Cross Selling – Offer Your Surfers An Alternative

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

As webmasters our primary goal is to make money from our surfers in order to be successful at business, however, in order to make money from our surfers we need to constantly change the way in which we sell products and services to them.

One such method of selling products to surfers is by using cross selling or, up selling as it is sometimes referred to in the industry. So what exactly is cross selling and, more importantly, what benefit does it give your business model? This is what we shall take a look at in this article.

Cross Selling – The Basics.

Cross selling is a method used by marketers to make the maximum amount of money out of a single sales lead at any given time regardless of whether you are working online or, in a bricks and mortar store cross selling is something that almost every sales person does from offering an extended warranty on a new television purchase to offering an affiliate product from inside your sites secure area.

Cross Selling – How To.

One of the easiest ways to initiate the cross selling process is simple to provide your site visitors with a selection of links going to a multitude of individual products, this may be a dating site, a software package or, something else, either way, by placing a selection of links on your main selling pages you have already initiated the cross selling process and, by doing so, have already increased your chance at making a sale.

Cross Selling – New Customers.

One method of cross selling that is becoming more and more prevalent on the internet is that of cross selling or, up-selling new customers immediately after they have made a purchase, this in itself is not a bad thing after all, you know they have money to spend so, why not use this fact to garner additional sales.

One good way of offering cross sales to new customers is to give the an option on the actual shopping cart page immediately when they hit it, this may be for a site that complements the product they are making a purchase to already or, something completely different either way, by having this already on the order page waiting for your customer you might just make additional money from them.

Cross Selling – Old Customers.

So what happens when a customer leaves your site after making a purchase? Well there are two routes you can take with thee customers, one, is to leave them alone and hope that they return to buy from your site again whilst, the other, my personal preference, is to send these customers a regular follow up letter offering them a product they may be interested in based on their initial purchase after all, if they purchased a copy of Adobe Photoshop, the chances are they may also be interested in something such as Paint Shop Pro, why not give the surfer this as an option by placing a link in the follow up letter taking them to that specific area on your site.

Cross Selling – Overview.

When all is said and done, cross selling whether you agree with it or not is a very powerful sales tool, not only can it increase the revenue potentials from new clients but, can also enable any business a method of gaining further incomes from older customers, the one thing that you should all be doing on a regular basis is ensuring that you have a good cross selling strategy in place, regardless of whether you actually are selling memberships to sites, warranties on televisions or, mouse pads for new pc owners.

Article written by Lee

Online Billing Alternatives – Token Payment Systems

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Billing Solutions | Response: 0

In this article we will continue our look at the various payment solutions that are available to webmasters for use on a global scale and, this time we will look at the ‘Token’ system of generating income to our sites.

Token Payments – What Are They?

Token payments, as they name suggests is a way by which your surfers can access your members area by using pre-purchased tokens as a cash alternative. These tokens are available in a variety of values ranging from US$1 to US$5 and above.

Token Payments – What Are The Costs?

The cost to the surfer (as mentioned above) can vary from solution to solution however, on average the tokens which are redeemed for payment are bought in amounts ranging from US$1 to US$5 and above, these tokens then grant the surfer access to any of the sites that uses the specific token system the surfer purchased ‘credits’ for.

Token Payments – Price Comparisons.

Okay so based on our previous articles we will again say that access to your members area costs an average of US$30 for a months access, now, using the token payment method, you are now able to set certain ‘restrictions’ immediately on the level of ‘access’ your new member can have although, the reality of it is, these restrictions are set by the token provider themselves.

Lets say a surfer has gained access to your site using a US$5 token, what can they get actually have access too – not a lot. Your surfer only has access to as much of the content in your site that his ‘credits’ or ‘tokens’ will allow him to, in fact, the token system itself is much like the current pay-per-view model only, IMHO, not as satisfying to the surfer.

back to the issue at hand, how much will you make from this surfer with the US$5 token who has just accessed your site, well, if your members area is good and you have enough content to keep the surfer there until their tokens run out of credit, then, you will make upto 95% of the initial US$5 token purchase.

