r4nto’s site

(Also known as incoming links)

Let me tell you a story set in the future which illustrates why it is essential that any Internet marketer worth his salt will set up a link exchanging strategy. It may seem a bit ‘out there’ to begin with but I promise it will make sense in the end.

Imagine that 1000 years in the future due to global warming man has had to leave Earth. With Jupiter being the largest planet it has been chosen by many to make their new home. If Jupiter were hollow it could contain over 1000 earths (Google has many uses!) so land is no problem and people happily settle down in giant pods to protect them from Jupiter’s elements. Some join their pods together to form communities others set up in near isolation.

Due to Jupiter’s high velocity winds flying is too dangerous. To travel therefore humans have created giant highways that interconnect the pods first joining the large communities and then over time the more isolated settlements. People travel along these highways in their space cars from their communities to visit pods containing shops, services, leisure facilities etc.

I hope this you’re still with me it will all make sense soon!

Within 50 years of colonizing Jupiter there are thousands of settlements / businesses / leisure facilities connected by these highways. They have been joined together into a network - much like the internet is today (see I told you there was a point - thanks for staying with me so far).

It is in Jupiter’s 55th year as a human habitat that you decide to set up you business on there. You buy a bit of real estate which is big enough to build a living pod as well as a shop pod.

Your shop you decide will sell rocket boots. Everything from rocket boots for work, rocket boots for leisure and rocket boots for fashion.

You set up your shop (Rocket boots ‘R Us’) and finish it with a great big neon sign advertising it’s presence on the frontage. You open up and wait for hoards of people to arrive and buy your products. Unfortunately very few people come and those who do seem to have come by accident and leave rather quickly hardly even looking at your goods let alone buying them. You’re a bit confused as to why no customers are arriving when you have such a great set up with great products.

You spend a small fortune on a ‘Jupiter business adviser’ as business is bad and you need help. The problem is he says that atmosphere of Jupiter is very gaseous and your business can’t be seen from more than a Kilometer away. So although you are surrounded by highways and other settlements you are in fact an island that few people know about. Due to the gaseous atmosphere your shop is all but invisible and people will whizz along the highways not even knowing you exist.

The adviser goes through a list of marketing methods that will bring in customers to your shop. Unfortunately you have used your last money in hiring the adviser and all these methods cost money. You tell him you need a way of bringing in customers that doesn’t cost money.

The adviser pauses for a moment then tells you something that will go on to change your life.

What you need to do he says is to build some highways between you and other pods. At the start of each of these superhighways you can put a bright flashing signpost telling people where the highway finishes (your shop) along with a short description of what the destination pod contains. He says that many pod owners will be happy to build a superhighway connecting your two pods along with one of the sign posts as long as you put a corresponding flashing signpost at your end of the highway advertising their pod.

He says he has a another customer who sells ‘Rocket Boot’ fuel who would be happy to set up a superhighway between his pod and yours as the two products you sell obviously complement each other. He would pick up customers from your customer base and you from his. He gives you his number.

You give him a call and after a brief chat you both agree to that setting up a superhighway between your two pods would be mutually beneficial. Within a week the superhighway is built along with flashing signposts at each end.

On the first day you get several enquiries from people who when looking buy fuel for their rocket boots saw the flashing sign advertising your Rocket boot shop and decided to check out your shop before going home. On the second day you get several more and make a couple of sales. You go on to get at least 10 visitors a day from people who having visited the Rocket boot fuel shop see the sign to your shop and follow the highway to check it out. About 20% of these visitors turn into sales.

This gets you thinking if you get 10 visitors a day from one Rocket boot fuel shop why not set up superhighways with other shops of the same genre. Looking in you Jupiter directory you find 150 such shops and make try to make contact with their owners. Many owners don’t return your call, some do to politely decline but 22 owners reply saying they think it’s a good idea. By the end of the month you have gone from 0 superhighways coming into your pod to 23 and the amount of customers has risen by 1000%.

Over time you strike up relationships with owners of ‘Rocket boot Repair’ shops and ‘Rocket boot cleaning’ shops before you know it you have over 100 superhighways coming into your pod all bringing customers on a daily basis. As your shop becomes better known shop owners come to you requesting a superhighway to link your two pods, some just build a superhighway to your shop without requesting a flashing sign at your end as your shop has now got a good reputation and they are keen to be linked to you.

