Introduction to Meta Tags

A FEW WORDS ABOUT HTML

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the basic code used to design Web pages. To help get a feel for HTML, think about the "Markup Language" part of the name. Remember the old days when an executive penned out a document and then gave it to the secretary to type on a typewriter. When the typed document was returned to the executive, he or she would often "mark it up" with a pen or pencil, indicating changes that needed to be made to create the final draft. In efficient offices and the publishing business, an efficient set of shorthand symbols was used to "mark up" the documents. Marking up was also used when a document had to be routed to several people within an organization. Each person would leave comments on the document (which were not to be confused with the original text itself). Thus, corrections, revisions, and comments to a document were accomplished by markup symbols.

HTML is not about correcting a document, but about displaying it. However, HTML is to some extent based on the historical markup concept. Web pages at their basic level are simply text documents prepared in a simple text editor (such as the Notepad or Wordpad applications built into the MS Windows operating systems). Web browsing applications (such as Internet Explorer) can read basic text documents (saved as file types with the .TXT extension) but do not know how to format them without a little help. This help comes from HTML tags placed in the document. When such tags are placed in the document, the document is given the .HTM extension (instead of the .TXT extension) so the Web browser applications will know the document is ready to be read and formatted in a Web browser. (Unix systems will use the four-letter.HTML extensions, instead of the three-letter .HTM file extension used by Windows operating systems and servers.) The HTML tags serve much the same purpose as the old mark-up symbols used in proofreading. The tags tell how the material should be displayed. They provide font style and size, paragraph formatting, spacing, listing order, and many other formatting features. For example, the

tag tells the Web browser to start a new paragraph. The

tag (with the forward slash) signals the end of the paragraph.

As you can see from the above example, HTML tags usually come in pairs. The opening tag is placed right before the text you wish to effect and the closing tag is placed right after the text you wish to effect. Some tags are an exception to this pairing rule, however, and all of the information is placed within a single tag. All HTML tags must be placed within the and tags on a Web page.

Before we get into meta tags, there is one other HTML tag with which you should be familiar. The comment tag is used to add comments about the page. These comments are not visible to those who view the page in a Web browser, but are visible to those who read the file as a text document. This is important because the search engines read a Web page as a text document and see the comments. The comment tag looks like this:

-- this a comment not visible from a Web browser, but visible when the source text file is read ---

HTML, like everything else having to do with computers and the Internet, comes in different versions. Newer browsers support the newer versions of HTML. This is only important so that you will understand that some people who use old versions of Web browsers may not get the effect of HTML tags (including meta tags) supported only by the newer versions.

A WORD ABOUT KEYWORDS

We introduced you to keywords in the previous lesson. Search engines, in one way or another, index your Web pages by keywords. Before you begin to design your meta tags, you need to have determined your keywords and your keyword strategy.

With respect to keyword strategy, you should become familiar with the concept of "key phrases." Key phrases are keywords that consist of more than one keyword. For example, you could have the keywords: "earning" and "profit," but you could also combine them into the key phrase: "earning profit." Due to the stiff competition in search engine placement, you should use key phrases along with keywords. Key phrases are much more precise in finding particular subject matter. The key phrase "earning profit" is more likely to be searched for by someone looking for pages discussing how a home-based entrepreneur can earn profit, while the keywords "earning" and "profit" used separately may be used by people looking for pages comparing the earnings and profits of various industries and large corporations. For a searcher, using key phrases helps to narrow down the results of a search. For a Webmaster, using key phrases on your page increases the likelihood that your page will show up when your target market searches.

Keywords and phrases are important in all of the meta tags, not just the keywords meta tag. Thus, the first step in preparing your meta tags is to identify your keywords, and, more importantly, your key phrases and the strategy behind them

THE TWO CATEGORIES OF META TAGS

Meta tags are often divided into two categories: 1)HTTP-EQUIV, and 2) meta tags with a NAME attribute. You should not be confused or concerned with this, as we mention it here only so you can ignore it. The difference between these two types of meta tags has to do with how the Web browser applications talk to the Internet Web server applications before the actual Web page is sent. (Recall we discussed this concept briefly in an earlier lesson on Web page design.) But, for now, you do not need to worry about it.

META TAGS USED IN PROMOTION

While there are many different meta tags that do many different things (from refreshing your page automatically to preventing your page from being cached), our focus is on those tags that serve to promote your site in the search engines. The main ones are "title," "keywords," "description," and the "robots" tags.

THE TITLE META TAG

The "title" opening and closing meta tags look like this:

To draft your page title, pick your two most important key phrases and include them in a sentence or two that does not exceed 200 characters. Make this an attention grabbing, powerful sentence. Some of the search engines will use your title along side your link in the search engine listings. Your title will be the information used by people to decide whether to click through to your page. You have to make them want to see the page by the wording of your page title. Many search engines search the title content first when matching keywords. Thus, be sure to include your most important keywords and key phrases in your title meta tag,

THE KEYWORDS META TAG

As discussed in the last lesson, the keywords meta tag looks like this:

Note that, unlike the title tag which has an opening tag and a closing tag with the text between the tag pairs, the keyword meta tag is just one tag with the text of the keywords and key phrases included within the quotation marks in the content attribute of the tag.

There is always an ongoing debate among the experts as to how many keywords you should use, whether to include the commas and/or the spaces between the keywords and phrases, and other such issues. The best course for beginners to follow is to start the list with two or three key phrases (such as "earning income, part time income, . . . ") and then add about twenty (20) more single keywords, including the keywords that make up the two key phrases. That is, in the example above, your keyword tag might look like this:

The strategy is in using key phrases rather than just keywords. Also, the strategy is in which words and phrases you pick to use. Further, there is strategy in the order of placing your keywords. Note the places where the keyword "earning" is repeated in the example above. It ties the keyword "earning" to the words that come before it as well as the words which come after it, thus doubling the chances of matching a search phrase in some search engines. Picking the right words and phrases to match the content of your site to search queries made by your target market is the name of the game. Exactly how many words you use, and whether you use spaces or commas are secondary considerations which you can safely ignore for now.

The final consideration for the keywords tag is to avoid keyword spamming (repetitive use of a single keyword in order to manipulate search engine indexing and ranking). Do not use the same word repetitively, at least without other meaningful keywords between each instance of your main keyword. There is no known exact number of times you can repeat a single keyword before it will be considered keyword spamming by the major search engines. The number seven is touted about as the maximum number of times you can use a single keyword, but there is no real basis for this number. Looking back at our last lesson and the considerations discussed there will help you to realize that whether keyword spamming has occurred depends on how meaningful and useful it is to repeat a keyword, in light of the content of the site. Less important is trying to determine any particular number of repetitions that will penalize the site.

