Internet marketing is such a broad term, that it really would take a long post to explain exactly how to make money with internet marketing. It would take a book. Heck, it would take several books to start to crack that subject. I am definitely not an internet marketing expert per se, but I do know a little bit about it.
The reason I decided to write this post is because I spoke to two people today who both asked me this very same question. I thought it was a sign that there are a few people out there who just have no idea how people go about making money online with internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogging, etc. They understand that you can sell advertisements on a blog or earn referral fees for products sold from links on your site, but their understanding stops at how people actually get to your site, how you set up a site, how you decide what to write about, and how to increase the traffic to your site.
This post will tackle a few of the basics of how people make money internet marketing.
Getting Traffic to Your Site is Key.
The real thing that helps people earn money online is website traffic. There are basically three way to get traffic to your website. The first is organic search, which is when web surfers find a page of your website or blog from a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or the brand new MSN search engine Bing. If your site is relevant to a search query, there is a chance that it may pop up and will earn a new visitor who is looking for information or has a problem that needs solving or is looking for a service.
If you’ve done your job, then you may get a new visitor to your site.
The second way people bring people to their site is from links. If you get links to your site, then that is another chance for people to find your site from another site. It’s crowded out there on the WWW, so the more links you get back to your site, the better. Search engines may also start to give your site some more relevance if you get links from related and relevant sites, which means your pages may appear higher in search engine results pages. Obviously, link building is something that people who are trying to make money online through internet marketing pay a lot of attention to. Getting relevant, high quality links is one of the keys to internet marketing. Look at it as your website or blog receiving a vote from another site that pushes it higher and makes it more popular.
The third way to create traffic to your website is by purchasing advertising. A typical way people do this is with the Adwords PPC program. PPC stands for pay per click, which is exactly what you do. You agree to pay a certain amount every time an internet surfer clicks a text ad that appears on websites (through the Adsense advertising program) or in the search engine results. The blue text ads you see at the top of the major search engines are PPC links. If you can pay a low per click rate, and can sell advertising at a higher rate, you can make some money off of a transaction of this kind.
Now that You Have People Visiting Your Website, How Do You Make Money?
To make money with internet marketing, you need to have traffic to your site and you need some way to monetize that traffic. People monetize their sites in many various ways. Some webmasters and bloggers simply broker their own deals with people who pay a certain amount for a link or a banner on their site.
Others use affiliate product links on their sites and earn when a visitor makes a purchase through their site. CJ.com, Clickbank, and Amazon all provide ways for you to earn money from the traffic to your website.
Perhaps the most popular way people make money online–especially in the beginning–is with the Google Adsense program. This is a fairly simple ad network to implement on your site, but it’s not necessarily easy to make money online with this program. As I mentioned above, you can earn money with internet marketing schemes that involve paying for traffic and then converting that traffic into a sale or a higher priced click on an advertisement.
The amount of money you earn online also depends on the niche that your site falls into. If you run a blog about cars, you may earn more money than if you run a blog about movies. If your online business makes and sells antenna balls, you may earn less than if you sell real estate classes. The reason is that the products associated with cars and real estate are more expensive than the products associated with movies and antenna balls. A muffler can cost a hundred bucks, while a DVD costs $19.99. Logically, the money you can earn from a more expensive product will be greater because the person selling that product has a larger margin (usually!).
Making money with internet marketing also takes diligent work and a lot of trial and error, just like in any other kind of job. If you have money to invest in your online business internet marketing efforts, you will be able to get up and running a little bit more quickly than if you have no money to put into your business.
People earn a living in many different ways online. You can find all kinds of businesses and services on the internet, as you most likely know. The internet marketing angle really comes in after you know how you want to make money online. If you have a service to offer–for example, you are a lawyer who represents people who have been in accidents due to drinking (or whatever it is you may do)–then you can start to try to target keywords in your PPC campaigns. Say you live in the city of Austin. If you could get visitors to your site who are looking for a term like “Austin DUI Lawyer” then that is highly targeted traffic that may convert into a sale or a consult. The person who searches for this term in Google and gets to your site may have their cell phone in hand ready to dial a number.
So make sure you have your office phone in big lettering on the front page. The internet marketing is what you do after you know what you want to sell or what service you have to offer. Some marketers are more like “information entrepreneurs” and set up blogs that are built around specific keywords and have strong SEO qualities to them. The goal is to create traffic and then convert into ad clicks and make money online that way.
As you may be able to tell, there are many ways you can get started in your quest to make money internet marketing. Some people go the content site route and monetize with affiliate links and ppc ads. Others go directly to pay per click campaigns and “push” affiliate programs.
Email Marketing
One thing that is unanimous in the internet marketing business is that use of email lists and email campaigns is effective if you do it right.
For your own information (as at this point you may not be ready for this kind of software), there are several choices when you decide to start email collection and email marketing. One company is Aweber (read an Aweber review) and another is GetResponse. Many people look at highly targeted email lists as the holy grail of internet marketing. Maybe it will help you in your business!
I was getting ready to write a new post and for some reason revisited some articles I had written months ago but I hadn’t thought of in some time. There was some good info in some of these posts, so I decided in this post I would bring them to your attention.
