How To Create A Profitable Long-Term Sales Process

There is no different in selling online or offline. You will need to have a customer base and loyal customers. However, for online selling, the advantage is that, you can reach all of your customers at a push of a button. You can send regular emails to them providing valuable information. In order to have such a customer based, you will need to collect their names and email address when they visit your website.

For every visitor that came to your website, encourage them to subscribe to your list. This is not as easy as sticking an opt-in form at your website. You will need to create a compelling reason for them to subscribe by offering them incentives, such as a report, mini-course by e-mail, a CD, software download, consultation or book. If you do not have any of these resources, you can purchase them with a master resell right and with rights to give away. It is a worth while investment. If you cannot find any of these products in the market, go to elance.com and get a writer to write an e-book for you which you can use it according to your plan.

Having a customer based is not the end of the story. You will need to nature them. You will have to stay in close contract with all of your opt-ins by communicating with them. You can make use of the power of newsletters, autoresponder e-mail and quality customer service to keep your opt-in up to date.

Once they have purchased from you once, it is more likely that they will buy from you again provided that your recommendations or product meet their expectation. If you have created the first product, you can develop more advanced products and services to offer to your existing customers. If they have profited or benefited from your first product, more likely than not, they will buy your second product.

Creating and maintaining a profitable long term sales process with your customer is a life long process. To be in the league, you will need to keep a close contact and communication will them on a regularly basis using the suggested tools above. You can get more information on working at home at Home From Business.

Internet porn and your adolescent

A study published in the February 2007 issue of Pediatrics found that 42% of Internet users ages 10-17 had been exposed to online pornography. Janis Wolak, JD and her colleagues at the Crimes against Children Research Center at University of New Hampshire, administered a telephone survey to 1500 youth between March and June 2005 and found that 630 (42%) of the adolescents had come across either wanted or unwanted online pornography. Of the 630 children who had viewed online pornography, 413 (66%) had done so unintentionally.

The adolescents who had unintentionally come across the online porn had done so through file-sharing programs that download images onto the computer. The unwanted exposure rate was higher for teens, those who had been harassed or sexually solicited online or interpersonally victimized offline, and those who showed signs of depression (borderline range on the Child Behavior Checklist).

The picture is different for those adolescents who had wanted exposure to online pornography. These children tended to be boys, teens, download images using file-sharing programs, talk online to strangers about sex, use the Internet at friends' houses and rule break (borderline range on the Child Behavior Checklist).

Not surprisingly, children who used filtering and blocking software were less likely to experience unwanted exposure online pornography. Also, children who had attended an Internet safety presentation by a law enforcement agent were less likely to view unwanted images.

Though the study included only 1500 "nationally representative" youth, the results indicate that more adolescents than we may realize are exposed to both wanted and unwanted online pornography. Certain risk factors may increase a child's chance of coming across such online content, but it is clear that we need to keep an eye on our children and on their access to the Internet.

Vikki Sloviter received her BA in History of Science and Medicine from Yale University. She lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania with her husband and three young children. She also proofreads, copy edits, researches and writes for Pediatrics for Parents and NeedyMeds.com.

Learn how to protect yourself from the latest internet attack

JUST WHEN you finally figured out how to deal with viruses, worms, spam and phishing, along comes pharming. Pharming is like phishing on steroids. A pharming attack maliciously redirects a web browser to a spoof site that harvests personal information. Banking sites are top targets. "It's less of a visible threat, because there is no e-mail. It operates behind the scenes," says Scott Chasin, chief technology officer with Denver-based e-mail security company MX Logic (www.mxlogic.com). Unlike phishing, pharming has no social engineering lure. That makes it a more dangerous and stealthy method of attack.

Chasin cites several ways pharming can take place. DNS-cache poisoning, which exploits faults in DNS servers, and malware are the main vehicles that have been identified so far. And a Trojan was identified earlier this year that targeted several major banks.

