gainfully unemployed » internet marketing

Are You a Blogger or an Internet Marketer?

chris — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 05:28:08 +0000

I don’t really know if there is a truly distinct difference between a blogger and an Internet marketer, since most bloggers delve into Internet marketing when they want to start monetizing the traffic that comes to their blogs.

Still, I think it’s an interesting question.

It seems to me that bloggers write for themselves and for their audience, whereas in the marketing realm the largest concern is supporting the product you are selling. I don’t mean this in a negative way, but it seems that if there is a distinction between the way the content is created in blogging vs marketing, that would be one way to put it.

To be honest, I think I enjoy the marketing aspect of creating content the most. To me, it’s fun to create great content and build traffic to it and watch it move up the search results pages, get a lot of traffic, and convert.

It think it’s important to keep a solid mixture of both Internet marketing mentality and the blogging mentality in your online content creation or whatever it is you do online to earn income. The reason is because people more than ever crave authenticity.

If you can provide an authentic voice–truthful reviews, incredible value without really asking for anything in return (since if you do it right, you will get more back than you give), and providing useful information–then you will be very successful in Internet marketing or blogging.

If you’re interested in setting up your own website business, make sure to come by and read more of my writing here on Gainfully Unemployed, the work for yourself blog, or leave a comment or send me an email with any questions.

Great Content is the Best SEO

chris — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:22:17 +0000

SEO is a very important factor in developing a successful blog or online property. You want the structure of your home to be solid, strong, and well-designed.

The same goes for your website.

When people say that SEO is unimportant or a waste of time, they’re wrong. Making your site search engine friendly and easily navigable and findable is incredibly important.

But…

It’s not the most important thing.

Your content is the most important thing.

It’s easy to find yourself rushing through a blog post or an article so you can get to the promotion and link building part much faster. Successful bloggers know that their job isn’t done after they finish a post. It’s only the beginning–especially with a new blog.

An informative, well-written post can be pretty lonely without anyone to read it. And the truth is, people have a lot of options. There’s plenty to read out there, so you have to find readers and traffic for your site. You have to promote your work.

The single best thing you can do for the SEO of your site, other than making sure the structure is sound and it’s highly searchable, is to find high quality, relevant links.

And the best way to find these kinds of links is by writing amazing content that people–yes, here it comes–want to link to!

It’s a much better use of your time to focus on creating amazing content than fishing around the web trying to find people to trade links with. If what you publish on your site is great, then links will be no problem. And they’ll all be “one-way” links, not reciprocal!

So, when it comes to the actual content of your site, it will pay off to make it as useful, as informative, as amazing, as scandalous, as eye-catching, and as entertaining as you can.

If I were to give you one piece of advice for your blog or website, I would tell you to not waste your time doing what internet marketers call “link-building.” Spend your time writing articles for your site instead of worrying about building links from crappy sites in order to “move up the rankings” in Google. Make your site amazing and the best kind of links will magically occur naturally!

Great Content is the Best SEO.

(image: Ivan Petrov)

9 Ways to Be a Better Internet Marketer and Blogger

chris — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:11:14 +0000

Create Valuable Content and You Will Succeed Online

These are a few points I have been thinking about for some time now that I believe will make you a better blogger and internet marketer.

Create Value – This is simple, right? Well, not really, but the idea of it is. Create something that helps people solve a problem or provides them with useful information that adds immediate value to their life. This is the kind of thing people will pay for. I know I will.

Give Give Give - Be generous. The beauty of the Internet is that it’s a platform that reaches almost everywhere. If you give 110% of yourself on the internet, you’re giving it to hundreds or thousands of people.

The more you give, the more you will get back–nowhere is this more true than online. Build trust and authenticity by giving. When you’re thinking of a product, don’t think about what you want to make, think about what your audience needs, and of course, what they will pay for.

Try Interesting Things – There are thousands of sites, businesses, blogs, and sales pages popping up every day. Try something that’s never been done before. Put your own spin on things. It’s so cheap that there’s no such thing as big mistakes. Being interesting will help you stick out in a crowded (and extremely competitive) business.

