Blog Marketing And Home Businesses

Blog marketing is something that all blog owners do. They market their blog so that they can get readers, and make a profit from their blogs. Marketing their blog means to get it out there so that others that are interested in it can find it and read it. It is also a great way to sell things by using affiliate links and programs. Blog marketing can very well become a home business if that is something that you are interested in.

Having a home business by blog marketing would definitely entail that you have more than one blog. If this is something that you are considering, you will want to make a list of markets that your blogs can cover. You will find that your blogs will do best when you only have one market per blog. For example, if you have a blog about cats, you will not want to include anything on the blog about kitchen appliances. This is because the readers that read your blog and visit your blog to learn more about cats and what you have to say about them will not be interested in learning anything about kitchen appliances. Once you have overcome the relevancy issue, you will be ok. You can however, have a blog about pets, and then blog about all of the many pets that you want to include.

In order to make a living by blog marketing, you need to know every aspect of it. You need to know what needs to be done to get readers to your blog, how to write about the things that you are promoting and how to get it up in search engine rankings. Doing so will lead to successful blog marketing and making a home business income with it.

One big aspect of blog marketing is SEO. SEO is search engine optimization and it consists of optimizing your blog so that the search engines will find it and rank it as high as possible. Which also leads to more traffic and leads from your blog. If you do not have time to learn SEO, and apply it to all of your blogs, hiring someone to do this for you might be something that you want to consider. Especially if time is an issue.

Outsourcing much of your work is something that you will need to get used to if you plan on making a substantial amount of money with your blogs. You may want to hire bloggers or writers that can write the content for your blogs, and someone else that can leave comments on other blogs with a link back to yours. Spread out all of the duties on a spread sheet and decide how often each thing needs to be done for each blog. Doing so will help you to be more organized and know what you need to do when, as well as prioritize. Using a spread sheet will also help you to keep track of who is doing what, and keep you from asking more than one person to get one job done.

Blog marketing for a home business is not much different from any other home business. You are going to get out of it what you put into it. If you only put in a couple of hours a week into your blogs, you can not expect to make a full time income with them. However, being consistent and working on your blogs every chance that you get will pay off in the long run. You will also discover that there is no better feeling in the world than owning your own home business, and working for yourself.

Just remember to start small, and work hard. That is all you need to become successful at blog marketing and make the income that you are dreaming of. All of your hard work will pay off if you are persistent and keep it up.



How To Choose Your Affiliate Program Wisely

Affiliate marketing programs have sky-rocketed in popularity in the past few years. As one of the fastest and easiest ways to start an online home business people are jumping on this wave by the millions. Affiliate programs offer merchants the opportunity to employ vast armies of sales people who get paid for the results they achieve.

The rewards for affiliates can be very good, and the skilled affiliate marketer can earn many thousands of dollars per month. This win-win situation has led to an explosion in the number of affiliate programs that are available to affiliate marketers.

With this growth of affiliate opportunities have come many questions, such as: how do you go about choosing the right affiliate program for you? What qualities should you look for in a program and which gives you a good chance of making a sustainable income? Below are some tips that will help you to evaluate affiliate programs, and help you to avoid wasting time and money.

What Commissions Does the Program Pay?

It is very important that you know how much you can expect to earn from a sale. There is no point in spending time and money promoting a product that pays very small commissions. You could end up spending more on marketing than you make on sales. It is probably best to stick with marketing products with a high commission value, unless you have found a niche market where you can sell vast quantities of product, and make substantial commissions on your volume of sales.

How Much Traffic is their Website Getting?

Try to discover the amount of traffic the affiliate owner’s website is already receiving. Alexa.com is a very useful tool for doing this research. If the website is ranked in the top 100,000, the merchant is getting a good volume of traffic, so it’s possible that there may already be too many affiliates. If it is ranked below 500,000 it may be no good, or it could be a golden opportunity to make some real money by becoming one of the first affiliates!

Always research a merchant’s product if their website has a low traffic ranking. It may be a good idea to buy the product yourself if you can afford it. Otherwise you could do a search to find out if there are any negative reviews about it on the internet. Be careful who you listen to though because many people are in the habit of bashing affiliate programs with nothing to really support their comments. If you find a large amount of negative reviews with little positive ones then it would probably be a good idea to stay away from that affiliate program.

How Often Are Affiliate Commissions Paid?

