The Make Money Online Blog

It seems like everyone is always struggleing to make some extra cash.  Most of the time, people either work to get a promotion, or take on a second job in order to supplement their income.

But ideally, the most favorable situation has to do with makeing a steady, passive income while putting forth a minimal amount of effort.

And no other venue is better for that than the internet!

Making money on the internet is quickly becoming one of the fastest, cheapest, and most popular ways to make an extra income.  If you think about it, the internet gives you a world-wide reach to customers,a nd allows you to create a storefront that is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Best of all - the internet allows you to automate a great many tasks, so once your website is set up and ready to go, it needs very little of your time to keep it profitable.

Unfortuneately, lots of people have no idea just how valuable the internet is when it comes to making a supplemental income.  They think it might be too complicated and require some knowledge of computer programming.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The fact is, nowadays you don’t need to know anything about computers to start an online business.  You don’t even need to create any products or fulfill any orders!

You can become what’s known as an “affiliate marketer.”

This is someone who has a website, and refers the people who visit his website to the websites of merchants, and they then collect a percentage of any sales the people they send to that website make.

So for instance, if you have a website and you send a visitor to Amazon.com to buy a Harry Potter book, you’ll get a small percentage of that purchase.

The more people you send to the website to make a purchase, the more money you make.

In this sense, the affiliate marketer is very much like a “middle man.”  He matches up buyers with products they are looking for, and he takes a cut of any resulting sale.  Think of it as being an “online broker.”

Being an affiliate marketer is ideal for many people because you don’t have to create products, provide customer support, go to an office, or anything you’d have to do at a “normal” job.  In fact, you can do it in the comfort of your own home.

To make money online as an affiliate, you need a few things:

1.  A computer with an internet connection

Just like you can’t be a mechanic without tools, you can’t be an affiliate marketer without a computer and a connection to the internet.

2.  A Website

In order to make money online, you need someplace people can go to in order to be exposed to your content.  A website is pretty much a necessity if you want to make money on the internet.

The best affiliate websites provide useful content to the people who visit them, and the websites grow naturally over time, thus providing the users with more and more content.

Affiliate websites should be on-topic, easy to read, easy to navigate, and kept up-to-date with current information.

3.  The right products to promote

The internet is such a huge space, you’ll find that you have a great many options available to you when it comes to what to promote on your website.

Because there are so many products out there, what you’ll find is that some products and services are good to promote and very profitable - and others are complete duds.

Once you find a good product that people want to buy, you’ll want to promote it as much as possible on your website.  If you are promoting a product that isn’t making you money, you should get rid of it and find a new one.

4.  Website visitors

Finally, you’ll need people to come to your website who will eventually buy the products and services you recomment.

You can have the best looking website in the world, but if no one visits it, it will never make you any money.

Luckily, getting people to traffic your website on the internet is not difficult, and there are many different ways to attract people to it.

The first, and fastest, is to buy advertising online.  You can have your ads appear on search engines and other websites that will attract people to your site.

But if you don’t have the money to advertise, you can still get a lot of free traffic by doing link exchanges and gearing your website towards specific keywords that people are searching for.

When you have all four of these factors, making money on the internet can not only be easy, but incredibly profitable as well.

Trying to make money on the internet can be an exciting task, but too often, affiliate marketers make some major mistakes when they are first starting out that can affect their ability to pull in that coveted internet income.

If you can learn to avoid these common mistakes beginners make, you’ll find your affiliate efforts will be much more profitable.

Mistake #1:  Trying To Do Too Much At Once

New affiliates can be so motivated to start making money on the internet, they’ll jump from one tactic to the next, trying anything they can to get massive amounts of new traffic to their website.

But while they’re trying every new traffic tactic under the sun, they are neglecting the fundamentals of pre-selling and offering valuable content to their users.

Not only that, but never taking the time to focus on one type of traffic source means that nothing they do will ever be extremely effective.

It is best to focus on the fundamentals of making your site a valuable resource, and mastering one avenue of traffic generation, before focusing your efforts on something else.

Mistake #2:  Selling Too Hard

In their desire to make money, many new affiliates try and push the products they are offering on their site far harder than they should be.

The affiliate begins making a sales pitch to his site visitor rather than offer anything of value.  Because of this, fewer people will tend to buy through the affiliate’s website.

Good pre-selling techniques involve offering a fair and balanced review of products and services, and sharing with the site visitor why the affiliate feels one product or service is worth buying over the others.

But more importantly than that, it’s about convincing the site visitor that the affiliate knows what he’s talking about, and that the site visitor should listen to the affiliate.  This is far more important that “pitching” whatever products you have chosen to promote.

Mistake #3:  Not Tracking Sales

Lots of affiliates just throw up websites and don’t bother to find out where their sales are coming from.