Don’t Be Boring – Don’t be antiseptic. Inspire people, make them laugh, entertain and enlighten them, but most importantly, let your personality (or eccentricity) shine through. Boring doesn’t make friends, so why would you think it makes sales?

Be Transparent – Why not be sincere and honest? Being honest with people is the difference between making a few bucks on a one time transaction versus having a customer who comes back to buy your products repeatedly and has such a good experience that she tells all her friends to buy from you too. Besides, transparency is easy–all you have to do is be yourself. People respect this and trust this.

Make Partnerships – Go out and find other people doing similar things to you and see if you can help them out. Offering to help someone or simply extending your hand is the seed of a partnership. It’s hard to do things on your own.

Make Friends – If you’re running your business well, you will have a lot of friends. Go out of your way to make some friends. Besides, who do you think is going to help you sell your next great idea? Networking is key and will help you find work, new projects, and opportunities.

Have Fun with What You’re Selling – Enthusiasm sells itself and makes your job easier. Doing something you are genuinely interested in energizes your business.

Work Hard and go the Extra Mile – When you think you are done with your blog post or sales page, sit back and take a few minutes before you publish it. Is there something you can add that will make the post a little bit more interesting or helpful? Maybe you skimped a little on research.

Maybe there’s another resource you can link to that will help your reader out a little bit more. These tiny details are what make people bookmark your posts, pass them to their friends, and encourage people to be long term readers and subscribers.

It’s all about the audience. This is the first thing we forget.

img courtesy of bizior at stock.xchng

Are You a Blogger or an Internet Marketer?

How to Promote Your Blog and Make Money

chris — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 07:52:14 +0000

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.

Here they are in all they’re glory. Click ‘em, read ‘em, let me know what you think.

Four Ways to Promote Your Blog and gain traffic, subscribers, and maybe some friends.

Looking to start a brand new blog? Why Not Buy One? An established blog will have some age, links, content, and hopefully traffic. These are all good reasons to buy.

Five SEO Tips to Turbocharge Your Website These are some basic and easy things you can do to make your website more visible to search engines and clearer to your possible visitors. Make the user experience better, and you will be rewarded.

Can You Really Make Money with Internet Marketing? Many have tried. Many have failed. Some have succeeded.

Six Online Business Myths the Aren’t True As in any line of work there are misconceptions, misunderstandings, and sure, some lies in internet marketing.

Increase Your Blog Traffic with Article Directories

chris — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:57:20 +0000

One of the best ways to promote your blog or website is by publishing articles in Article Directories. Some of the better known directories are EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com. Publishing articles in these kinds of directories is smart for a few reasons.

They create direct click-through traffic to your blog posts, articles, or domain.
They can help your site become indexed by search engines more quickly.
They create back-links to your site, which helps it achieve higher search engine results in Google and Yahoo.

How do Article Directories Work?

You can publish articles about anything, but you want the subject to be specifically related to what you write about on your blog. The reason for this is that you get to place two links in the signature box at the end of your articles. This is pretty much the whole reason you want to write for article directories: building links to your work.

Once your article is approved, it will be live and should soon get some search traffic to it. This will in turn send some traffic to your blog via you signature links. Other web publishers can re-publish your work on their own websites as long as they include the links to your site, which can further increase the amount of links you get to your work.

How to Get Click Through Traffic from Article Directories.

It is always nice to see high rates of click-through traffic on your ezine articles. One way to increase clicks on your links is by writing in such a way that your reader still wants more information and will naturally want to click your link as a means to finding it.

In my last post I used the example of home brewing beer so I’ll continue that here. Your article may be about how to brew beer properly or some things to know for beginners. You may write in your signature something like this (with the link in quotes):

Read more about how to choose the best “Home Brewing Kits.” Also, learn more tips and tricks to getting started “Brewing Beer at Home.”

Both links can be to different posts on your blog, or one can be to a post and the other can be to the homepage domain. You want to also make sure to use keyword-rich anchor text. The first link in the above example could lead to a review of several “home brewing kits,” while the second may be to the homepage, which may be more general in theme, which is why you use the text “”Brewing Beer at Home.” It really depends on what your target keywords are. In this example, you would

Keyword-rich links are good for off-site SEO and will help your site in the SERPS. If you’re looking to gain traffic to your site, both direct and long term, article directories are a good place to start.