THE DESCRIPTION META TAG

The description meta tag looks like this:

Use your keywords and key phrases in your description, but make it meaningful! Like the title tag, what you put in the description tag content is used by some search engines to tell people what your site is about. It's your only chance to motivate most people to click to your site.

Common questions include: "How long can the description be?" and "How many times can you repeat your keywords in it?" Again, there are no exact answers to these questions. The rule of thumb is just to describe your site as attractively as you can using the fewest words possible. Put the most important stuff first in your description so that, if some of the description does get truncated by the search engines, the important stuff will likely still be included.

In addition to using a description meta tag, it is also smart to include the description in an HTML comment at the top of the page. Some of the search engines simply ignore the meta tags and grab the first few words they see on your page. Even better, use your description as the beginning of the displayed page itself. If worded properly, your description will serve to entice your visitors to continue reading your Website.

THE ROBOT META TAGS

Despite the standards specifications for the robot tag, which suggest a means of controlling the search engines, in reality the robot tag is only used by most search engines to honor your wishes to exclude certain pages and content from the search engine's reach. Your instructions for revisits (which can be included in the robot meta tag) are pretty much ignored. But it is very useful to be able to exclude incomplete or distracting content that may interfere with your search engine rankings.

You can tell a search engine to ignore a page and all the links from that page with the following tag:

To be safe with most engines, you should also include a text file named "robots.txt" in any directories on your Webserver that you want excluded from the search engines and put the words "noindex, nofollow" in that file as well.

Thus, the robot meta tag can be used to exclude certain content which you feel will penalize your ranking in the search engines, either because the content is incomplete or because it is off-subject from the rest of your content.

by George Little

Introduction to Search Engines

WHAT IS A SEARCH ENGINE?

When people look for things of interest to them on the Internet, they go to search engines and directories. A directory is a listing of category subject headings with Websites listed under the specific categories. You browse through (often called "drilling down") the categories until you find what you are looking for. Search engines, on the other hand, have a form in which you input keywords, and pages of results are displayed. The results are lists of Websites that pertain to the keywords you have used.

Search engines seek out and index Websites on the Internet according to keywords. When a user types a search phrase, a search engine scans its database and returns a list of successful matches to the request.

WHICH SEARCH ENGINES ARE IMPORTANT?

According to Nielsen//NetRatings, as of the date of this writing, search engine popularity within the top 25 online properties is as follows, with the most popular listed first:

Yahoo!, Google, Lycos, Go.com, Excite, InfoSpace, and Ask Jeeves.

HotBot, which has always been a very popular search engine, is now part of the Terra Lycos Network. Other search engines worth noting but not presently in the top 25 online properties are Northern Light and LookSmart.

Thus, although there are thousands of search engines, you can narrow your main focus down to just those mentioned above, as they receive the overwhelming majority of all search engine traffic.

The "reach" of a search engine is usually defined as the percentage of all Web users who visit the site at least once a month. Services, such as Nielsen//NetRatings, also periodically release statistics on the current reach of a search engine.

Another factor by which to judge a search engine is the percentage of Web pages it has indexed. Even the most comprehensive search engine was aware of no more than 16% of the estimated 800 million pages on the Web, according to a study published in the July 8, 1999, scientific journal Nature.

"The amount of information being indexed (by commonly used search engines) is increasing, but it's not increasing as fast as the amount of information that is being put on the Web," according to Steve Lawrence, a researcher at NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J.

Even the pages that do end up indexed take an average of six months to be discovered by the search engines, according to the study. That study was a long time ago in "Internet time." The situation is much worse today. Thus, you can not wait for the search engines to find your site. You have to submit it to them.

THINKING LIKE A SEARCH ENGINE

By now we hope you have noticed a theme running throughout the Internet Income Course. When we discuss recruiting affiliates, we ask you to think from the perspective of the prospects you are targeting. When we discuss selling products, we ask you to think from the perspective of the potential consumer. When we discuss contacting Webmasters to place your ads on their sites, we ask you to think from the Webmasters' perspective. When we discuss spam, we ask you to think from the perspective of the e-mail recipients. Now, as we begin to discuss search engines, we are going to ask you to think from the perspective of the search engine operators.

Take a few minutes and pretend that you are starting your own search engine. Say it is back in the mid 1990's and you want to establish your site as one of the popular search engines on this new fantastic Internet. You are going to take your company public and retire as a zillionaire! What would be important to you? How would you make that happen? You would certainly want your database to include all of the important, valuable Websites on the Internet. You would also want a comprehensive list of all the other not-so-great sites on the Internet as well. You would want your visitors to be able to efficiently find just what they want among those sites when they search your engine. You would want the most useful, valuable, high-quality sites to come up first in the list, followed by the less useful sites. You would want the most relevant sites to show up first, followed by the less relevant sites in the search results.

Say you start your index of Websites and for each entry you have a field for "site name," "site description," "site URL (address)," and "keywords." When visitors search from your search engine, they will input search words or phrases and then be led to sites pertaining to those words or phrases. Again, you want the most useful, valuable sites to come up first in the results. How would you accomplish this?

Let's say, for example, that one of the visitors to your search engine has to write a report on the planet Saturn for a class he is taking. He types in the keyword "Saturn." When your engine searches through its index of keywords, it will pull up sites that discuss the planet Saturn, but it will also pull up sites that deal with the automobile named Saturn, the Saturn Sega game system, the comic strip character named Sailor Saturn, perhaps a rock band named Saturn's Rings, and maybe even a porn star who goes by the nickname Saturn (provided you have not taken steps to filter out porn sites).

These diverse results are to be expected. What you do not want, however, is for a number of business opportunity sites, credit card sites, long-distance service sites, and porn sites (at least those that don't have stars named Saturn) to come up also. If those sites come up under a search for Saturn, then your search engine is not very efficient and your visitors will become frustrated and quit using your search engine. (If your visitor loses valuable time needed to write his report on the planet Saturn while plowing through all of these other non-relevant sites, he or she will find another search engine to use next time. If this happens often, there goes your zillion dollars!) You also want a means to identify the most valuable sites and rank them to come up first in the results. So, what you realize is that you need a means to exclude irrelevant sites and to rank relevant sites according to their value. The better you do these things, the more people will like your search engine and the more successful it will be.