All these incoming highways bring in thousands of customers each day and it’s not long before you hire more staff to keep up with demand.

5 years later down the line you have expanded into other fields buying several more pods and start each venture by linking them to other pods in the same way. They grow as did your original rocket boot business

As you sit back one day in your luxury habitat pod bought with the profits from your several businesses you recall with a smile the day the business advisor gave you the advice ‘the only way to bring customers to your pods without paying money is to link to other pods’.

Ok you might ask if the author of this article has is insane - the purpose of this article is why you must have incoming links to a website. You may be right on the insanity charge but if I say from my story :-

The planet of Jupiter is the internet - the WWW
The pods are websites
The superhighways are links between websites
The flashing signposts on the superhighways are the descriptive anchor text to the links.

Then (hopefully) you will see the futuristic analogy I have just described.

The simple fact of the matter is that to have a website with lots of targeted traffic you must set up a reciprocal linking program. It is the one best way of getting targeted traffic to your site with no cost except your time.

If you don’t set up a reciprocal linking program you will either have to pay a fortune on advertising or like the rocket boot shop in the beginning get but a few lost soles who will leave your site as soon as they arrive basically rendering your webiste a ghost town.

There is also the small matter of search engine ranking. All search engines place high importance when ranking a website on the amount of webistes a website has linking to it.

Search engine optimization has a language all of its own. Below is an A - Z of some of the most common search engine optimization words and phrases.

Algorithm
A complex equation that a search engine uses to rank the sites in its index. This algorithm will be made up of on-page and off-page factors. The search engine companies constantly change and develop this algorithm.

Anchor text
Also called link text. Anchor text is the text that appears in links, and more importantly for search engine optimization, in back links. If you want to rank highly for the keywords ‘Gold Watches’ you would want your backlinks to include the anchor text of ‘Gold Watches’.

The HTML would therefore be :-

<a href=”http:/www.yourwebsite”> Gold watches for Sale</a>

Backlinks
Sometimes called incoming links. All links coming into a website.

Banned Site
Web pages ( or even whole sites ) can be removed from a search engines index if they violate the search engine’s rules.

Crawler
See Spider.

Cloaking
Where a webmaster designs two versions of the same page. One is designed and optimized for the search engine spiders ( search-engine friendly ) and one is designed for the normal visitor ( human friendly ).

The webmaster creates a script that holds all the IP addresses of the search engine spiders. When one of these spiders visits, the script will ‘feed’ the search engine friendly page tailored to that particular search engine.

When a normal person visits they will see a completely different ‘customer-orientated’ page.

Directories
A search engine where the listings are created by humans not automatically by spiders. To be included you usually have to submit your site manually.

Doorway page
Also called ‘Pointer’, ‘Hallway’ and information pages. It is where a page is optimized to score highly on certain keywords and is linked to a page on your website. This page doesn’t contain any real value it is created just to score highly with search engines and pass the visitor onto the main page.

Index
The database of information ( web pages ) that searchers can put a keyword query against.

Keywords
The words an internet user enters into a search engine’s search box. The search engine will then return the most relative ( in its opinion ) results from its index.

Link text
See Anchor text.

Listings
The web pages that appear on a search engine’s results page in response to a keyword search.

Meta Tag
HTML code placed in web page but not seen by visitors to the site. Contains information for the spiders and web browsers.

Meta Description Tag
Contains description of web page as shown in a search engines result page.

Meta Keywords Tag
Contains list of keywords relative to the web page. It is now mostly ignored by search engines.

Meta Robots Tag
Tells search engine spiders which pages of a website not to index.

On-page Optimization
Methods of improving search engine rank that are in the HTML document itself. Things such as headings content, image titles, file titles, keyword density etc.

Off-page Optimization
These methods of improving search engine rank are down to quantity and quality of incoming links.

Pagerank
How Google rates the importance of a web page. Each page is ranked from 0 - 10. Although it’s not a definitive measure, in general the higher the pagerank the higher it will appear in Google’s result page.

Rank
How high on a search engine’s results page a web page is listed. If it’s ranked ‘one’ it will be the first to be listed for a certain keyword or keywords.

Reciprocal Link
An exchange of links between two sites.

