Flu babi mulai menyerang

Mexico flu sparks worldwide fear

Mexico Flu Sparks worldwide fear

Mexican authorities have taken drastic measures to contain a new strain of the swine flu virus that has killed 81 and prompted fears of a global pandemic.

People are being urged to stay at home and maintain strict personal hygiene. Many schools, public buildings, bars and restaurants have been closed.

Non-fatal cases have been confirmed in the US and are likely in New Zealand.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has confirmed that at least some of the cases are a new strain of the virus.

H1N1 is the same strain that causes seasonal flu outbreaks in humans, but the newly detected version contains genetic material from versions of flu which usually affect pigs and birds.

The respiratory virus - which infects pigs but only sporadically humans - is spread mainly through coughs and sneezes.

The WHO has warned the virus has the potential to become a pandemic.

Several countries in Asia and Latin America have begun screening airport passengers for symptoms

FLU PANDEMICS

1918: The Spanish flu pandemic remains the most devastating outbreak of modern times - infecting up to 40% of the world's population and killing more than 50m people, with young adults particularly badly affected

1957: Asian flu killed two million people. Caused by a human form of the virus, H2N2, combining with a mutated strain found in wild ducks. The elderly were particularly vulnerable

1968: An outbreak first detected in Hong Kong, and caused by a strain known as H3N2, killed up to one million people globally, with those over 65 most likely to die.

reff: news.bbc.co.uk

Pandemic Concern

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization are concerned that this outbreak may become a pandemic, because:

New strain

The virus is a new strain of influenza, from which human populations have not been vaccinated or naturally immunized.

Human transmission

The virus appears to infect by human-to-human transmission. Investigations of infected patients indicate no direct contact with swine, such as at a farm or agricultural fair. In contrast, for example, disease transmission in the last severe human outbreak of influenza, the bird flu that peaked in 2006, was determined to be almost entirely from direct contact between humans and birds.

Virulence

The virus has produced severe disease in Mexico, and some deaths. Furthermore, in Mexico (but not in the United States) the illness has primarily struck young, healthy adults, much like the deadly Spanish Flu of 1918. This is unlike most influenza strains which produce the worst symptoms in young children, elderly adults, and others with weaker immune systems.

Geography

The virus has been detected in multiple regions within Mexico and multiple areas in the United States.

reff : news.bbc.co.uk
Wikipedia

BedBug (Cimex lectularius)

The bedbug (or bed bug) is an insect of the family Cimicidae that lives by hematophagy - feeding on the blood of humans and other warm-blooded hosts. Its name comes from its preferred habitat: mattresses, sofas, and other furniture. Although not strictly nocturnal, bedbugs are mainly active at night.

Biology

The common bedbug (Cimex lectularius) is the species best adapted to human environments. It is found in temperate climates throughout the world and feeds on human blood. Other species include Cimex hemipterus, found in tropical regions, which also infests poultry and bats, and Leptocimex boueti, found in the tropics of West Africa and South America, which infests bats and humans. Cimex pilosellus and Cimex pipistrella primarily infest bats, while Haematosiphon inodora, a species of North America, primarily infests poultry.

Adult bedbugs are reddish-brown, flattened, oval, and wingless, with microscopic hairs that give them a banded appearance. A common misconception is that they are not visible to the naked eye. Adults grow to 4–5 mm (1/8th – 3/16th of an inch) in length and do not move quickly enough to escape the notice of an attentive observer. Newly hatched nymphs are translucent, lighter in color and become browner as they moult and reach maturity. In size, they are often compared to lentils or apple seeds.

Feeding habits

Bedbugs are generally active just before dawn, with a peak feeding period about an hour before sunrise. However, they may attempt to feed at other times, given the opportunity, and have been observed to feed at any time of the day. They climb the walls to the ceiling and jump down on feeling a heat wave. Attracted by warmth and the presence of carbon dioxide, the bug pierces the skin of its host with two hollow tubes. With one tube it injects its saliva, which contains anticoagulants and anesthetics, while with the other it withdraws the blood of its host. After feeding for about five minutes, the bug returns to its hiding place. The bites cannot usually be felt until some minutes or hours later, as a dermatological reaction to the injected agents, and the first indication of a bite usually comes from the desire to scratch the bite site. Because of their dislike for sunlight, bedbugs come out at night.

