Sampath Wijeratne | Personal Page

Google Adsense Basics

2007-12-31T18:46:00.001+05:30

Google Adsense is an internet advertising service provided by Google. It lets website owners to genarate an income from their websites. If you own a website and if you have a good content in it about any topic, you can register free on Google Adsense and put Google ads on your website. But your website must fulfill the standards that Google requires to become an AdSense publisher.

Google pays you everytime when a visitor of your website clicks on the Google ads. It is called Pay Per Click(PPC). PPC payment for ads differ according to the advertiser. Google will pay you at the end of each month by a cheque or by wire transfer according to the facility available. The website owner has to make sure that more users visits his website and clicks google ads daily.

There are basically three types of ads offered by Google. They are Content,Search and Referrals. You can customize these ads according to the template of your website. You can find all the statistics about your website after you register in Google AdSense. If you are interested Click Here to register in Google AdSense.

Online Payment

2007-12-26T18:09:00.000+05:30

Online payment is not a new thing. But it is very important to understand how to do it safely as there are millions of incidents happened where hackers(Internet thieves - not everyone) steal your credit card information and use it for their purchases. If this happens to you, you will be in a big trouble wandering how to pay the credit card bill for the purchases that you didn't make.

Many people are not aware about it and sometimes gets into trouble. The first thing you must do when you try to pay online, check the website URL in the address bar of your web browser. If it is starting with http://, then it is not secure to pay online. The website URL must start with https:// to ensure that your payments are secured. If it is not, don't make any payments.

But there have been some incidents where even this method is not secure and hackers have been able to get credit card information. So you should go with the best solution, which is paying through a payment gateway. The best way is using a service like Paypal where you can make online payment without exposing your credit card details. You can register there and give your credit card details to paypal which is a highly respected service and you don't need to fear about your credit card details. I strongly suggest you to use a service like Paypal. Most of the goods and service providers accept Paypal payments. If you are an online businessman or not you can open a paypal business account easily and experience many facilities. Try the following link, if you wish to get a new Paypal account.

How to find a web hosting company to host your website..

2007-11-07T10:18:00.000+05:30

Web hosting industry is booming very rapidly as many people around the world design their own websites for various purposes like for business, as personal pages, charity work, to give information, for fun, etc. . At the same time, the amount of web hosting companies around the world are increasing in a rapid phase. Most of these companies are US based. These companies can be mainly categorized into 2 categories as follows.

Self owned web hosting service providers - Companies who invest on hardware, technology, staff and buildings etc. to maintain the web hosting service.

Resellers - Companies who provide a web hosting service which is bought by a self owned web hosting service provider.

Both above mentioned companies provide the same service. But the prices of their hosting packages may change. If you plan to host your website with any web hosting company, there are certain factors you must consider before you make a decision.

Purpose - If you are starting a website with a commercial purpose where you plan to earn money by various ways from your website visitors, you must go for a web hosting company which provides a quality and reliable service with high storage capacity, high bandwidth, high uptime and a very good customer service. Your website must be available to your customers or visitors all the time with a reasonable access speed. If you want to host a website without a commercial purpose, it is better to go for a cheap web hosting company.
Budget - If your budget is good, go for a trusted and one of the best web hosting company. If your budget is bad, there are many websites who provide free web hosting facilities. You can register with them and host your web site free. Some display their advertisements on your website and some don't. Just type "Free web hosting" in Google or Yahoo. You'll find many free web hosting services there.

Selecting the company mainly depends on the above mentioned factors. You can find reviews on web hosting companies in various forums, blogs and websites in the internet. Host your website after a reasonable background study. Good luck!

Online Work at Home Scams - Be Careful

2007-10-31T18:50:00.000+05:30

If you type "Work at home jobs" in Google or Yahoo, you'll find millions of listings of various websites with very encouraging and fascinating words in their website content saying that they provide legitimate work at home jobs. And they ask you to pay a small amount of Dollars for the processing of the membership of their site. They will show you a very nice looking image stating that they have a 30/40/50/60 day money back guarantee and proofs of earnings in large amounts. And they will also publish the testimonials of their members who earns $ 1000 + per week with appreciations of the company. Sometimes they will publish that they offer many bonuses worth $$$$$ if you buy their work at home package. Some websites also show banners saying that "Verified by XXXXXX", "Hacker Safe tested by XXXXXX", "Rated as the no. 01 by XXXXXX", "Listed as a reliable business by XXXXXX" etc..