Results Page
The page of web pages returned after a searcher enters a keyword or keywords into a search engines.

Robot
See ‘Spider”

Robot.txt
A file that contains a list of pages that the webmaster doesn’t want indexed by a search engine spider.

Search Engine
A tool that allows internet users to search an index of web pages.

Search Engine Optimization
The tailoring of web pages and link strategies to rank web pages high in a search engine’s results page for specific keywords.

SEO

Acronym for search engine optimization.

SERPS
Acronym for search engine results page.

Spam
Any search engine optimization method that is considered by the search engine as ‘cheating’. Basically anything that is deemed to try and trick the search engine into thinking a page is more important on a subject than it is. This may lead to websites being ‘banned’ and dropped entirely from its index.

Spider
A search engine tool that trawls the internet finding web pages to place in its index. Also called a ‘Crawler’ or ‘Robot’.

Overview - What is Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is basically optimizing your website so that when someone enters the keywords that relate to your site in a search engine your website appears as high in the list as possible ( preferably on the first page ).

For example if you’re website sells gold watches you would want your site to appear high up in the list of results when someone types ‘gold watches’ into the search engine. Or if you wanted real targeted traffic from the search engines you could optimize your site for ‘I want to buy a gold watch’.

Search Engine Optimization for a website by onpage ( keyword density / placement, html tags etc. ) and offpage ( basically quantity and quality of incoming links to your site ).

It is recommended you check out the search engine optimization glossary of terms to start with. This contains content for both beginner and experienced Search engine Optimizer.

Internet marketing has a language of itself. Below is a glossary of terms.

Above the Fold : With reference to the top part of a newspaper, the term is used in internet marketing to describe the top part of the page that the user can see without scrolling down.

Copy: The style of writing on a website. Good copy will be good for the visitor to read whilst persuading them to make a purchase or click on a link.

Copywriter: Someone who is paid to write content for a website.

CTA: Abbreviation for Content Targeted Advertising. It refers to the placement of relevant PPC ads on content pages for non-search engine websites. Google Adsense is the market leader in this area.

E-Zine: An information based electronic newsletter usually distributed on the internet ( usually via email ). As well as information the newsletter will contain promotional material.

Mailing List: Online a mailing list is an automatically distributed email message on a particular topic going to individuals. You can subscribe or unsubscribe to a mailing list ( opt in / opt out ). The sales percentage made from a mailing list is much higher than direct from a website.

Opt in: To give permissions to a company to send you promotional emails or an E-Zine This process is usually performed from a website.

Opt out: To unsubscribe from a mailing list.

Pay Per Click: Where companies pay a fee depending on how often their add is ‘clicked’. Google adwords are a good example of this.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): See Search Engine Optimization

Signature file: A footer that is automatically added to outgoing emails. This can contain details of a website along with promotional messages.

Overview

Ok you have your a beautiful looking website which is packed with great content and you are selling great products. People are going to come flocking to your site right ?

Wrong !!

Please don’t think that if you stick a super duper site out there on the internet that you can sit back and relax while people visit in their thousands - they won’t. And if few people come to your site you won’t sell many products and therefore won’t be making much money.

People will come to your site ( in ever increasing numbers ) if you work at it and apply some of the internet marketing principles and methods described in these pages.

What is Internet Marketing ?

Internet marketing put at its simplest is the art of attracting targeted visitors ( visitors that are interested in what your site has to offer ) to you’re site and then getting them to purchase the product you’re selling. Like all things online, to be a success at internet marketing will take a lot of hard work on your part.

The good news is that internet marketing is extremely rewarding ( both psychologically and financially ).

The buzz you will get when the number of visitors to your site moves from a few a week, to over a 100 a week, to over a 1000 a week, to …. more than makes up for the hard graft required to get there.

There’s a whole language to internet marketing so in this section there is an A - Z glossary of Internet Marketing terms.

One of the most important forms of internet marketing is Search Engine Optimization. This is covered in detail and has its own A - Z glossary.

“People Laughed At Me When I Said My Sites Would Make Thousands Every Week .. But Guess Who’s Laughing Now?”

