So you have paid your money to whoever has told you that you can get rich in your sleep if you market and sell their products or services. You got a website and a URL with an interesting sounding name that sets you apart from the tens of thousands who also sell the product and services, it was provided to you, someone made you an awesome website or you built it yourself with all sorts of interesting information about the products you are selling and an e-commerce page that allows people to buy your products online.

Now what.

No one is visiting your website let alone buying your products. So you start working on promoting your website in an effort to generate traffic. Start placing free classified ads or even paid ads on various internet publications such as Bacpage, Craig’s lists, Add-post, Lycos, Local, Domesticsales, Google base etc.

You go to your website stats every day and still there is barely a perceptible trickle of visitors to your site.

You’ve already printed business cards, postcards, and brochures at a hefty cost courtesy of Vistaprint and distributed them around the small town you live in and toured your neighborhood, golf club, beauty salons, and put up postcards promoting your business online. all the mailboxes you can find. You’ve spent a ton of money on print cartridges and glossy paper for your brochures.

You keep checking your visitor statistics and be damned if you can find an increase in visitor traffic to your website, not to mention someone buying something from you.

What to do next?

Scour the Internet for advice, watch hundreds of videos that are all bait and switch schemes that promise the world and offer very little, try some of those get-rich-quick marketing schemes that don’t work, throw more money, send e- emails promotional materials, including videos, to anyone you can find in your Outlook address book.

Make a bunch of videos that you then upload to YouTube, Google, Yahoo, Mydeo, My Space, WAYN, Face Book, because the whole Guru community tells you it will increase your search engine rankings. This is only partially true regarding your ranking on video search pages, but it doesn’t really help you with your ranking on regular search pages.

And yet, hardly anything happens with the daily visitor statistics.
Then there must be something else that is required.

And to create your own blogs on topics related to your business, commenting on other people’s blogs that are relevant to the business. Writing articles on EzineArticles.com and more commenting on other articles relevant to his business.

You join Adsense, place a Google search bar and AdSense ads on your website, go to Commission Junction and get RSS feeds to earn commission on their ads; all this in the hope that cross-pollination will drive traffic to your site. It gets an XML sitemap for your sites, uploads them to your site, registers them with Google and Yahoo, and gets verified.

You’ve probably done enough with all of the above to make your sites stand out. I have several refereed articles published on my behalf, that people use to promote their websites, like Amazon.com, Strategic Finance, All Business, etc., not sure if they are successful, but these posts have been there for four years So that must mean something. All you have to do is search Google or Yahoo for “bou van kuyk” (my name) and at least five to ten entries will come up promoting the big companies mentioned above, including my own three websites, but then who will search ever a name like that unless you already know me?

However, the traffic to my websites is still anemic and I am wondering what to do next. Or what it is that prevents people from taking me seriously.

I am good looking, I have an honest face, I am responsible, I provide my customers with great value products, I have a privacy statement on my website, I have a toll free number posted, several instant messaging buttons through which they can contact me at via Yahoo or MSN with a simple click, I’m Pay pal approved/certified, I’ve opened merchant accounts for each of my businesses so I don’t commingle funds, so what’s stopping people from making purchases on my website?

Although this sounds like an excuse, and I certainly haven’t thrown in the towel yet, some of the reasons may be readily available.

First, I think the Internet is riddled with nameless scammers, MLM members, and people who impersonate big-name companies to extract money from honest, unsuspecting people, selling them things that don’t really exist, that have been burned so many times that they’ve become timid and reluctant to hand over their money to anyone who cannot positively verify that they are part of a well-known chain.

The worst of these products and services are subscription based and usually start with a free trial period. The subscription is automatically activated after the trial period and invariably costs less than $30 ($29.99) per month and is non-refundable. The trick here is to make the cancel method as cumbersome as possible, in the hope that the client will forget or give up trying to cancel it before the test is done. At least one monthly subscription is activated for a low enough amount that the customer doesn’t sue for a refund and let go or cancel as a lesson learned.
Fool me once, embarrass me Fool me twice, embarrass me! This person will think twice before making a transaction on the Internet again and there are millions of them.

Second, the fact that anyone who joins an MLM and isn’t one of the first to join, like number 98,996, will find it extremely difficult to make money without spending an inordinate amount of time and money to gain traction. Therefore, it is important to choose a business that does not depend on MLM to make money, unless you are one of the first to join.

Although I have not been successful to date, I strongly believe that YTB’s approach to offering individuals and corporations their own website to book travel and receive commissions is a good one.

It is unfortunate that the MLM part is so widely advertised as the real money maker, which I think it is not, except for the few who made it to the top. It is simply a strategy to increase travel bookings under the YTB banner by the masses and thus increase YTB’s market share of travel sales.

Most people who spend less than $6,000 a year on travel shouldn’t have their own website, though of course any amount of travel they book on their own website, no matter how small, counts toward sales. YTB’s travel agency, growing the company and increasing its market share.

The minimal number of trips booked by these small owners, compared to the amount they spend to maintain a YTB website, has also skewed YTB’s profits. YTB ​​​​earns more by selling and hosting portals/websites than by selling trips.

However, the idea of ​​cutting out the middleman and offering the traveler the opportunity to be the travel agent is sheer genius.

The traveler/corporation now has the opportunity to benefit from the commissions received by the traditional intermediary and reduce their travel expenses with those commissions.

Additionally, by becoming the travel broker/broker, YTB offers its site owners the opportunity to be in charge of their travel arrangements. The site owner/traveler has full and direct access to the travel operators and as such has access to benefits not available to the average traveler.

So, I am convinced that I chose the right business model, but I would like to sell travel only in the “honorable way” by targeting people/companies who can really benefit/make profit from having a ready and secure hosted travel website. use and therefore by definition buy at least $6000 per year in travel. I do this by openly posting the one-time setup costs of $450 and the monthly maintenance/hosting/liability insurance fee of $50 up front, which by the way may be the other reason no one visits my site, maybe I should hide the real costs like everyone else!
That’s the path to a win/win proposition, I make money on their travel, they save money on their travel, and YTB grows market share in the travel business instead of the website hosting business.

Therefore, I have not been able to provide the answer to my original question. I would be very grateful for any helpful advice from my fellow fighters. Having said all that, I invite anyone to comment on my observation on how to get noticed on the internet and be taken seriously and my observations on YTB, MLM and Scammers.