We’ve beend using Trailpay on a few sites now for over a year and it’s a very impressive. From the outset we confess niether of our site are the type of site that will take full advantage of what Trial pay has to offer. They are low traffic sites in unique markets.

One site is an auction and we charge $2.00 to validate the membership of each person who wants to sell on this site. We give the option of paypal, card trasaction via RBS and Trialpay. The info below will tell you how Trialpay works but of three we are very keen to get people to use Trailpay to pay for their validation, why? well profit.

For both paypal and RBS we are charged around 5% but if the member chooses Trialpay not only do they get their process free and the discount or offer they choose from Trialpay but also we get commision. That commision ranges from $5.00 to $25.00. So you see it’s, as they say, a nice little earner and helps maintain the site. Here’s a link to Trailpay so you can see for youself what they offer -

TrialPay works with thousands of software, social games and digital goods providers and has served 60 million users across 100 countries. TrialPay invented this ad-funded payment model back in 2006, giving rise to the next wave of online payments and advertising.

The Trialpay Story.

TrialPay was born out of the idea that online stores should be able to do everything done in retail stores—only better.

Lower overhead costs, higher profit margins, promotional messaging, renewal revenue and sophisticated retention techniques were just the beginning of the “virtual” advantage. Building on these advantages, TrialPay’s founders recognized the potential of advertising throughout the online consumer transaction process.

TrialPay began with the Get It Free model, giving shoppers thousands of ways to get their purchases for free by completing an offer from one of their favorite brands. After boosting sales for thousands of online merchants, TrialPay’s founders realized that by using the efficiencies of the Web, they could pair online shoppers with ideal offers at every stage of the purchase process—revolutionizing the concept of transactional advertising.

Using TrialPay, any company selling online (from the Fortune 500 to one-man operations) can significantly increase sales from its current traffic by providing compelling deals to shoppers at ideal intervals. Shoppers get a free product with every purchase, and blue-chip advertisers acquire high-quality customers on a pay-for-performance basis—a model all too rare these days.

The potential demonstrated in the Get It Free model led Atomico, Battery Ventures, Index Ventures, Baseline Ventures, Bob Pittman and several other individual investors to invest in TrialPay in 2006. Three years, 10,000 merchants, 80+ employees and 60 million users later, TrialPay is recognized as the inventor of the “Get It Free” payment method and an innovator in the transactional advertising space.

To see how easy Trialpay is to setup watch this video

The very first thing a new web site owner need to do is to understand why they want a web site presence at all. The internet is a handy place to be but not must place some people would have you beleive. Knowing why is is the first step to knowing what and that leads to how, when and how much. Let’s take those in turn and expand on why it’s so critical to make this your first step.

WHY ? – it could just be tha you want to tell people about your pet cat. In that case your target audience will be those who love cats (ed. Rule me out of that one).  People who like cats and use the internet might search on cat topics. So what do learn from that ?

1. You should look for buying a domain name with the term “cat” or more likely “cats” or “kittens” perhaps. Your alternatives, especilly if your site is going to be fun or zanny is using some sort of cat activity – ScratchPost.com ? FleeRiddenRats.com ? (ed. sorry I really don’t like cats).

2.  The dot com also would depend on the visitors you want to attract. If you only want to focus on UK then a co.uk domain is best.

3. As your target audience if in the UK you don’t want to base your site the other end of the world so look for a UK host.

4. Your site will be mostly images and comment and so the simplest of web space is all you need but I would stay away from free web space. In general it now very hard to drive traffic to free web space simply because the structure of the systems they sit on and the fact that they tend to house a lot of spam or purely promotional rubbish. Almost always when a person signs up to a free web account the hit restrictions. Web space need not cost a lot so why go for the cheapest option. If you site is not worth £20.00 a year to setup properly then why bother. Look professional even if your site is just an hobby you need it to reflect your interest in it and the people who come to view it. 

5. A simple site could be better termed as a brouchur site and if you have ever used Ms Word or Ms Powerpoint you are already more then capable of producing this type of web site. No need then for external costs.

But what if you have grander ideas ?

You want to be able to cominicate with people and discuss cats on your web site. Perhaps your aim is to build a community of cat lovers and use that community to earn money.

6. Almost is all cases you’ll need a slightly more advanced hosting and this more or less rules out free hosting. But the more importent issue here is the application you use. That could be free using open source products but if needs to be able to do what you want doing. So right there you why leads on to a big how.

7.The are a number of really good produces available to build forums, almost all need a database to store the data. This need not extend your budget behond that stated £20.00 either so no extra cost. But you will have to try each one as they all have their issues and differing levels of difficulty to design, build and maintain.

But dealing with database driven sites does carry a rather steep learning carve if your eyes have already glazed over at this point. Many people do manage to acomplish what they want and you should not be dettered and we hope to cover these issue on this site.

What we’ve not covered here is perhaps 95% of all other options and type of web sites anyone might want to setup, not least ecommerce sites. The reason being that dealing with money needs more time and far more business expertise from the outset. We will cover  taking payments online, online stores and even auction but not today. A breaf outline of what we’ve covered here and what help it might be to the novice follows;

1. Make sure you know and understand what you want from your website.

2. Host and Build for your audience.

3. Find the right tools for the job and make sure you can work with those tools.

4. At all times have a professional aproach, you only get out what you are prepared to put in.