Some affiliate programs pay commissions every week; some once a month, others only pay every quarter. It is important that you know how often you can expect a pay check if you are going to have financial control over your business. Do you have the financial resources to continue to market a product if you have to wait a long time before you get paid? It would also be wise to find out the minimum commission that you have to earn before you get paid.

Does The Affiliate Program Use Tracking Cookies?

Many customers do not buy on their first visit to a merchant’s website. It is important therefore that the merchant uses cookies for their affiliate program, so that you get credit if the customer returns and buys at a later date. Check out how long the cookies last. The longer the cookies lasts; the better the chances of you getting paid!

Does the Affiliate Program Pay on Subsequent Sales?

Some programs will only pay commission on sales that come through customers visiting their site via a direct link from your site. They pay you nothing for any subsequent purchases that the customer makes if they visit the merchants site directly. It is important that you get paid no matter what route the customer returns by if you are to build a sustainable affiliate business.

What Marketing Resources Does the Affiliate Program Offer?

Look at the type and quality of the marketing resources that they provide. Do they provide articles, advertisements, or other content that you can use to put on your site? Do they provide free guides, special offers, free viral e-books, or product samples that you can send to your list? If the marketing material they provide is good then it is likely that the business will provide good support for their affiliates.

Finding the right affiliate program for you can be tough to do. The best advice is to do your own research, follow the advice above, and listen to your instincts. Use the above questions as an aid to finding an affiliate program that enables you to reach your financial goals. You never know… You might just strike affiliate marketing gold!

Top 3 Ways To Boost Your Affiliate Commissions Overnight

The ideal world of affiliate marketing does not require having your won website, dealing with customers, refunds, product development and maintenance. This is one of the easiest ways of launching into an online business and earning more profits.

Assuming you are already into an affiliate program, what would be the next thing you would want to do? Double, or even triple, your commissions, right? How do you do that?

Here are some powerful tips on how to boost your affiliate program commissions overnight.

1. Know the best program and products to promote. Obviously, you would want to promote a program that will enable you to achieve the greatest profits in the shortest possible time.

There are several factors to consider in selecting such a program. Choose the ones that have a generous commission structure. Have products that fit in with your target audience. And that has a solid track record of paying their affiliate easily and on time. If you cannot seem to increase your investments, dump that program and keep looking for better ones.

There are thousands of affiliate programs online which gives you the reason to be picky. You may want to select the best to avoid losing your advertising dollars.

Write free reports or short ebooks to distribute from your site. There is a great possibility that you are competing with other affiliates that are promoting the same program. If you start writing short report related to the product you are promoting, you will be able to distinguish yourself from the other affiliates.

In the reports, provide some valuable information for free. If possible, add some recommendations about the products. With ebooks, you get credibility. Customers will see that in you and they will be enticed to try out what you are offering.

2. Collect and save the email addresses of those who download your free ebooks. It is a known fact that people do not make a purchase on the first solicitation. You may want to send out your message more than six times to make a sale.

This is the simple reason why you should collect the contact information of those who downloaded your reports and ebooks. You can make follow-ups on these contacts to remind them to make a purchase from you.

Get the contact information of a prospect before sending them to the vendor’s website. Keep in mind that you are providing free advertisement for the product owners. You get paid only when you make a sale. If you send prospects directly to the vendors, chances are they would be lost to you forever.

But when you get their names, you can always send other marketing messages to them to be able to earn an ongoing commission instead of a one-time sale only.

Publish an online newsletter or Ezine. It is always best to recommend a product to someone you know than to sell to a stranger. This is the purpose behind publishing your own newsletter. This also allows you to develop a relationship based on trust with your subscribers.

This strategy is a delicate balance between providing useful information with a sales pitch. If you continue to write informative editorials you will be able to build a sense of reciprocity in your readers that may lead them to support you by buying your products.

3. Ask for higher than normal commission from merchants. If you are already successful with a particular promotion, you should try and approach the merchant and negotiate a percentage commission for your sales.

If the merchant is smart, he or she will likely grant your request rather than lose a valuable asset in you. Keep in mind that you are a zero-risk investment to your merchant; so do not be shy about requesting for addition in your commissions. Just try to be reasonable about it.

Write strong pay Per Click ads. PPC search engine is the most effective means of advertising online. As an affiliate, you can make a small income just by managing PPC campaigns such as Google AdWords and Overture. Then you should try and monitor them to see which ads are more effective and which ones to dispose of.