The first thing you have to figure out as a search engine operator is how to associate keywords with sites. You will not have time to examine all the sites on the Internet and write keywords for them. You will either have to create a program that can read sites and make the keywords for them, or you will have to get the site publishers to do that themselves. There are at least two ways that you can get the sites' Webmasters to do this. One (employed by Yahoo!) is to make the Webmaster submit keywords in the process of submitting their site to your engine. This does not work for the "spider" engines, which go out and find the pages themselves, however. Since you want as many sites on your engine as possible, you do not want to wait for the Webmasters to submit them. You want to go out and find them. What you could do is support a standard whereby a certain meta tag included in the HTML code of all Web pages contains the keywords the Webmaster thinks are appropriate for his or her site. That is indeed what has happened. HTML supports the meta tag keywords for that very purpose.

When knowledgeable Webmasters build their Websites, they use the meta tag keywords on each page and insert the relevant keywords for that page. The tag looks like this:

Thus, when your search engine indexes sites, it automatically grabs the keywords from the keyword meta tag, and you are good to go. . . Or, are you? What if the Webmasters cheat when coding in their keywords?

Why would Webmasters want to cheat, and how would they go about doing so? Let's switch gears away from our Saturn example for a moment to explore these questions. Although the statistics are now changing, over the last several years the Internet has been used mostly by young men. Thus, the "hot" search terms—the ones most frequently searched for on the search engines—have been things of interest to young males. Because of this, as you might expect, search terms relating to sex and nudity, rock music, famous female stars, and outlaw-type sites (called "warez sites") have been high on the list of popular search terms. Some Webmasters have kept themselves aware of the current popular search terms and used them in their keywords, even though they may not be relevant to their Website. They do this to increase the probability of their site showing up in a search and, therefore, to increase their traffic.

Currently, one of the most popular search terms is "Britney Spears." It may occur to a Webmaster of a business opportunity site that if he adds "Britney Spears" to his keywords, he will increase traffic to his page and perhaps get more signups. But, as a search engine operator, you would have a problem with this Webmaster. You want your search engine visitors to find the pages they are looking for. If some young man is looking for a page discussing Britney Spears and finds business opportunity sites, your search engine has not done a good job. The young man, being unhappy, will take his search engine business elsewhere (so to speak) and your search engine will lose popularity. Thus, as a search engine operator, you are at cross purposes with these Webmasters who want to cheat with their keywords. Because you want that zillion dollar retirement, you are dang sure going to figure out ways to deal with them.

Now let's return to our "Saturn" example and say that a space probe launched by the United States has just gone into orbit around Saturn and is returning images from the planet's surface. NASA is publishing these images on the Internet as they come in. For a period of time before, during, and after these pictures are coming in, the word "Saturn" becomes a hot search term. People are going to search engines and trying to find sites where they can see these pictures of Saturn as they are downloaded from the space probe. A business opportunity Webmaster, being aware of this, decides to add "Saturn" as a keyword to his or her new Website. It will increase traffic to his site to add this keyword. But, the keyword has no relevance to his actual site, as he does not provide the NASA pictures on his site or any other information about Saturn. If your search engine does not catch and correct this attempt to cheat, your search engine will be ineffective. People who are trying to find the real sites with the Saturn pictures will become frustrated using your search engine because all they are finding are business opportunity pages which have nothing to do with Saturn. They will quit using your search engine and your goal of having one of the most popular search engines on the Internet will be defeated. Thus, as a search engine operator, you have to develop means to detect this keyword cheating.

The various search engines do exactly that in various ways. Search engine operators are constantly trying to improve their means of detecting such cheating. They closely guard the algorithms they use to do this as industrial secrets because if they become widely known, people will find ways around them.

When search engines detect people cheating, they can exclude the page from the search engine (and even any future submissions from the same person or company), give it a very low overall ranking, or give it a low or non-existent ranking with respect to the offending keywords.

Since we are never going to know with certainty how the search engines actually go about detecting keyword relevance and ranking sites, at least at any particular point in time, all we can do is imagine that we are the search engine operator and think how we would go about doing those things.

Thinking again like a search engine operator, how would you go about detecting keyword relevance? One thing you would soon realize is that you do not want to throw the baby out with the bath water. That is, you would realize that by only looking to see if the keywords show up in the actual content of the site and assuming that cheating has occurred if the words do not, you will exclude some very relevant, very valuable sites. This, too, would be bad for you as a search engine operator.

There are many legitimate situations where a keyword may not be repeated in the actual content of the site. Say a Webmaster has a regional site which provides news and current activities for a three county area commonly known among people in the region as the "River Basin Area" or perhaps the "Wiregrass Area" or some similar term. Say the three counties are Washington County, Adams County, and Jefferson County. Imagine further that the Webmaster included the state name and the name of all three of these counties in her keywords, but never actually mentions them in the content of her Website. The Website just refers to "news and events for the River Basin Area." The county names are very relevant keywords, even though they do not appear in the content of the site. People looking for news and events for Washington County would want to see this page. As a search engine operator, you would want them to find this page because it has information they are looking for. It would have been better if the Webmaster had included a statement like "covering the Washington County, Adams County, Jefferson County news and events and more" in her content. But, since she did not, you will have a more effective search engine if you recognize that she is not cheating, and her keywords are relevant. Thus, you realize that you are going to have to come up with a pretty sophisticated procedure for determining keyword relevance and ranking the Websites in your search engine.

Since you cannot afford to pay someone to sit and look at all of the millions of pages submitted to your engine in person, you will have to develop some algorithm that will do this task as best it can be done without human intervention. Clearly, it's not going to be extremely accurate. It would be far too difficult to write a program sophisticated enough to figure out all the different variations of relevant keywords. Most likely, you will have to settle for doing it on some statistical bases. Say, for example, you decide that if 90% of the keywords actually appear on the site, then that's close enough. The other 10% could be cheating or it could simply be legitimate oversight like the River Basin Area example above. You may have to settle for that margin of error. On top of that, you could look for certain keywords that suggest cheating and deal with them separately. You could try to develop algorithms which judge whether the keywords which do appear in the content are actually in context or just thrown in to fool the search engines. Whatever means is actually employed, it is a constant struggle between the aggressive Webmasters who would manipulate the search engines and the search engine operators who want to keep their search engines effective.

SITE DESCRIPTION

In addition to keywords, there is also a meta tag standard for the site description. This is where the Webmaster provides a description of the site which can appear in the search engine listing. We will discuss this in another lesso

RANKING VALUE

In addition to producing search results containing sites that are relevant to the search terms used, search engine operators also want to place the most valuable sites high in the results list, leaving the less valuable sites for the end of the list. They want the people who use their search engine to find high-quality sites first.

