Why is it One of the Most Cost-Effective Ways to Advertise your Business

Ever heard of affiliate programs? These are forms of Internet advertising that rewards the affiliates for driving traffic to the advertiser or for other transactions. The advertiser pays the affiliate to place a link on their website, and the affiliate sends traffic to the advertiser in return. Simply put, it's about paying commissions to people who help you make sales. It's that easy. NOT.

Affiliate marketing has its ups and downs. It could be draining if you are not armed with updated information and the technical how-tos. But this article's sole objective is to reach out to you and not to badmouth affiliate marketing.

Here are the following reasons on why web marketers go gaga over affiliate marketing as a form of Internet advertisement.

1. Low cost

Many are scared to go on a home based business because of the capital required. In affiliate marketing, you don't have to spend much to start raking in moolah.

2. Inventories not included

Product management fuss could be very stressing. An inventory is not asked to be maintained. The merchant does the maintenance required.

3. Unlimited income through leverage

When you have a paid job, your monthly income mainly relies on whether you go to work or not. With affiliate marketing, your affiliates could all just lead traffic to your site without having to lift a finger after providing them your ad copy and links. Though not every web marketer earns limitless, it still is a fact that all the necessary matters for the advertiser or Internet marketer are all there to be successful.

4. Go worldwide

With affiliate marketing, you are dealing with a global market place. All you have to do is choose a niche product and prepare all the necessary tools for your affiliates to lead traffic from just about anywhere to your website.

5. Low risk

The very main reason for Internet marketer's enthusiasm with affiliate marketing is its having a low risk factor. Especially for those with low budget set aside for advertising, affiliate marketing is just the way to do it.

6. No closing time

With affiliate marketing, your business works every single second of the day while targeting a worldwide market! What could be better than that?

But all of these will be put to waste if you don't have the right niche product and all the other important tools to make it big in affiliate marketing, i.e., well-SEO-ed website. So better work on this first before ever considering those benefits.

Wanna be an affiliate and make a lot of money? You got first to learn and then be patient... You must educate yourself to succeed  and get advices and tips to accelerate your choices before choosing a product or program.

Affiliate program is the starting place for a big majority of home entrepreneurs and beginners in Internet Marketing, because of the small amount of work involved. There is some elements that you must absolutely look for before you start promoting an affiliate product...


Tip #1. Promote a unique product  to get better results.

Promoting a product which is already being sold by hundreds or affiliates will not give you the same results as if you have a unique proposition. A different product that only some affiliates distribute. That  kind of program is a little bit difficult to find because it is not in the interest of the merchant to do so in the short term.

Tip #2. Powerful and effective affiliates tools.

When you are ready to promote, you may be lost if you are new to affiliates marketing. Actually, most of the beginners take months to make their first sale, because the merchant doesn't help them in their hard work. So be sure to find a powerful and clear affiliates resource section. That will skyrocket your chances of success. Also, a good communication with the merchant is hard to find, but it is a must.
Try to find these resources, or some of them.

Tip #3. Example of effective resources:

* Brandable ebooks to give away or sell at a little price with your own affiliate ID links to generate leads... and sales.
* Sales letters provided.
* Templates of the emails to send to your list(s), pre-writen email or even better.
*  Free promotional tips provided, to make money without spending thousands in the beginning (a must for beginners)
*  Advices and tips for paid promotional techniques (don't loose all your money in something that don't bring results).
* Redirect links through your own website. For example: www.yoursite.com/theaffiliatesite/
* Banners

Tip #4. Good Tracking software.

It is a very important part. You must be able to monitor almost everything in your resources section:
you must be able to track your sales, how many visitors came to your site and to the merchant site, by which page they enter to the merchant site(here is the importance of the redirect links).
You must be able to view your payment history, and also how many people signed up underneath you if it is a two tiers affiliate program.

Tip #5. Cookies plus IP addresses.

