We have got to admit to ourselves. Most of us are into it for the money. We are not going to waste our time and effort just for the fun of it. Many sites would not wait until hell freezes over just to see their profits. While there are some who takes things lightly there are always those who would rather see profit any given day.

It is common knowledge that without traffic we have no business. Like any business, without any customers you don’t get sales. Traffic represents all the people that gets a chance to see what you have to offer. The more people who see your products the more people there would be to buy them.

Nobody puts up an E-commerce site that doesn’t expect profit. We have a startup capital that needs to be regained. With a consistent traffic, we at least have a fighting chance to achieve that probability. Monetizing your traffic would optimize your chances of making the best out of it.

Making Money out of your Traffic

The best and most proven method of making a profit out of your traffic is using advertising. The internet generates hundreds of thousands upon hundred of thousands of traffic everyday. Most of them are searching for something. While some are just looking for information there is also a good percentage that is looking for something that they need.

The internet has proven to be a very reliable source in finding what was deemed to be a very unsearchable product. The internet has made the world a smaller place; you can advertise a product from the depths of Istanbul and still find a buyer from the center of Philadelphia.

Generating traffic is not an easy task. You have to contend with a great number of sites to generate a good number of traffic flow. But if done successfully this could open up a Pandora’s Box of possibilities. One of the benefits is monetizing your traffic flow.

So, to get to the core of it the more traffic you generate the more likely you are considered as a desirable, desirable, in a sense that a good traffic flowing site is easily convertible to profit. Basically traffic equals profit. Advertising is the name of the game; with the good advertising scheme you can use your traffic flow to your advantage.

When you have good traffic you have a good number of potential customers, customers that are willing to pour money into your coffers. Other than that these are also traffic that can be redirected to sponsored links that are willing to pay you for a sizeable portion of the traffic that you have generated.

This scheme is called “pay-per-click”. With every click a visitor of your site makes on an advertised link you will be paid. The more traffic you generate and the more clicks that happens would spell to more profits.

Affiliate Programs

Another method of monetizing your traffic are affiliate programs. You can link up with other tried and tested sites and online companies and monetize your traffic by having a percentage of sales generated by traffic coming from your site.

The basic idea is, traffic generated from your site will go to another site that can offer a product that you do not carry. Many programs can keep track and make records of transactions that was made possible because of site linkage.

When purchases are made by customers that was led by your site to their site you get a percentage of that sale. Affiliate programs would give you the benefit of monetizing your traffic without the actual need of carrying or promoting a certain product.

There are so many ways and methods to monetize your traffic. All it takes is a bit of hard work and the desire to successfully launch a profit-earning site. The internet is a veritable source of information, many tips and guides are offered everywhere in how to monetize your traffic and make your site a good profit earner.

Every individual would definitely want their website to look good, if not, to the best they can. Here are a few things we could look out for when wanting to create a professional looking webpage.

Color Schemes and Themes.

When designing, always choose matching colors. An example of a matching color would be to have a dark background, with visible words and designs. With the dark theme, try not to mix too many bright colors into the design. What we should NEVER do, is to mix two very different colors, such as purple and yellow. Now, of course, it would depend on the purpose of the website, but those two colors are too striking for one who wants it to look more professional.

Themes must always suit the company or rather, the organization / etc. If the website was made to cater for a food company, it would be wise to stick to that particular category, rather than to revert to a different theme, such as machinery.

Fonts should be used in regard to the formality of the website. A simple sans-serif font would suffice in most cases. Exceptional cases such as design and art groups might want to use fanciful designs and fonts. Of course, that’s only if you know what you’re doing.

Finally, we must always try to think of our visitors, see the way they see. The resolutions and file sizes of the pictures must not be too large in terms of size. This is to allow maximum compatibility and cater our visitor’s needs.

So, planning is something we should always do, before attempting something.

Your company is rolling out its new web application. This web application is well designed and attractive. It has been well tested by your quality assurance group. You have spent a lot of money marketing your new website. The website now goes live. Very soon you realize that your new web application is unable to scale to your typical production load and the response times and performance reach completely unacceptable levels.

Your web logs indicate that most of your website visitors simply leave the new website before buying anything since its response times are very poor. You start to panic, and one of your friends tells you that the reason your application does not perform adequately is that you do not have ample hardware. Hearing this, you decide to add more server hardware. While this has a small effect on the website response time, it is still woefully inadequate. You soon realize that problem does not really lie with the hardware but rather with the web application itself. It appears that your web application was not well optimized for the typical peak loads. It becomes increasingly evident that most of your marketing dollars were wasted.

Enter the world of performance and load testing. In order to ensure that your application scales as the load increases, it is necessary to perform tests where your application is tested against a simulated load that closely resembles the actual load that it will be subjected to when it is exposed to the outside world.

