How do you achieve credibility for your internet business?

So you have paid your money to whomever it is that has told you that you can get rich sleeping if you market and sell their product or services. You have gotten yourself a website and an URL with an interesting sounding name that differentiates you from the tens of thousands that are also selling the product and services, you were provided with, had someone make you an impressive website or built it yourself with all kinds of interesting information about the products you are selling and an e-commerce page that allows people to buy your products on line!

Now what.

Nobody is visiting your website let alone buying your products. So you start working on promoting your website in an effort to generate traffic. You start placing free classified ads or even paid ads in various internet publications such as Bacpage.com, Craig’s lists, Add-post, Lycos .com, Local.com, Domesticsales.com, Google base and so forth and so on.

You go to your website stats every day and still there is barely a noticeable trickle of visitors to your site.

You have already printed business cards, postcards and brochures at considerable cost courtesy of Vistaprint.com and have distributed them in the small town that you live in and have gone around your neighborhood, the golf club, the beauty parlors and put postcards promoting your internet business in every mailbox that you could find. You have spent a ton of money on print cartridges and glossy paper for your brochures.

You keep checking your visitors stats and be damned if you could find any increase in traffic of visitors to your website not to mention anyone buying anything from you.

What to do next?

You scour the internet for advice, watch hundreds of video’s that are all bait and switch schemes that promise the world and deliver very little, you try some of those get rich quick marketing schemes that do not work, throw more money away, send e-mails with promotional materials, including video’s, to whomever you can find in your outlook address book.

Make a ton of videos that you then upload to YouTube, Google, Yahoo, Mydeo, My Space, WAYN, Face Book, because the entire community of Guru’s tell you that it will increase your rankings on the search engines. This is only partially true with regard to your rankings in the video search pages but does not really help you with your rankings on the regular search pages.

And still barely anything happens to your daily visitors statistics.
So there must be something else that is required.

And of you go setting up your own blogs on subjects related to your business, commenting on other peoples blogs that are relevant to the business. Writing articles on EzineArticles.com and more commenting on other articles relevant to you business.
You join Adsense, put a Google search bar and Adsense ads on your website go to Commission Junction and get RSS feeds to earn commissions on their ads; all this in the hope that the cross polinization will drive traffic to your site. You get an XML site map for your sites, upload them to your site, register them with Google and Yahoo and get verified.

Surely you have done a fair amount with all of the above to get your sites noticed. I have had various refereed articles published in my name, that people are using to promote their websites such as Amazon.com, Strategic Finance, All Business and so on, I am not sure if they are successful, but these entries have been there for four years, so that must mean something. All you have to do is Google or Yahoo search “bou van kuyk” (my name) and at least Five to ten entries show up promoting the big name companies mentioned above, including my own three websites, but then who will ever look for a name like that unless they already know me?

Yet traffic to my websites remains anemic and I wonder what it is that I have to do next! Or what it is that prevents people from taking me serious.

I am good looking, have an honest face, am responsible, get my customers great value products, got a privacy statement on my website, have a published Toll free number, various IM buttons by which they can contact me thru Yahoo or MSN with a simple click, am approved/certified by Pay pal, have opened business accounts for each of my businesses so as to not commingle funds, so what is stopping people from making purchases on my website?

Although this sounds like an excuse, and I certainly have not thrown in the towel yet, but some of the reasons may be readily available.

First, I believe that the internet is riddled with no name scammers, MLM’ers and people that imitate big name companies to extract money from honest unsuspecting people, selling them stuff that does not really exist, who have been burned so many times that they have become gun-shy and are reluctant to part with their money to anyone that cannot positively verify that they are part of a well known chain.

The worst of these products and services are subscription based and typically start with a free trial period. The subscription kicks in automatically after the trail period and is invariably under $30 ($29.99) per month and non refundable. The trick here then is to make the cancellation method as cumbersome as possible, hoping that the customer forgets or gives up on trying to cancel it before the trial is over. At least one monthly subscription kicks in for an amount that is low enough for the customer not to sue to get it refunded and to let it go or write it off as a lesson learned.
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me! This person will think twice before he or she enters into a transaction on the internet again and there are millions of them.

Secondly, the fact that any person who joins an MLM and is not one of the first to join, like number 98,996, will find it extremely difficult to make money without spending an inordinate a mount of time and money to get traction. So it is important to pick a business that does not depend on MLM to make money, unless you are one of the firsts to join.

Although I have been unsuccessful to date, I firmly believe that the YTB proposition of offering people and corporations their own website to book travel and receive commissions is a good one.

It is unfortunate that the MLM part is so widely publicized as the real money maker, which I believe it is not, except for the very few who came in at the top. It is merely a strategy to increase travel bookings under the YTB banner by the masses and so increase market share for YTB in sales of travel.

Most individuals that spend less than $6000 per year in travel should not own their own website, although of course any amount of travel that they book on their own website, no matter how small, counts toward sales of travel by YTB thus growing the company and increasing its market share.

The minimal amount of travel booked by these small owners, compared to the amount they spend for maintaining a YTB website has also skewed YTB’s earnings. YTB earns more from selling and hosting portals/websites than from selling Travel.

However the notion of taking out the middleman and offering the traveler the opportunity to be the travel agent instead is pure genius.

The traveler/corporation now has the opportunity to benefit from the commissions that the traditional middle man receives and lower their travel expenses with those commissions.

Additionally by becoming the middleman/travel agent, YTB offers its site owners the opportunity to be in charge of their travel arrangements. The site owner/traveler has full and direct access to the travel operators and as such has access to benefits that are not available to the ordinary traveler.

So I am convinced that I picked the right business model, but would like to only sell travel the “honorable way” by targeting people/corporations who can truly benefit/make a profit from having a turnkey secure hosted travel website and therefore by definition will buy at least $6000 per year in travel. I do this by openly publishing the one time set up costs of $450 and the monthly maintenance/hosting/ Liability insurance fee of $50 up front, which by the way may be the other reason why nobody comes to my site, perhaps I should hide the real costs just like everyone else!
That is the way to a win/win proposition, I make money from their travel, they save money on their travel and YTB increases market share in the travel business instead of the Website hosting business.

So I have not really been able to provide the answer to my original question. And I would be greatly appreciative for any helpful hints from fellow strugglers.

Having said all that, I invite anyone to comment on my observation of how to get noticed on the internet and to be taken seriously and my observations about YTB, MLM and Scammers.