Today, it is a common practice by Internet users to clear their cookies daily or weekly. So if you spend money on PPC or any other paid advertising to get a customer, you do not want to see another affiliate get the commission you should have received. So try to choose an affiliate program with a tracking software which take also the IP address of your future customer. By the way, recurring commissions are a must.

Last but not least, try to find associate programs with generous compensation plan, and give a preference to the two tiers affiliates programs because you will be paid on two levels. Good promotion, and enjoy your affiliate life.

So, you want to make money online, but you’re having trouble getting visitors to your website? If so, you’re not alone. Many people think that running an online busy is easy – just build a website, and in no time you’ll be making money.

Well, running an online business is no different than running any business – you need to find ways to reach people who want and need (and are willing to pay for) your product or service.

Affiliate marketing (selling other people’s produc...

So, you want to make money online, but you’re having trouble getting visitors to your website? If so, you’re not alone. Many people think that running an online busy is easy – just build a website, and in no time you’ll be making money.

Well, running an online business is no different than running any business – you need to find ways to reach people who want and need (and are willing to pay for) your product or service.

Affiliate marketing (selling other people’s products) is a great way to make money online.

Yet, it is still a business, and the same rules apply to affiliate marketing – you need to find people who need what you are selling.

The best way to be a successful affiliate is to create your own website, provide information to get people ready to buy, and then encourage them visit the programs you are representing.

How do you do this, without spending a fortune on advertising?

1) Learn how to get free traffic from search engines

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) means getting the search engines (like Google and Yahoo) to place your website at the top of the rankings. Getting “free advertising” from the search engines is great. However, it is not easy, and it does take some time. The key is make your site the best possible site for your theme – tricks and scams may provide you with an instant “boost” but this rarely lasts (and sometimes even gets you banned permanently!) Over the past few years, I’ve made lots of money by having high rankings – and I’ve lost money when my rankings have fallen. It’s part of the process, so you shouldn’t count only on free traffic from the search engines.

2) Create your own newsletter

By creating your own newsletter, you can contact each person who signs up more than once, increasing your chance for a sale. Don’t have any ideas for a newsletter? How about a free course. Or monthly tips about the topic of your website. Sign up for a few newsletters in your industry to get an idea of how other websites maintain this important relationship with their current – and future – customers!

3) Write articles

Writing articles provides you with several benefits at the same time – by writing an article you are positioning yourself as an expert; when your article is published, you get a link back to your site (which helps SEO; you can promote your newsletter so you can contact readers more than once. You don’t need to have your article published in USA Today to get these benefits. In fact, getting your articles listed in an article directory (such as EzineArticles.com), can help you get listed in more specialized websites, newsletters, and magazines, helping you reach the right people!

4) Place newsletter, magazine, & newspaper ads

When spending money on ads, especially for the first time, start out small. It’s very easy to spend a ton of money, without getting any responses (a tough lesson many advertisers learn the hard way!) Email newsletters or ezines are a great way to start (start with the ones in your industry that you subscribed to in order to get ideas for your newsletter above). Make sure you offer something valuable – like your newsletter – to get as many people to respond as possible.

5) Watch out for scams!

Buying 10,000 visitors for only $29.95. Submitting your website to 150 search engines for $19.99. Getting your site listed #1 on all the search engines for just $50. Most of these sound very tempting, especially when you are just starting out. Unfortunately, most of these are great ways to drain your bank account very quickly – and make other people rich.

So learn from the real experts how to build your online business: sign up for newsletters (HighRankings.com is a great resource), read the forums (IHelpYouServices.com and WebmasterWorld.com), read articles (EzineArticles.com).

Yes, you can make money online. So, get started, keep learning and trying, and don’t ever give up!

Every affiliate marketer is always looking for the successful market that gives the biggest paycheck. There is not a magic formula.  It is mroe complicated than that. With these three marketing tips, you will be able to increase your sales and survive in the affiliate marketing online.

