Hi there,
Answer to Question 1:
An Affiliate Program
This is also known as an Associate program, is a way to get other
people to promote your product or service. The basic idea is that for
every customer that your affiliate refers to your website, you pay
them a predetermined commission.
The common ways that an affiliate sends visitors to your site are
banner ads, text links, word of mouth, etc. Regardless of how they
send you the visitor, they'll be sending them to a special link that
is part of your website, which allows you to track which affiliate
sent which visitor. If the visitor decides to buy, or complete
whatever requirement they need to, you pay your affiliate a
commission.
The major benefits of this approach quoted from the Internet Marketing Centre are:
It?s a win-win partnership, so enlisting an army of affiliates to
promote your product is extremely easy. Your affiliates get paid when
they refer a paying customer to your web site.
There are no up-front advertising costs, because you only pay your
affiliates for advertising that gets you sales. Whether they send 10
visitors a day to your site or 10,000, you only pay them for the sale
of your product or service.
It?s extremely low-risk. Setting up your own affiliate program doesn?t
cost much at all if you?re prepared to do some work yourself.
----
Posting on Relevant Newsgroups
This is more of a long-term method of getting traffic to your site,
and requires both expertise and effort. There are hundreds of
thousands of newsgroups that you can choose from, and millions of
people participating in these worldwide discussions. You can start
your sales campaign by getting your name and URL known to these web
users by including them in your post signature, and at the same time,
you can develop your reputation as an industry expert by answering
questions and providing others with information that they need.
With newsgroups, you are not looking to throw a sales pitch with every
post, but to try and sell yourself as a trusted expert. Responding to
questions with exact information that the poster is looking for is a
better way to approach this method than gimmicks and hypes.
The best way to locate newsgroups that relate to your industry or
niche is by using the "search" or "find" feature in your newsreader.
You simply type in one or two keywords, and this will bring up a list
of potential newsgroups.
http://groups.google.com
http://www.talkcity.com
http://www.topica.com
http://www.forumone.com/index/index.php
----
Links From Related Websites
This is a very effective way to start driving highly targeted traffic
to your web site. By persuading other related sites in your industry
to link to you, you are essentially getting them to make a personal
recommendation to their visitors. If the webmaster is well-respected
by his visitors, by association, this will also increase your
credibility before the visitors even look at your site.
The best approach for securing links is to first find the most
relevant websites through search engine - especially ones that have
the best synergy with your content. To the webmasters, rather than
talking about how great you or your products are, focus on showing
potential linking partners how linking to you is going to benefit
their visitors.
--------------------
In response to your second question, there are many ways that some who
has control of your server could pirate your traffic and email by
redirecting them to their chosen destination. While you may be
helpless with them pirating your traffic, you can certainly test if
they are by trying to visit your site from different region IPs.
As far as pirating your email goes, one solution is to use encrypting
software between you and the other party. However, in order to solve
both these problems, if you have reasonable suspicion about your
server, simply switch to a more established/reputable company.
Hope this has helped, and if you require clarification on any part of
the answer, please feel free to ask for one.
Cheers,
Tox-ga |
