To write an ebook is a good and cheap way to promote yourself and your business and perhaps give some extra income to put out those small personal economic fires in the end of the month. It doesn’t have to be difficult either. If you are a blogger you maybe could take some of your best postings, edit them, and put them together in a smashing ebook.

It builds your online reputation as an expert worthy of bookmarking and seeking out for further consultation or purchases – and might also work as a viral traffic generator for your site or blog. There are many advantages with producing your very own ebook.

Wikipedia: An E-book is “an electronic version of a printed book which can be read on a personal computer or hand-held device designed specifically for this purpose”.

If you now are convinced of all the blessings with ebooks and decide to give out your own, we on Cashrevelations.com have put together some tips that might improve the finished ebook. These tips assume you already have chosen the topic for your ebook.

Software’s You Need

You need a few softwares. Namely one word processor, one PDF converter and an image processor. You can fetch them breathtaking and marriage destroying expensively, or you can get them free. Here we will introduce you to the completely free variant.

OpenOffice.org – The Free and Open Productivity Suite
OpenOffice is an office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It can also read and write files from other common office software packages. The advantage with OpenOffice is that you can save your word document as a PDF file, and an extra PDF converter won’t be necessary.

Wikipedia: A publisher has options when it comes to choosing a format for production. Wikipedia has a comparison of e-book formats used to create and publish e-books.

Free PDF Creator – PrimoPDF
If you have an office software that can’t save your files as PDF – you will need a PDF converter. PrimoPDF is a free tool for PDF creation, comprising a user-friendly interface that enables printing to PDF from virtually any Windows application.

GIMP – The GNU Image Manipulation Program
An ebook without images is boring. If you can’t afford Photoshop, then GIMP is for you. GIMP is a free software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter and so on.

If you already have word processor, PDF converter and image processor you can use them. There are also some competent free online alternatives you could use.

The Importance Of Research

Any subject you are capable of providing enough information on to write an ebook should be researched once again. Search for news and dissenting opinions about the viewpoint you are taking. Incorporate those opinions and news into your own ebook. This method will make your ebook much more interesting and useful.

If by researching you can come up with a wild and unique viewpoint building an ebook around such controversy will attract attention and more sales just be sure that you have enough information to back up your wild claims.

Wikipedia: Research can be defined to be search for knowledge or any systematic investigation to establish facts. The goal of research is to produce new knowledge.

Internet provides you with more or less easy accessible information on any topic you can imagine, if you use correct search method. Which search engine to use to find specific information can be a bit tricky and a question of experience, but a small hint about that is provided by NoodleTools: Choose the Best Search for Your Information Need.

Writing Method

Literature is told in the authors voice and you should think about to keep your voice clear and understandable. To keep the words flowing and personable – try to imagine while you are writing that you are explaining the subject to one specific person in your life.

Consider the questions that imaginative person may ask – use examples to visualize your concept. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who want to learn the information you are about to provide. What do they think? What do they feel? What do they already know?

Wikipedia: Electronic books use DRM restrictions to limit copying and sharing of e-books. Digital Rights Management is a generic term for access control technologies.

Perhaps they feel ashamed for not knowing the information? Putting that in perspective before you sit down and write can make a huge difference in how the reader feels toward you after finishing your ebook.

And don’t forget to be practical. Provide information that is useful for your reader – something they immediately can adapt for their special purposes or projects.

Touchy Subjects

Many go online to ask questions in anonymity that they would not even imagine asking their closest friends. Feeling like a novice or an idiot (or both) is not a pleasant emotion, unless one is somewhat orientated against masochism.

A gentle touch of reassurance backed up with some convincing statistics proving that they are not alone with their fears may make your ebook to appear so much better and might even be recommended as an authoritative resource on “touchy” subjects.

Use Illustrations

Any kind of publication, whatever it is a newspaper, novel, tutorial or ebook become better with some kind of illustrative images. Images help you to describe complex data so it appears much clearer for the reader. Images make your ebook more attractive.

You can use your own images, but be your own hardest critic when you judge the image quality. Blurry and badly composed images are only excusable if they show something truly unique or sensational. But a bad image can be better with some simple editing.

The truth is, almost all images become better with some photo editing – a little bit of cropping, some color adjustments, better contrast and so on, do good for the most of the images we take. The GIMP software above is a competent resource for tasks like that.

If you feel that you don’t want to use your own images, there are alternatives also for you. For example Wikimedia Commons have a huge archive of free images and illustrations you can use for your projects. We recommend that you use those images under GNU license or Public domain images. This article by SmashingMagazine on free images might be of interest for you: Free and Commercial Stock Photography Sites.

Be sure to only use images you have right to use. Do not steal copyright materials. It is irritating and not necessary. There is so much free materials you can use out on Internet that any form of image theft is ridiculous.