Article Length

400 to 500 words is the optimal length for these articles.

It can be frustrating getting started at Article directories–at least for me it was–because your work may be rejected for not reaching the publisher’s standards. They don’t want spammy or keyword-stuffed content, which is part of the reason these directories maintain their high quality reputations, which are reflected in PR and search engine rankings.

6 Online Business Myths that are Way Off

chris — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 03:27:33 +0000

Just like any other human venture, online business is burdened with collective beliefs, common knowledge, and myths that just are not true. Here are a few of the myths.

1) Succeeding in online business is easy. This may be a point that I haven’t quite hammered home on this site. In fact, I may make internet business seem a little easier than it really is. This is far from the truth. Internet business is just as hard as any business out there, just as competitive, and can be just as demoralizing. That being said, if you are a superstar or a hard worker with great ideas, you will climb to the top.

2) Online business takes a different skill set than “normal” business. Online business is just that, business. Everyone who has a website talks about “social media” and “web 2.0″ and the amazing benefits tools like Facebook and Twitter create for online businesses. These tools do create a lot of amazing opportunity for those who know how to use them to stay connected to their audience.

But if you don’t know how to connect to people in the first place or have a valuable service or product to offer, then these tools are not going to magically help you get your message out and make sales for you.

If you have sales skills or marketing skills or the ability to rally people around you, then you will be able to transition right into the internet business world. The same rules apply. Create a great product, give great service, and find the people interested in your product. Hit it out of the park for people, and you will win.

The only difference is that instead of having customers come into your store on the street, your store is now visiting your target audience via computer screen in their living rooms. Or on a beach in Jamaica that has wifi.

3) Online business is for tech people. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Sure, it helps to have someone who knows their way around a computer, but internet tools are so easy to use that you really do not need much technical or design expertise. If you can use a keyboard and a mouse and are willing to put in the effort and learn about things you don’t know much about, then you will be able to create a viable online business.

Working on the internet can also consist of your direct skill set. ?If you’re a writer, you can start a freelance writing business, and if you are a web designer or social media pro, you can do the same. ?You can even become an information entrepreneur and create informative blogs based on different themes and monetize them in many different ways. ?For the content writers out there, read my post about how to make money with Hubpages.

4) Internet marketing is just spam. Sure there is a lot of spam out there, but there are hundreds of thousands of legitimate companies doing business online. Every single brand name company has an internet presence. If they don’t, then they don’t exist. There is nothing shady about doing business online. In fact, I would be surprised if in two years you will be able to do any business at all without using the internet.

As people gravitate more and more to the web to do their shopping, to find their directions, to communicate with their friends, and to plan trips and flights, there will be more opportunities for online businesses of all kinds. If you aren’t preparing your small business for an all-internet world, then you may be left behind.

5) I can’t start an online business because the Internet is too crowded. The internet is crowded and it gets more crowded every day. But guess what, the streets of your town are also crowded with businesses, but new businesses start and old businesses fold every day.

Google and other search engines are becoming better at weeding out the fraudulent, worthless, and spam sites, which makes it easier for the high quality online businesses to shine. Search engine traffic is a huge part of success on the internet and if you play by the rules and create a great product, service, or entertainment, you will rise to the top, as the cream often does.

6) I don’t have time to start my online business. Building an online presence for your small business is vital to your success going forward. There are few companies that will be able to avoid doing business online. A website or an e-commerce store selling your product should be a priority for you.

A good (and easy way) to start is by creating a blog. You can even do it for free. Start a free blog at blogger.com or wordpress.com, find a custom theme online so it looks a little more professional, and start pumping out content and your message. There are so many things you can do with a blog to promote your company and your brand. Even just getting out there and promoting yourself will help you a great deal.

Just like in anything, the people who work the hardest and test different ways of doing business to find what works will be the most successful. The thing that the internet does for business is the same thing it does for communication–it speeds it up. This means that you can rise quickly, but you can fall just as quickly.

One of the best things the internet provides though is free access to your target audience. You can find and reach out to your community on so many fronts, it’s ridiculous. And you can do much of this for free because all it takes it time and the willingness to do good work. Getting your message out and driving targeted traffic to your web presence are both important element in the online game. But having an amazing product or service is the most important thing.