Try out these strategies and see the difference it can make to your commission checks in the shortest of time.

The 3 Easiest Ways For Newbies To Start In Affiliate Marketing

The 3 Easiest Ways For Newbies To Start In Affiliate Marketing

With the aid of the Internet, you can almost have everything right at your fingertips. With just a few clicks you get access to thousands and even millions of pieces of information and data on virtually any field of interest. As years pass by, the Internet continuous to effect radical changes in many facets of human endeavors, including commerce. Experts say that the information space, commonly known as the “world wide web,” grows by over a million pages everyday as more and more people utilize the Internet for information, education, entertainment, business and other personal reasons. It doesn’t take a business-oriented individual to realize that this phenomenon can bring about sky-high financial gains. The Internet’s fast-growing popularity in the recent years is surely an opportunity for business that any entrepreneur would not want to miss.

You might be thinking only businessmen can make much money out of the Internet, don’t you? Think again. You too can earn big bucks through the Internet even if you don’t have products to sell and high-profile and established company. How? That is through affiliate marketing. You might have come across these words over the net while surfing. Affiliate marketing is a revenue sharing between a merchant and an affiliate who gets paid for referring or promoting the merchants’ products and services. It is one of the burgeoning industries nowadays because it is proven to be cost-efficient and quantifiable means of attaining great profit both for the merchant and the affiliate and other players in the affiliate program, such as the affiliate network or affiliate solution provider.

Affiliate marketing works effectively for the merchant and the affiliate. To the first, he gains opportunities to advertise his products to a larger market, which increases his chances to earn. The more affiliate websites or hard-working affiliates he gets, the more sales he can expect. By getting affiliates to market his products and services, he is saving himself time, effort and money in looking for possible markets and customers. When a client clicks on the link in the affiliate website, purchases the product, recommends it to others who look for the same item or buys it again, the merchant multiplies his chances of earning. On the other hand, the affiliate marketer benefits from each customer who clicks on the link in his website and who actually purchases the product or avails of the service provided by the merchant. In most cases, the affiliate gets commision per sale, which can be fixed percentage or fixed amount.

If you want to be an affiliate marketer and make fortunes out of the Internet, you may follow the following three most basic and easiest ways to start an effective affiliate marketing program. First is to identify a particular thing you are interested in or passionate about so you won’t be bored and forced to develop your affiliate web site later on. Focusing on a specific area you know very well will help you bring out your best without much risks and effort. You can add a personal touch to your site and give your visitors who are possible buyers an impression that you are an expert in your field. In this way, you gain their trust and eventually encourage them to buy the products you endorse. Next is to look for good paying merchants and products or services related to your interest and create now a website. In choosing the products, you must also consider its conversion rate

Blog Marketing Crash Course

Many people with blogs get disheartened after a few weeks or months when their blog fails to attract thousands of readers. It is a real shame, because if bloggers followed a few simple blog marketing steps, then they would probably find that there is a willing audience just dying to read about most topics. So what can a blogger do to get noticed? Here are a few blog marketing ideas that should get most blogs getting reasonable traffic in a short space of time.

Blog about a niche: The world doesn’t really need another ‘vanity blog’ about what you had for breakfast. Unless you are a super-model good looking teenage girl who wants to put a lot of photos on your blog, then you are probably going to have a hard time getting noticed. If you already have a vanity blog and are wondering why you are not getting traffic, then you need to know that the vanity blog market is totally saturated. Consider starting or changing your blog to some other topic – an interest or a hobby for example.

Next, you need to start posting to forums. Put the URL of the blog in your forum signature (don’t spam forums saying “look at my blog”). If you just join in the conversation naturally, then people will get curious and you will get a few more readers. If the forum you post in is also to do with a similar topic to your blog then you will probably get repeat readers from it! Try to find the most popular forums in the niche you are writing about. To find them, just go over to Google and search for your niche keyword plus ‘forum’ and you should get a list. Try to find forums with at least a few thousand active members.

Make sure to do trackbacks and pingbacks to other blogs that you have linked to so that they know about you. When people find out that you have talked about them, they will come to see what you said. So will some of their readers. Talking about popular stories from popular blogs may get you more than just a few visitors too.