Thus, as a search engine operator, you will want to find means to evaluate the quality and value of sites submitted. How would you go about this? Here are a few things you might consider. Check the HTML code of the submitted pages for errors. If the code contains errors, it is a signal that few resources were put into the site or else the Webmaster is less than knowledgeable. If the Webmaster is less than professional is his coding, he may also have been less than professional with the content. Check to see the number of other sites which link to this site. If there are many sites out there linking to this site, obviously some human beings have looked at it and determined that it has some value. You may also want to consider the quality ranking of the sites which link to it. If known high-quality sites are linking to it, it probably is a high-quality site itself. You may also want to look at the number of outgoing links from the site and see where they go. There is probably some ratio of links to volume of text content that is characteristic of high-quality sites. The quality of the pages linked to is also a factor. You would also want to look at how long the site has been at the same address. Many sites come and go. The fact that a site lasts is an indication of its quality. Thus, you will need to revisit the ranking of the sites on your engine from time to time to revaluate these factors. Simple things like the amount of content on a site and whether it has its own domain name would also be important.

Introductiom to Internet Traficc

In this lesson you will learn how to analyze Internet Traffic. You will be reminded that Internet traffic consists of human beings with desires and interests and goals of their own. You will learn how to get into the "flow" of Internet traffic using value and ease of use, combined with effective traffic building strategies.

Think of what we know about early humans and how they migrated and settled. Water is a basic human need. If early man did not live close to water, then he had to bargain for it from others who transported the water into his area. People who did not live close to water had to have several vessels to store what water they could get their hands on. The consequence was that people who settled far from any river or stream had to spend a great deal of their time and resources trying to obtain and store water -- and they never really had more than just enough to get by. On the other hand, people who settled near a large river or stream could freely dip out all the water they needed in abundance. When it came to water, positioning was everything. Any map will show that large successful settlements are usually close to free flowing water.

Analogies have been made between money and water. It has been suggested that if you position yourself where money freely flows, you will obtain a lot more of it with less effort than if you position yourself in some remote location relative to the "money stream". The analogy to water is equally useful when applied to Internet traffic.

ANALYZING INTERNET TRAFFIC

MARKETING FORCES IN HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE

Similar to how the forces of nature and history determined where rivers flow across the earth's surface, the history and forces of the Internet have shaped how Internet traffic flows across the wires and ether. For the most part, people make their initial connection to Cyberspace in one of two fashions: they either dial in from home or work, or they connect through a network at work. In order to do this, they have to have software that creates a TCP/IP socket. To view the World Wide Web, they also need software called an Internet browser. That socket and that browser are the first opportunities for anyone to get their attention in Cyberspace. Some socket software allows for ads to be shown as the Internet connection is established.

Browsers have three features that control Internet traffic. Those three features are "Home Page", "Favorites" or "Bookmarks," and "History." The Home Page is all important. That is the first page you see when you open your browser. You see this page over and over on a daily basis. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide their subscribers software which sets the ISP's page as the subscribers' home page and even sets some of their favorites. Even though many subscribers may eventually change their home page, ISPs, by their very nature, have a natural tap into much of the Internet's traffic. ISPs that provide an expansive and encyclopedic digital environment along with their access, such as AOL, really have a tap into the traffic. Software companies that make browsers (and there are really only two players here - Microsoft and Netscape) can have pre-set bookmarks and favorites. Operating systems can control consumers' choices of an ISP by having software built into the operating system. (Sometimes it seems like there is a battle for your attention going on inside your computer when various software packages pop up and ask to be made the "default" software.) The fairness of this type of competition has been the subject of a major antitrust action by the Justice Department against Microsoft.

The History feature of a browser, on the other hand, just makes it more likely that you will return to a page once you have been there before. This, in addition to the other features, makes it more likely that pages with traffic will gain even more traffic.

Other types of software-based online marketing include software that resides on your screen independent of a Web browser and displays ads while you surf. You are paid or otherwise rewarded for the time you spend using this software. An example is AllAdvantage.

THE ROLE OF CONSUMER CHOICE

Once a user gets beyond these built-in features vying for his or her attention, it becomes more a matter of choice. The Internet user can type in a URL and go to Web pages that have come to the user's attention through word of mouth or some other media. From there, the user is likely to follow links to other similar pages. As memories may fail, typing errors may occur and links may be outdated; this process only takes the user so far. The next thing a user looks for on the Web is a way to directly find things of interest to him or her. Search engines fulfill that function and have been the most popular sites on the Web. Yahoo! was the original Web search engine and thus, by mere force of history, has been one of the most popular site on the Web. As a general rule, search engines and the large digital environments of the media companies (such as AOL, Go.com, MSNBC, etc.) maintain the top traffic rankings. Because search engines exist, the choice and interests of the user are a strong factor, dispersing Internet traffic according to demographics. That is, unlike the traditional broadcast media, traffic branches off to different sites according to people's interests.

UNDERSTANDING PEOPLE

Stephani Richardson, the administrator of the SFI Discussion Board and one of the most successful affiliates in SFI, advises that you put yourself in the position of the persons you are trying to recruit. Think from their perspective rather than your own. This, of course, is excellent advice! People on the Web are looking for content. They seek information applicable to themselves. To be a successful Internet marketer, you must take time to think about how people use the Internet.

When staring at their Web browser, people have these choices: They can type in a URL that someone told them about, they can read their home page and follow links from it, they can look at a page in their history or in their favorites, they can go to one of the very popular sites and follow links, or they can go to a search engine and follow links or compose a search phrase.

In order to be the target of a link or be listed in a search engine, you must have a Web presence.

TWO IMPORTANT PRINCIPLES FOR YOUR WEB PRESENCE: VALUE AND FLOW

The first principle illuminating how people use the Web is that it takes value for a Website to be "sticky." A 1998 article in Science magazine stated that Web surfers are constantly making a judgment about continuing to visit a Website or exiting the site. Two factors come into play: the value of the current page and the promise of value in future site pages. That is, even if the current page has a low perceived value, if there is an indication that the quality of pages may improve, users will stay on the site for another page or two more. But if there is no value, they will leave the site very quickly. This is why we hear so often that "content is king." When they leave for lack of value, they are never coming back.

The second principle is that there must be a balance between the difficulty of using a Website and the rewards the user obtains from the Website. The term "flow" has been used to describe what occurs when a user loses himself in a Website. Flow occurs when the user becomes so absorbed that time and task temporarily become unimportant. Whatever the user started out to do online gets temporarily forgotten while they enjoy your site. When flowoccurs, direction, inhibitions, and caution give way to impulse, and the user is much more likely to join or buy something promoted on the site. The site must be both interesting and easy to navigate for this to occur.Flow is also a concept that applies to movement from one Website to another. Banners or textual links must be in context and create a smooth transition from one site to another to be effective. Otherwise, the flow is broken and interest is lost.