By Cheryl Mustian

Every affiliate marketer is always looking for the successful market that gives the biggest paycheck. Sometimes they think it is a magic formula that is readily available for them. Actually, it is more complicated than that. It is just good marketing practices that have been proven over years of hard work and dedication.

There are tactics that have worked before with online marketing and is continuing to work in the online affiliate marketing world of today. With these top three marketing tips, you will be able to able to increase your sales and survive in the affiliate marketing online.

What are these three tactics?

1. Using unique web pages to promote each separate product you are marketing. Do not lump all of it together just to save some money on web hosting. It is best to have a site focusing on each and every product and nothing more.

Always include product reviews on the website so visitors will have an initial understanding on what the product can do to those who buys them. Also include testimonials from users who have already tried the product. Be sure that these customers are more than willing to allow you to use their names and photos on the site of the specific product you are marketing.

You can also write articles highlighting the uses of the product and include them on the website as an additional page. Make the pages attractive compelling and include calls to act on the information. Each headline should attract the readers to try and read more, even contact you. Highlight your special points. This will help your readers to learn what the page is about and will want to find out more.

2. Offer free reports to your readers. If possible position them at the very top side of your page so it they simply cannot be missed. Try to create autoresponder messages that will be mailed to those who input their personal information into your sign up box. According to research, a sale is closed usually on the seventh contact with a prospect.

Only two things can possibly happen with the web page alone: closed sale or the prospect leaving the page and never return again. By placing useful information into their inboxes at certain specified period, you will remind them of the product they thought they want later and will find out that the sale is closed. Be sure that the content is directed toward specific reasons to buy the product. Do not make it sound like a sales pitch.

Focus on important points like how your product can make life and things easier and more enjoyable. Include compelling subject lines in the email. As much as possible, avoid using the word “free” because there are still older spam filters that dumps those kind of contents into the junk before even anyone reading them first. Convince those who signed up for your free reports that they will be missing something big if they do not avail of your products and services.

3. Get the kind of traffic that is targeted to your product. Just think, if the person who visited your website has no interest whatsoever in what you are offering, they will be among those who move on and never come back. Write articles for publication in e-zines and e-reports. This way you can locate publications that are focusing on your target customers and what you have put up might just grab their interest.

Try to write a minimum of 2 articles per week, with at least 300-600 words in length. By continuously writing and maintaining these articles you can generate as many as 100 targeted readers to your site in a day.
Always remember that only 1 out of 100 people are likely to buy your product or get your services. If you can generate as much as 1,000 targeted hits for your website in a day, which means you can make 10 sales based on the average statistic.

The tactics given above does not really sound very difficult to do, if you think about it. It just requires a little time and an action plan on your part.

Try to use these tips for several affiliate marketing programs. You can end maintaining a good source of income and surviving in this business that not all marketers can do.
Besides, think of the huge paychecks you will be receiving…


About the author:
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There are many ways to earn an honest buck using the Internet, while others just try to find the best deals possible. There was a time when people that were surfing the Net were more prone to click on the affiliate links and buy stuff without thinking too much of it. Not it seems that the things are a little bit different, due to the fact that the prices are higher than they were before and some people try to "Hijack" the commissions by replacing the ID of the affiliate links...

There are many ways to earn an honest buck using the Internet, while others just try to find the best deals possible. There was a time when people that were surfing the Net were more prone to click on the affiliate links and buy stuff without thinking too much of it. Not it seems that the things are a little bit different, due to the fact that the prices are higher than they were before and some people try to "Hijack" the commissions by replacing the ID of the affiliate links with their ID.

Let’s suppose that you have an affiliate link such as www.productdomain . com/?affID, and the hijacker will replace your link with his ID, which is "newID": www.productdomain . com/?newID. This is how he manages to take the money that is rightfully yours.

There are also cases when the hijacker will replace your ID from the link. The visitors will be redirected to the plain URL and buy the products they find there, without even seeing your ID (it would look like www.productdomain . com). In both cases, you will loose your commission.

