The Importance of a Good Infrastructure

When you create your first website, the chances are that the only visitors will be you family, friends and colleagues. However, once it finds its way into the search engines, your site will start to receive visits from more people. If you're good at marketing, the amount of traffic your site receives per day could reach the thousands, or even millions. Yes, it's possible! As an example, the popular article marketing site, EzineArticles.com, receives over 1 million hits per day.
I million hits per day works out at an average of 11.6 hits per second, and that assumes that all the hits are spread out evenly throughout the day.

So imagine how many hits sites the most popular sites, Facebook, Microsoft and Google receive per second at their most busy times.

Clearly, these organisations have very powerful servers and connections to the Internet to be able to cope with the demand. The responses to requests for information from their sites are no worse than anybody elses'. Better in many cases.

My own websites are very unlikely to receive anywhere near the amount of traffic that these sites receive, and I am reasonably confident that the shared host server that I use has sufficent power to cope with the demand. If my sites become more popular, I would upgrade them to dedicated servers to cope. In the event of a miracle occurring and I started to receive daily hits in the order of millions, I would be looking at multiple servers with load-balancing.

So why am I writing this short article?
There's a site that I started using several years ago, called LinkedIn. It is a business networking site which helps you keep in touch with colleagues and contacts, and find new ones. It seemed to remain largely undiscovered for some time, growing steadily, but recently it seems to have caught the imagination of online marketers. This is probably due to the number of people using sites such as Facebook and Twitter for networking.

Recently, an ex-colleague of mine sent a request to add me to his LinkedIn network.
I followed the link in his email and was taken to the LinkedIn website, where I was presented with the signup page. As I already have a LinkedIn account I clicked the Login link. It took several attempts to finally get the Login page displayed, with most attempts timing out after several minutes. I'd say it took me about an hour to get to the login page. After entering my account details, is took me at least another hour to get logged in.

Finally, I was able to see my Inbox including my colleague's request. I clicked the link to read his request. Again, several attempts later I still couldn't see the request. Finally at 11.00pm I clicked the link and went to bed. At 7.15 the next morning, my browser told me that it was still waiting for the server. I clicked again and still no response.

I tried again from time to time. It is now 3 days after the request was sent and I still haven't managed to respond to it.

This is not the first time that I have had this trouble with LinkedIn, so it's definitely not a one-off problem.

I have also tried it with different browsers (Opera, Firefox, IE) and that made no difference. I can view and log in to other popular sites like Google and Facebook with no problems, so it's not my Internet connection or my PC.

So come on LinkedIn! Get your act together! If you're going to provide a networking site serving millions of people, sort out your infrastructure.

Why Silver Membership at Article Content King Gives you the Edge

When you use Article marketing, what do you do? That seems like a stupid question, doesn't it? You write an article related to the products or services you are selling or promoting, of course.

If you're in a very narrow niche or specialised market, occasionally you might find it difficult to come up with something new to write about your product or service. There is only a limited number of ways you write the same information about something without becoming repetitive or boring.

So what if there was a way that you could promote your product or service on article sites, without wracking your brains for new ideas? Wouldn't that make life so much easier?

Believe it or not, there is one article site that lets you promote your product or service without actually having to write about it! In fact, you can write about any subject you want, even if it is totally unrelated to your product, and your product will still be promoted.

How can this be possible? The whole concept of article marketing is such that people looking for information on a particular subject will find your article and then follow the link in your resource box.

Well that's where Silver membership at Article Content King stands out from the crowd.

AdSpace Credits
When you publish an article on Article Content King, you're not just publishing an article; you're opening up a whole new stream of advertising. You see, every time somebody reads your article, you earn an AdSpace credit. Additionally, when somebody reads an article published by somebody you introduced to Article Content King, you earn 0.1 credits, on a downline of 10 levels. You also earn 2 additional AdSpace credits whenever you moderate other peoples' articles. (Don't worry - it's easy! Simply read an article and rate it on a scale of 1..10)

AdSpace
When you have accrued 1000 credits, your AdSpace is enabled, and you can enter your own advertisement codes. Free members of Article Content King are limited to Google AdSense, but if you choose to upgrade your membership to Silver, then you can enter your own advertising codes (within the terms and conditions of the site).
There are 4 advertising spots on each page, and your advertisements will be displayed alongside articles in your chosen category.