Although bedbugs can live for a year or as much as eighteen months without feeding, they typically seek blood every five to ten days. Bedbugs that go dormant for lack of food often live longer than a year, well-fed specimens typically live six to nine months. Low infestations may be difficult to detect, and it is not unusual for the victim not to even realize they have bedbugs early on. Patterns of bites in a row or a cluster are typical as they may be disturbed while feeding. Bites may be found in a variety of places on the body.

Bites

In most observed cases, bites consist of a raised red bump or flat welt, and are often accompanied by intense itching. The red bump or welts are the result of an allergic reaction to the anesthetic contained in the bedbug's saliva, which is inserted into the blood of its victim. Bedbug bites may appear indistinguishable from mosquito bites, though they tend to last for longer periods. Bites may not become immediately visible, and can take up to nine days to appear. Bedbug bites tend to not have a red dot in the center such as is characteristic of flea bites. A trait shared with flea bites, however, is tendency towards arrangements of sequential bites. Bites are often aligned three in a row, giving rise to the colloquialism "breakfast, lunch and dinner." This may be caused by the bedbug being disturbed while eating, and relocating half an inch or so farther along the skin before resuming feeding. Alternatively, the arrangement of bites may be caused by the bedbug repeatedly searching for a blood vein. People react very differently to bedbugs, and individual responses vary with factors including skin type, environment, and the species of bug. In some rare cases, allergic reactions to the bites may cause nausea and illness. In a large number of cases, estimated to 50% of all people, there is no visible sign of bites whatsoever, greatly increasing the difficulty of identifying and eradicating infestations.

People commonly respond to bed bug infestations and their bites with anxiety, stress, and insomnia. Individuals may also get skin infections and scars from scratching the bedbug bite locations.

Most patients who are placed on systemic corticosteroids to treat the itching and burning often associated with bed bug bites find that the lesions are poorly responsive to this method of treatment. Antihistamines have been found to reduce itching in some cases, but they do not affect the appearance and duration of the lesions. Topical corticosteroids, such as hydrocortisone, have been reported to expediently resolve the lesions and decrease the associated itching.

Many patients also experience temporary relief of itching and inflammation with the application of hot water to the bite. The water should be quite hot (about 120 °F) because if it is not hot enough it may cause aggravation of the symptoms. The water should be hot enough to cause minor discomfort, but care must be taken not to burn the skin and this treatment should only be self-administered in order to reduce the risk of a burn. Itching and inflammation can be relieved for several hours by applying hot running water, a hot washcloth, or even using a blowdryer to heat the area of the bite, for 10 seconds to 1 minute (or longer if desired). There is disagreement as to why heat causes the symptoms to abate. Some hypotheses propose that heat overwhelms the nerve endings that signal itch, that heat neutralizes the chemical that causes the inflammation, or that heat triggers a large release of histamine causing a temporary histamine deficit in the area.

Disease transmission

Bedbugs seem to possess all of the necessary prerequisites for being capable of passing diseases from one host to another, but there have been no known cases of bed bugs passing disease from host to host. There are at least twenty-seven known pathogens (some estimates are as high as forty-one) that are capable of living inside a bed bug or on its mouthparts. Extensive testing has been done in laboratory settings that also conclude that bed bugs are unlikely to pass disease from one person to another. Therefore bedbugs are less dangerous than some more common insects such as the flea. However, transmission of Chagas disease or hepatitis B might be possible in appropriate settings.

The salivary fluid injected by bed bugs typically causes the skin to become irritated and inflamed, although individuals can differ in their sensitivity. Anaphylactoid reactions produced by the injection of serum and other nonspecific proteins are observed and there is the possibility that the saliva of the bedbugs may cause anaphylactic shock in a small percentage of people. It is also possible that sustained feeding by bedbugs may lead to anemia. It is also important to watch for and treat any secondary bacterial infection.

reff: From Wikipedia

Twitter

Oprah joins Twitter

With Oprah Winfrey joining Twitter, expect an influx from Middle America, and a backlash from the press. But remember, it's all part of the technology Hype Cycle

Oprah's followers versus Jonathan Ross's at TwitterCounter

The big event on Twitter last week was Oprah Winfrey making her first tweet, live on her show, with the help of Twitter co-founder Ev Williams. "HI TWITTERS," she shouted, "THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY."

The show also crowned Ashton Kutcher King of Twitter for becoming the first user with a million followers, following a race with the CNN Breaking News account.

