An important part of marketing is ranking high in major search engines such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo. To rank high you need to have links pointing to your website so they think your content is important and worthy of top placements. Many marketers use auto blogs to artificially create links to their important websites in hope of ranking high in the search engines.

Setting one up is easy, you have a couple of ways you can do it. One way is to use a free hosted solution offered by Wordpress or Blogger where they will setup and host your blog with your own unique URL. The other way is to download wordpress and install it on your server. From there you want to grab one of two free plugins to grab feeds from the Internet. Look for Feed Wordpress or WP o Matic plugins and install them. From there you can setup to pull RSS feeds and have you blog automatically update.

Using this method also allows you to make money online directly. You can add affiliate link and/or Google adsense to monetize the site itself. You can make a few bucks and over time cover the minimal time you spent setting up the website. Some marketers do this to the extreme and it is possible to make a few hundred dollars a month setting these things up. Basically all you have to do is multiply your efforts and have hundreds of auto blogs going. Not only can you make money online with them but also have thousands of links available to your other site to rank higher in search engines.

I’ve have taken the last little while to test out as many areas as possible setting up websites, marketing campaigns, content ideas, linking, and more. I have to admit that one of the most overlooked aspects of making money online is truly testing out things you read.

Landing Page Design

Took some time to research the best practices used and have come to the realization that landing pages are probably one of the most important factors in making money with your website. The KISS rulle applies where by you have very little time to catch the users attention and by creating a simple easy to read page for the visitors is how many of the experts roll out their money making ideas.

Getting Quality Links

Most of us rely on getting link exchanges manually by contact related websites or responding to a few of the many received via email. A few months back I was introduced to the concept of creating your own website network and then use them to promote the sites that you are trying to make money with. The concepts involve building websites from scratch and signing up for blog services like Wordpress.com or Blogger.com to use some of their domain popularity to benefit your sites. These examples are just surface level concepts but I ran a few tests and by implementing the suggestions was able to get a couple of my websites ranked higher in search engines in a matter of weeks.

Content

It’s still one of the most important parts of making money online. There are many tools you can use to try and auto generate content. By using RSS feeds for example is a commonly used way, integrate some kind of application that alters the text and your content is all of a sudden unique and ranking in search engines for many long tail keywords. This practice is considered a grey area of marketing, but is used by many leading marketers to make money online.

These are just a few areas that i’ve been researching and testing over the past few months. I will take the time in future post to get into them in more detail. Making money online is an ongoing process and the learning process is ongoing. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments to making money online.

Zip / Email Submits

There are marketing companies out there who are prepared to pay websites anywhere from $1 - $5 (sometimes more) for having a user simply provide their email address or Zip Code of where they live. They provide incentives to users by basically offering them free stuff. From Ipods to gift cards to free shopping sprees, as long as they complete the terms and conditions the user will actually get the free offer. On a side note, these offers actually work, a friend of mine pretty much had to divuldge much of his personal information and participate in offers, but actually got himself a free 42 inch plasma screen in the process. Anyways back to the money making opportunity.

How To Market Email Submits

A popular way of making money online with email submits is to be on top the current trends in the world, create a poll on a popular / new subject matter in the media, then offer the free incentive to those who participate in the poll. Marketers then use Google Adwords to buy traffic to the newly designed website hoping that users visit the site, participate in the poll, and enter their email address to receive the free offer. Now I won’t go into specifics, but it’s more than realistic to make $100 - $500 dollars a day simply by running a poll and offering email submits as an incentive for participating. As usual you can contact me for more on the how to and where to get started. This post was merely to introduce readers to a way people are making money online.

Best Christmas Offers

What is the latest trends in Christmas gifts? Have a look a the trends when it comes to childrens toys, clothing, perfumes, electronics, and more. Check out the current search engine search trends and keyword counts. Also look around for holiday gift related sites who profile the hottest items. I recently did this and found a couple of gems including a Childrens toy that currently gets close to 50,000 searches per day and has little competition. Sorry, can’t tell you what it is

How To Market It

Now that you have your list of products / services you are considering promoting, figure out how you plan to market them. Is there enough time to build out a website in hopes of getting organic search engine traffic? Probably not, but you should research the competition levels and if you see it’s not crowded in the space, go for it. You may choose to go the paid advertising route, do your research on keyword bids and the long tail keywords that are relevant to the product.

Who To Promote

You have to decide how and who you will promoting these product for. You can go the route of dealing with the majors such as Commission Junction or Linkshare in hopes of getting a many of the product to market under one system. Or you can research and find individual programs to promote. Personally I like to go direct and deal with the smaller companies who offer the products. I find they are more willing to work with you to optimize your effort by giving you better revenues per sale, more latitude in how you do the marketing, and overall communication is better.

So get to it and let’s all have a prosperous holiday season… Good Luck!

Just Do It

Sounds simple but a majority of the time many people plan, ponder, and procrastinate on getting started. The excuses are wide spread, whether they are valid or not is kind of irrelevant. If you are not actively doing something for your website, you are not going to get the results you anticipate. Although there are those dream circumstances where people get riches in an easy way, the reality is that 98% of successful people making real money online is doing so the traditional way… getting things done.

Join Communities

One of the things I learned early on is that there are loads of quality communities online who focus on trying to make money online. Most who are aware of them visit them and lurk around gathering as much information as possible to help their efforts. What I suggest is that you actively participate in the community building relationships, sharing experiences, and contributing your knowledge to others. When you do this, you’ll notice that more quality and relevant information for your business comes your way. On a basic level, this simple rules applies… you get what you give.