Pharming attacks can be completely transparent to the unsuspecting internet user. "Pharming, from a threat perspective, has the potential to rival that of phishing," says Chasin. "We're dealing with sophisticated attackers, with very organized criminal enterprises."

There isn't much end users can do to protect themselves other than be aware of the problem. Netcraft (www.netcraft.com) offers an anti-phishing toolbar that also works for pharming, alerting users to the geographic location of the site they're accessing. You'll know something is wrong if your U.S. bank suddenly seems to be hosted in Russia.

Chasin says it will take industrywide cooperation and efforts to come up with solutions and better authentication schemes. In the meantime, entrepreneurs should keep an eye out for news on the latest pharming attacks and keep their guard up, especially when accessing financial sites.

Today's internet

Aside from the complex physical connections that make up its infrastructure, the Internet is facilitated by bi- or multi-lateral commercial contracts (e.g., peering agreements), and by technical specifications or protocols that describe how to exchange data over the network. Indeed, the Internet is essentially defined by its interconnections and routing policies.

As of March 10, 2007, 1.114 billion people use the Internet according to Internet World Stats.

Internet protocols

For more details on this topic, see Internet Protocols.

In this context, there are three layers of protocols:

• At the lowest level is IP (Internet Protocol), which defines the datagrams or packets that carry blocks of data from one node to another. The vast majority of today's Internet uses version four of the IP protocol (i.e. IPv4), and although IPv6 is standardized, it exists only as "islands" of connectivity, and there are many ISPs without any IPv6 connectivity. [1]
• Next came TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), UDP (User Datagram Protocol), and ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) - the protocols by which data is transmitted. TCP makes a virtual 'connection', which gives some level of guarantee of reliability. UDP is a best-effort, connectionless transport, in which data packets that are lost in transit will not be re-sent. ICMP is connectionless, it is used for control and signaling purposes.
• On top comes the application protocols. This defines the specific messages and data formats sent and understood by the applications running at each end of the communication.

Internet structure

There have been many analyses of the Internet and its structure. For example, it has been determined that the Internet IP routing structure and hypertext links of the World Wide Web are examples of scale-free networks.

Similar to the way the commercial Internet providers connect via Internet exchange points, research networks tend to interconnect into large subnetworks such as:

• GEANT
• GLORIAD
• Abilene Network
• JANET (the UK's Joint Academic Network aka UKERNA)

These in turn are built around relatively smaller networks. See also the list of academic computer network organizations

In network schematic diagrams, the Internet is often represented by a cloud symbol, into and out of which network communications can pass.

ICANN

For more details on this topic, see ICANN.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the authority that coordinates the assignment of unique identifiers on the Internet, including domain names, Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, and protocol port and parameter numbers. A globally unified namespace (i.e., a system of names in which there is one and only one holder of each name) is essential for the Internet to function. ICANN is headquartered in Marina del Rey, California, but is overseen by an international board of directors drawn from across the Internet technical, business, academic, and non-commercial communities. The US government continues to have the primary role in approving changes to the root zone file that lies at the heart of the domain name system. Because the Internet is a distributed network comprising many voluntarily interconnected networks, the Internet, as such, has no governing body. ICANN's role in coordinating the assignment of unique identifiers distinguishes it as perhaps the only central coordinating body on the global Internet, but the scope of its authority extends only to the Internet's systems of domain names, IP addresses, and protocol port and parameter numbers.

On November 16, 2005, the World Summit on the Information Society, held in Tunis, established the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to discuss Internet-related issues.

Language

For more details on this topic, see English on the Internet.

The prevalent language for communication on the Internet is English. This may be a result of the Internet's origins, as well as English's role as the lingua franca. It may also be related to the poor capability of early computers to handle characters other than those in the basic Latin alphabet.

Further information: Unicode

After English (30% of Web visitors) the most-requested languages on the World Wide Web are Chinese 14%, Japanese 8%, Spanish 8%, German 5%, French 5%, Portuguese 3.5%, Korean 3%, Italian 3% and Arabic 2.5% (from Internet World Stats, updated January 11, 2007).