Oprah is a huge power in the US, as we have seen from her book club and magazine. Where Oprah leads, thousands if not hundreds of thousands follow -- starting with Gayle King from Oprah's magazine. Indeed, Oprah's own following has already zoomed past many of the UK's favourite tweeters, including Jonathan Ross. There's no telling where it will end.

If you missed the event, you can watch the two YouTube videos on the Mashable post, Ashton Kutcher and Evan Williams Talk Twitter With Oprah [Video].

Kutcher made the right noises about the "democratization of media" -- that "one man can have a voice that's as loud as an entire media company". He also talked about the ability to correct stories about him by talking directly to fans, instead of going through publicists, journalists and other intermediaries.

Whether Kutcher's achievement will survive close scrutiny is another matter. NowPublic has already questioned it in Ashton Kutcher Punks Twitter: A Giant Million Follower PR Stunt. It says:

This is not a story of the "little man" beating out "big media" — this is the story of a major Hollywood celebrity orchestrating a massive, social media publicity campaign that was specifically designed to promote himself, Twitter and, by extension, Ted Turner and CNN.

Kutcher's effort was promoted on 1,133 digital billboards, it says, and "as the race to the million follower finish line approached last night, Twitter users were suspiciously blocked from unfollowing either Ashton or CNN". It reckons the show needed someone to make the million, though (as suggested in comments) it might simply have been a way to prevent people gaming the system to try to win the prize for the millionth follower.

It also remains to be seen whether 4chan got involved. Members of this bulletin board belatedly entered the race, using hundreds of thousands of fake accounts.

Ev was less impressive than Kutcher, and ducked the chance to say something useful about Twitter policy on fakesters. Oprah pointed out that anyone could set up an account and pretend to be Oprah, so how would anyone know an account was the real thing? This is a serious problem that, at the moment, is being handled at the grass roots level by sites such as Valebrity. Ev's answer was that "our people know your people," which is no use at all to many millions of people with some species of fame.

Twitter is a tiny 30-person company, and if you are, for example, an actor on EastEnders or Corrie, or an author or a pop band, your people (if any) certainly don't know their people.

Still, Twitter was growing at a rapid rate, and Oprah's arrival is likely to boost it. This will make Twitter less select and less geeky, and that might attract different kinds of attack. Gartner analyst Mark Raskino, co-author of Mastering The Hype Cycle, thinks the process may already have started., His post, Classic Hype Cycle turn signal: 'Twitter Backlash' reported, picks up on a New York Observer headline that caught his attention: 'Twitter Sucks!' The Backlash Begins. Among other things, this points to "an entire blog devoted to chronicling the "Twitter Backlash".

Raskino says:

Remember the innovation is microblogging (and there are competitors) - so let's forget the company name for a moment. This technology innovation example is particularly interesting because the technology is of direct relevance to journalists and media people in their own jobs. So naturally they will discuss it more and the situation is unusually amplified. As they compete for audience attention we will tend to see more extreme hyperbole and backlash. That helps make this innovation a particularly clear reference example, as it passes through the early stages of the Hype Cycle.

The benefit of the Hype Cycle, of course, is that it helps you regard the backlash in the same way as the hype. Neither is worth taking too seriously: they're just a normal part of the way technologies grow up.

reff: Jack Schofield / guardian.co.uk

Twitter

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Twitter, Inc.

Type	Private
Founded	2006
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, USA
Key people	Jack Dorsey, Chairman Evan Williams, CEO Biz Stone, Creative Director
Industry	mobile social network service, micro-blogging
Website	http://twitter.com/

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers). Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow anybody to access them. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. The service is free to use over the Internet, but using SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Since its creation in 2006, Twitter has gained extensive notability and popularity worldwide. It is often described as the "SMS of Internet," in that the site provides the functionality (via its application programming interfaces) for other desktop and web-based applications to send and receive short text messages, often obscuring the Twitter service itself.

Four gateway numbers are currently available for SMS — short codes for the United States, Canada, India, and a United Kingdom-based number for international use. There is also a short code for Vodafone users from the UK. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via e-mail.

Estimates of the number of daily users vary as the company does not release the number of active accounts. In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4-5 million users. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third most used social network (Facebook being the largest, followed by MySpace), which puts the number of unique monthly visitors at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visits at 55 million.In March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest growing site in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had a growth of 1382%, Zimbio had a growth of 240%, followed by Facebook with a growth of 228%.