You can learn my insider secrets in “The Website Marketing Bible” - a book the world’s best marketing masterminds are calling “a MUST-READ”:

Learn The Insider Secrets

Firstly a quick explanation making money via affiliates is where a visitor to your website or blog follows one of your links and makes a purchase. You then get a percentage of this purchase. Examples of affiliates are the merchants found in affiliate networks such as Click Bank and Commission junction.

PPC (pay per click) is where you get paid for a visitor to your website or blog clicking on one of the ads – there is no sale required. Examples of this are Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher network.

Benefits of Affiliate Schemes

Higher Commission

Firstly the commission is usually greater than from PPC ads this can run up to big 3 figure sums per sale depending on the product.

Recurring Commission

Some affiliate schemes have recurring commission an example of this is a membership site that pays a percentage of the monthly membership fee to the affiliate every month the customer remains a member. This can bring in a steady stream of income.

Multiple tiers

Some affiliate schemes have multiple tiers. Not only do you get a commission on people you refer but you get a commission on people they refer too.

Downside of Affiliate schemes.

Loss of commission through time lag of purchase

Most affiliate schemes have a time limit from when the referred visitor arrives and when the product is purchased. If time limit this is exceeded then no commission is paid. People usually take their time to purchase something so if this time limit is low there is a high risk of losing some commissions.

Commission theft.

As more and more people are becoming internet and affiliate savvy they are realising that instead of paying for a product they can make a saving by joining the affiliate scheme and earning the commission back on their purchase. You lose all the commission even though it was your hard work that created the lead.

Relationship management.

If you are part of several affiliate schemes it can take time and effort to manage the relationship with these different schemes. Things such as managing usernames, passwords plus tracking what is and what isn’t working for each scheme take time. Time that is increased with each new affiliate scheme you join.

Benefits of PPC

No Sale required

With PPC schemes like Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network you only require a click to get commission. You don’t require a sale. Once the surfer has clicked on the ad the money is yours and there’s no way you can lose it.

The PPC network sells the advertising space on your site for you.

The network does all the hard work of getting 1000s of advertisers signed up. Using content targeting-technology they then display advertisers relevant to your web page. This means they do all the hard work – all you need to do is provide the content and the traffic. This saves you a hell of a lot of time and effort.

Downside of PPC schemes
Payment for click can be low.

Payment on ads can pay as little as 1 cent so it would obviously take many clicks to earn major money with this. You can however earn around $2 a click (in some cases more) it all depends the subject of your web page and how much competition there is from advertisers for it.

Being banned from the scheme

To protect its advertisers PPC providers such as Google are very strict on click fraud (where publishers click on their own ads to make themselves money). If they find any of their publishers clicking on their own ads they will quite rightly ban that publisher from the scheme for life.

However there have been some instances where innocent publishers have been banned either by malicious attacks or mistakes. In these instances the publisher can lose a major revenue stream.

Conclusion

On average I think that the PPC model is the best way to earn money from your visitors. It saves you time on managing multiple schemes and means you can concentrate more on content creation and marketing. You also don’t stand to lose commission via theft.

However if your website is in an area that only attracts small sums for the PPC ads it’s definitely worth looking at what affiliate schemes out there compliment your site.

What I do is have a split of around 90% of my pages serving PPC ads and the remaining 10% promoting carefully selected affiliate schemes.

If you trawl through the AdSense message board you can’t help but come across tales of woe from AdSense publishers that have had their account banned by Google.

Below is a list of ways people have been banned from AdSense and information on how to avoid it happening to you.

Don’t click on your own ads

The obvious one but still people do it. Google has the IP address of the computer/s that you’ve used to create and check your AdSense account. If it sees that this IP address clicks one of your ads you’re in trouble.

Don’t do it. It’s theft not from Google but from the AdWords advertisers.

If you want to go to a site advertised by one of your ads don’t click on it look at the URL of the advertising site at the bottom of the ad and type it into your browser.

If you click on one accidentally (which does happen) you’re probably be ok but it’s worth dropping a quick email to Google with an explanation and apology

Don’t log in to AdSense from a shared computer.

As I said above Google keeps a record of every machine IP address used to look at your account. If you check your stats on a machine then someone else clicks on your ads from the same machine Google sees this as click fraud. Worth bearing in mind when thinking of checking your stats from somewhere like an Internet Café.

Don’t log in to AdSense from work.