The good thing about this payment solution from a webmasters perspective however, is that YOU can actually set how much time each token will last on your site. Therefore, the reality of it is, you could have a surfer join your site with a US$5 token and only see one movie file whereas, a surfer who joined with a Credit card for 30 days access, could in effect strip your site of its content and move onto the next paysite.

Token Payments – Overview.

All in all, i strongly feel that there is a place in todays adult industry for the token payment solution after all, webmasters have to limit access to the amount of content surfers are able to see for free (or cheaply) and start to ‘educate’ todays sufer that they need to spend some money in order to access ‘the good stuff’.

By allowing webmasters to control the content and value of the token payments on their sites this payment solution could, somewhat start this education process for the surfers. Whether this will be a good or, a bad thing however, will depend entirely on the amount of use these relatively new payment solutions get from both webmasters and, ultimately, surfers.

Article written by Lee

10 Ways To Promote Your Site

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

As we all know, getting productive traffic to your site can be a long and tedious task of course, there are ways to generate ‘optimized’ traffic at very little cost and time involvement. Below are just a few suggestions about how you can increase traffic to your
site and, inevitably, there are hundreds of different variations of these that will work for your site, I think the key to getting a successful traffic source is dependant on how much effort you put into it and, if you work hard and play little, you will reap the benefits tenfold.

1. Create an email discussion list. The list should be related to your web site’s subject. Place your ad on all posts and it will remind people to visit your site.

2. Prove your site is a bargain. Add a lot of free stuff to your offer or, if you’ve sold the product for a higher price before, show them the difference or, show them how much your competitors charge.

3. Make your web site more useful. Sell ad space, generate hot leads, answer visitor questions, offer free content, be news friendly, etc.

4. Make the most of each visitor. Sometimes your price is to high. You should provide a variety of similar products at different price ranges.

5. Test and redesign your banner ads till you get your desired click through rate. Once you do, join many banner exchanges and buy ad space.

6. Use holidays as a reason to get free publicity. Write a press release or article about the current holiday. It’ll have a high chance of being published.

7. Utilize the free content on the internet. Publish one article on a single web page and your main web site link then upload it as a doorway page.

8. Test your new products on the bottom of your home page. You don’t want to take away hits from your best selling products until others are proven.

9. Make commissions without joining an affiliate program. Just propose a joint venture offer to web sites that don’t have affiliate programs.

10. Persuade other web sites to link to yours. It can improve your search engine ranking. Just offer them something of value in return.

Article written by Lee.

Making Money From Adult Webmaster Referrals

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: General | Response: 0

One method of income generation that is very rarely talked about in the industry is that of the webmaster, from the new webmasters to the adult industry right up to those who have been in the biz some time.

One of the easiest ways to generate ‘long term’ income is by referring webmasters to programs using your own linking (referral) codes.

However, this is for some a huge step out of their everyday site building even though it shouldn’t be.

This is what we will investigate in this article.

By now we should at least have a fair few sites online and getting surfer traffic but, how many of us get traffic from other webmasters and don’t even know about it?

The chances are, if you submit a site to ANYWHERE you will at least get one webmaster hit to it regardless of whether it is a webmaster of a TGP, Links List, Dmoz Editor etc these are all potential money makers for you.

One of the easiest ways to make money from other webmasters is to simply have a link on each and every site you build in text that says ‘webmasters’ this should be linked to a single page on your domain with a listing of various affiliate programs you use or can recommend.

Often placing a button or a banner on this page for each of the referral programs will work much better for you as the webmaster can actually see a little more information about the sponsor you are trying to make them join.

We all know of some of the big sponsors like ARS, Topbucks, Sic Cash etc etc but, what about the smaller programs that, perhaps not many webmasters know about, these would be the ideal types of sponsor to use on your webmaster page.