Technology

Twitter has been described as akin to a web-based IRC client. The Twitter web interface uses the Ruby on Rails framework.From the spring of 2007 until sometime in 2008 the actual messages were handled by a pure-Ruby persistent queue server called Starling.Starling was replaced in 2008 with Scarling, a persistent queue server written in the Scala programming language, which has since been renamed Kestrel.The Twitter API itself allows the integration of Twitter with other web services and applications.In late April 2008, TechCrunch reported that, due to downtime related to scaling problems, Twitter would abandon Ruby on Rails as their web framework and create a new system with PHP or Java. Evan Williams, however, soon debunked this report in a Tweet he sent on May 1, 2008.

Twitter messages may be tagged using hashtags, a word or phrase prefixed with a #, such as #beer.This enables tweets on a specific subject to be found by simply searching for their common hashtag, provided that the user has tagged his or her tweet. Meanwhile, the @ sign before a username, such as @example, is used to distinguish a reply directed at that user. A message preceded by the @username prefix can still be read by anyone, but is treated as directed firstly to the user in question.

Privacy and security

Twitter collects personally identifiable information about its users and shares it with third parties. Twitter considers that information an asset, and reserves the right to sell it if the company changes hands.

A security vulnerability was reported on April 7, 2007, by Nitesh Dhanjani and Rujith. The problem was due to Twitter's using the SMS message originator as the authentication of the user's account. Nitesh used FakeMyText to spoof a text message, whereupon Twitter posted the message on the victim's page.This vulnerability can only be used if the target's phone number is known.Within a few weeks of this discovery Twitter introduced an optional PIN that its users can specify to authenticate SMS-originating messages.

On January 5, 2009, 33 high-profile Twitter accounts were compromised, and falsified messages — including sexually explicit and drug-related messages — were sent. The accounts were compromised after a Twitter administrator's password was guessed via a dictionary attack.

Virus info Update

'Conficker' worm author's= $250,000

"Conficker/Downadup" worm that infected millions of PCs worldwide in the past month – though past results suggest it might have limited success.

The reward – for information leading to the capture and conviction of the author or authors of the software – follows similar cash incentives offered by Microsoft to catch virus writers since 2003.

"The Conficker worm is a criminal attack. People who write this malware have to be held accountable," said George Stathakopoulos, of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group. "Our message is very clear – whoever wrote this caused significant pain to our customers and we are sending a message that we will do everything we can to help with your arrest."

Graham Cluley, of the antivirus company Sophos, said: "Offering substantial rewards can do no harm. If a culprit isn't found then Microsoft hasn't lost anything, and it may just entice some members of the computer underground to come forward with information. People considering releasing malware in the future should take careful note of this and think again."

Microsoft has brought together a wide group from within the industry to combat the effects of Conficker, which attempts to connect to a randomly generated list of internet domains every day. Experts fear that one of those domains will be a "control" site that will instruct the infected machines to perform an as-yet-unkown harmful action.

"The best way to defeat potential botnets like Conficker/Downadup is by the security and domain name system communities working together," said Greg Rattray, the chief internet security advisor at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, in a statement: "ICANN represents a community that's all about co-ordinating those kinds of efforts to keep the internet globally secure and stable."

But while the words – and amounts on offer – are dramatic, it is hard to know whether they will be effective. Microsoft set up a $5m fund to catch virus writers in November 2003, shortly after another worm dubbed "Blaster" infected millions of computers and disrupted communications for thousands of companies. It offered $250,000 for the writer of that worm, and for a number of other viruses, such as Zotob, Sobig and Sasser. Though the alleged authors of Zotob and Sasser were caught, it has never been made clear whether the bounties were paid out.

The Conficker worm though has caused far more damage than the amount being offered as a bounty. It has infected millions of PCs worldwide, including parts of the French navy and air force and the American air force. Security experts are still trying to work out what its intent is, although they note that it spreads throughout any network to which a Conficker-infected machine is connected.

That could mean it is either intended to create a "botnet" of machines that could be used to send spam, or a network that would send private information such as credit card numbers and passwords to an unknown location on the net.

Although Microsoft released a "patch" in October for its software that should have prevented computers being infected, many companies and organisations did not install it because they were worried about disrupting their existing setup. A version of Conficker began circulating at the same time as Microsoft released its patch, but had little effect.