TRAFFIC BUILDING

Once you have planned a Website that has value and creates flow, you need to direct traffic to your site. The four important goals of traffic building are: 1) obtaining the right domain name, 2) obtaining good publicity, 3) obtaining an effective portal presence, and 4) utilizing and maintaining flow in the placement of your Internet ads. Ads, of course, can be free, exchanged, or paid. All of these will be discussed in detail in future lessons.

CONCLUSION

To be an effective Internet marketer, you need to analyze and understand Internet traffic and, very importantly, you must understand that the "traffic" consists of human beings with feelings and interests and desires. You must understand that they are looking for what they want to find - not what you want them to find. You must understand that they will get there through their methods - not the methods you may prefer for them to use. The old broadcast media methods of controlling attention do not work so well on the Internet. It's a new game. You must use valuable content and ease of use to create flow. You must properly position your site within the flow of Internet traffic. Once you get this right (and you will), you are on the road to becoming a very successful Internet entrepreneur.

10 Common Online Marketing Methods

MARKETING METHODS

Recall from our last lesson that we enumerated the most common Internet marketing methods, particularly useful in promoting the SFI affiliate program, as follows:

1) Gateway Pages and Search Engine Registration
2) Banner or Textual Ad Placement (Exchange Programs)
3) Banner or Textual Ad Placement (Online Classifieds)
4) Banner or Textual Ad Placement (Affiliate and Paid Placement)
5) Building Your Own Content Rich Website
6) Utilizing an Opt-In Program
7) Hosting FFA Pages
8) Using Safelists, Announcement Lists, and Viral marketing
9) Press Releases, Relationship Building, and Offline Promotion
10) The Latest New Technique

Also, in the last lesson, we briefly described the first five. Here's a brief description of six through 10.

UTILIZING AN OPT-IN PROGRAM

E-mail is a vehicle that works in conjunction with other interactive features of a Website to create a flow of communication with your prospects. In order to avoid spamming, you have to have consent from a prospect to send them e-mail. The best way to get that consent is to have them do something on your Website that establishes that consent. Such devices are called "opt-in" programs.

The simplest example of an opt-in program is to have a line on your Website which says "Join our Newsletter" and provides a form for the viewer to submit his or her e-mail address. From there, the extent and variety of opt-in programs that can be created is limited only by imagination. Often effective are contests. Viewers enter a contest to win something by entering their e-mail address. Often, there are interactive games which pit the viewer against other players around the world, and the scores and results of the games are communicated to the participants with e-mail. Particularly interesting is one which has a slot machine interface on the site which you can play for free, but if you accumulate any winnings, you have to opt-in to collect your money.

There are many types of opt-ins. You can sign up to receive news, weather, stock tips, pictures, and many other types of information to be received by e-mail. There are many educational opt-in programs for school children (and adults) including "science facts," "strange animals," "today in history," and other education subjects. A prayer of the day, week, or month is available from many different sources.

You can also allow people to post information on your Website and thereby gain consent to e-mail them. Examples of this are business directories and FFA pages (discussed below), among many others. Remember, imagination is the only limitation.

It is both intuitive and supported by research that an e-mail inbox is a much more effective place to communicate with a prospect than a Website. But, it takes the Website to get the necessary permission to communicate by e-mail. Thus, the "Opt-In" program is a crucial step in an effective Internet marketing campaign.

One of the most effective opt-in programs on the Internet is the SFI marketing Group's affiliate program. As an SFI affiliate, you need only point people from your Gateway page to the SFI page for this very effective opt-in to be made available to your viewers.

HOSTING FFA PAGES

"FFA" stands for "Free for All" which is short for "Free for all to post here." FFA's are Websites where you can post a link and perhaps a short description to your Website without having to pay an advertising fee. When you post on one of these FFA sites, you will receive an e-mail from the site host confirming that your link was placed and, in all likelihood, containing an advertisement as well.

It is not an effective use of your time to individually post your link to these sites. These sites are actually rarely seen by anyone. Plus, almost all these FFA sites have a maximum number of posts that will be displayed. The old ones are dropped to make room for the new ones. In many cases, this process occurs in just minutes or hours so that your link is not on the site long enough for it to do you any good at all.

There are FFA submission services that will post your link to hundreds of these sites at once. That makes it somewhat more time effective, but even with that, this is still not a terribly effective way to promote your Website. Should you use one of these submission services, be sure to create a separate e-mail address to use. You will receive confirmation e-mails from several hundred FFA sites after using one of these submission services. It will choke down your e-mail. Thus, do not use your everyday e-mail address when making such submissions.

An effective way to use FFA sites, however, is to HOST an FFA site. When you host an FFA site, you get to send out all the confirmation e-mails - with YOUR ad in them! There are services on the Web which will allow you to host an FFA site on their server without charge or for a small fee. There are also autoresponder services available (for free or a small fee) which you can connect to your FFA site to send the confirming e-mails.

USING SAFELISTS, ANNOUNCEMENT LISTS, AND VIRAL MARKETING

Safelists are e-mail lists which allow you to join and post advertisements in exchange for receiving advertisements from others. You and other members send your e-mail to a list address and from there it is distributed to the members of the list. There are several such lists at Yahoo! Groups and other e-mail list services. These also are only effective if done in bulk. That is, you must create a separate "throw-away" e-mail address to sign up for these and use group mail software to send to hundreds of lists at once. The e-mail you will receive from being a member of hundreds of lists will be in the thousands per day. Thus, it is imperative that you use a different e-mail address from the one you use for daily correspondence.

It is not easy to use safelists effectively. Until you are experienced, you should seek the tutoring of a more experienced Internet marketer in setting this up properly. You can begin to learn, however, by going to Yahoo! Groups and searching for lists that allow advertising. For now, just join one or two groups to become familiar with the process. Do not expect any results from the ads you post to just one or two groups, but use it as a learning process. It will be much easier for you to master the skills necessary to effectively market with safelists in bulk if you have had some hands-on experience with the lists first.

Announcement Lists are similar to advertising lists but with a slant toward announcing new sites rather than advertising per se. Unless you obtain a list of "safelists" from a very trusted source, carefully read the rules for each list before you post and keep your posts within the guidelines for the list.