But if you take the time to figure out what advertising is making you money, and what keyword terms are bringing you the most traffic, and what affiliate programs convert the best - you are then better able to optimize your website to make you the most money possible.

When you ignore these factors, not only do you miss out on potential sales, but you could also be wasting valuable time and money on efforts that won’t bear fruit.

Mistake #4:  Promoting Products That Have Nothing To Do With Your Site

Some new affiliates will try and cater to every possible type of consumer on the internet by offering any product they think would appeal to people.

What most affiliates don’t realize is that a website geared towards a specialized niche is far more effective than a website that tries to be everything to everybody.

For instance, a website geared entirely towards Golf is far more effective that a website geared towards Golf, Cooking, Tattoos, and Sausage Making.

Keep your website tightly focused, and don’t stray from your market by offering new affiliate programs that have nothing to do with your website.

Mistake #5:  Promoting Too Many Products

Some affiliate are so desperate for money, they’ll sign up for as many affiliate programs as possible in an attempt to find something that will make them some cash.

However, by signing up for a lot of programs, they are actually doing the opposite.

If a website overwhelms its visitors with too many choices, they just won’t buy anything.  Affiliate sites that focus on one to three programs at the most are the ones that are effective in getting people to buy.

Narrow your focus and sell only the products you feel offer the most value to your site visitor, and you’ll find your conversions will increase dramatically.

The longer you work at being an affiliate marketer, the more you’ll realize what mistakes to avoid.  Don’t be afraid to try new things - even if they may not work - but always realize when it’s time to cut your losses and move on.

One of the fastest ways to get traffic to your website is to buy it.  As an advertiser, you have a lot of different avenues available to you on the internet, but none is more powerful than Google.

Google gets over 30% of all internet search traffic - one of the largest search engines in the world.  But in addition to that, the Google Content network covers over 64% of the internet!  This means that your ad for your small website can get massive exposure all accross the internet, almost overnight.

Unfortuneately, Google’s advertising solution, Adwords, can seem confusing and daunting to people who aren’t familiar with it.  Horror stories abound about people who want to get traffic to their website, and end up spending thousands of dollars on Adwords without making any money in return.

But if you know the right way to use Google Adwords, not only will your website get a lot of traffic, you’ll also save a lot of money.  Here are some tips to help you use Google to your advantage…

Google Tip 1:  Do Good Keyword Research

Keywords are the lifeblood of internet commerce.  The right keywords can make you millions.  The wrong ones can cost you millions.  So it’s important to find the right ones quickly, and stop paying for the wrong ones.

You can use Google’s keyword tool to find keywords to bid on, but you’ll want to make sure your keywords are relevant to your website.  For instance, if your site is about training dogs, bidding on keywords about cats is probably a bad idea.

Try and find as many keywords as you can that are related to your market.  The more keywords you have, the greater the chances of you finding a winner.

Google Tip 2:  Write Winning Ads

Having a good ad is just as important as having good keywords.  With a bad ad, you won’t get any traffic (or worse yet, lots of traffic and no sales!).

Google has very strict standards for the ads they display, so it can be challenging writing ads that meet their guidelines at first.  Just remember this ad-writing tip:

Create a headline that gets attention, and create body text that gives people a reason to click on your ad.

Simple, right?

Don’t be afraid to write more than one ad and test out which one does the best.

Google Tip 3:  Set A Reasonable Daily Budget

Setting a daily budget for your campaigns is what gives you a great amount of control over what you spend.  If you can’t afford to spend a lot of money, set your daily budget low - but not so low that you’re just wasting funds.

A good starting point is $50 per day.  That should give your ads enough time to display during the day without putting you into the poor house.

Google Tip 4:  Track Conversions

If you don’t track what keywords are making you sales, you’ll never know which keywords to get rid of.  Google offers conversion tracking, and it is vital to learning which keywords are duds and which are winners.

As you begin to eliminate keywords that aren’t converting, you’ll see that you’re spending less money and making more money.

A good rule of thumb is that if a keyword gets 200 clicks without a conversion, it’s a dud and should be shut off.

Google Tip 5:  Seperate The Search And Content Networks

Google’s content network traffic is much bigger than it’s search traffic.  If you create a campaign in which your keywords are showing on both, you may be hitting your daily budget to quickly.

By seperating the search and content network into two seperate campaigns, you have a greater flexibility to not only manage the bids for your keywords on each respective network, but also control your daily ad spend a lot more precicesly.

So for instance, if you notice the content network gets more clicks but less sales, you can lower the daily budget to spend less.  If you notice the search network is making lot sof sales, you can increase your daily budget to get more of that traffic, without worrying that you’ll get flooded with junk traffic from the content network.

Google Adwords can be a very powerful tool to get traffic to your website.  If you can master it, you’ll be able to make incredible amounts of money in no time.