However, in addition to the affiliate programs you could also recommend hosting companies, content providers etc etc for example, the following companies have referral programs that you could use on this page:

Content Providers:

http://content.xphotography.com
http://matrixcontent.com
http://pixmasters.com

Hosting Providers:

http://webair.com

Message Forums:

http://arsresources.com/forum/
http://xnations.com

Traffic Generation:

http://adultbuttonexchange.com
http://pornclient.com

As you can see from the small list above, you could have more than one way for webmasters to make you some additional profits in the form of either, cold hard cash or, from some of the places, additional traffic to your sites.

Hopefully list brief article will have given you some ideas as to how you can make some additional money from webmasters visiting your site and, don’t forget, once you have the page linked on your site, it will, inevitably get into the search engines, so keyword the page up and you might start generating more webmaster traffic than you could imagine.

Article written by Lee.

Niche Marketing – What Is A Niche?

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

The first step as webmasters we must take to become successful is to discover what our niche specialty is however, many webmasters still do not realize exactly what a niche is.

In fact, from the webmasters I have spoken to it would seem that a ‘niche’ is just another word for the main topics of pornography, Teen, Asian, Fetish, Gay, Straight, the list goes on and, whilst this list is never ending they are all niches in themselves however, you need to look beyond the top level niche and start to develop a feel, a stance of your own as to what niche you will work on for example, Asian Midgets, you probably cant get more niche than that in this day and age however, realistically, the chances of you a) being able to find the content for this niche and b) Being able to find a sponsor are remarkably thin.

That said, if you can find a niche that you like personally, whether that be she-male, midgets, straight or, gay, this will give you a solid foundation to market your sites on especially if you build on your already vast knowledge of what turns you on.

Now, onto breaking down the niche you are comfortable working in..

Lets say for arguments sake that you have chosen to concentrate on the ‘Gay’ market,, within this market (as with any other) there is a remarkable amount of ‘sub-niches’ and, these are what you need to build your business around whether you want to or not, the ‘sub-niches’ of any given adult market is where the $$$ can be earned.

Now using the gay market as an example the first few niches that come to mind are:

Twink’s – Young looking hairless 18 – 20 year olds.
Bear’s – Hairy men over the age of 20.
Hunk’s – Muscular looking guys in the age group of 20 – 30 .
Straight Guys – Yes, that’s right, gay men get off on looking at straight guys.

As you can see from the above four examples we can now start targeting our market audience a lot better.

The next thing we need to do now that we have found the niche and the sub-niche we will be working is to look for a sponsor that complements the niche of our choice, this is the hard part. Many webmasters will go directly to the highest paying sponsor and throw links up to their ‘sub-niche’ pay site not even looking at the sites tour or members area. This is a huge mistake, the first thing you NEED to do is to look over the sponsors paysites and, more importantly, the sponsors site tour AND members area. What point is there sending your surfers who are after Twink’s if, your sponsors tour has images of a load of guys over the Twink age bracket?

From this point on and, after you have chosen a suitable tour to send your traffic to you need to build up a flow of ‘niche’ traffic the chances are, if you submit your TGP gallery to an ‘all gay’ TGP that you will receive a substantial amount of unfiltered traffic making your hard work in choosing your sponsors tour worthless.

So how do you choose a traffic source that is right for you? Simple, you need to experiment, start of with your niche TGP’s, Top Lists, Links Lists etc and see what happens, how much traffic are you being sent from your chosen traffic source and, more importantly, how much of this traffic is actually clicking through to your sponsors tour. Once you can get an idea of what traffic you are being sent from what traffic source you have won more than half of the battle already.

Record EVERY possible detail about your traffic sources that you can, how much traffic they send a day, how many visits your sponsor gets, how many sales you made, what content you were using etc, etc.

Once you have a working list of data to use you can start to abuse and filter your traffic like you would have not thought imaginable, if one of your sponsors has a higher payout on Bear traffic, then you instantly know what traffic source gives you traffic for that niche and, you can utilize that information to your benefit.

The most important thing to remember however when marketing a niche is that you need to have patience, you need to use a process of trial and error and, more importantly, you need to experiment, just because TGP A sends you 100,000 hits of Twink traffic one day, it doesn’t mean you will get the same quantity of niche traffic the next.