The next Internet marketing technique, VIRAL marketing, is interesting but not very effective. Viral marketing is designed to circumvent the spam rules by hoping the recipient of the e-mail will forward it on to the people on his or her forwarding list. Since you have not sent the e-mail to these other persons directly, you can not be accused of spam. The concept is that the e-mail will spread out to many recipients like a virus - being passed from one to another to another. Each recipient receives the e-mail from someone with whom they have a pre-existing relationship. Since a pre-existing relationship is an exception to most spam rules, the e-mail is not considered spam.

All of us have had the misfortune (or perhaps good fortune, if you have a lot of spare time) of being on a number of our friends' e-mail forwarding lists. Every time they receive a joke that they think is funny or the latest urban legend ("Watch out for AIDS-infected needles hidden in theater seats or gas pump handles."), they very generously pass it on to us and the 15 or more other people on their list. Many of the people on their list then pass it on to 15 or more other people. Observing this phenomenon, it occurred to a number of enterprising Internet marketers to try to harness this distribution technique for marketing.

A consulting group I organized ran an experiment on viral marketing about 18 months ago. Our results were interesting. What we found was that in order for the distribution to be effective (i.e. for people to keep passing it on) it had to be either of a "hysterical" nature (ex: hidden AIDS needles or people stealing your kidneys) or it had to be humor or complete nonsense. Otherwise, it died in two generations (that is, it was not passed on more than twice). In theorizing about these results, we considered the effectiveness of an ad traveling along with one of these hysterical or nonsensical e-mails which would survive several generations. We concluded that the state of mind induced by either the hysteria or the nonsense of the primary message was not conducive to generating response to the ad. In other words, the ad did not flow with the material and thus would not be effective.

One of the funniest things I have seen was the viral e-mail that convinced the reader that the technology now existed for an ordinary computer monitor to take someone's picture like a camera. You were then given a link to a page where you were instructed to hold your face in front of the monitor and then click a "shutter button" and count down the exposure time. To see the results, you were taken to a full screen picture of a surprised looking monkey - which was a pretty accurate picture of you at the time! This particular viral achieved extremely wide distribution. However, it could certainly not be used effectively for marketing. Who wants to buy or join something when it has just made a monkey out of you?

Thus, while viral marketing per se does not appear to be an effective Internet marketing technique, an understanding of its limitations can lead us to consider the most powerful technique of all - sincere communication. People decide whether to pay attention to e-mail based on two obvious factors: the source and the subject. Viral e-mail, by definition, comes from a trusted source. It also has an attention grabbing subject. Its limitation is that it is either not serious at all (just humor or a practical joke) or it is too serious (warning of some bizarre danger).

There is a somewhat slower, yet very effective process, however. You can send sincere communication to someone you know (and who you know does not mind receiving e-mail from you) and sincerely tell them about your successful experience with an affiliate program such as SFI. Do not make it sound like an ad in any form or fashion! Rather, let it just be a sincere sharing with them of your experience. Mix in other things about your life and inquire about their lives so that it is not just a single subject e-mail. They, in turn, may become interested in your program and may later join. If they do, they may later share their successful experience with others that they know. And so it continues and grows! Let's not call this process "viral marketing." Let's call it "infectious enthusiasm"!

PRESS RELEASES, RELATIONSHIP BUILDING, AND OFFLINE PROMOTION

While the offline world does not exist to the exclusion of the online world, neither does the online world exist to the exclusion of the offline world. Although the SFI program is primarily online, you can certainly use offline marketing in conjunction with your online techniques. You should combine offline and online efforts in effective ways. For example, you can send classified ads and press releases by e-mail to newspapers, which will then appear in print publications. The printed announcements and ads can then direct people online to your Website. Successful SFI Affiliates use the two together effectively.

You can use the relationship building techniques effective in the offline world in the online arena as well. Relationship building and "infectious enthusiasm" are things that occur both online and offline. You can meet people online and then build a relationship which carries over to the offline world. You can communicate with people online that you have met and known from the offline world. The bottom line is that it takes trust to induce someone to buy or join. It takes a relationship of some sort to build trust. These principles have always been true in the offline world and they are still true in the online world. The relationship begins when people first see your ad and they continue to judge you by everything that follows. An ad does not sell—it starts a relationship. The resulting relationship sells—provided it becomes a trusted relationship.

THE LATEST NEW TECHNIQUE

Have you heard of "vortals"? They are single subject portals and they are the latest buzz. And, hey, what are "portals" anyway? Isn't that what we used to call "Search Engines" before they added a bunch of new features and some personalization capabilities? The only thing constant about the Internet is that it is constantly changing!

The latest tip is that you should be on a constant search for new subject specific portals (vortals) dealing with your subject and make sure your site gets listed there. Search for these vortals through the search engines by searching for words dealing with your product or service. When you find them, read the rules for posting and post a link to your site there.

One constant is that you should always stay on top of what's new on the Internet and be one of the first to take advantage of each new technique as it becomes available. You will need to stay informed and be adaptive to be successful in Internet marketing. How can you do that? There are a bunch of experts at the SFI sites just waiting for you to read their articles and ask them questions. Hang out with the right people and you can not help but be successful.

The Potential Of Internet Income

MOORE'S LAW

Moore's Law describes the falling cost of digital technology. When my daughter was born in 1980, the price of the memory chip for a home PC was $1,000.00 (not the whole PC, mind you, just the memory). When my daughter was one year old, the same amount of memory cost only $500.00. When she was three years old, the price was $250.00. When she started the first grade, the same amount of memory cost only $62.50. When she graduated from high school in 1998, the price of that same amount of memory had fallen to less that $0.25. Now, as she begins her junior year in college, the cost for the same amount of memory as in that original PC is just pennies. I assure you that nothing else we have purchased over her lifetime has decreased in cost anything like that! We, of course, upgraded the amount of memory we used over the years. Each time we upgraded, we spent about the same amount of money but got more and more computing power. So, what really happened was that our computing power increased by four times every three years for the same cost.

Gordon Moore, one of the co-founders of Intel Corporation, made mathematical observations in the 1960's of the engineering practices which allowed miniaturization in semiconductor technology. This miniaturization applies to processors and other computer components as well as memory chips. What he observed mathematically is that computers can be made four times more powerful every three years for the same cost. Some argue that this same formula has held true for a full century, if you include the mechanical computers of the early 1900's and the old-fashioned transistors that followed.

If you knew that you could get four times more raw materials every three years with no increase in cost in a given business, would you want to get into that business? The overwhelming answer everywhere is, of course, a resounding "yes!"

