A merchant account is not for every online seller to run his web store (it mostly depends on the scale of your business – most individual online entrepreneurs are more than happy with PayPal services).

I have been using PayPal for years and was happy with their service all this time. Yes, PayPal had some issues 5 or so years back, but they have resolved them.

I was always interested to get some extra features that were not available in their ‘Help’ section:

- give my customers discounts
- sell gift certificates
- provide shipping options
- paypal coupons

I know of O’Reilly’s ‘PayPal Hacks’ manual and this forum

One more way to find PayPal solutions is PayPal Help website – one page with a selection of tips and tricks that will help you to extend the limits of PayPal as a payment solution for your online business.

Summary: now everyone talks of GBuy and how it will take away PayPal customers. But PayPal was the first company who paved the way to this sort of services for small and middle online businesses. I am sure it will help them to stay in the game. Google is a great company, but it tries to be everything and everywhere online.
[tags]paypal, merchant account, gbuy, affiliate marketing, home based business, online business, work from home, google, links, seo, website promotion, e-commerce[/tags]

I have recently posted about my experience of link building. In continuation of my article, ideas on the future of link building expressed by Abhilash just prove my own conclusions – link building is and will be just a waste of time, you will not achieve the desirable effect by adding your website to directories, submitting press releases, contacting webmasters for a link exchange and leaving your signature in forums and blog comments.

To summarize the observations in the article: websites will have no way to gain links, but buying them (and taking into the account many things to make that link work for you) and getting natural links. Yes, Google has progressed greatly and is very good at spotting and closing any flaws that webmasters are lucky to find when working at the link popularity.

SEO is not likely to last long since now. It simply does not work. Webmasters can work at their websites improving the quality of content, but I think ‘big companies’ will take niches one by one leaving individual webmasters no space for activity.

Summary: I have an impression it is time to change the industry. Or at least it is time to look around for other kinds of projects.

Those webmasters who started 5-7 years back have advantages over those who joined the game 1-2 years back. They have more online property and space for manoeuvre.

[tags]link popularity, links exchange, affiliate marketing, home based business, work from home, dmoz, google, links, seo, website promotion, e-commerce[/tags]

In the recent 4-6 weeks I have spent (wasted) much time trying to improve the link popularity of some of my websites.

The website topics are different, but the result of my approaching hundreds of websites is next to nothing. I killed hours and hours searching for the websites in Google, DMOZ, social bookmarking sites, digging link pages of authority sites – ALL IN VAIN.

What did I do for link exchange?

- I tested various message subject (info about your site.com, will trade or buy a link form your site.com, John P., a question about your website plus 5-10 more variants).

- I experimented with e-mail extensions (some e-mails sent from gmail, yahoo, site.com). The only achievement with this test was the ban of one website for spamming.

- I tried many body text versions where I addressed the website owner by his name, asked to buy/ rent a link from his website, admired his site pointing to some cool features, etc.

- I searched websites to contact from various sources (Google, DMOZ, social book marking websites, digging link pages, etc)

- I approached my direct competitors and those websites that complement my sites perfectly.

- I tested week days, weekends, holidays.

- I tried to approach .com/ .org/ .edu sites

- I contacted old sites (started in 90’s) and quite new sites (started in 2000 and later)

Important notice: the websites I tried to gain links for are at least 8 months old, min PR2, do not look like crap (they look pretty for me), not purely commercial, designed on the same level like this website, with unique content.

I did get some replies – most common:

- we do not trade links;
- you are welcome to buy a link from us for $60.00 month (a PR4 website with extremely low Alexa ratings).

I have got three links so far that I am aware of: one from .ca, .nz and .com sites.

Summary: the only reasons of this as I see it – summertime and most website owners are on vacations; or – link exchange does not work anymore (I think the second option is true).

In this situation it is reasonable to stop time waste to exchange links by contacting other websites. It is cheaper (you save time and Internet bandwidth) and much faster to buy a few links from the websites of your choice on webmaster forums, eBay.com or special marketplaces (www.tex-link-ads.com and similar).

The extra time you get since you drop the inefficient link exchange work – time to develop extra features of your website and focus on generating more content.

[tags]links exchange, affiliate marketing, home based business, work from home, dmoz, google, links, seo, website promotion, e-commerce[/tags]