Article written by Le

Quick Loading Pages Plus Saving Bandwidth

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

Have you noticed how many of the sites out there are trying to make themselves look better than they actually are by using heavy graphics and media files? The fact of the matter is this, most surfers who visit your we pages are viewing them on a screen that is between 15 and 19 inches wide, can only see 216 colors and, are on a connection of 33.6 kb per second (If they are lucky).

What Does All This Mean?

What does this mean to you as a webmaster? Simple, try this test.

Connect to the internet on a 33.6 connection, type in your url and, hold your breath. Does the page load before you need to start gasping for air? If so then you are designing your sites correctly, if not, your pages are far to big in file size.

I’m pretty sure that some of you can hold your breath for a long period of time so, here is a basic rule of web design. Your pages should, be no larger in file size than 50k in fact, I would even go so far as to say try getting your pages under 30k in size.

How Can I Get It Under 50K? 30K?

First, all your graphic images should be as small as possible. Try to get them smaller than 4k. Going up to 6k is reasonable. When designing a graphic for the web site keep in mind the number of colors being used.

I know, from designing banners myself, it was hard for me to go from millions of color to only 216. Yes, 216 is the number of colors you have on a web safe color pallet.

Use solid colors when designing your image. PhotoShop has made the gradient such a popular tool. It looks good to fade things in and out. I always see a background border made up of this gradient. I always right click on that image to see the size. The 8k-12k is not worth the space. The problem with the gradient is it uses many colors and dithering. Both take up big time K. The more color you have in an image the bigger it’s going to be.

Use design more, graphics less. For a web page to be successful it needs to download quickly and look good.

Here is the dilemma download quick or look good? Instead of designing graphics and taking pictures and turning them into jpgs to make your web page look good, try using color schemes. Use cell colors to make borders. Use the negative space on your web site. What is not there is just as important as what is there.

Remember sometimes less is more. When in doubt think of a typical visitor coming to your web page. Would that extra graphic sell them or keep them coming back again and again. If the answer is yes, by all means keep it. If the answer is “well maybe” or “it just looks good there”, yank it.

Your surfers will appreciate not waiting more then they have to. The web is here to make our life easier not to sit in front of a screen waiting for heavy web pages to download.

Article written by Lee

Thumbnail Preview TGPs And The Gay Market Place

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: TGP | Response: 0

One of the latest crazes to hit the gay adult market from a webmasters point of view is that of the thumbnail preview TGP and, more surprisingly than this is the fact that this new breed of gay adult TGP seems to attract more traffic than the standard format TGP ever did so, what is a thumbnail preview TGP and just how do you go about making one of your own? This is what we will investigate in this article.

Thumbnail Preview TGP Basics.

A thumbnail preview TGP is just as the name suggests, a standard TGP with one main difference, the TGP itself doesn’t list gallery descriptions rather a small preview image of the content placed on each of the galleries submitted. This thumbnail preview is usually size between 100×100 pixels and 60×60 pixels in dimension however, the thumbnail preview size can be determined by the webmaster owning the TGP.

How Do I Start My Own Thumbnail Preview TGP?

In order to start your own thumbnail preview TGP you will need a couple of things, first and foremost, a domain name to run it on, the current trend in the gay marketplace is to name your TGP something short, memorable and, well, brand able so, the domain name you choose for your TGP should take all of these aspects into consideration. The next thing you will need in order to run your own gay thumbnail preview TGP will be the script which you use to manage the TGP itself, for this purpose I would highly recommend Autogallery MySQL from http://www.jmbsoft.com it is affordable and, easy to maintain which is a must if you are wanting to run a sizable TGP. One other thing that you may also like to consider investing in for your thumbnail preview TGP is a design, in fact, most of the ‘good’ thumbnail preview TGPs whether they are focused in the straight or gay market, have a clean, almost pay site quality design aspect to them. Of course, you do not need to keep up with the joneses however, if it works for other people, then why not see if it will work for you also?