Here are few tips that could help any affiliate business to fight back those "hijackers" and prevent them to ever "chop" your affiliate link. Those are great tips, but if someone really tries to steal your commission, it might succeed, finally.

TIP #1
You can use a java script redirect page in order to hide the affiliate link. Here is where your affiliate link can be found and the customers can have access to your products. This is a great way to avoid a maximum exposure of your affiliate link in emails or ezine ads, until the customer is redirected to the true affiliate link, where your ID is also viewable.

Here is an example of how cans this be done: http://productdomain . com/productA.html , and the ID can be seen in the address bar – "productdomain".  Even if the hijackers can finally access your affiliate link, they will not access it directly from your websites or newsletters.  The free redirect scripts are available usually with free java scripts.

TIP #2
You can also use a zero-frame that will hide the affiliate link and give the impression that you redirect people to one of the pages of your website.  This method is used by the redirect services as "sub-domains" and you will be given an URL such as http://productA.productdomain . com . 

TIP #3
The most effective way to protect you affiliate links is to use affiliate link cloaker software. Visitors will be redirected to something that looks like your web page but pulls in the affiliate link such as the sub-folder services. (Here is the url example of how it would look: http://ww.productdomain . com/recommends/productA).

Therefore, never send a "naked" link through the affiliate programs. There are always hijackers waiting for this, and they might take your commission without you eve being aware of it.

If you have your own product or service on the Internet today then you will know that the way to explode your profits is to have your very own, successful affiliate program.  The problem is that most people do not have their program set up in the right way resulting in low traffic counts and therefore poor sales from their affiliates.

In this article I am going to outline some tricks and strategies that anyone with their own affiliate program should use in order to take th...

If you have your own product or service on the Internet today then you will know that the way to explode your profits is to have your very own, successful affiliate program.  The problem is that most people do not have their program set up in the right way resulting in low traffic counts and therefore poor sales from their affiliates.

In this article I am going to outline some tricks and strategies that anyone with their own affiliate program should use in order to take their online business to the next level.

Encourage People To Sign Up

This is where most people start to go wrong.  They set up an affiliate program, stick up a link that says “click here to sign up” and leave it at that.  You need to sell your affiliate program. After all there is an incredible amount of competition out there.

Have a mini sales letter that explains the benefits to people signing up.  Tell them their commissions and how they can earn an income without having to worry about creating a product or having a website but from promoting your products instead.

Provide Affiliates With Marketing Materials

Here’s another big one. Site owners get people to sign up their affiliate program and then just leave them to it. It’s like they’re saying “thanks for signing up, now go and make me some cash”. That’s ridiculous.  To start earning the big bucks, you need to do all the hard work for your affiliates.  If you don’t, somebody else will.

Provide your affiliate with email promotions, articles, press releases, pay per click ads, banner adverts and whatever else you can create that will enable people to promote your site to the masses with as little work as possible.

Here’s the thing. You could write an article and submit it to article directories all over the Internet and do very well for yourself. However if you just had one hundred affiliates blasting that article all over the net you’ve just multiplied your marketing power by one hundred. This is the key to making massive mounts online.

If you can’t write articles etc yourself hire someone to do so from www.elance.com but do provide your affiliates with marketing materials or your just setting yourself up for having a very mediocre Internet business

Have An Affiliate Only Newsletter

Here’s a real cracker. Have an email list of only your affiliates. Each week send out a mini blueprint on how they can market your products and earn a commission. Inform them of new products you’ve just launched or new marketing materials you’ve just added to your affiliates area.

Another great method you can use with this is to have a weekly completion. Each week your affiliate who earns the most gets an extra one hundred dollars or whatever you can afford. Mention the winner in each week’s newsletter and say things like “who thinks they can overtake Joe Bloggs as being my top affiliate? Come on guys I know I’ve got some great marketers signed up as my affiliates prove it and I’ll mention you in next weeks newsletter”.