Proofread

Before you publish, have your work proofread by as many people as possible. Few of us have the ability to proofread our own work. A mistake made in writing can easily be slipped over in editing if the same person does both.

The most important thing is to have the book understandable by your customers, so test out your ebook on a few friends. Ask for their input and take any advice they give you to your heart. By adjusting your writing so they can understand it, you will have a much more practical and useful ebook.

Maybe you have considered a traffic exchange as a cheap and fast alternative to receive a large amount of traffic to your website. The question is if it is worth the effort to spend hour after hour to surf other members sites to an often unfair ratio – and does a traffic exchange really do anything good for your website?

The concept for traffic exchanges is very simple: I visit your site if you visit my site. And like that, in theory, it sounds good – like something productive to spend time on.

Note: The first ever traffic exchange was ClickThru.com, where webmasters could view each others sites, with the ultimate goal to make a sale or earn a referral.

But there are negative voices about traffic exchanges. One of the problems mentioned with traffic exchanges is if you are for example using Google Adsense, or similar programs, you could get banned and lose your Adsense account.

Other problems mentioned are low quality traffic and high Bounce Rate.

Low quality hits by exchanges seldom lead to some actual result because the typical traffic exchange surfer only surfs for credits. Traffic exchanges increase your sites visit rate, but also your bounce rate – which may negatively influences your ranking.

One problem (not mentioned often enough) of using traffic exchanges is that you might become hooked on surfing and forget to devote time to develop your website.

But On The Other Hand…

You might have a new and exiting website but no visitor except you, so the bounce rate should be excellent – theoretically you have done everything like it should be done.

In that situation all traffic – even if it is low quality provided by a traffic exchange – is of use, because all new ventures need a big amount of exposure.

The same “Traffic Experts” that say 20 seconds visits from traffic exchanges are useless probably on the other hand believe in love at first sight. With that said – there is no academic truth about traffic exchanges, only speculations from people who think it maybe could be so.

And maybe traffic exchanges are a waste of time and 20 sec visits from bored surfers useless. But maybe not. Only one thing is sure, they are never an alternative, only a temporary complement.

Be Aware Of Arrogance And Cryptic Surf Ratios

You need to be aware of a few things before you begin to use a traffic exchange. All the surfing you do in a traffic exchange is for sale, the owner sells traffic and cash in on your work. You do a work for free and if you upgrade your traffic exchange account you will even end up paying for to do someone else’s work.

Nothing wrong with that as long as everybody is informed about that – but with that follows that you don’t need to accept the arrogant behavior some exchanges have towards their users. You do them a favor – not the opposite.

Arrogance in form of not answering support questions, arbitrary suspensions of webpages, demands to change the content, absence of promised bonuses, unfair surf ratios, rude responses and so on, are much more usual that one might think.

Some people have experienced that they have been cheated or treated unfair by traffic exchanges. That is the reason to why you should chose traffic exchange with great care.

Note: Justin Jones wrote in his hub “ClickThru is clearly a dead site – it also had a lot of cheaters while it was active including the anonymous ClickThru Tech”.

Be careful with traffic exchanges which use cryptic surf ratios – terms like dynamic ratio, activity points, bonus levels and other exchange owner generated terms, exist only to convince you to surf to a ratio that is worst than in other traffic exchanges. The rule is simple: do not join traffic exchanges where you don’t understand the credit system.

Be also aware of the false sense of traffic. Most surfers are probably eating, watching TV, while the exchange runs in the background. Their main goal is to earn their credits.

Traffic Exchanges – The Basics

Wikipedia: A traffic exchange website receives website submissions from webmasters that join the exchange. The person who submitted the website then has to browse other member sites to earn credits, which enable their sites to be viewed by other members through the surf system.

Exchanges enforce a certain surf ratio, which illustrates the amount of websites the surfer must view in order to receive one hit to their own website. Most traffic programs also impose a time limit when members are browsing, ranging from 10 sec to 60 sec.

Note: Autosurfs are traffic exchanges that automatically rotate advertised websites in one’s web browser. A large amount of controversy is concentrated over whether they are inherently structured as Ponzi schemes. 12DailyPro was one of the largest in 2005.

Many exchanges offer the ability to upgrade membership level for a better surf ratio.

Traffic exchanges are generally used by small business owners or marketers who either want free advertising or use exchanges for low-budget advertisement campaigns.

Choose Correct Traffic Exchange

Which one is correct or not depends on what you need and feel comfortable with. But in general you need an exchange with a huge member base and it is good if the exchange has some community functions where you can socialize and promote in more than one level – like for example Traffic Era and EasyHits4U.