Create an amazing product with a great story behind it and that fulfills a human need or solves a problem in an interesting or new way, and you just might be the next online success story.

Make Money Online with Hubpages Part 2: Backlinks

chris — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:15:21 +0000

This piece is about one strategy you can use to help you make money online with Hubpages.

Hubpages, as you may know, is a website where you can publish content and earn money for your work. Read my first article about the site at the link above, then come back to this one. Or just read on.

You can write about anything you want and have the option edit your content anytime you feel like it. One of the best parts about making money with Hubpages is that you can earn residual income for as long as the website is around, and it will be around for a long time.

There are many reasons why writing at Hubpages is a worthwhile endeavor for you if you are trying to make money with an online business, or have a blog you want to create links to, or just want to write some content and earn some income from it.

First of all, Hubpages is a well-respected site that gets a lot of love from search engines. Writing at hubpages is like having a head start in the search engine wars. This brings up an important point. One of the main elements that will allow you to make money online is traffic. Traffic is the lifeblood of internet marketing and online business.

Look at it as a store owner would. The more people you get to come into your store, the more sales you will make. This can be translated into Adsense clicks, affiliate sales, or referrals in the online environment. Traffic is a key part of the game. And the more targeted this traffic is, the higher the probability you have of getting a conversion or having an action occur. Obviously there is more to making money on the internet: copywriting, branding, actually having something of value to provide, or in this case, providing useful well-written and highly searchable content. But high traffic numbers is how websites become online money-making machines.

One of the strategies to writing on Hupbages and earning money from your efforts is to write more than one “hub” on the same topic. The more you write about the same thing, the more likely you will look like an authority on that subject. Obviously, to write a lot of content about the same thing, you probably will actually have to be an expert on that subject. But you can also learn as you go. Writing is one of the best ways to learn things and solidify ideas in your mind.

Writing about the same topic will also give you more opportunity to increase the rankings of similar content. Say you have an 800-word authoritative hub about the best ski resorts in California. You spent a lot of time researching keywords, reading about the resorts, and clearly presenting the information to your readers. This can be a very good piece of content for you. If you have three or four other related hubs, you can use them to create anchor text links to give your authority hub a little bit of a boost and create some more traffic to it.

Your “support” pages should be directly related to the main authority page you are looking to link to. In the example I use above about ski resorts, these can be pieces more specific to certain resorts. One could be about Mammoth and another could be about Vail. If the main keyword phrases (and related ones) you are working with are also strong in these pages, and even in the title, then links out from them will be even stronger.

When you create your links, you want to create anchor text using the phrases you are focusing on. In the example used here, the phrase you would want to link out to your main hub would be “best ski resorts in California.” It is much better to be descriptive in the hotlink you create, rather than just linking with text like, “see my other article about this topic here.”

You can do this with several of your hubs to create several relevant links that will give the page you want to promote more direct traffic and relevant keyword links that will help move it up the in search engine rankings. The more targeted keywords and links are, the more likely they will be of interest to web visitors and the more money you will make online.

Websites (and web pages) that adhere to web standards of copywriting, search engine optimization, and linking practices are more valuable than those that don’t. If you think from the point of view of a potential web surfer and do your best to create informative, well-written content that is useful, then you will be successful.

Remember that content is king and high value content will gain more natural links from other websites and more return traffic. The more effort you put into your content on the front end, the easier the entire process will be for you. When writing your hubs, take the time to make them as helpful, informative, and unique as possible.

How to Make Money Online with Hubpages

chris — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:30:32 +0000

Hubpages is a website where you can write about whatever you want and earn money for your efforts. This is the one line explanation of the site, but there is quite a bit more to it.

You earn money when you gain traffic to your site and that traffic clicks on advertisements that display on the page. For this reason, traffic is one of the most important elements that will help you make money online with Hubpages. Making money online is really no easy feat, but there are quite a few ways to do it.