This is great. Psychologically you are motivating your affiliates to promote your products like crazy to get recognition as being your “top gun”. Often ego trips are just as motivating as money.

Motivate Your Affiliates And Explode Your Profits

In this article I’ve been taking about what you need to do in order to earn a serious living online through having your own affiliate program. Done properly this could earn you more money than you could ever have dreamed of. The methods in this article outline what you need to do to in order to overcome the three barriers of starting an affiliate program

You need to:

Persuade people to sign up

Make it easy for them to market

Motivate them to market fast and market hard.

Do these three things and you will be able to create a massively successful affiliate program and you will sell buckets of your products, and build a huge list without any real hard work or costs.

Take my word on this; if you implement these simple strategies today then you will see a marked improvement in both your affiliate sign ups and your affiliates marketing efforts.  Go on. Give it a go!

The term affiliate marketing is used to describe an advertising agreement between a website owner and a merchant. If you have researched Internet home business opportunities, you know that affiliate marketing is one of the most simple and profitable opportunities on the web. Most affiliate marketing programs cost nothing to join, which means that there is no financial risk involved for you.

For the most part, getting started is easyThe term affiliate marketing is used to describe an advertising agreement between a website owner and a merchant. If you have researched Internet home business opportunities, you know that affiliate marketing is one of the most simple and profitable opportunities on the web. Most affiliate marketing programs cost nothing to join, which means that there is no financial risk involved for you.

For the most part, getting started is easy. There is no previous sales experience required, and as mentioned above, there is no charge to join most of these programs. Most programs provide all of the marketing materials you will ever need, including site graphics and links. You also don't have to worry about many of the other things that come with an online retail business, such as inventory, order processing, and shipping.

However, these programs, like any work at home business, requires an organized plan of action if you want to succeed. To assist you in developing a plan, Web Business Tools has created a list of affiliate marketing tools that are essential for every work at home business.. There is no previous sales experience r...

When it comes to affiliate marketing, your website is not only your most important tool; it is the key to your success. In addition to being user-friendly, your site should also be credible and professional looking. If you are interested in using one of these programs as an Internet home business opportunity, you will want to begin by building a website that will serve your needs. To come up with ideas, search the web and see what others are doing. Assess these other sites to determine what you like and what you don't like. Make notes as you go and use them to develop an original and unique website that can stand out among the competition.

If you are unable to build your own website, there are many different professional web development companies who can. They may also be able to help you develop optimized content that will be relevant to your Internet home business opportunity. If you are not interested in hiring someone, there are also software programs that can be purchased which will teach you all about website building and website development.

To be successful in affiliate marketing, you must encourage people to click on links for the products and services that you are promoting. To help build a clientele, create an opt-in email list, newsletter, or e-zine. If you really want to increase the profits of your work at home business, offer incentives, such as free software, services, etc., that will encourage people to subscribe to your publications. As with any Internet home business opportunity, promotion is the difference between success and failure.

Affiliate marketing success depends heavily upon the traffic that comes through your website. Your search engine ranking typically determines your traffic level, but another factor is link popularity.

To gain link popularity, you can submit your site's link to other websites, free newsletters, etc. The more times you submit, the more chances you have to become a popular destination, which in turn, provides you with more chances to make your Internet home business opportunity a success.

Having your own work at home business can be a satisfying experience. If you want to make the dream come true, give affiliate marketing a try. By taking time to learn more about affiliate marketing programs, affiliate marketing tools, and other Internet home business opportunities, you can develop a successful work at home business.

That Could Help You Along The Way

Many newbies come into affiliate marketing and affiliate programs of all types can start out being very green and think they can make money fast and easy with only doing the basics and not actually committing themselves to a long term business model or plan. I believe the best way to take advantage within affiliate marketing is to create a blog farm that will provide significant traffic,that doesn't mean spam blogs but blogs that are properly created and marketed to your target audience.

