How To Make Money Online, Three Basic Ingredients Needed
Rome was not built in a day. It takes nine months after conception to be born. Learning how to make money online takes time but with the right attitude and all the free tools available to you, your online success can very well be at an arm's length. You have to put the time to get the price. In this article I will try to put the pieces of the puzzle together by breaking it down in three basic steps, elaborating on each one of them.
Step 1 Finding A Hot Item To Sell
So finding a hot product to sell, picking a winner can be time consuming but well worth the effort. First you must decide if you are going to sell your own product or someone else's product through affiliate marketing for a commission. The second option is a much better choice for most internet marketers and the one I will be discussing here. You can choose to sell a physical product from affiliate networks such as CJ (Commission Junction), Click Galore to name a few or a digital product from a company like Clickbank Marketplace, which is the most popular affiliate network with over 35,000 digital products to promote, offering up to 75% commission on each sales. The idea behind affiliate marketing is a simple one. All you have to do is create a great looking landing page, site or blog with a lot of original and interesting content to promote the product.
A very popular method is to write a great honest review of the product you're promoting to pre-sell your visitors. You can actually make the purchase yourself so you can accurately review the product first hand. You have to gain the trust of your customers by presenting them with the facts, the pros and cons, you need to stress the benefits and come across as an expert in the field. Once your landing page is ready all you need to do is strategically place the affiliate links on it to send the potential customers to the affiliate site with a buying frame of mind. You don't need to worry about payments, shipping etc. all you do is refer the pre-sold visitor to the seller site and they take care of the rest.
But How do I know if a product is selling well before investing time and money for promotion you may ask, no body really knows for sure what is behind the curtain and if they did they wouldn't tell you anyways. The best way to promote a Clickbank program is through trial and error, if you choose to promote a digital product, try picking a product with a high gravity. The higher the gravity means the more money affiliates are making from the product, it also means that the competition is stiff and this is where keywords strategy comes in. I won't get into it in this article. You can also promote a low gravity product that may sell very well indeed even if the gravity is low and not to many affiliate marketers are promoting it. A good way to test the water is to track the hops count (the hits to the affiliate sales page coming from your site) by using ClickBank tracking system. A rule of thump is, never discard a product until you get at least 200 hops without a sale. You can find out more about Clickbank products trend at cbtrends.com.
Step 2 Tons Of Traffic, Promoting the day light out of it
The key to the kingdom is traffic, I cannot say it enough, I am sure you heard it before, targeted traffic is king. There are several ways to get paid and free traffic to your site or blog . You can purchase traffic by opening a PPC (pay per click) account with the big names such as Google AdWords ,Yahoo Search Marketing (Panama system) MSN Adcenter, Adbrite, Miva, Searchfeed etc. When setting up a campaign you need to do keyword research in order to find the best targeted keywords at the lowest possible price for your niche. Low site competition and high enough number of daily search is a big plus. Paid directories and articles submission are also popular, paid press releases, etc.
Free traffic generating methods or organic search are mainly accomplished by submitting articles to free articles directories such as EzineArticles, Go Articles, Article Base and many more in order to get free backlinks to your site. Directories submission is another popular method, traffic exchange is also a famous way to drive targeted free traffic to your site by exchanging a link with a similar site. Classified ads and social networks such as MySpace.com, Digg.com, Twitter.com, Squidoo.com are well known to drive extra traffic to your website. You can also try Kijiji.com and Craigslist.org but make sure your read their ad policies and follow their guidelines.
Step 3 Sticking To Your Plan
Sticking to your plan might be the most important step to your online success. No matter what direction you decide to take towards making your fortune online, you must give yourself enough time to test your chosen method before jumping on the next project. For example, if your plan is to get into affiliate marketing by promoting digital products from Clickbank, then find yourself three products to promote and concentrate on these chosen products for a good solid month depending on the amount of time you can spare everyday building your online business. If you decide to drive the majority of your traffic via the free traffic generating methods mentioned above, then stick to these methods even if they are extremely boring and monotonous. You need at least thirty good long tail keywords per product with low competition and high daily search in order to write thirty great content articles about these keywords per selected products to generate enough traffic to give you a pretty good idea if the products you chosen are worth promoting. How to make money online require a lot of persistence and perseverance to see your plan through in order to achieve success, others have done it, so can you.