You can obviously provide a service or sell a product. You can also do online copywriting or freelance writing. I have been watching the site for a while, and I think that if you can learn how to use Hubpages to make money, ie, you learn how to create “hubs” that gain traffic, convert traffic to ad clicks or affiliate sales, and rise to the top of the search engine rankings, then you will know a great deal about internet marketing. And this experience will help you out a lot in whatever kind of business you get into online.

In the online environment, it’s all about words. Words are where search engines can really dig in and find relevant information for web surfers. Because of this, online marketing or making money online is often dependant on writing.

People write a lot about writing for humans versus writing for search engines. I think it’s important to do both, meaning that you do have a focus on certain keywords, but you don’t want to write in such a way that the content is unreadable for a human being. You always want to write for people first, and for search engine bots second. There is a lot of value in enticing people not only to read your content, but to come back and read it again.

However, that being said, there is also a lot of value in enticing viewers to your work in order to encourage a click through on Adsense. There is nothing wrong with doing this, but if you write really hacky articles that are filled only with keywords and nothing else your work will be weeded out by Google and send to search oblivion. If people can’t find your work, then you won’t make any money.

Hubpages is a good place to write because you immediately get a boost in rank when you publish a piece because the site is well respected by Google as a network that produces informative and helpful user-generated content. Hubpages does a good job of policing itself in terms of eliminating crap content and making sure their advertising networks run smoothly and there’s no fraudulent activity going on. As a result, your content will be indexed by search engines a lot quickly than if you started your own blog and wrote something. It could take you months to get a few readers to an article on your own site, whereas it may take hours or a day or two to get readers to your hub.

How to Make Money with Hubpages.

First, you have to sign up. If you haven’t yet, sign up here. Then come back here and read the rest of this two part article–I promise it will help you.

The way you earn money on hubpages is through the Google Adsense program and affiliate links through eBay and Amazon. You can also earn with an advertising network called Kontera, but don’t worry about it for now because it really doesn’t pay that well. If you are a savvy internet marketer, you can also make money on Hubpages with your own affiliate links to third party websites.

You split revenue with Hubpages 60/40 in your favor. The way this works is 6 times out of 10 your ID is used in the advertisements, which means you will earn on a click or sale made during this time. The other 4 times Hubpages has the potential to earn money for an action taken. People sometimes think that the total revenue is just split 60/40, but that’s not the case. Your ID is used randomly 6 times out of 10. It is a generous pay structure and there are quite a few people making good money at Hubpages.

Hubpages is a great place to start writing online, and even making money online. I mentioned earlier that you want to use keywords in your articles in order to be competitive and gain traffic to your work—because that’s what you need to do if you want to make any money. The way you do this is imagine what someone would type into a search engine in order to find the information you are providing.

If you were going to write about “making money online by writing,” then that phrase could be the keyword phrase you would want to use in your article. The next thing you want to consider is how competitive a term is. You can do this by using the Google Keyword Tool at this URL – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This tool will show you how many times your keyword has been searched in the past month and will give you a monthly average. It will also give you ideas of related terms that may be better options for you to use because they’re less competitive. It may sound a little confusing at the beginning, but you will get the hang of it after you do keyword research a few times. You also want to look at the price paid per click, which will give you a good idea on how much money ads that will display will be worth. The figure shown is not the total that you will earn because Google keeps some of the money, but you can easily see which terms are “worth” more and which ones are worth less.

My next article will go into more depth about choosing keywords for your internet writing. But for now, write down or copy and paste two or three sets of terms and how often they are searched and what they are worth. Now, you can type the keyword phrase into Google to see how many pages pop up. This is not an exact science but it will give an idea of how much content on the internet uses the term you are searching. If 100,000,000 pages come up, there are a lot of pages about what you are planning to write about, so it may be a lot more difficult to compete and get to the top of the search engines with your page. However, if only 250,000 pages come up, you have found a niche in which you can compete and may possibly be able to “own” by getting your page to the top. This is how you make good money in internet marketing with content and Google Adsense.

If you have a specialized skillset (and we all have at least one) I highly recommend you start creating content based on it on the internet. I notice that I sometimes get a few visitors to this site who are looking for ways to make money while unemployed. Hubpages is one such way. Start writing content about your expertise. I don’t care if it’s plumbing, roofing, gardening, or investing. If you can create content that is useful to people and valuable in some way, you will be able to make money.