There are ways to find out if a traffic exchange is worth any consideration. When you visit a traffic exchange look after this:

• Member base – how many members is in the exchange
• Daily statistics – members online, pages surfed etc.
• Surf ratios – you should find and understand them easy
• Faq and support – should be easy to find
• Contact – is the contact information easily accessible
• Terms of service – are they easily understood and are they fair
• Anti Cheating Protection – should be clearly defined

If you find all those things you can begin to evaluate if this is a traffic exchange that fits your needs. Keep in mind that (not always, but almost) if something looks suspicious and poorly designed, then it is just that – a traffic exchange with poor quality.

Using Traffic Exchanges Effectively

If you find a traffic exchange you are comfortable with and decide to use it to increase the number of visitors to your site, there are advises that might be useful and you can read some of them below.

The key of using traffic exchanges is understanding that the person will only be viewing your site for 10–20 seconds. Rather than sending the person to your website, you should be sending them to a specific advertisement designed for traffic exchanges.

Or even better, target the page to the specific exchange you use.

The page you link to on your web site must load very fast. If not, the visitor may have moved on to the next site before your page has finished loading. The page should not under any circumstances take more than 2 sec to load. You can test your page HERE.

The most effective are squeeze pages and splash pages, which have a simple headline, description, and opt-in form or a link to a page where they can get more information.

Make sure that all links on your splash page open in a new window, and clearly inform the other traffic exchange users of that.

A Short Summary

Traffic exchanges are never an alternative if you want to build long term traffic to your site. There is no substitute for content that attracts visitors and search engines.

But like a temporary complement they can work great. We have used traffic exchanges from time to time with a good result – its all about what expectations you have.

Choose traffic exchange wisely and don’t continue to use them if they don’t live up to your expectations or what they self promise. There are plenty of traffic exchanges out on Internet you can use instead.

Be aware of what you are doing and do not accept to be treated in an unappropriated manner. Remember, you are doing the Traffic Exchange a favor by choosing them from the huge amount of other traffic exchanges.

More about Traffic Exchanges:

• What Traffic Exchange Owners Don’t Want YOU To Know
• Are Traffic Exchanges A Waste Of Time?
• A note on traffic exchange programs
• Getting the most out of Manual Traffic Exchanges
• Should you buy traffic from a free Traffic Exchange?
• Jon Olson’s Hit Exchange News
• Traffic Exchange Exposed Directory

Merchants use ShareASale to implement and manage their affiliate program.

Established in 2000, Share A Sale began on the premise that they could provide any merchant with high quality, reliable tracking software with the added benefit of being plugged into a large network of quality affiliate sites.

There are currently over 2,600 Merchants plugged in to the Share A Sale Network. Each of these merchants has a different type of product that they are selling.

ShareASale is primarily targeting small and mid-size merchants and is among the largest U.S. affiliate networks in terms of number of advertisers who are using an affiliate network to manage their affiliate program.

Share A Sale’s affiliate network is an Adware free network – not accepting any affiliate who used Adware or similar software products to place ads. The networks stance against Adware and other unethical business practices in the affiliate marketing industry was recognized by the industry.

The founder Brian Littleton received in August, 2006 the “AFP Fair Practice Award” and in January 2007 the “Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Award” for “Affiliate Marketing Advocate” at the Affiliate Summit West 2007 industry tradeshow and expo.

• Share A Sale on Alexa
• Share A Sale on Quantcast
• Share A Sale on Wikipedia

Visit ShareASale…

Sources: Wikipedia.org, Shareasale.com

This is what is more commonly known as the 404 Error Page. It’s the page that shows up by default when someone ‘accidentally’ types in the address of the page they are looking for on your site incorrectly. Now, in many cases, it truly happens by mistake. However, in many other instances, people end up on this page because they are snooping around trying to look for your download page or thank you page without having to pay or opt-in.

Why, not capitalize on it whether they are doing it purposely or they are truly ending up there by accident. If you have your own website and it gets traffic, some of your visitors are ending up on that page. Now, if they are seeing the generic message that their browser shows them when it happens, then you are not making good use of your web real estate.

Examples of 404 Error Pages: Productplanner, Apartmenthomeliving.com, Brightkit,
Mundofox.com, RussianTales.se, Jhuskisson.com, RealMacSoftware.com, Gog.com

Every page of your website can put money in your pocket. Even your 404 error page. You can customize that page just like any other page on your website.

• Some ideas to utilize on that page include:
• • Making an special offer at a discounted price
  • Having it be a squeeze page
  • Making it an Adsense pages
  • Redirecting it to a related affiliate product

Those are just a few of the many different, yet profitable types of ways you can make good use of your 404 error page. It won’t make you rich, but it definitely will put some extra money in your account. Maybe it will help you pay one of your bills, or you can just reinvest it into your business.

• Get your hands on Jason Dinner’s 404 Secrets Special Report

Either way, if you don’t customize this page, you can be leaving money on the table. Having something for your visitors to see that end up on that page is extremely more beneficial to you then not having anything on that page.