Here's an example of how it works.
Let's say you sell real estate from your website. Traditional article marketing means that you would publish articles about real estate in your region and link back to your website. Now if you have accrued 1000 AdSpace credits and you are a Silver member (or higher), you can enter advertisements which will be displayed alongside any articles relating to real estate. They will even appear alongside your competitors' articles! Each time an advertisement is displayed, one AdSpace credit will be spent.

To ensure that your advertisements are displayed, you will need to keep accruing AdSpace credits. As mentioned before, this will happen when people read your articles and when you moderate other peoples' articles.

So to accrue more credits, you need people to read your articles, and this is where you can find that you have run out of ideas for new articles.

Now let's assume your hobby is fishing. You know that you could write hundreds of different articles about fishing, but you don't sell anything fishing-related, so there's no point in writing them.

Well, in Article Content King, you receive AdSpace credits for EVERY article that is read by somebody else, regardless of its subject or category. So you CAN publish those articles about your hobbies and other interests. If you write a lot of articles about a popular subject, you will keep on racking up those AdSpace credits, which will keep your advertisements showing. If you design some attractive advertisements for your primary business, which link back to your website, you could actually get more traffic that way than via your resource box. The fact that you earned the credits from articles in a different category is irrelevant. Your AdSpace advertisements will be shown alongside the appropriate articles.

If you're not a member of Article Content King, join now. If you are a member, consider upgrading your membership to unlock a powerful advertising opportunity.

Start To Make Money With ClickBank

Last year I highlighted the problems with ClickBank Dormant Accounts. Basically if there is no activity on your account for more than 90 days, they start to charge you to mainitain the account.

Many people, including myself, have lost money because of this. In fact, the majority of ClickBank Accounts are dormant. Of something like 1.6 million accounts, only about 100,000 are active. That's makes a whopping 93.75% of ClickBank accounts dormant.

Perhaps you are one of the many disillusioned people who made a little money on ClickBank, but never actually received any of it because it was swallowed up by ClickBank's dormant account policy. Or maybe you haven't received your first payment because the rules state that you need to meet the buyer criteria which requires 5 different credit cards and 2 different PayPal accounts to be used when making purchases via your link.

I struggled for ages to get my ClickBank account moving and finally receiving paments. Then I discovered Harvey Segal's excellent guide which shows you how to overcome these stumbling blocks, keeping your ClickBank account active and passing the payment threshold so that you finally get the money that is rightly yours.
Not only that, it shows you how you can start to build up a list, which makes it so much easier to make more money.

The best part about Harvey's book is that it is totally FREE, and you don't even have to sign up to a mailing list to receive it.

So if you've been struggling with ClickBank, check out ClickBank For Newbies (opens in a new window).

Get a Huge Number of Twitter Followers

It took me a while to "get" Twitter. I signed up for an account, but found it to be pretty pointless. I tweeted occasionally, but not very often. I even closed my account at one point, but decided to reopen it ... just in case ...

And I'm glad I did. Because this week I had an "epiphany". I suddenly "got" Twitter and all the other Social Networking sites. At least from the point of view of an online marketer I did.

On Twitter, I follow a very popular person, who at the last count had an amazing 179,000 followers! He put a new product up for sale and Tweeted about it. Within minutes the website that handles the sales of that product had exceeded its user limit and to anyone else who wasn't quick enough to get in, the site had effectively crashed.

As an online marketer, I would love the chance to tell 179,000 people about a new product. Imagine it - if I was selling a product for $47, and just 2% of the 179,000 people who read my tweet actually bought it, I'd make a cool $168,260.

So having realised what it's all about, I wondered how to get a large number of followers on Twitter.

Well it just so happens that there is an excellent way of building your follower list. It works on the same principles as viral marketing, is absolutely free to join, and takes about 30 seconds to do.

If you're not on Twitter yet, head over to Twitter and sign up. Again, it's totally free.
Once you've signed up, get on over to TweeterGetter and follow the incredibly simple instructions.

I had doubled my number of followers within 24 hours and it's still increasing.

Give it a try. You have nothing to lose.

Stop Press: In just 2 days, the number of Twitter followers I have has increased 10-fold.