Once you sign up, let me know if you need some help figuring out what to write about. I’ll do my best to help you out by giving a push in the right direction in terms of keywords and ideas.

Read my 2nd post about Hubpages called Make Money with Hubpages Part 2: Backlinks.

PS. How has your experience been on Hubpages?

6 Way to Make More Money with Your Website

chris — Sat, 02 May 2009 02:23:11 +0000

Make Money with Your Website

I’ve made a commitment to write at least a couple of posts a week over here at Gainfully Unemployed, your Online Business Inspiration blog. How about that for a tagline?

Anyways, I realize that it is Friday and I have yet to achieve my two post a week quota.

Earlier today, I read a great article at Dosh Dosh, a fantastic internet marketing blog. Maki goes into 6 highly detailed steps you can use to make more money online.

The focus is on using your pageview and search data to find the most popular pages on your site. From there, the next step is to optimize these pages in order to achieve the goal you are looking to achieve.

Do you want the viewer to sign up for a subscription to your feed or to your newsletter? Do you want a qualified lead for an affiliate program? Or are you simply looking for a quick ad click-through?

I found this to be a very helpful and useful article about how to make more money with your website. If you are getting some good sustained traffic at your site, the steps Maki explains may help you. If you aren’t there yet, read step 6 about increasing your search engine ranking. Good luck. ?

Read another article about how to make money online. ?I got a bunch of ‘em. ?This one is a general one. ?Another piece you may be interested in is one about how to make money with Hubpages.

How to Make Money Online

chris — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:16:11 +0000

If you have a blog or website that is getting traffic then you may be looking to make money from that traffic. There are many different ways to make money online with a website or blog. I am not a guru or even an expert, but I’d like to share some of the things I’ve learned, which I think is some pretty good knowledge to have starting out in any kind of online business.

How to Make Money Online: Pay Per Click Advertising.

You may have heard of Google Adsense, which is a huge advertising network online. In fact, it probably is the most popular one online for a few reasons. It is rather simple to sign up and it couldn’t be easier to start using. All you have to do once you sign up (besides adhering to the Terms of Service) is put a few lines of javascript code onto your website where you want the advertisements to show. Ads will show up on your pages and will be contextually relevant, meaning they will be (or should be) related to the content published on your website. This advertising platform is popular and a lot of people do quite well with it. It is a pay-per-click ad network, which means that when someone clicks on an ad on your page, you get paid anywhere from $.01 to $10.00, although as you can imagine, the ten dollar clicks are hard to get. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get them.

Many people start with this network because it is simple to get started, but as I mentioned, it isn’t necessarily easy to make money with it. Your website needs to have a lot of daily visitors in order to receive a lot of clicks. One thing you want to keep in mind is that the advertisements displayed on your site will be related to what you write about. So, if you write about electronics you may earn more than if you write book reviews. The reason is that a high end stereo system has a higher profit margin than a paperback book, so an advertiser is willing to pay more for a click to a page selling that product. This last “rule” applies to most online advertising programs and is something to think about as you plan to monetize your website.

Chitika is another ad network that you might consider using as a way of making money with your site. It is similar to Adsense in some respects, but also very different. Many people actually use the two programs together on the same webpages as a way of complementing each other. The easiest way to start using Chitika is by creating Chitika Premium ad units (which only work from traffic from the US and Canada). This kind of ad is not contextually relevant, but rather, behaviorally targeted. This means that the advertisements displayed are related to the keywords that a visitor to your site uses to find your site. In other words, they are based on the search terms someone put into a search engine that led them to your website. This is good because the visitors who see the ads displayed on your site are more targeted by the ad, making them more likely to click them. Chitika Premium works on a pay per click model. Learn more about how Chitika works.

Pay per click programs might work well for you if you receive a lot of traffic from a click-happy audience, but you might also want to consider affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is advertising a product on your website in return for receiving a percentage of the sale amount. This is typically a lot larger than what you may make with other programs, but keep in mind that it is harder to get someone to actually purchase something in contrast to convincing them to click an ad, which is basically just selling their attention for a few moments or minutes. Affiliate marketing is really a different animal and the people who are very successful with this kind of online sales often create email lists, know the importance of copywriting and sales pages, and have knowledge of other less basic sales tactics. But if there is a product that fits in really well with what you write about, it is definitely worth it to create a link to it from your home page or display a banner ad. What might work better is writing a review of the product and posting it on your website.