But according to my experience, almost 99.99% of websites that they ask for a small amount of processing charge are scams. They don't have a good record on reliability, customer satisfaction and quality. If you plan to work at home, you must consider the following factors before you pay a cent for an unknown web site.

Always try to find a website which provides free service to find you a legitimate work at home job. There are many websites like www.craigslist.org where you will find thousands of job postings under various categories around the world and direct contact information of the client, www.getafreelancer.com where you can bet for the various projects and jobs posted,without any payment.
If you find a website which charges some money, first check with a reputed online scam monitoring organization like www.bbb.org. These organizations provide you the statistics of the website that you want to pay. If these organizations don't recommend the website that you checked, it is better if you drop your interest on that website.

Think more than twice and do some background research before you pay even a cent which you earned hardly. And I assure you that there are no shorter paths to become rich and from those websites' offers, you can't earn $1000+ in a week. You have to keep the trust on your capabilities and work with dedication and with an aim. Then you will become a successful person. I hope that this post give you something to think if you plan to find a work at home job. Good Luck!

What is Viral Marketing - An introduction

2007-10-31T09:05:00.000+05:30

Viral marketing is a marketing strategy used mainly in online businesses. But it is used in off-line businesses also. And it is proved to be one of the best marketing strategies by world top businesses. In this post I will give a brief introduction to viral marketing.

Any consumer who purchase products or service either online or off-line, would love to have a free gift from the products or service provider which is something useful to him/her. The businessman can give away a free gift which is useful in some way to the customer along with the descriptions of the goods or services that he/she provides. The customer will surely like the gift and definitely pass it to his/her family members, Relations, Friends etc with a good recommendation. This will attract more customers to the product or service with a minimum cost for marketing and advertising.

Viral Marketing is heavily used in online business promotion. Thousands of web sites use this in many forms. The most commonly used Viral marketing techniques are listed below.

Free e-books containing information important to the customer
Free Softwares
Free presentations
Free training materials
Referral bonuses
Free movies and videos
Social service projects

More and more new concepts of viral marketing will be added in the coming years. If you plan to start a new online business and promote your product or service, you can succeed with proper usage of viral marketing concepts with creativity added to it. There will be more posts in the coming years about this topic in my personal page.

Affiliate Marketing - A brief introduction

2007-10-30T18:57:00.000+05:30

Affiliate Marketing is not a new thing for a person who is involved in e-commerce. But I thought to give a brief introduction to affiliate marketing from the things I learned. Please note that I'm still learning on this area and I might not cover the whole things.

Affiliate marketing is a marketing technique mainly used in business promotion and marketing over the internet. If a company or an individual provides goods or services over the internet with a commercial purpose, it is a must to promote and market them to the consumers around the world to make profits and improve the business. If you do it by your self, it will cost a considerable amount of money and time. And you must also have a sound knowledge and experience in internet marketing. If you have no time,knowledge and enough money to market your product or service by your self, affiliate marketing is one of the best solution. In affiliate marketing, the goods or service provider allows people who owns web sites(webmasters) to promote their product or service through the website. Web masters are paid with a commission for every sale made through their website in return. The commission is generally a percentage value of the sale. And some goods or service providers even pay for the direction of users to their website, but it is comparably lesser than the commission.

If you plan to design a website and willing to make some profit from it (at least to cover the annual domain name and hosting charges), affiliate marketing is a very good concept. But you must have a sound knowledge on promoting your website and attracting people to it. Otherwise there would be no income for you from the affiliate goods or services that you promote.

My advice is, if you want to become an affiliate, you must be prepared well and do some background study on it. This post will be a small initiative for the people who wish to become affiliates. You will find more posts by me on this topic in the future.