All businesses, even traditional brick and mortar businesses, must market their goods and services. Because businesses look for the lowest cost to perform their processes, more and more marketing information and marketing processes, even for brick-and-mortar businesses, will become digital.

Moore's Law ensures that Internet businesses, especially Internet marketing, will continue to grow and flourish at an astounding rate. Will Moore's Law continue to hold true in the future? Can engineers keep making computer chips cheaper? Intel's engineers assure us that Moore's Law will continue to operate for several more device generations, if not indefinitely. (http://developer.intel.com/technology/itj/q41998/articles/art_1.htm)

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ACCEPTANCE OF DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTS

The next factor that ensures continued growth for Internet businesses is the acceptance by consumers of digital environments. People have taken to Cyberspace. Despite the many predictions to the contrary, people have warmed up to digital environments with enthusiasm. Many Web communities have been formed and their participants report feeling all warm and cozy in those digital environments. Participants have developed a strong sense of identity with some of the digital communities. As Moore's Law continues to operate, our technology becomes more and more capable of producing engrossing digital environments in which even larger numbers of people will enthusiastically participate. Online communities are forming in much the same way that communities have formed in the physical world throughout history—only much faster. The success stories of Yahoo! and eBay and others make it pure folly to think that brick-and-mortar business will go on as usual, unaffected by the Internet.

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CONVERGENCE

The third factor assuring a prosperous future for Internet entrepreneurs is convergence. Simply defined, convergence is the coming together of separate things. Convergence is now occurring at both the industry level and the consumer level. On the industry level, computing, communications, and media companies are merging to form such multimedia ventures as MSNBC and Disney's Go Network. On the consumer level, new devices are being used to combine computing with phones and televisions. In the very near future, consumers will replace their phones, TVs, and PCs with one central media center (which may have several satellite devices for convenience and portability). Even our money is fast becoming digital, as we have automatic bank deposits of our earnings while we buy things with credit and debit cards. What this means is that digital products and processes become more and more important as the Internet gets closer and closer to people's everyday lives.

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THE POTENTIAL

These three factors—Moore's Law, acceptance of digital environments, and convergence—assure us that the potential of the Internet for the home-based entrepreneur is nothing less than incredible. In fact, the belief in these three factors has been driving our economy for some time now. Venture capitalists are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into purely digital ventures. In the digital world, the large corporations have to compete, not just with each other but also with the home-based entrepreneurs. The large conglomerates no longer have the exclusive advantage. Given the low cost of computing power, individual entrepreneurs now have at their disposal the raw materials to develop digital products and processes and make them available to the world. Even more importantly, individual entrepreneurs can ban together in digital environments (such as SFI's Full-Circle Success) to combine their skills and knowledge and use convergence to their advantage in a very efficient way, rivaling the large companies with the results.

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HOW TO POSITION YOURSELF

To obtain convergence, you must bring together computing power, media content, and information processing. To obtain the economies of scale, you should position yourself within a digital community where resources can be shared. Despite the low cost of computing, there is still power in numbers with regard to media content and information processing. To position yourself as a marketer for one of the fastest growing digital communities in existence is without doubt the smartest move you could possibly make right now. Having done that, you can use your individual creativity, skills, and resources in an environment of freedom employing the low cost computing power at your disposal to obtain your financial goals. Due to the three factors discussed in this lesson, there is an unprecedented opportunity available to you right now as an SFI affiliate. You have but to take advantage of it.

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History Of Affiliate Programs

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

In this lesson, you will learn how affiliate programs have evolved as the means of advertising for e-commerce. You will learn how the Internet created an entirely new channel for selling goods and services and how the multitier commission structure supplies the missing link to make this new channel fully effective.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE WEB

Ten years ago, there was no such thing as e-commerce as we know it today. Although the Internet has been around in some form or fashion for many years, for most of its history it was used only by the military and research scientists. As the technology became friendlier, others began to use it. The key event to the popularization of the Internet was the creation of the World Wide Web—especially the capability to show pictures and play sound from the Web, which became available around 1994. Adding that multimedia capability to the Web made it inevitable that the Internet would eventually pervade business and commerce. It did not take long.

The graphical Web was shortly followed by the capability to transmit credit card information securely online, which was shortly followed by the ability to process the card payments in real time online. A new venue to sell products and services had arisen seemingly overnight.

A NEW DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL

The Internet provides a new and quite different distribution channel for vendors to sell their products and services to consumers. Consumers can learn about, view pictures of, and order products from anywhere at anytime from the comfort of their home or office.

To sell anything, though, a vendor needs to get traffic to his or her Website through advertising. This was first approached from the old model of TV, radio, and print ads. That is, vendors went to popular Websites and offered to pay for placement of their ad for a period of time. Since the Internet is different from the old broadcast media, however, new more efficient methods of advertising were sought. It is relatively easy to determine the size of a TV or radio station's audience. The same is true with the circulation of print media such as newspapers and magazines. It's not as easy with a Website, however. Sure, there are counters, but they can not always be trusted.

Plus, a Web page being retrieved from a server (and thus adding to the counter) does not necessarily mean it will be seen by a human being. Bots and automated processes can retrieve pages that are never seen by any human being. It became important to know whether the page views were coming from the same source or whether they were "unique views"—i.e. new people rather than the same few over and over or some automated process. Another problem was that unless the ad is placed prominently and in context on the host site, it will not draw traffic, even from a large audience of unique viewers to the host site. So, paying a flat fee for displaying an ad on a Website for a set period of time turned out to be undesirable.

Rather than paying for a set period of time, advertisers began to prefer to pay according to the number of clicks on their banners. Standard sizes evolved for banners used to advertise Websites on other Websites. The banners can have words, pictures, and animation and serve as a link to the advertised Website. When you click on the banner, you are taken immediately to the advertised site. Thus, with "pay per click" if you did not get any traffic, you did not have to pay. This motivated the host site Webmaster to place the banner effectively on the site so it would draw traffic. Even "pay per click" had its problems, though. Clicks could also be automated and unscrupulous hosts could cheat. Clicks also needed to be from "unique viewers" to be effective.

Thus, vendors ultimately came to prefer paying only when a sell was actually made or someone at least interacted with the site by joining an opt-in program. The vehicle for paying only for sells or opt-ins on your site from persons sent from the host site became known as "affiliate programs."

AFFILIATE SERVICES

As the popularity of affiliate programs has grown, services, such as LinkExchange, Commission Junction, BeFree, and many others, have arisen to provide centralized locations where Webmasters can pick and join affiliate programs. These services also monitor the vendors and keep them honest. They provide standardized software and interfaces to run the affiliate programs so that each new vendor does not have to re-invent the wheel when they start up an affiliate program.