How To Really Make Money Online

The above are only 2 examples of the basic activities you should be doing. In doing so, you’ll open yourself up to a wealth of additional information that you’ll look back on and consider priceless. I purposely only gave 2 examples to encourage you to get going and truly become part of the community. Once you do, i’de like to hear from you and your experiences in how it has fundamentally helped your business. By then, you’ll be on your way to making real money online.

Research

Found a handful of solid forums that discuss aspects of making money online from affiliate marketing to search arbitrage and blogging.

Wicked Fire

Stumbled upon this site while searching for information on search arbitrage, basically its a forum of affiliate marketers who make money online. They discuss areas such as traffic building, affiliate marketing, content development, and more. Their Newbie section allows beginners ask basic questions regarding the what to do. What separates this website from others is the proportion of successful marketers to newbies. With a solid base of active users, it’s a great resources for affiliate marketing and making money online in general.

Digital Point

This forum has been around for a while but it’s good to note some of it’s strong points. The amount of information available is huge and their forum is neatly categorized helping you find the information. They have a voucher section on the forum that allows you to buy promo coupons for the major search engines. I was able to setup my Google, Yahoo, and MSN advertising campaigns receiving bonus money. It’s also a good place find link partners, services providers, and more. It’s definately a place to frequent every so often.

Tests

I had a couple of sites in development that are part of a larger network. The sites were designed and content created, they weren’t launched as yet because the overall network strategy was to get traffic through organic search results. I decided to test the Google Adwords to adsense model to see if it’s viable. Based on my results over a 30 day span, I was able to earn approximately $2 on adsense for every $1 spent on adwords. The sample size is quite small but the ratio is good, i’ve concluded that it can definately word and with the proper time can be built out into a successful money making operation.

In future updates i’ll break down some of the other tests done as well as provide some more resources to help you make money online. For now, know that research and testing is a VERY important aspect to your success. Most want to jump right in and go for it, if you have the money to blow fine but I suggest taking your time.

Contextual Advertising

This is Google Adsense and the (much smaller) others who match your content with advertisers interested in being seen by your visitors. Once registered, you are provided with a code which you place on your web page and advertising is automatically matched to your content.

Affiliate Marketing

Based on your content topic, you can go out and find related products / services and advertise them on your website taking a percentage of the sale each time you refer a customer. Popular programs online are Commisison Junction, Click Bank, Linkshare and Performics. These are affiliate networks where you can promote a wide range of products from many different companies.

Text Ads

If you have a decent Google Pagerank or have high volume traffic, you should consider selling text links on your website. There are broker services such as Text Link Ads that can find link advertisers for you. Although they take a hefty 50% cut off the top, it is a good revenue stream with little work involved.
(more…)

Content

The content you develop on the website has good value. As long as it is orignal, has proper keyword targeting, and is insightful. Establish a schedule to add new content to your site on a regular basis. It has several benefits one of which encourages the search engine spider to visit your website more often. Value is being created simply because the website is being actively updated.

Link Popularity

Often times someone who is interested in buying your website, will have their own ideas of what they will try to do in order to make money with it. The one element they will look for in the value is the amount of quality incoming links to to website along with the anchor text. Part of your marketing efforts should be acquiring quality links. Not only is it an essential search engine optimization element, but it adds good value to the overall website.

Domain Name

The domain name you choose is important to the success of the website and it’s re-sale value should you decide to sell. You’ll want the domain to be specific to a niche but not too specific to allow the site to expand into related areas. Based on the incoming links, the domain will establish a Google Pagerank which is a tools used for many things including defining the value of the domain. The age of the website is also an important element.

Summary

Even if you are not making money with a website, continue to build out and develop the domain. Doing this essentially continues to add value to the site and increases your opportunity to make money online either way. Look at it like real estate, a little work into it and the value goes up even though you are not making money with it at the present time.

Payment Schedule

Knowing when and how affiliate programs payout the affiliates is a very important elelment. Especially if you actively buy advertising / traffic to fuel the affiliate sales. You always want to look for the programs who pay more frequent, have a low payout threshold, and support fast payout options such as direct bank deposit, or paypal. This ensures that your cashflow can be better maintained.

Conversion Process

What is the action that triggers a commission? How many steps does a user have to go through? Are conversions triggered automatically? These are some of the questions you’ll want to find out about the program. I like to promote the ones that offer the easiest process for the user. Even at the expense of a high commission.

Market Saturation

When selecting the affiliate program to promote, I like to look for opportunities that give me the best chances of converting my visitors. I tend to stay away from the ones who everyone and their freinds are promoting, looking for newer programs. This usually equates to better payouts, conversions, and overall interest in your efforts by the affiliate program.

Summary

In summary, do you research on the affiliate programs before deciding to join or promote the program. Use some of the suggestions above as well as frequent an affiliate marketing forum such as Earners Forum where other affiliates disuss their issues and experiences.

Type-In Traffic

This is where you register typo-domains of popular search words and or popular websites online. You then put up a landing page of several different adsense type programs that show results and pay you each time a link is clicked or ads are shown. The programs are not typical in that they are designed specifically for parked domains. Ever type in a domain wrong and get single page site with alot of links? This is what I am talking about!

New Extensions

Every so often ICANN (The Domain Name Authority) opens up a new extension to the public. When this happens, you can get in on it early and register dictionary and/or popular domain names. Sure they are not .com’s, but over time most appreciate in value.

Expired Domains

These are domains that are not renewed and expire, every day registrars delete thousands of domains. With a few good tools and the knowledge, you can pick up some valuable domains that have pagerank, backlinks, and/or listings in authority directories (DMOZ, Yahoo, etc…). Once picked up, you can sell them of domain name forums where people actively buy and sell domains.

In summary, these are just some of examples of how you can make money with domain names. The industry is huge, you should do some research if this interests you. It’s easy to learn and there is not much time or resources needed to be successful at it.