Apart from getting in trouble with the company that employs you there’s also a further real risk. Most companies use a proxy server to access the Internet. A proxy server with ONE IP ADDRESS. Therefore you checking your ads from work means this proxy IP address being recorded by Google as one that you use. Problem is if there are 1000 people in your company it is the same IP address for them too. Google can’t differentiate between you and the other 999 employees in your company. If one of these 999 clicks on one of your ads it’s ban time.

Don’t get into a ‘I’ll click your ads if you click mine’ agreement with another Webmaster.

As above Google will have your IP address and that of every AdSense publisher. If they see these IP addresses consistently clicking on each other ads it’s goodbye for both of you.

Don’t tell friends and family.

Telling friends and family about your money making websites can lead to problems. Even if you tell them not to click on your ads there’s always the chance that Auntie Maud will think it’s a good idea to make some extra money for her favourite nephew. 100 clicks later from the same visitor and your account is screaming ‘Click Fraud’.

Receiving clicks from Illegal traffic

Check the AdSense TOS for sources of traffic that aren’t allowed by Google. These include methods like Traffic exchange, PTC advertising, Auto surf etc.

Do monitor your visitor and AdSense figures

Check your account at least once a day. If you see a massive spike coupled with a massive increase in Page CTR investigate using your visitor stats website. If you see it’s all come from the same IP address you could have been the victim of a malicious attack – inform Google via email and offer them access to your logs.

When AdSense first appeared on the scene a few years ago. Many webmasters who already had websites saw it as a opportunity to make money from their website/s.

Of the many who made great money from their hobby websites few ever thought of making an AdSense business. As far as they were concerned they had a great way of making money from their hobby. They couldn’t believe their luck!

It wasn’t long though before entrepreneurs caught onto this great way of making money and started building 10s even 100s of AdSense websites. Many of these made thousands a month and some became Internet millionaires just through their AdSense business. With the advent of tools that make it easy for anyone to set up an AdSense website thousands continue join the AdSense gravy train every month.

Over the past year legendary online marketer John Reese has been publishing a ‘secret’ monthly publication (electronic newsletter and companion CD-Rom) that has both demonstrated and taught hundreds of little-known money-making strategies.

John has opened up the monthly resource and has now gone public.

I’m delighted to be able to offer one of John’s monthly publications for free as a special offer to the readers of MakingOnlineMoney.com

In it you’ll learn:-

How To Build A Virtual Real Estate Empire
The simple techniques and methods you can use to start building an online empire made up of lots of tiny content sites. This is the model that John has used to cash AdSense checks worth over $72,000 for a single month.

Special Methods That Grow ANY Online Business Automatically
Learn how to easily structure your websites so the site traffic grows by itself - without you doing any additional work or paying a single penny for advertising. This works for AdSense sites, affiliate program sites, infoproduct sites, and more.

Get An “Inside Look” At Valuable Testing Results
What if you could take a peek at the testing results from other web sites? Now you can.

This is some amazing stuff contained and I’m eternally grateful for John for letting my readers have this amazing opportunity for FREE.

I subscribe to John’s monthly publication and can safely say it’s the main reason for me going from earning a little extra cash online a month to a owning a thriving online business.

If you’re familiar with AdSense you’ll be aware that you can have 3 ad units and 1 link unit per page. Many webmasters make the mistake of using the full allocation thinking the more ads there are the more likely a visitor is going to click them and therefore the more money they will make.

This doesn’t work in my experience (and the experience of other webmasters I have spoken too) and here is the reason why.

What ever you web page subject there will be AdSense ads of varying value. Google will always display the most valuable ads because they want like you to make the most money. Now if you have all three ad units in play on the page not only will you have the most valuable ads but also you will have the ads from companies who paid considerably less. Obviously if people click on one of these less paying ads you may only be getting a few cents.

Therefore my advice to you is to have a maximum of one ad unit and one link unit per page. That way when you get clicks from your visitors they are more likely to be of a higher value.

Having fewer ads on your pages also has the benefit of making your page look more professional. There’s nothing worse than coming to a page which is swamped with AdSense ads it’ll have the majority of your visitors hitting the back button long before they read the ads let alone click on them.

If you don’t believe me choose a page with reasonable traffic and test it for a couple of weeks. If you’re not earning as much as before you can always change it back. I’m willing to bet though after you see the improved ‘Click Through Rate’ (CTR), page ‘Effective CPM’ (eCPM), and ultimately earnings for the page you’ll be changing the rest of your site to the same format.

