EbizEmoney - Make Money Online - Internet Revenue System

This page lists some of the popular web 2.0 development and deployment tools from various vendors -

IBM’s “Enterprise Mashup” - A platform for helping developers mash various information and applications together.

BEA’s AquaLogic Systems - A set of tools and platoforms that cater for all phases of Web 2.0 application development and deployment.

4D’s Web 2.0 Pack - A toolset for allowing developers to develop and deploy RIAs (Rich Internet Applications)

The Web is packed with top level entrepreneurial technical talent that knows how to look for development widgets and components and puts them together to build “social systems”. The use of such creativity spawns from the many available computing resources as well as easy to use tutorials all across the web.  

Developers within large enterprises are usually not as daring as their fellow freelancer technologists who roam the web domains freely. Lack of available time, limited flexibility to roam the web due to enterprise firewall and security concerns, and the lack of the burning entrepreneurial desire to create something that wows the web souls keeps enterprise developers from exercising such creativity and executing with such agile speeds.  

For an enterprise to transform itself to match the competing environment of the Web 2.0 / 3.0 systems and environment, a change in culture is needed coupled with availability of next generation of tools. These tools can help such developers produce with the same agility without compromising the security and regulatory limits within which they must operate within a larger business enterprise and company.  

Recent announcements by BEA, IBM and other vendors signal the initiative by many companies to move toward facilitating a social computing development environment and infrastructure. BEA has announced it’s BEA AquaLogic product family that helps integrate people, process, systems and information to facilitate the move toward the Web 2.0 environments. IBM on the other hand has unveiled the “Enterprise Mashup” that allows for mashing company’s content and services with other useful information.  

There is a lot of buzz in the Internet marketing circles about the glamour of PPC marketing and the potential that it holds for making many entrepreneurs the next generation of Internet millionaires. The underlying concept behind such buzz is that when used effectively, PPC marketing can be used to market any affiliate’s product on major search networks such as Google and Yahoo. Considering that these networks get numerous searches from potential buyers, online advertisers hope to get enough conversions from their PPC campaigns to make them a profit. Multiply that strategy across various products and merchants and you have the potential to become rich real fast.  

But the question is whether PPC marketing really works out that way?  

Although I am not familiar with any formal statistics about how many entrepreneurs actually become millionaires from PPC marketing, one thing is for sure that there are a lot of them who lose money on PPC marketing. Numerous e-books and websites surface daily that market you the promise of becoming millionaires using PPC marketing techniques. Such Internet marketers, gurus and publishers use enough energy and powerful marketing rhetoric to sell Internet newbies on the promise and potential of PPC marketing.  

If you are one of those just starting with PPC marketing in the hopes of becoming rich real quick, consider these facts –  

1. If PPC marketing was SOOOO promising as these Internet gurus sell you to be, they would be spending that much time making the millions they want you to make – not selling you the e-book about making millions.

2. If selling an e-book on becoming a millionaire using PPC marketing has indeed so much demand,

3. PPC marketing for affiliate programs requires you to either use the company’s URL in the PPC campaign or use a landing page of your own website. If you were to use the actual merchant’s URL, you will be competing with numerous other PPC marketers thus hiking your bids on the PPC campaign. The only way around that is to use a made-up display URL but search engines like Google are already cracking up those sites and techniques.

On the other hand, if you were to use your own website’s landing page, you are introducing another step before the potential buyer can get to the actual product. You will have to therefore invest enough time and money to ensure you have a good enough landing page that will make the potential buyer to click again to go to the actual merchant’s site. Remember, once the visitor lands on your site’s page, you have already been charged for the click.

When engaging in PPC marketing for affiliate programs, you can expect to spend your time on the following activities –  

• Identifying hot products for your affiliate marketing campaigns

• Evaluating historical business metrics for those merchants and products - This is not that easy simply because the metrics that are available to you from various affiliate networks such as Commission Junction and others are used by everyone else for the same purpose. Imagine having 50 affiliate marketers trying to outbid each other on Google for a recently released printer. Some campaigns may make money but many will actually lose their marketing dollars.

• Finding the right range for your bids that can yield good conversion rates.

• Establishing a system for constantly monitoring the ROI for each of your PPC campaigns

• Constantly monitoring your budget to ensure that you are not for example max-ing your credit cards.

• Constantly evaluating competitors who most probably will be getting into your space to market the same products.

The bottomline is this - PPC marketing executed effectively in an affiliate marketing context can require a lot of your time. Put simply, it is not that easy. However, if you are passionate about certain products and markets, that can arm you with knowledge and fuel to venture into the PPC marketing waters and in turn may help you reap appropriate ROI.