Comment on other people’s blogs as much as you can (without spamming). In most cases you can put a link back to your own blog and people do follow these links. It is also good to target blogs that talk about the same subject as you, because then you will get targeted readers who are more likely to continue reading your blog. (Avoid using “comment spam” programs as Google can track this and will penalize you).

Most importantly, you need to keep blogging! Nobody will return to a blog that is updated weekly or only occasionally. You need to add more content at least once per day, especially in the early stages of getting your blog noticed. This is hugely important.

3 Reasons Why Adsense Is Essential For Content Sites

To know why Adsense is essential for your content sites is to know first how this works.

The concept is really simple, if you think about it. The publisher or the webmaster inserts a java script into a certain website. Each time the page is accessed, the java script will pull advertisements from the Adsense program. The ads that are targeted should therefore be related to the content that is contained on the web page serving the ad. If a visitor clicks on an advertisement, the webmaster serving the ad earns a portion of the money that the advertiser is paying the search engine for the click.

The search engine is the one handling all the tracking and payments, providing an easy way for webmasters to display content-sensitive and targeted ads without having the hassle to solicit advertisers, collect funds, monitor the clicks and statistics which could be a time-consuming task in itself. It seems that there is never a shortage of advertisers in the program from which the search engine pulls the Adsense ads. Also webmasters are less concerned by the lack of information search engines are providing and are more focused in making cash from these search engines.

The first reason why Adsense is essential for content sites is because it already has come a long way in understanding the needs of publishers and webmasters. Together with its continuous progression is the appearance of more advanced system that allows full ad customization. Webmasters are given the chance to choose from many different types of text ad formats to better complement their website and fit their webpage layout.

The different formatting enables the site owners the possibility of more click through from visitors who may or may not be aware of what they are clicking on. It can also appeal to the people visiting thus make them take that next step of looking up what it is all about. This way the people behind the Adsense will get their content read and making profit in the process.

The second reason is the ability of the Adsense publishers to track not only how their sites are progressing but also the earnings based on the webmaster-defined channels. The recent improvements in the search engines gives webmasters the capability to monitor how their ads are performing using customizable reports that has the capacity to detail page impressions, clicks and click-through rates. Webmasters and publishers can now track specific ad formats, colors and pages within a website. Trends are also easily spotted.

With the real-time reporting at hand, the effectiveness of the changes made will be assessed quickly. There would be time to sort out the contents that people are making the most clicks on. The ever-changing demands would be met while generating cash for the webmasters and publishers. The more flexible tools are also allowing webmasters to group web pages by URL, domain, ad type or category, which will provide them some accurate insight on which pages, ads and domains are performing best.

The last and final reason is that the advertisers have realized the benefits associated having their ads served on targeted websites. Thus increasing the possibility that a prospective web surfer will have an interest in their product and services. All because of the content and its constant maintenance. As opposed to those who are no using Adsense in their sites, they are given the option of having other people do their content for them, giving them the benefit of having successful and money-generating web sites.

Adsense is all about targeted content, the more targeted your content is, the more target the search engines’ ads will be. There are some web masters and publishers who are focused more on their site contents and how best to maintain them rather than the cash that the ads will generate for them. This is the part where the effectiveness is working its best.

There was a time when people were not yet aware of the money to be achieved from advertisements. The cash generated only came into existence when the webmasters and publishers realized how they can make Adsense be that generator. In those days, the content were the most important factors that is taken quite seriously. It still is. With the allure of money, of course.



Creating Online Business Magazines

Today this article will focus on how to find a business niche that is underutilized which you can use to your advantage. By finding a niche starving for information, you will have the inside track at creating online business magazines geared to what they need.

One of the keys to creating online business magazines is the research that you do. Whenever you decide to enter a new niche and are working on creating online business magazines, you must absolutely know what is happening within that niche. That is a critical step that many people often forget.

The first thing that you should do is to see what ways the community is currently having their interests and needs met. The way to find this information is to find different groups related to that particular topic that you are interested in creating online business magazines for. The place to find these groups is at groups.google.com and groups.yahoo.com. There are other community oriented websites out there but these are the two largest ones. Look for the particular groups that you are interested in. Let us assume that you want to create an online business magazine on parenting. If we go to Yahoo! Groups and look at this, we can see that when we search by parenting, there are many different categories such as Adoptees, by birth date , as well as by where parents might like to adopt children. This can help us focus our efforts on how we want to word our magazine then. By reading into the messages that are posted, this is a good way that you can do some of your research that is needed to make sure that you are hitting appropriate topics.