By continent, 36% of the world's Internet users are based in Asia, 29% in Europe, and 21% in North America ([2] updated January 11, 2007).

The Internet's technologies have developed enough in recent years that good facilities are available for development and communication in most widely used languages. However, some glitches such as mojibake (incorrect display of foreign language characters, also known as krakozyabry) still remain.

Internet and the workplace

The Internet is allowing greater flexibility in working hours and location, especially with the spread of unmetered high-speed connections and Web applications.

The mobile Internet

The Internet can now be accessed virtually anywhere by numerous means. Mobile phones, datacards, handheld game consoles and cellular routers allow users to connect to the Internet from anywhere there is a cellular network supporting that device's technology.

Creation of the Internet

The USSR's launch of Sputnik spurred the United States to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA) in February 1958 to regain a technological lead. ARPA created the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) to further the research of the Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) program, which had networked country-wide radar systems together for the first time. J. C. R. Licklider was selected to head the IPTO, and saw universal networking as a potential unifying human revolution.

Licklider had moved from the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory at Harvard University to MIT in 1950, after becoming interested in information technology. At MIT, he served on a committee that established Lincoln Laboratory and worked on the SAGE project. In 1957 he became a Vice President at BBN, where he bought the first production PDP-1 computer and conducted the first public demonstration of time-sharing.

At the IPTO, Licklider recruited Lawrence Roberts to head a project to implement a network, and Roberts based the technology on the work of Paul Baran who had written an exhaustive study for the U.S. Air Force that recommended packet switching (as opposed to circuit switching) to make a network highly robust and survivable. After much work, the first node went live at UCLA on October 29, 1969 on what would be called the ARPANET, one of the "eve" networks of today's Internet. Following on from this, the British Post Office, Western Union International and Tymnet collaborated to create the first international packet switched network, referred to as the International Packet Switched Service (IPSS), in 1978. This network grew from Europe and the US to cover Canada, Hong Kong and Australia by 1981.

The first TCP/IP-wide area network was operational by January 1, 1983, when the United States' National Science Foundation (NSF) constructed a university network backbone that would later become the NSFNet. (This date is held by some to be technically that of the birth of the Internet.) It was then followed by the opening of the network to commercial interests in 1985. Important, separate networks that offered gateways into, then later merged with, the NSFNet include Usenet, BITNET and the various commercial and educational networks, such as X.25, Compuserve and JANET. Telenet (later called Sprintnet) was a large privately-funded national computer network with free dial-up access in cities throughout the U.S. that had been in operation since the 1970s. This network eventually merged with the others in the 1990s as the TCP/IP protocol became increasingly popular. The ability of TCP/IP to work over these pre-existing communication networks, especially the international X.25 IPSS network, allowed for a great ease of growth. Use of the term "Internet" to describe a single global TCP/IP network originated around this time.

The network gained a public face in the 1990s. On August 6, 1991, CERN, which straddles the border between France and Switzerland, publicized the new World Wide Web project, two years after Tim Berners-Lee had begun creating HTML, HTTP and the first few Web pages at CERN.

An early popular web browser was ViolaWWW based upon HyperCard. It was eventually replaced in popularity by the Mosaic web browser. In 1993 the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois released version 1.0 of Mosaic, and by late 1994 there was growing public interest in the previously academic/technical Internet. By 1996 the word "Internet" was coming into common daily usage, frequently misused to refer to the World Wide Web.

Meanwhile, over the course of the decade, the Internet successfully accommodated the majority of previously existing public computer networks (although some networks, such as FidoNet, have remained separate). According to a research done by K.G. Coffman and Andrew Odlyzko, the internet is growing at a rate of over 100% per year.^[1] This growth is often attributed to the lack of central administration, which allows organic growth of the network, as well as the non-proprietary open nature of the Internet protocols, which encourages vendor interoperability and prevents any one company from exerting too much control over the network.

Internet

The Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). It is a "network of networks" that consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and government networks, which together carry various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat, file transfer, and the interlinked web pages and other documents of the world wide web.