As a Webmaster, you can go to one of these sites and pick out the programs you want to join. You fill out a form providing information about yourself and your Website and then you download the "banner code" to place on your site. When someone clicks on the banner from your site and buys something from the vendor, the sale is tracked and they pay you a small commission. Most provide online reporting so that you can see your how your sales are going at any time.

While these affiliate services help to promote affiliate programs for the vendors, and provide some efficiency for the Webmasters, vendors are still looking for better ways to promote their affiliates' programs and Webmasters are looking for more profitable arrangements.

BUYING FROM YOUR OWN STORE

Only a small percentage of the millions of Websites on the Internet actually draw any significant traffic. ISPs and other services provide free personal home pages and many people have designed sites more for their own amusement than any serious purpose. Nevertheless, it is advantageous to vendors to have their affiliate banners on as many pages as possible. Even the sites that do not draw significant traffic have the benefit of the loyalty of their own Webmaster. If you have put the Amazon.com affiliate banner on your site, you will go there to buy your books rather than Barnes and Nobles because you get a little commission back when you buy from your own "store." Because of this, most vendors make it as easy as possible to join their affiliate programs and want affiliates even with low traffic sites.

After the new wears off, however, most Webmasters realize it is too much work for too little value to keep affiliate programs on their low traffic Web pages. Because vendor sites are constantly being redesigned, your banner stops working and you have to download new "banner code" and replace it on your site. As promotions change, the vendors make you change your code or the pictures stop showing up. A few of the major vendors with affiliate programs have gone bankrupt and the links just quit working. It turns out to take a lot of time and effort to keep affiliate banners working on your site. Yet, it would benefit both the vendors and the Webmasters of the low traffic sites if this could be more conveniently and more profitably done.

A BRAIN TEASER SOLVED

There are thousands upon thousands of affiliate programs available on the Internet. A Webmaster cannot put more than just a very few affiliate programs on any one Website without losing effectiveness. (Nothing is worse than a Web page crammed full of banners.) Thus, Webmasters have become selective in choosing affiliate programs. As competition heats up among the vendors, the vendors find themselves focusing on finding creative ways to promote their affiliate programs. Affiliate programs are excellent for marketing products and services on the Internet, but how do you effectively market an affiliate program to the Webmasters?

A few bright entrepreneurs, including SFI marketing Group's founder, Gery Carson, have come up with the answer. The answer is to have a multitier affiliate program. This solves two problems. One, it makes it worthwhile for the ordinary person to become involved in e-commerce. You can make good money even without a high-traffic Website because you share in the sales of an entire organization. Plus, you don't have to hassle with keeping banner code for multiple programs up to date. SFI's Catalog allows all SFI affiliates to "buy from their own store" without the hassle of trying to maintain hundreds of affiliate programs yourself. Two, the attractiveness of the multitier commissions effectively promotes the affiliate program without distracting from product promotions.

Plus, this solution involves multitier training as well. Webmasters become involved in affiliate programs not only for their own savings but also to generate income from selling to others as well. This is not easy and requires training. It would be extremely costly for each vendor to establish an effective training program, providing the one-on-one communication necessary for true results. A multitier system with Team Leaders providing one-on-one training as needed eliminates the vendors' substantial affiliate training costs.

Thus, the next logical step in the evolution of affiliate programs in e-commerce is exactly what the SFI marketing Group has already done: a multitier commission and training structure.

NETWORK MARKETING AND THE INTERNET

When you step back and look at the history of e-commerce, you see that affiliate programs have independently evolved into something very similar to network marketing, which has been around for a long time. Ironically, though, network marketing itself has not taken well to the Internet. Most network marketing companies mistakenly believe that face-to-face interactions are necessary and that recruiting can not be effectively done online. (The research is in, however, and it shows the contrary to be true.) Another factor is that many network marketing companies do not encourage analytical examination of their opportunity, which is inevitable on the Information Superhighway. Thus, most network marketing companies only use the Internet to provide forms downloads and similar services to their existing representatives. They do not effectively use the Internet as a recruiting tool or to sell products to the general public.

Some enterprising independent representatives, however, have evolved the "downline clubs." Downline clubs sign people up on the Internet, promising to place them in multiple network marketing opportunities based on the order in which they signed up. Downline clubs theoretically offer the possibility of a large organization below you in multiple opportunities without any recruiting effort on your part. In actuality, though, most downline clubs have been disappointing. The greed of the club founders, the hope of instant riches, and the lack of focus due to joining multiple network marketing companies have usually yielded poor results. Training and commitment are lacking, so large downlines (if they get built in the first place) often crumble even faster than they were collected.

Thus, network marketing as we traditionally have known it has not grasped the potential of the Internet and does not appear likely to do so. Plus, and perhaps because of the Internet, the old model of network marketing is less effective in any venue of late.

THE NEW PARADIGM

SFI's founder, an experienced and successful network marketer, was one of the first to recognize that the old network marketing model quit working for many previously successful marketers around the same time that e-commerce was evolving toward a similar but different paradigm. He realized that an entirely new model was needed. He drew upon those principles of network marketing that remained viable and applied them to solve the current e-commerce challenge of promoting affiliate programs on the Internet. The results are phenomenal. SFI now has well over 7 million affiliates and the numbers of new affiliates each month is growing progressively.

SFI works because it is an e-commerce affiliate program. Unlike the old network marketing model, SFI does not require you to make unnecessary purchases or meet stringent qualifications to earn commissions. In contrast to almost all of the old network marketing companies, SFI fully embraces the powerful recruiting potential of the Internet. The SFI opportunity stands up well to the analytical scrutiny characteristic of the Information Superhighway. It is a forerunner in the next stage of evolution of e-commerce. Adding the multitier structure to an Internet affiliate program makes the new e-commerce channel of distribution fully workable. Because of this, SFI has been able to negotiate fantastic savings and commissions for its affiliates from world-class vendors and will continue to attract more and even better deals as SFI continues to grow.

CONCLUSION

The natural evolution of e-commerce has pointed to a multitier commission structure to give life to the new channel of distribution of goods and services created by the Internet. SFI is in the forefront of this new adventure in commerce. SFI embodies the most advanced stage of evolution of e-commerce. As Moore's Law (discussed in an earlier lesson) ensures the continued growth of e-commerce, history and logic dictate that affiliate programs will continue as the distribution channel for e-commerce. It follows that SFI, representing the most advanced evolution of affiliate programs, will continue to have lasting phenomenal growth and prove profitable for all involved.

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