The lack of updating left a huge security hole which hackers abruptly exploited in mid-January when a new version of a "worm" that exploited the weakness appeared, apparently written by the same team that wrote the original.

The new worm attempts to crack the passwords of machines on a network using the computing power of the infected machine to apply a "brute force" approach – so that passwords such as "admin", "password" or "123456" on potential target machines will quickly be broken.

Once it has infected a machine, the software also tries to connect to up to 250 different domains with random names every day. Researchers believe that one of them will be the intended "control" domain, and that when the computers connect to it they will download a fresh program that will take over the infected computer.

reff. Charles Arthur, guardian.co.uk

Conficker detail's

from Wikipedia

Conficker

Common name	Conficker
Aliases	Win32/Conficker.A (CA) W32.Downadup (Symantec) W32/Downadup.A (F-Secure) Conficker.A (Panda) Net-Worm.Win32.Kido.bt (Kaspersky) W32/Conficker.worm (McAfee) Win32.Worm.Downadup.Gen (BitDefender) Win32:Confi (avast!) WORM_DOWNAD (Trend Micro) Worm.Downadup (ClamAV)
Classification	Unknown
Type	Computer worm
Subtype	Computer virus

Conficker, also known as Downup, Downadup and Kido, is a computer worm targeting the Microsoft Windows operating system that was first detected in October 2008.An early variant of the worm propagated through the Internet by exploiting a vulnerability in the network stack of Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 Beta, and Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta that was discovered earlier that month.The worm has been unusually difficult for network operators and law enforcement to counter because of its combined use of advanced malware techniques.

Although the origin of the name "conficker" is not known with certainty, Internet specialists and others have speculated that it is a German portmanteau fusing the term "configure" with "ficken", the German word for "to fuck". Microsoft analyst Joshua Phillips describes "conficker" as a rearrangement of portions of the domain name "trafficconverter.biz".

Money Blogging

Learning How to Make Money Blogging

There are two major types of business models that entrepreneurs use to make money blogging. The firstand most common way to turn a blog into a profit making machine is to sell advertising to different companies and brands who want to reach that blog's readers.

The second kind of money making blog is one that helps a single brand improve its image by creating positive associations between the blog and the product in the mind of consumers. Both kinds of blogs can make a lot of money, especially if the creator has a keen mind for marketing. If you are blogging with the goal of selling advertising, there are two basic ways that you can go about recruiting sponsors who want to put ads on your site; you can let someone else do all of the legwork, or you can do the work yourself and keep all of the revenue. Within the first group, many people make money blogging by selling space through Google's AdSense program.

The advantages of this program are numerous, as it requires very little effort on the part of the blogger or webmaster to begin raking in profits. However, most people discover that they make less money through this method than they had hoped that their blog would earn. Selling advertising directly to companies who want to put banner ads or sponsored links on your blog can take quite a bit of time, but it is often fairly lucrative. If you have a lot of contacts in industries that are related to the topic of your blog, you may want to try to go this route.

People who have a strong background in sales and are experienced at pitching proposals can make quite a bit of money by renting blog space to interested companies. The most serious problem with this model is that you often have to build quite a sizable readership before you can attract advertisers, which can mean that you have to do several months of work before you start to make money blogging. As blogging becomes a more and more lucrative business, a lot of established companies are considering how they can get into the action.
One way that companies are capitalizing on the blog movement is by having blogs that provide a kind of friendly face for their corporation. Often, a company will employ an established blogger to create a weblog designed specifically to appeal to that company's customers and to create positive associations with the brand in consumers' minds. More than one writer who never even dreamed that he or she could make money blogging has been approached by a company and offered quite a pretty penny for this kind of gig.

Yuan.

Apple launches Safari 4 beta that looks like Windows

Increased speed, better standards support and extra eye-candy could make the new version of Safari more attractive in an increasingly crowded browser market

Safari 4 beta on Windows Vista

Apple has released a beta version of Safari 4 for Mac and Windows, with the most surprising thing being that the Windows version actually looks like a Windows program, and does Windows font rendering.

Like Google's Chrome and Android, the Nokia Series 60 and Palm webOS browsers, Safari is based on the Apple's WebKit open source rendering engine, and v4 is said to be the first browser to pass the Web Standards Project's tough Acid3 test. Safari 4 also features a new Nitro engine for rendering JavaScript, in response to Google Chrome's superfast JS processing.