Outsourcing this task is the best option. As long as the top marketers continue to make their millions and the rest continue to make reasonable amounts of money or no money, but have the urge to emulate the top marketers, Affiliate Marketing will continue to draw the attention and be popular with Home Based Business Entrepreneurs.

Having established why affiliate marketing is so popular,statistics have proven that only approx 5% of online marketers are making big money using affiliate marketing.Before you begin your venture into affiliate marketing, it is necessary to choose the right programs for you. This is best done by starting in the niches you already have established websites in as you will already have a traffic base.

Then after you have some solid results you can move onto promoting products and services in new niches. Affiliate marketing or any affiliate program is only going to grow globally as the trends of internet sales and marketing increase and my guess is some of us stand to make an incredible amount of money by researching it and then just plainly going and doing it. Where will you be in 5 years? Because affiliate marketing has the huge potential to take you to where ever you want to go if you let it.

All I really want to get across to you is the advantages to having your own Niche blogs as part of your affiliate marketing mix to help market your affiliate programs to your target audience,and the good news is that there are many many ways that you can increase the traffic flows you have created .

This has many advantages including the fact that blogs are free to start, own and maintain and they are also loved by the search engines I you can provide unique content. It couldn't be made simpler for you to launch your blogs and post some free articles to them and then learn how this you can earn many thousands of dollars as you go.

If you have no products of your own but want to earn money marketing affiliate programs you can set yourself up and succeed and this is the greatest thing I love about affiliate marketing, anybody can succeed at it. If you are an online entrepreneur or marketer and you have your own website then you can also promote your business and increase your sales through affiliate marketing. By utilizing some of these ideas and suggestions you can easily and quickly grow your business via affiliate marketing.

What is the Affiliate Business Internet Marketing Online? And how can you profit from it? The idea of affiliate program or business is in fact a very simple marketing strategy. In part it is an outgrowth of the Internet and free email services. Imagine that you are standing in the middle of a crowd of hundreds of millions of people with money in their pockets, and a desire to spend it.

If you had a product to sell, it would seem that you are in Heaven, wouldn’t it? If you are planning to engage in Affiliate Business Internet Marketing Online in an active role, you either need to start getting people who visit your site to subscribe to your newsletter, or you need to by lists of addresses from people who gather lists of “double opt-in” subscribers.

A double opt-in has to not only agree to accept email from one site, but also has to agree to accept emails from unspecified “others” who may be affiliated with the site you subscribed to.Now imagine that you have the ability to send each of them a piece of mail every day. No need to imagine; you can do it. What’s the catch? The catch is that you need their exact address, and their permission to send them the mail.

How do you get this permission? New laws in the U.S. governing Spam, require that you acquire this permission from the addressee, and that the addressee has the right to cancel that permission at any time.Whether or not you are in an Affiliate Marketing Program, you are continually being offered the option to join some marketer’s “list.” Whatever you are interested in; whatever you read on the Internet, you surely have seen an invitation to receive a “newsletter” from that site. If you “subscribe” to the newsletter, you are a captured address with a “single opt-in.”

With you being a “single op-in” the owner of the newsletter has certain rights with regard to sending you emails. These rights include, but may not be limited to sending you “offers” directly from the owner of the newsletter. Before you subscribe to any newsletter, READ the “terms and conditions” and the “privacy policy” of that site, (you know, those two little boxes you check without reading just to get your newsletter).The affiliate program or programs are challenging to figure out in the beginning, just stick to your guns and you will have it worked out quickly.

Remember, targeted marketing, research and websites that convert into sales are key to the affiliate program marketing business. Buy a book from an authority in the business, understand what it’s all about, and then jump in and start promoting! This is definitely a business anyone can enjoy and profit from! An affiliate program can definitely make your profits increase over only just a short period of time so there would not be any need in you worrying over if you have made the right decision.

