There can be few people reading this who haven't heard of StartBlaze - the free traffic generating system that came from nowhere and is now sweeping across the internet thanks to its viral recruitment design and the way it delivers traffic that grows exponentially.

But I guess anything that was created by Mark Joyner (CEO of Aesop.com and the guy who brought us ROIbot, Promote- Ivator, and all the rest) would have instant credibility with webmasters everywhere.

Running a really effective StartBlaze campaign starts with the design of the target URL - the page that you want other StartBlaze members to see.

Your page might sell a product for you, sign up subscribers for your newsletter, lead to an affiliate site - anything you want.

But to work on StartBlaze - it must load fast.

Scorchingly FAST.

No matter how convincing your copy is, regardless of how compelling the offer - if they can't see it, they can't be influenced by it. If your target page isn't on screen before they have time to type in a URL or choose a "favorites" entry - you've crashed and burned.

So, in this article, let's look in some detail at what you can do to make fast StartBlaze pages.

Firstly, how long a web page takes to display is a function of several things:

1) The total amount of data to be transferred from host (the server)to client (the PC). Crudely, this is the size of the html file + the size of all the graphics on the page.

2) The number of different connections that must be made to retrieve all the files required for the page. Each html file, graphic, external style sheet, server script, SSI, etc. is a separate connection - and each comes with its own built-in delay.

3) How complex the page is for the browser to render. Every page requires the browser to make many decisions and perform calculations before it can deliver a page that looks right.

.. and to make matters worse, these factors are influenced by a whole raft of additional variables such as the performance and loading on every host server involved, the user's internet connection speed, how busy the internet is at that time, the performance of the user's computer and the browser they use.

Fortunately, although there are some things outside your control, here are 15 things you can do to make your pages appear as quickly as possible:

~~~~ Graphics ~~~~

Re-size every image to the size it will appear on the page. Don't use WIDTH and HEIGHT tags in your html to shrink a large image.

Compare the file size when saved as GIF and JPG - the results may surprise you.

For GIF files, experiment with reducing the number of colors in the image.

For JPG files, experiment with different image quality settings.

Save files at a maximum 96 dots per inch - any more is wasted on a monitor.

~~~~ Page Design ~~~~

Include pixel WIDTH and HEIGHT settings in IMG SRC tags.

Give pixel width settings for TABLE elements and HR rules rather than percentages.

Don't use many different background images within TABLE or TD elements.

Try not to nest TABLES within TABLES.

Use embedded (not external) CSS style sheets to minimise the size and frequency of complex FONT descriptions.

Minimize the number of different files making up the page.

Reduce your dependency on outsourced elements such as counters, graphics, javascript, and so on where the speed of the 3rd party service may be suspect.

~~~~ Editing HTML ~~~~

Editors such as FrontPage produce very bloated html files, with a lot of uneccessary duplication. Go through the file with a text editor looking for repetition (most commonly of FONT tags) that can be removed.

Remove any non-essential text such as comments.

StartBlaze pages aren't designed to be indexed by search engines, so you don't need page elements like META keyword and description tags.

Prune and tune your pages until they are mean and lean and you can be confident that every time your page comes out of the StartBlaze database - someone will actually see it.

And making your page *visible* is the first critical step to creating desired actions from StartBlaze. Now you only need to worry about what you say on the page - but that's a subject for another article ...

About the author: Stewart Hutton is the author of "Practical StartBlaze." This free eBook includes all the help you need to get the most out of StartBlaze - and converts into a ready made viral recruitment tool to build your StartBlaze "downline," promote your site, and earn you a residual income. www.roibot.com/tk_sbp.cgi?psbyg1