@Bill_Hodgson on Twitter, who runs Windows XP in Parallels, says Safari 4 is faster on both OS X and XP than Firefox 3 is on OS X. Whether it will be enough to tempt away people who love their Firefox extensions remains to be seen.

People who like Apple's bought-in CoverFlow technology should particularly like its use for viewing history and bookmarks in Safari 4, as well as presenting full-page previews. (Some have said it looks like a rip-off of CoolIris, but I don't use that, so I don't know how the two compare.)

Apple provides a very good overview of the new and old features at http://www.apple.com/safari/features.html

It will be interesting to see how Safari 4's features and speed stack up against Internet Explorer IE8 RC1, Firefox 3 and Chrome -- or Opera, of course, though that has proven to be the browser you can't even give away. It certainly looks more appealing than Safari 3. But they are all have their merits, and users can choose whichever browser(s) they find most useful.

Update 1: Just been catching up with some test results, and CNet UK has not only run some, they've turned out some nice graphs. The story, Safari 4 benchmarked: 42x faster than IE 7, 3.5x faster than Firefox 3, says "our benchmarks confirm Apple's Safari 4 browser, released in beta today, is the fastest browser on the planet. In fact, it beat Google's Chrome, Firefox 3, Opera 9.6 and even Mozilla's developmental Minefield browser."

The tests were run with WebKit's SunSpider suite of JavaScript tests. But maybe they could also have tried Google's JavaScript test, which Google's Chrome used to win hands-down, according to CNet.

Of course, old testers know there are lies, damned lies and benchmarks, and they may not mean much. However, Safari 4 is certainly a snappy performer, and while racing through JavaScript hasn't done Chrome much good so far, it's definitely a welcome feature. Indeed, as more and more bloated JavaScript is dumped into memory by more and more underpowered web-based applications, the need for speed could become increasingly apparent.

(http://www.guardian.co.uk)

4 common Affiliate Mistakes

Don't Make These Common 4 Affiliate Mistakes!

Myths concerning affiliate marketing are appealing and attractive. People who do not know the entire system the wrong way round are prone to believing that it is something capable of giving them great fortune overnight. Stories concerning affiliates who earn tremendous amounts of money swim in their heads, and while these stories are as true as they can be, there are those who believe that they are going to have the same fortune once they indulge in this particular business. It is true enough that affiliate marketing is financially rewarding. People who have gone through everything to be able to succeed in this business are reaping the seeds that they untiringly sowed. Many of them enjoy the kind of existence that was not possible for them to have had under ordinary circumstances.
Having gone through the A-Z of affiliate marketing, however, these people are the ones who know that while such business is lucrative, there is absolutely no easy money in it. Ignorance of this fact is one of the main reasons why there are people who fail miserably in the internet business. There are those who believe in myths concerning the easy money involved in systems such as affiliate marketing. They do not know that there are those who have wasted time, effort and too many resources in trying to pursue the life of ease that they believe this business will give them. And so they go into affiliate marketing armed with nothing but myths and fantastical notions of wealth swimming in their consciousness, never realizing that they bound to make mistakes that would prove to be their downfall. What may be the reason why in businesses such as affiliate marketing, many are called but few are chosen? Perhaps the answer lies on the fact that many affiliates make mistakes that result from their ignorance of facts concerning how the entire business runs.
Affiliate marketing is not as simple as an affiliate promoting a merchant’s wares through his website and getting paid for it. It is also about knowing the market and the customers at hand. Discovering what the most common mistakes affiliates make can perhaps dispel the gloom about myths surrounding affiliate marketing by correcting some wrong notions about it. It might also be able to make those concerned understand that like any other business, there are dos and donts involved in this one if they want to make each of their steps count.
The first common mistake affiliates make is their lack of knowledge concerning principles involved in their business. This refers to the affiliate’s knowledge of search engines in particular. Affiliate marketing involves advertising, and advertising through the internet could not have been better without the existence of search engines. What every affiliate has to do is to make these search engines his best friend through studying search engine optimization closely. This way, he is able to know what to do in connection with building a better website to ultimately use for his business.
The second is that affiliates make the mistake of stuffing their sites with banners that do not provide enough information about the product at hand. The best way to battle this mistake is to provide good content hand-in-hand with such banners. It is important for customers to know and understand the features of a product, and good content will be able to help them realize this goal.
The third is that there are affiliates who make the mistake of promoting only one product. Consequently, customers are not given enough options to choose from. There is also the risk of generating fewer sales as compared to having more options for customers ponder about. It is always better to give them a few better alternatives than to give them only one.
The fourth is that there are affiliates who make the mistake of promoting too many products. As a result, customers are confused and end up beyond making a choice. It is perhaps good to give them only the best choices. This is because it is ultimately up to them to judge which one is the best for them to patronize.