AdMarketplace, the auction-based market for buyers and sellers of graphical online advertising has announced the launch of a new Affiliate Program for Web publishers. There are so many things to be learned about this specific topic of interest so continue reading throughout this article, you just might be surprised as to just how much helpful information you can gather from this. The Affiliate Program which adMarketplace notes as the first of its kind that will allow publishers the chance to earn revenue on every site in the adMarketplace Network.

With working with publishers and encouraging them to bring as much content as they can, we have a better chance of using that niche content for our advertisers as well. There are most definitely lots of competitors out there and this differentiates us from the pack. We want to bring additional value to publishers and we really wanted to let advertisers expand their ability to target ads.

Through the program, publishers add a link on their site that leads prospective advertisers to a co-branded registration page introducing the network. Referring publishers then receive a portion of total revenue across adMarketplace's entire network for advertisers that sign up through this program. There is a great deal of money to be made but you just have to be determined enough to work very hard to achieve just that.

The adMarketplace Affiliate Program handles all the back-end work for publishers who aren't able to directly sell their ad space, and allows publishers to leverage the inventory across the Network as a whole," stated by many business professionals.

The Program is neither a one-time bounty nor limited to the publisher's own inventory - it's a chance for publishers to create a long-term annuity with advertisers they introduce to adMarketplace. The adMarketplace Network is fully transparent for advertisers, displaying competitive bids, ads, and linking URLs.

The cost-per-click ads are served on a rotational basis to unique users in sequence, from highest rank to lowest, giving top bidders the first shot at every user in their target audience across the Network. The Network easily integrates with all ad-serving platforms, with IAB-standard ad unit sizes requiring little or no configuration.

Learning about all types of affiliate programs can be challenging but once you get into this sort of thing you are going to be very pleased at the end of it all, once it is all said and done. You will begin generating an income like you never have before, which is always very thrilling for beginners in the affiliate program business.

Check out different affiliate program websites, magazines, books and other sources, these are where you will find a great deal of information that is crucial for learning about the affiliate program opportunities. Pay close attention during your studies because at the end you are going to be excited to see just how much you can get accomplished once you have an affiliate based program that you are working from.

If you are anything like me, you probably think your home town is the most boring place on the planet Earth, especially if it is a small town. But it is still probably boring if you live in a big city because there is a limit on what you can do as a child growing up.

However, there is a way for kids to find something fun to do with their friends that does not involve getting into trouble with the law or drugs. This game is sort of like a scavenger hunt and will appeal to all of the aspiring Indiana Jones wannabes of the world. This game does not really have a name, but entails finding artifacts all over your home town or neighborhood. Now, these do not really have to be artifacts, but can be anything you consider old and worthy of mention as a unique item.

To play, approach it like a scavenger hunt. Have you child get a group of friends together and decide on the rules. For instance, each child must find an interesting old rock, a piece of petrified wood and some really old pop bottles or cans.

The options are limitless because it depends on what you, your child and his group of friends deems to be worthy of the term artifacts. Also, your child might consider something to be an artifact that is really only a couple of years old. But to him, it is ancient.

Your child and his friends can then use their imaginations and create their very own treasure hunt and archeological expedition with just a few things. It is the best way to get your kids and their friends outside to enjoy the weather and truly be a kid. The kids get to flex their creativity and you get to rest easy knowing they are participating in a wholesome activity that helps them think strategically and quickly.

Once your child and his group of friends have gathered their artifacts, have them meet to show off their wares. You never know, one of the children may have found something that will spark off a conversation about the history of your home town, history of the United States, the history of anything.

The game of finding artifacts is also one that can be played by adults as a twist on the traditional notion of scavenger hunting. There are only so many restaurant straws and ketchup packets you can collect in these sorts of games. This gives you an opportunity to go back to your childhood and find the joy in finding “artifacts.”

So, let your kids be kids and let them scavenge for artifacts. Then you can also be a kid again with your very own version of the game. It is fun, it is free and it can turn out to be a great educational opportunity for your child. No video game or sophisticated computer toy or cell phone can boast the same educational benefits that this game can have.