Hopefully this article on creating online business magazines will help you out. The key to finding and developing the magazine is to find the niche and see what you should write about that. From there, everything should be very straightforward. Research and use of software cannot be overemphasized.

The Disadvantages Of Adsense

As adsense becomes the most popular publisher program for Price per Click advertising, flaws and disadvantages still exist. Since its inception advertisers have chosen to advertise in search because they felt that visitors would be less targeted. This is a genuine concern and one that makes perfect sense. If you are visiting a website, and notice an advert then the chances are you are not particularly concentrating on its content.

Adsense has also become so popular that people can distinguish them from other adverts. Therefore people may choose to ignore them without even paying them a thought. This has been a hot topic discussed by Bloggers and one that could contain a lot of truth. Many have blamed Google for this, and their decision to include text that says “ads by Google” beneath the advert.

Many publishers also fail to ever gain the revenues they anticipated when starting the program. Those only gaining 30 – 40 visitors a day to their website would be unlikely to earn even one dollar a day. Many advertisers talk of rates such as 1.5%- 5% for traffic to click conversion, whilst only gaining around $0.10 per click. The maths doesn’t work out great, but you can hardly blame advertisers or Google if you are not bringing enough traffic. The key is to bring targeted traffic to your website that are likely to click on adverts, however it is said that it may be easier on other programs which allow figures such as 75% share of advertising revenues for publishers.

Another disadvantage in adsense is that it has almost become tacky. Its appearance on websites that generally appear to be designed in a DIY fashion has lead people to associate them inextricably. This can only be tackled through adsense evolving to be more attractive to the bigger brands, whilst those who currently use adsense are restricted.

Google Adsense also has to tackle the issue of click fraud which is anticipated to count for over 15% of click through rate in content. This has meant that advertiser’s who have been particularly affected, have moved away to other programs or have restricted their advertising to search.

This has meant that there is less competition in content and therefore smaller revenues for publishers. Publisher’s who previously had high yielding ads, are now having to alter their content to ensure they get any adverts at all. This has largely been the fault of the publishers themselves however the issue is one that; if not addressed could bring adsense to its knees.

Google Adsense also has the disadvantage of not paying enough for their search program. Other similar programs pay higher rates, and if publishers decide to go elsewhere then problems will occur for advertisers and publishers alike. Although Google fail to pay enough for search another major problem with Adsense is that it does not have a powerful database of graphic adverts. Many advertisers prefer showing graphically drive advertisements, however this has yet to materialise. As several other programs exist for PPC graphic distribution problems could occur.

Whilst this may not be a problem for all publishers, many complain that the adverts within their site do not change, so their repeat visitors fail to see fresh adverts so therefore fail to visit them. This is a problem which could be addressed through making adverts rotate. However if adverts rotate then how will that be linked with advertisers paying a rate per click? These are all problems which Google has to address to ensure that Adsense remains the market leader.

Adwords on the other hand also has major advantages, and remains the best in the market. It’s CPC rates can be chosen by the advertisers so that even when they feel that they are not getting the results they expect they can lower their prices whilst still using the service.

Whilst many issues remain with adsense the program still remains the most popular amongst publishers, whilst Google Adwords remains the most popular amongst advertisers; with a database of over 140,000 Adwords will remain on top for the time to come.



Turning Traffic In To Adsense Traffic

If you’ve been running AdSense ads on your site for quite a while and you feel that you aren’t making as much cash as you could, in 99.99% of cases you’re right. Most people feel frustrated that they cannot generate the revenues they expected, and this is down to traffic levels as well as click through rates.

There are many ways to turn traffic into AdSense traffic and here is a short list of them with a description for each.

The first thing that you need to do is tune up your site’s contents. While for some people this isn’t an option (if you’re running a forum for example it’s a lot harder) most people can make their AdSense sites veritable cash cows.

To begin, you should find out what your site’s keywords are. This is a basic technique in SEO (search engine optimization) known as keyword density verification. A good tool for this job is SEO Density Analizer.

You should then take this list of words and search the Overture Search Inventory or Google AdWords Sandbox to find out what other words could be doing better then what you currently have.