Thumbnail TGP Structure.

So you now have a domain and have purchased the script and / or design that you want to use on your thumbnail preview TGP what next? Well first things are first, you should take a look at some of the other sites that currently exist and see how they do things, find out what things you feel they are doing wrong and, capitalize on that.

You should also make some decisions now as to the look and feel you want your thumbnail preview TGP to have, how many galleries are you going to list on the front page each day? Will you be utilizing the archives feature of your TGP script? What limitations do you want to put on submissions from other webmasters? These are all aspects of running a TGP that you need to think of prior to opening your site up for general submissions.

In general however, you will find that most thumbnail preview TGP sites will have roughly 100 thumbnail images on their front page of the site with any additional galleries being listed in their archives section again, you should decide on how you want to maintain your own site.

Getting Traffic To Your Thumbnail Preview TGP.

Now you have hopefully set your thumbnail preview TGP live you need to do one final step in making the TGP itself a huge success, get the traffic flowing, one of the best ways to do this, as with any other type of site is to ask your friends and associates to trade traffic with your site however, should this not be an option then you should use more conventional methods such as submitting galleries to other TGP sites ensuring that you use a recip to your TGP on each gallery as well as utilizing other forms of traffic such as cheap brokered traffic, top lists, web rings and, even counters, within a month or so you will soon start to see a steady flow of new webmaster gallery submissions and, with each new submission comes more traffic and ultimately, more income from your site.

Article written by Lee

Marketing to European Surfers

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

Marketing to European Surfers.

Today we’ll try to answer couple of questions regarding dialers and how to market them to European traffic.

How to get traffic to your European market targeted site?

Pretty much the same way as for all the other sites, lets German market for example (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) use SE’s, German link-lists, TGPs,… feed site with your own traffic, and don’t forget to use exit-consoles.

Is your site translated into specific language?

Yes, of course you won’t get far using English template on German/Spanish.. sites… You can always contact Adult Site Translation if you need help with translations.

What sponsor should you use?

That is pretty hard to say. Practically since almost every European based sponsor offers dialers so it doesn’t really matter which one you choose. It’s the same with per sign-up sponsors: It depends how good you are in sending traffic to them. And as always try couple of them and see which one works best for you. Most of the sponsors will offer to your surfers to pay by CC, bank account and dialers.

Me personally, I don’t really advertise dialers. I go for sign-ups because most if not all European sponsors are recurring and it brings more money in the long run. But if a surfer wants to pay the (admittedly) high phone bills – that’s fine with me In fact, sometimes I get more money from a 0190-number (dialer number in Germany starts with 0190) than I’d get if the surfer would sign-up with his CC and would cancel his membership after the first payment.

Why are dialers so successful in the German/European market?
Well, I can think of 3 reasons for this:

1.) 0190-numbers are very common in Germany. Many support-hotlines use them, you can download logos for your cell phone via 0190, you can get health-tips via 0190, fax-numbers, etc… Germans see those numbers everywhere and get used to them. Of course they know that they are expensive but I think they tend to forget this because they are so common.

2.) Much of my income from dialers is from Swiss and Austrian people. Especially surfers from Switzerland LOVE dialers (Some of them spend hours/nights with dialers and in the end if i get 50% of that for me is not bad, isn’t it? I think they love dialers because they hesitate to give out the information on their CC (if they have any) and they can’t/don’t like to transfer their money via bank transfers. So dialers are actually their only way to get into the members-area.

3.) Credit cards are not very common in Germany. I would guess only some 30% have one and many who have one don’t believe that CC transactions on the internet are secure. So most of the surfers have only 2 options left: Paying by bank account or using a dialer. The bank account has 2 disadvantages in the eyes of the surfers: 1st “The sponsor knows my name, my account number, where I live and that I’m a greasy little wanker who pays for porn. -Maybe this sponsor is going to tell my neighbors about it-” 2nd “How can I explain this to my wife?” On the other hand the dialer has advantages: 1st It is anonymous. Nobody knows who and where the surfer is. 2nd The dialer is faster than typing all the necessary information needed for a bank transaction. A few seconds for a 35kb download and the surfer is ready to go. 3rd You can always find a reason why there’s this 0190-number on the phone-bill. “Well darling, you know, I had problems with my new graphic card and I had to contact the customer-support. Those damn bastards are on a 0190-number what what can I do?”