All in all, affiliates that are doomed to fail in this business are those who do not exert enough effort to understand everything involved in the industry that they are in. Knowing their path step by careful step will prove to be beneficial to them, as there is no other way to succeed than to go through any path slowly but surely.

Yuan

Google Adsense & Affiliate

Google Adsense Profits Mixed In With Affiliate Marketing

Are you a webmaster who needs funds to keep your website running? Or is your website the only way for you to earn income? Whichever you are, for as long as you are a webmaster or a web publisher and you need cash, affiliate marketing may work well for you. With affiliate marketing, you may get a lot of cash pouring into your bank account easily. And if your website is rich in great contents and you want to earn more profit, why not get into the Google Adsense program as well? Why Affiliate Marketing? Well, simply because affiliate marketing is the easiest and probably the best way to earn profits online, unless otherwise you are a businessman and would rather sell your own products online than advertise other businessman’s products on your site. But even online retailers can benefit from affiliate marketing programs, because affiliate marketing actually works for merchants as well as it works for the affiliates.

Affiliate marketing, simply said, is a relationship or agreement made between two websites, with one site being the merchant’s website and the other being the affiliate’s site. In the relationship, the affiliate agrees to let the merchant advertise his products on the affiliate’s site. The merchant, on the other hand, would agree to pay the affiliate in whatever method they have agreed into. This would generally mean easy income for the affiliate, as he would do nothing but place the retailer’s ad on his site. This would also be very beneficial for the merchant, as getting affiliates to advertise their products would be a lot more affordable than hiring an advertising firm to promote their products. There are a variety of methods on how the merchant would compensate the affiliate for his services, and for the webmaster, these methods simply translates to the method by which he would earn easy cash. Among the more common methods of compensation are the pay-per-click method, the pay-per-lead method, and the pay-per-sale method. The pay-per-click method is the method most preferred by affiliates, for their site’s visitor would only have to visit the advertiser’s site for them to gain money.

The other two methods, on the other hand, are better preferred by merchants, as they would only have to compensate you if your visitor becomes one of their registrants or if the visitor would actually buy their products. Getting much profit on affiliate marketing programs, however, does not depend so much on the compensation method is it does on the traffic generated by your site. A website that can attract more visitors would generally have the greater chance of profiting in affiliate marketing programs. What about Google Adsense? Google Adsense is actually some sort of an affiliate marketing program. In Google Adsense, Google act as the intermediary between the affiliates and the merchants. The merchant, or the advertiser, would simply sign up with Google and provide the latter with text ads pertaining to their products.
These ads, which is actually a link to the advertiser’s website, would then appear on Google searches as well as on the websites owned by the affiliates, or by those webmasters who have signed up with the Google Adsense program. While one can find a lot of similarities between Google Adsense and other affiliate marketing programs, you can also see a lot of differences. In Google Adsense, all the webmaster has to do is place a code on his website and Google takes care of the rest. The ads that Google would place on your site would generally be relevant to the content of your site. This would be advantageous both for you and for the advertiser, as the visitors of your site would more or less be actually interested with the products being advertised.
The Google Adsense program compensates the affiliate in a pay-per-click basis. The advertisers would pay Google a certain amount each time their ad on your site is clicked and Google would then forward this amount to you through checks, although only after Google have deducted their share of the amount. Google Adsense checks are usually delivered monthly. Also, the Google Adsense program provides webmasters with a tracking tool that allows you to monitor the earnings you actually get from a certain ad. So, where do all of these lead us to? Where else but to profits, profits and even more profits! Affiliate marketing programs and the Google Adsense program simply work, whether you are the merchant or the affiliate. For the merchant’s side, a lot of money can be saved if advertising effort is concentrated on affiliate marketing rather than on dealing with advertising firms. For the webmaster, you can easily gain a lot of profits just by doing what you do best, and that is by creating websites. And if you combine all your profits from both the Google Adsense program and other affiliate marketing programs, it would surely convert to a large amount of cash.

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