From that point on try to keep your site focused on the things that appear mostly in the keyword suggestions you receive. Try to include those keywords, or at least some related keywords as often as you can in the links on your site.

Because of the way Google AdSense works this is a sure way to increase your earnings because you’ll get better ads in your AdSense banners, similar to how you would get a better Google PageRank

It’s also important that you continuously add new pages to your site. This is very important, as the more pages you have, the higher the chance is that you’ll get more hits on your ads.

It’s also very important that you choose the appropriate formats for your AdSense banners and the best locations for them. While this is a much wider subject you should generally know that the top three Google AdSense formats are: 336×280 large rectangle 300×250 medium rectangle and 160×600 skyscraper.

Make sure you choose the appropriate colors for the ads, as making them too different from your site’s content (or just different in a bad way) is sure to make visitors regard them as banners which have nothing to do with the site itself.

Make sure these ads are positioned where they’ll generate the highest amount of profit. Most times, that location is said to be right before the beginning of your site’s actual content.

On pages with a long text body, you might find skyscrapers to do better, simply because users get exposed to them for more time. Also, for sites with news or similar items, you might find a good position to be at the bottom of your content, because that’s when people are finished reading your story and are looking for something else to do.

You should use more AdSense units if you have a lot of text on your page. Just make sure not to overdo it because you might find that you will get a lot lower CTR and lower revenues then you were getting in the first place by employing this technique inappropriately. You can add as many as three units, so use them wisely.

There’s a Google AdSense Preview Tool that will let you visualize what ads would get served on your page and it can come in very handy as a testing mechanism.

Just make sure you respect the AdSense policy regarding click fraud. As a pointer you could place a picture next to your adds, just make sure to leave some room in between in order to make sure this isn’t regarded as encouraging visitors to click the link.

Of course there are more ways to increase AdSense traffic from your site, but these should serve as a good starting point for income maximization.



ways to identify and tackle click fraud

Identifying and tracking examples of click fraud is the first step to eradicating the problem. Click fraud is an enormous drain on the resources of advertisers operating on a national and international scale, estimated to occupy around 30% of all pay per click advertising spend. With so much at stake, its no wonder the search engines are investing so much time and effort into devising solutions.

One way in which Search Engines and other pay per click programme providers have attempted to curb the growing click fraud problem is through introducing IP address repetition algorithms. These formulae are designed to pick up on suspicious click patterns emanating from a singular IP address, which can help to uncover the existence of click farms and competitor-led sabotage, as well as identifying potential fraudsters at source.

However, there is an array of problems with this method of attempting to identify the fraudsters. Firstly, fraudsters logging on through a dialup modem, DSL line or cable modem can almost completely bypass this check, as with every new online session, a new IP address is generated. Furthermore, there is an extensive range of software available to alter IP addresses, which again can be used for ‘cheating’ the algorithm. Cookie and session tracking are other methods by which search engines can attempt to uncover potential fraudulent activity, but again there are ways around these for the fraudsters.

More comprehensive software is being developed which profiles and reports on the browsing habits of each click-through to enable companies to track and monitor suspicious behavior, although this could be seen by many as intrusive and ineffective as anything on a small scale is still likely to go unnoticed, based on the vast coverage of ads across the internet.

The problem of click fraud recently hit the headlines with a class action raised against Google, prompting Google to offer $90million as a potential settlement. Perhaps an acceptance of their responsibilities, Google’s offer goes some way to suggest the extent of click fraud, and its vast costs to the internet economy.

There are a number of self-help remedies that can be implemented to keep an organization out of trouble. The first of these remedies is the reliance on search engine optimization and organic listings. If a site is well and fully optimized, it could eventually realize a ranking that another site is willing to pay $2.50 a click for. Similarly, with organically high rankings there are no clickthrough rates, therefore the costs associated with PPC are not applicable. Although the process is significantly more laborious and takes significantly longer to see results, the SEO process is much cheaper in the long run, and with an estimated 25-30% of all clicks being performed fraudulently, an organically high listing can save money which would otherwise be drained by click fraud for more beneficial reinvestment.

Year on year, as the pay per click advertising market continues to grow and expand, surely click fraud will follow suit. Unless an effective means of preventing click fraud is developed and successfully implemented, buyers will steadily lose confidence in the advertising medium and turn to more effective, less wasteful marketing methods, which would seriously hit the search engines and could potentially threaten the online economy as a whole.