Article written by Lee

Utilizing All The Content You Use On TGP Galleries!

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: TGP | Response: 0

Utilizing All The Content You Use On TGP Galleries!

For the last few months i have been experimenting with a few new (but old, if ya see what i mean) ideas.

Basically i have adapted Voltars 3x3x3 project slightly and incorporated it into the TGP/TGP2 game.

The results have given me some of the best sales ratios ever! We’re talking under 1:60 almost consistently across all sponsors!!

What you did is thus….

Design a NICE 15 pic tgp gallery in a table preferably four rows high and 5 columns across.

In the first row place one thumb in each cell (5 pics).
In the second row place one odd sized banner in the first cell and merge cells 2,3 , 4 and, 5.
In the cells you have merged place some descriptive text about the pics you are using in under two paragraphs and include a line of text where you MENTION the sponsors site name.
In row 3 place one thumb in each cell (5 pics).
in row 4 place on thumb in each cell (5 pics).
under the table place a juicy text link.
below this juicy text link leave a line or two and add a money bar (one row by three columns using a contrasting color to the background of your gallery page).
ALL pics go on html pages using the same layout as your main TGP page but, without the table included.
Repeat this process 4 times once for four different niches, saving each niche in their own sub folder for the main site i.e:

url/sub folder/niche 1
url/sub folder/niche 2
url/sub folder/niche 3
url/sub folder/niche 4

You should now have 4 TGP galleries using 15 pics on each in four niches (60 pics in total).

At the top of each of these main pages place a three cell one row table.

in this table use text links to describe each niche i.e:

Teen
Gay
Lesbian
Mature

in the template for the teen niche you use text for the gay, lesbian and, mature templates and link these to the appropriate TGP template.

This is where the fun begins…..

Take all four TGP niche galleries you have just made and do the following….

Delete the first row of cells (including pics) on all TGP galleries and save the new page layout in another folder using the same navigation structure as the original ie:

url/sub folder 2/niche1
url/sub folder 2/niche2
etc
etc

You should now have the following:

four TGP templates consisting of 15 pics each.
four TGP templates consisting of 10 pics each.

Again, link these new 10 pic templates to each other in the same way as you did the 15 pic templates.

Repeat this procedure to make the 10 pic TGP page using the original TGP page BUT, this time, delete the bottom row of cells.

You now have the following:

4 niche 15 pic TGP pages
4 niche 10 pic TGP pages
ANOTHER 4 niche 10 pic TGP pages

Still with me?

Its gets better….

Take your original 15 pic TGP template and do the following…

Delete the first and the third row of cells including all the pics and save them in ANOTHER folder using the same structure as before i.e:

url/sub folder 3/niche 1
url/ sub folder 3/niche 2
etc
etc

Again link these in the same way as before using the text links at the top of the pages.

What do you have now?

4 TGP pages using 15 pics
8 TGP pages using 10 pics
4 TGP2 pages using 5 pics

Can you guess what’s next?

Take that original template again and…

Remove the first and fourth row of cells do the same when you save it as you have done above…

What do you have?

4 TGP pages using 15 pics
8 TGP pages using 10 pics
8 TGP2 pages using 5 pics

Do it once more using the original templates but removing the final set of 2 rows of cells you now have…

4 TGP pages using 15 pics
8 TGP pages using 10 pics
16 TGP2 pages using 5 pics

In the root of the domain where you are going to upload these pages do the following…

Create a simplistic warning page… link this to a multi site FPA… this multi site FPA links to each of the niche (15 pic) TGP templates you have made.