How to Make Money Online: In-Text Advertising

Have you ever come across a website or blog posting that has a word or a phrase underlines by two blue or green lines? When you hover over the text, a box pops up with a link to a product. This is another form of internet advertising that many people are starting to use as a way to add to their online earnings. If you display this type of ad on you website, you get paid per click. Two companies that run this kind of service are Kontera and InfoLinks.

It is fairly easy to implement this kind of ad to your website–all you have to do is put a few lines of code into the template of your site. Results with this kind of advertising is very mixed. The amount of money you earn really depends on what “niche” you write in, but even then, from my experience, results vary wildly from one day to the next. I wouldn’t really even consider this type of ad if you are just getting started.

How to Make Money Online: Affiliate Marketing.

Two popular affiliate networks are Clickbank and Commission Junction. Clickbank has hundreds maybe thousands of digital products that you can choose from and immediately display links to. If someone purchases a given product through your link, you receive a certain amount of payment. This is a very easy way to get started with affiliate marketing because you can find products you may be able to sell and you don’t have to wait for approval from the creator or the website.

Commission Junction is another affiliate marketing network that is different from Clickbank in many ways, but one of the biggest differences is that they have a lot of well-known name brands with products that you can try to sell. Most of the companies require approval before you can display ads for their products, which means they look at what websites you own in order to determine if you will be a good fit for their program. For some, you will be automatically approved.CJ is also very easy to use, that is to say, it’s easy to implement, not always easy to make money with. Once you are accepted by a chosen company, you gain access to their “creative”: banners and links that may help you sell the product or promote the company. You actually have quite a bit of latitude in how you display their ads. You may want to put a banner ad at the top of the page or in the sidebar and just see what happens, or you may want to include links within your articles and posts.

Some companies that work with CJ are Blockbuster Online, Zappos, Citibank Credit Cards, and hundreds of other companies, many of which you probably recognize. Internet marketing is a tricky business, but there are thousands of ways to make money at it if you learn how to do it. It just takes a little time to learn about the internet sales environment. If you like to test out different methods of selling and don’t mind constantly tweaking your websites in order to optimize them for the best sales, then you will do fine in internet marketing and affiliate sales.

Another way to become an affiliate is to work directly with a company that specializes in one business that you can plug your traffic stream into. One such company is LeadFlash, which specializes in payday loan leads. This is a very smart route to go because the more you can “niche down” or make the thing your selling as targeted as possible, the more sales you will be able to make.

How Do I Start to Make Money Online?

The best way to start making money online is by building an audience. So how do you build an audience? One way to do this is by creating quality content. Well-written posts will not only attract people to your website, but they will also bring the same people back. And when people are impressed with your work or it is useful to them, they may want to share it with their friends and save it to social networking websites. Word of mouth can really help your site grow. Think about the three or four websites that you visit every single week. What are the owners and writers of these sites doing that brings you back? Figure that out and do your best to replicate it. When you land on a website, you often know within a few seconds whether or not you “trust” the site you are on. If you don’t trust the site you are on or relate to it in some way, you’re not going to stick around very long.

The most successful sales people look at their products and sales strategies with the purchaser in mind, not from their own point of view. You are trying to make money by selling something or want to promote a product that you like, but you need to evaluate why someone would want to buy it. What need does it fill? What is the conversation you need to start in order to present the product in the right way? Who are you talking to? Who is the person who is going to buy this product? This is why it helps you immensely to sell a product (or write a blog with pay per click ads) related to something you are familiar with or better yet a product that you yourself would buy. That way you can easily relate to other people who want to buy it.

Creating great content and then promoting it will help you gain an audience and will slowly (or quickly if you’re lucky) move your site up in the search engine rankings. The higher your site pops up in Google, Yahoo, MSN, or Ask, the more traffic you’ll get. This brings me back to the first point I made in this article: you need traffic in order to make money online.