It is important to distinguish between functional or regression testing and load or performance testing. Functional and regression testing is used to automate a large number of scenarios to ensure that your website works as intended. Load testing on the other hand gauges how well your website performs when it is subjected to a large load, such as a large number of simultaneous users.

Load and performance testing require the use of automated testing tools. It is impractical if not ridiculous to try to simulate a load of 200 concurrent users by having a group of 200 folks sit on 200 machines and try to perform operations at the same time. Before you can begin any kind of load and performance testing you will need to identify the test scenarios you need to automate.

A load testing tool will typically record web requests and responses based on user interactions with a website. As you perform various operations on your website or application, the tool records all the web transactions that take place. When you finish recording, it generates an automated script. Alternatively you could use the tool to manually create the script. Typically testers will perform a combination of the two. They will use the recording mechanism to generate the skeletal foundations of their scripts and then manually modify the scripts to take into account specialized scenarios. The load testing tool should also allow the tester to simulate constrained bandwidth situations. This means for example that it would accurately model users who would use the application on a slow modem connection. It should also allow the tester to drive the script using random data from large external data sets.

Load testing scripts can be either graphical or textual in nature. Good load and performance testing tools do not require the testers to be programmers. Testers that are not familiar with programming will work with scripts that can be graphically manipulated. Graphical scripts will typically show all recorded steps in the form of a hierarchical structure and testers would modify any of the steps in order to modify the recorded script. Testers who are proficient in programming may want to manipulate their scripts by editing the code. These testers would work with code written in a well known programming language such as JavaScript, VBScript or C.

Once your script has been created, you may wish to put specialized checks in place. These checks would typically be related specifically to the application under test. For example you may wish to check that the response returned by a certain web request meets certain textual criteria. This would involve the placement of a text checkpoint. A text checkpoint can verify that a given text segment is present or is not present in a specified portion of the web page. Once you have finished the creation of the script you would typically test the script on your own machine as a single user to ensure that the test script runs as intended.

You are now ready to perform a performance based load test. A good load testing tool will allow the tester to fine tune the execution of the test. This means that it will allow the tester to choose the number of concurrent virtual users, how the script ramps up, how it ramps down and for how long it runs. It should also allow the tester to create various groups of concurrent virtual users that have their own ramp up, steady state and ramp down characteristics. A good testing tool will allow the user to distribute this load over several machines since a single machine may be only able to scale up to a few hundred users.

To understand the behavior of the loaded web application, it is also important for the load testing tool to enable the tester to track the performance characteristics of external components such as operating systems, web servers, databases etc. This allows the user to see how the performance of his application correlates with the performance characteristics of the external component. This kind of analysis will allow the tester to pinpoint the root cause of performance bottlenecks fairly easily.

During test execution the tester should be able to view the performance graphs in real time for performance metrics such as the transaction response time, HTTP responses per second grouped by HTTP code (e.g. 200, 404, 500 etc), passed transactions per second, failed transactions per second, total transactions per second, hits per second, pages downloaded per second etc. The tester should also be able to simultaneously view the performance characteristics of the external components described above. For an operating system this could be something like the % processor time, for a database it could be the number of writes per second. At the end of the test, the tester would typically be able to view and save this data as a report for further analysis.

Load and performance testing allow you to simulate the behavior of your application under a typical production environment. This will allow you to plan your hardware deployment strategy effectively and ensure that your application will deliver the expected performance characteristics. Rolling out a web application without testing its performance characteristics under expected production loads would resemble crossing a road blindfolded. Load testing is an essential part of the development cycle of a web application and should never be overlooked.

What one must consider, however, before creating a website, are the factors in which must be put to thought before doing so, such as the cost, maintenance, use, web host and so forth.

Firstly, associating with the cost, we must always try to find an affordable host, not spending too much, nor too little. A cheap host does not exactly symbolize a credible reliability rating, but we must always look for value for money deals. Also, regarding the efficiency and server/web host reliability, there are many cases of web hosts not providing the service they had assured other people, some had even shut down and were nowhere to be seen. Keep this note in mind, as if you would like a long-lasting website, this would be the first thing to look for.

Next, would hiring a professional be affordable? Is it the best option? For simple websites, we could always pick up the coding, or even use programs, as it is relatively simple. However, when it comes to more complex coding, and when you want it to do a tad more than just providing information, hiring help in doing so would be the best way. Not only in terms of design, but security is also a key factor in assuring a quality website. If the website also acts as a portal for businesses, security would definitely be the issue here.

So, having considered the things to do before building a website, do we actually NEED one? If creating one would boost sales or promote positive implications to oneself, then by all means, go ahead and do what’s best. Yet again, planning is the key to success, in everything we do.