On this same fpa place an email erotica collection box, banner exchange code and a toplist counter code along with an exit console going to a MC POTD program.

Now, what you need to do is start submitting these pages to the TGP/TGP2’s submit one a day or as many as you can until you have submitted them all.

Ok still here?

Next you have to duplicate ALL of the above again.

Place the duplicate of the above into a separate set of folders/sub domains etc.

On the new root you have created, link to another multi site FPA AND the first root index.html page.

You now have the makings of an EXCLUSIVE 3x3x3 TGP hub which, you can leave alone and submit all of the pages intermittently to any TGP/TGP2 you wish for LIFE!!

All the time you are adding new sections to it and building your link pop in the search engines because you are continually interlinking to each of the separate niche and relevant sub niche folders.

Of course, you NEED to get the meta’s sorted on the first main template for this to work but, if you change all subsequent meta descriptions etc you’ll have a very reasonable listing in Google for the relevant search terms

Article written by Lee

Fighting Back Against Computer Viruses

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: General | Response: 0

Only 10 years ago, the only way that a virus could have infected your computer was through you physically putting a floppy disk into your hard drive and running the program file that initiated the virus however, today’s viruses have become more complex in how they operate and, can spread like wild fire if they are not recognized as a virus doing damage not only to your computer but that of your associates and peers.

So how do we minimize the risk of virus infection on our computers which, lets face it, for the Adult Webmaster are our livelihood and, need to be protected at all cost. This is what we will take a brief look at in this article, how to minimize the risk of getting a computer virus and, heaven forbid, how to deal with a virus if you actually have one on your machine already.

Computer Viruses – A Little History.

1981 – The first widely accepted computer virus is recognized. The ‘Elk Cloner’ virus was spread through floppy disks and, whilst by today’s standards, it was not a high risk virus it, non the less was still a virus, in fact, all this first virus did was to display a message on your computer screen.

1991 – The ‘Tequila’ virus was the first recognized ‘polymorphic virus’ meaning, it was the first virus which actually altered its state once on your machine in order to remain undetected.

2001 – 2001 saw the spawn of several highly potent ‘worm’ orientated viruses from the ‘Gnuman’ virus, the ‘LogoLogic Worm’ and the famed (is that the right word?) ‘Nimda worm’. These ‘worms’ were the first of their kind to actually spread themselves across the World Wide Web through infecting users email clients (specifically Outlook Express) and sending itself to every email address the infected machine had in the address book.

Virus Infections – Prevention Better Than Cure.

So we now have a little background on the main viruses over the last 20 years we will take a look at the ways in which we can prevent viral infections on our computers after all, as the subtitle for this paragraph says, a prevention is far better than having to find a cure.

Here are a few simple ways you can help to prevent the spread and infection of computer viruses.

1) Install a good anti-virus software package on ALL of your computers, Norton and, Mcafee, both have some good products to aid you in preventing viral infections of your PC. Also, you should ensure the software package you do install has updated virus definitions, a new virus is created almost every week so you need to ensure your software keeps up-to-date on the latest infections.

2) Scan any and all email attachments you receive, irrespective of whether you know the sender or not, anything that you get sent in an email should be scanned, as mentioned above, there are complex viruses that can ‘send’ themselves from other peoples email address book, what happens if you are on the address book of an infected users computer? Can you afford not to be online?

3) Ensure that, once you have an Anti virus program installed on your machine that you have it setup to start each and every time that your computer boots, the first thing that should be loading on your machine is an anti-virus program, you only have one chance to prevent infection.

4) Avoid downloading .exe and .com files to your desktop unless, you know the person you are downloading the files from and, even then, before you launch or open the files ensure you scan them independently.

Virus Prevention – Overview.

Hopefully this article will have given you some insight into how you can protect both your computer and the computers of your associates and peers from computer viruses and, hopefully, by following the guidelines within this article your time spent online will be productive and virus free. One thing you should remember however is that no matter how hard we all try to remain virus free, someone will create a new program that ultimately, could infect our machines no matter how hard we try.

Article written by Lee