Many webmasters have found that it is relatively easy to make money with AdSense as you get paid for every time a visitor clicks on a AdSense ad - no sale required!

AdSense allows you to serve text-based Google AdWords on your web site or blog and receive a share of the pay-per-click payment.

What are Adwords ?

Adwords are text only advertisements that Google sells to people who want to advertise their website on the Google search results page. Adwords appear at the top and right of a Google search results page.

Adwords adds are set up so they only appear when someone enters certain keywords into the Google search. For example if you had a website selling Gold Watches you would set up your Adword add to appear when someone entered ‘Gold Watch’ into the search box.

When a user clicks on one of these adds he is taken to the advertisers website and the Google automatically receives a fee from the advertiser.

The cost to advertise depends on how competitive the keywords you have chosen to advertise on. If you want to appear at the top of the list to a very competitive keyword area the cost-per-click(CPC) price may be over 10$.

Back to AdSense.

Adsense is where these Adword ads are put on your Website. Which adds appear depends on what Google ‘thinks’ the webpage the adds are being displayed is about.

Therefore if your a webpage is about gold watches adds will be displayed for gold watches.

If it thinks the webpage is about cars it will display adds relating to cars.

To decide what your webpage is about Google will look at things on the webpage like headings, the density of keywords and also places importance of the file name of the page. So if you wanted the gold watches adds to appear on your page you would call the page gold-watches.html.

When a visitor to your site clicks on one of your adds you will get a percentage of the CPC (Cost per Click). Google keeps the percentage secret but it is generally thought to be around the 50% mark.
If that is 50% of a $10+ add you can see how having Adsense on your website can become very profitable.

Download Free Report

John started a little “side business” barely 12 months ago to prove (yet again) that he practices what he preaches. This little business was solely focused on creating what John calls “Virtual Real Estate.” In other words, small content web sites that make money from advertising or affiliate programs. (i.e. The sites don’t sell any products of their own.) This little side business of John’s (which he will tell you he has spent less than a total of 150 hours developing) has already raked in.. are you ready for this? $521,829.73 in AdSense earnings. (And John expects this number to *exponentially* GROW.)

* And oh yeah, these sites have NOTHING to do with “Internet Marketing” or teaching people how to make money. They are tiny niche markets that ANYONE can make money from. And because ALL of his traffic was generated from no-cost search engine listings, it’s almost ALL profit for him. (Aside from hosting and domain registration fees.)

Okay. So Here’s What This Is All About… Early last year, John decided to do something as a TEST. He decided to start an OFFLINE monthly publication to share some of his best strategies. Every month he created a 20-page newsletter and companion CD-Rom that contained tons of screencam video tutorials where he DEMONSTRATED his moneymaking Internet techniques. Now, you’ve probably never even heard of this publication. That’s for a reason… John decided to only offer it to a very small group of people — because he didn’t know what the response would be.

Well, the response was OVERWHELMING and people couldn’t get enough of his special techniques. Many of the people that were lucky to get access to his ’secret’ publication made tons of money by simply applying EXACTLY what he showed them how to do. And now (for a very limited time) John wants to let other Internet marketers get a small glimpse into what he has been publishing — FOR FREE.

WARNING: John is only sharing his valuable information with entrepreneurs that are willing to WORK HARD on their businesses to make huge profits. So if you are only interested in “get rich quick” schemes, this isn’t for you. John has just put a single issue of his ’secret publication’ (he calls it “The Reese Report”) online for you to go and download — BUT… ONLY IF YOU HURRY! John plans to take the newsletter and CD-Rom files OFFLINE very soon to protect the valuable strategies that they contain. So here’s what you need to do… (It will only take a moment.) Go right now and download the files while they are still available! That’s it. There’s nothing more to it. I’m 100% positive you will enjoy them as much as I have AND find tons of ways to apply his methods to make more money. Frankly, I can’t believe some of the things he’s sharing!

You’ll see exactly what I mean when you download the files. Here’s the link to download them:

HERE

If you visit the above link and the files have been removed, PLEASE don’t email me and ask me for them — I am not allowed to give them out directly. And once John takes the files down they will no longer be available.

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