Subscribe To Our RSS Feed
I have been marketing online in one form another for almost five years now. It never ceases to amaze me just how many different ways there are to make money online. I'm convinced that there must be at least several thousand different ways to make money online.
What really amazes me is that you don't even really need a website or technical skills in order to start to start making some serious cash online. If you know how to write articles and distribute them online as well as understand the basics of Google Adwords, you can easily make money online.
The reason you don't need a website is because of something called an affiliate program. An affiliate program pays you a commission every single time you make a sale through your unique affiliate link. All you need to do is find an affiliate program, create a unique affiliate ID, and then send traffic to the merchant's website via your affiliate link.
There are affiliate programs available in just about every conceivable category online. The most lucrative affiliate programs are those that pay recurring, lifetime commissions. You can find hundreds of lifetime commission affiliate programs by going to www.lifetimecomissions.com.
Once you have selected an affiliate program that interests you, you then need to put together a plan to drive traffic to your unique affiliate link. The most cost effective means of doing so, especially if you are on a shoestring budget is by writing articles and using Google Adwords. Google Adwords allows you to buy traffic from their search engine results and direct that traffic directly to your affiliate link.
To get started with Google Adwords you will need to create a long list of keywords related to your affiliate program. The best way to create a list of keywords is to use a service like nichebot.com or Keyword Affiliate Elite. After you have selected your keywords you will then need to write some ads which will display every time your keywords are searched for.
When most people perform a search online they are usually looking for some kind of information related to their search term. Writing and distributing articles online is a great way to generate traffic to your affiliate link by including your link with each article you write. When someone performs a search for some of the keywords related to your article there's a good chance that your article will be viewed and affiliate link clicked on.
Writing articles for the purpose of generating traffic is known as article marketing and it's great way to make money without spending a great deal of money. If you are kind of lazy or not a very good writer, you can use a software called Instant Article Wizard which can create top notch articles in less than 30 minutes.
Granted, Instant Article Wizard requires some skills to use but it is much easier than trying to write 20 articles a day by yourself. Once you have gotten your articles together you can use a paid service like articlemarketer.com to distribute your articles over the internet. The more articles you write and distribute, the more money you will ultimately make.
Filed under Internet Marketing by 
Finding profitable niches can be difficult. Finding one that isn't extremely saturated can be intimidating when you're just starting out as an Internet marketer. The key to finding niches that are both profitable and have little competition is drilling down a top-level niche to find profitable sub-niches with fewer competitors.
For example, let's say you're interested in creating a site that has to do with beauty. You can drill the beauty category down into several different sub-categories. You could choose hair care, skin care, fitness, organic beauty, cosmetics, or any number of niches related to beauty.
But these categories are still too broad to be profitable with small numbers of visitors. You need to drill down further. Let's say you decide to tackle the skin care demographic. Sub-categories of skin care might include eczema, acne, blackheads, wrinkles, age spots, psoriasis, and dry skin.
Now you have a list of smaller niches that you can begin to narrow down. Acne might still be too broad. You can drill down even more by targeting teenage acne, infant acne, and adult acne.
While you want to find niches that are narrow enough for you to dominate, you don't want to choose niches that have too little traffic available. Don't be afraid to spy on your competitors.
Go to your favorite search engine, like Google, and search for things like "how to get rid of acne." This is obviously a niche desperately seeking a solution. If you drill down too much, like targeting "blackheads," you might find it's an annoyance, but maybe not something people are desperate enough to spend money solving.
You should verify that your idea gets a decent level of search volume by using a keyword tool like WordTracker or Google Keyword External. When you look for the niche on Google, see if there are plenty of AdWords ads on the right sidebar of the screen.
If so, this means people are making money in this niche. Any time you can come up with an original slant on an idea that's already churning profits online, you're poised for instant success.
If you rally want to get into the eBay niche, don't go after a broad, eBay for beginners niche. Target something unique such as "eBay Businesses for Baby Boomers." Pick a specific target audience and then cater to their needs instead of approaching the mass public with a broad idea.
Filed under Internet Marketing by
Long tail is a big buzzword in marketing these days. The term "Long Tail" was initially coined in 2004 by Chris Anderson in an article in Wired magazine. The term was initially used to describe the niche business strategy that is used by companies like Amazon.
Marketers are now using the term to describe the phenomenon that "long tail keywords" could get more traffic combined than the broader, more general keywords. For example, let's say the keyword "dog training" gets approximately 2,420 searches per day.
Then you start looking at the long-tail keyword phrases for that niche – dog training collars, dog potty training, dog training careers, and so on. When you add up all of the long-tail keywords, which are easier to dominate in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), it equals more traffic than if you simply went after Dog Training.
If you have 10,000,000 websites competing for the term "dog training," but only 361,000 competing for "dog training DVD," then you have a far greater chance of reaching the first page than you would if you were competing against 10 million pages.
Being ranked number one for a broad term like "mp3" would probably take a truly exceptional SEO expert many months of very hard work and a very large budget for buying backlinks to accomplish.
Ranking for a term like "1970s rock mp3s" might be much easier – because it's a long tail. If the term gets 50 searches per day, and you rank number three, then you might get 20 or 30 hits to your website per day.
If you rank number 30,714 for the term "mp3," you won't get any traffic from that at all. Finding good long tail keywords is very important, because you need those long tail phrases to bring in traffic.
While some marketers shun long-tail keywords, believing they have to rank well for the prime keyword phrases, others are using it to reach a demographic that has money in hand. Would you rather get traffic from people searching the word "golf" or from someone who types this into Google: "Taylor Made R580XD Titanium Driver?"
The person who gets more specific with their searches is usually someone who's ready to buy – someone who knows what they want. The person typing in golf may want to know its history for a project, might want to take a golf vacation, or could be interested in attending a local tournament. That won't do you any good if your site sells golf clubs, but the long tail phrase will cater to that crowd.
Pick your keywords and phrases carefully. Separate your broad, generic terms from your long-tail phrases so that you can monitor your Google SERP positioning and see how your keyword list is performing for you.
Filed under Internet Marketing by
