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Help me make this guide even better! The simple goal of this guide is to show you, whether you are a complete computer newbie or experienced veteran, how to start making some extra money online using the same strategies I use. The first version of this guide was released in late April of 2008. I tried to make it as user friendly and easy to follow as possible and although it makes perfect sense in my mind as I read through it, I realize it may not to you and there is always room for improvement.Therefore, I will update this guide regularly, to provide you with the most current information and strategies I am aware of and also in an attempt to make it more user friendly and easy to follow. What I would like to ask you the readers to do, is help me in this process. I need feedback from you so that I know what areas I need to work on. I have set up a poll on the right side of this screen where you can rate this guide and also a comment section on my blog where you can review this guide. |
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Please take just a moment after you've finished the guide to tell me what you thought about the guide. You can vote in the poll on the right and/or leave a review on my blog by clicking here. |
Introduction
Welcome to my guide on How to Get Started Making Money Online. The purpose of this guide is of course to show you how you can start making money online using some of the same strategies I have been using since May of 2006. You have probably seen the products on the internet that promise you a 6 figure income working an hour a day from your home office. These programs usually are ridiculously expensive and generally do not provide any useful information that will make you money. That is not what this guide is!
What this guide IS
This guide is free and written for the benefit of my eBay customers, blog readers, forum members, and everyone else who has helped me get to where I am today. The strategies discussed in this guide are the exact same strategies I use and you can see live examples of them on my websites. I am also not going to lie to you and tell you that you are going to make a ton of money in a short amount of time with no work. What I do promise you though is that if you follow the strategies in this guide, you will make money online. Whether it is a couple hundred or several thousand dollars a month depends on how much effort you put into it. Another thing that makes this guide unique is that I personally will help you do the things I talk about in this guide.What About Help & Support?
I have a free support forums site that I have been running since June of 2006 where you can ask any questions that you have and get help and support. I have tried to write this guide as detailed and user friendly as possible but I know you are going to have questions along the way.Asking questions is the quickest way to learn, so come visit the forums and ask a question (even if you think it seems silly) and I and the other members who have been doing this for awhile will be glad to help!
Keeping the Guide Fresh with Frequent Updates
As I said above, this guide is a work in progress and as I learn about new ways to make money online or find ways to improve upon my current strategies, I will update the guide. I will post a message on my blog whenever updates are made and send out an email to my mailing list subscribers. If you would like to be notified of new updates, just enter your name and email address below to sign up for my free internet marketing newsletter.|
Subscribe to my free Newsletter |
If you would still like to get updates but prefer not to sign up for the newsletter, you can also get updates from my blog via RSS. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is an easy way to get updates on all the blogs you read in one place. You can find out more about RSS in this Wikipedia entry. You can subscribe to my blog with your favorite RSS reader. (I use Google Reader)
Ready to get started?
Ok, so now that I've covered a few things about what this guide is, lets get into the guide! Remember if you have any questions, need help along the way, have suggestions for ways to improve the guide or requests for new topics you would like to see covered, feel free to contact me anytime!Wishing you all the best in success,
Quick Start - Make $100 Today!
Paid surveys can be a good way to make some extra money online if you can find the right surveys to participate in. I personally don’t do a lot of paid surveys because I think my time is probably better spent putting the strategies discussed in the guide into place and thereby creating a larger recurring monthly stream of income. However, paid surveys are probably one of the easiest ways to make money online so I do find myself doing them from time to time and if you are just getting started, they are an easy way to make some money right away.
If you set aside a couple hours a week, you can easily make several hundred dollars a month just doing silly little surveys. The problem of course is finding good paying surveys that pay well. Instead of wasting a lot of time going out and searching for them myself, I use a website called GetCashForSurveys.com that finds them for me. It is a membership site with a one time fee of $37 to join but if you are going to do paid surveys, the membership fee is worth it and you can usually recoup your investment after just a few surveys. It is updated regularly and new surveys are added with each update.
Remember, the real money is made doing the things that the bulk of this guide talks about but if you want an easy way to start making some money in the meantime, paid surveys through GetCashForSurveys.com is something I recommend giving a try. You can click on the banner to find out more about the program. As I mentioned, this is the same program I use so if you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me.
Note: If you know nothing about websites, that is ok! I'm going to show you how to set up a website that requires no coding or design experience! All you have to do is type the content in simple English. With that being said, lets get started!
Before we go any further, the first thing you are going to need is your own website. If you do not know anything about websites or website design, do not let this deter you. Even if you know nothing about websites, you can create a professional looking, money generating website in a matter of minutes using some very sophisticated and free software that I’ll tell you more about in the next chapter of this ebook. Your website can be about anything you like. I have built mine around Internet Marketing but I also sell ebooks on all kinds of different subjects and your site should be about something that interests you. Vehicles, Finance, Gardening, Video Games, Photography, Computers, Travel, Celebrities, Fitness, Outdoors, etc. etc.A website on any topic can generate you a lot of money and this guide will show you how. Before you can get started though, you need to pick a domain and get a web hosting package.
I have written a Recommended Webhosting post on my blog that you can use to get a website for under $5 a month (using the 25% off promotion) so I am going to refer you to that post instead of rewriting it all here. I highly recommend you go with the package in this review. It is the same hosting company I have been using since May 2006 and therefore can show you via extensive tutorials with screenshots how to do basically anything you want to do on your website. They are very reliable with a 99.9% uptime, over 7 million websites hosted, and 24 hour phone support. Click on the banner below to get signed up using the 25% promotion. The Home Package is the best deal for the price and will provide more than enough for getting started. You can always upgrade to a larger plan later if you need to.
Try picking a domain that relates to what your site is about and keeping it as short as possible. It can be difficult finding a good domain because so many of them are already taken. You can get creative though by adding a dash or number to find an available domain. I recommend trying to get a .com domain if at all possible but you can also use a .net, .biz, .ws, etc., if the domain you want is already registered as a .com. I simply went with my initials LC, the word online, and the number 1, to come up with LCOnline1.com when I first registered with 1and1 (nothing fancy but works for me). The most important thing is building a quality site and getting traffic to your site so don’t get discouraged if the domain you had your heart set on is already taken. Add a dash or some numbers to it or go with a .net, .biz, .ws, etc., address.
Now that you have a website, it is time to set it up so it will start generating a nice recurring monthly income stream for you. Creating a traditional website can be complicated, time consuming, and expensive. Even if you learn how to create a basic site, you really need expensive software and equipment to make it look professional so that visitors are willing to give you their hard earned money. Research shows that a visitor to your site forms an opinion of a website after just a few seconds of seeing it. If it looks like junk, they are off to another site never to be heard from again. Finally, even if you manage to create a great looking site, how are people going to find it? There are millions upon millions of websites in the world. Getting traffic to your site is by far the most challenging part!
I mentioned in the first chapter that even if you know nothing about websites, you can use software to create a very sophisticated site. The software I am referring to and that I recommend that you use to get started is what is known as a content management system or CMS for short. A CMS allows you to create a website with no design experience and to add content via a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) html editor.
The CMS software that you use depends on what you want to do but I’m going to recommend two free systems that I use and will be able to walk you through the setup process. Wikipedia provides a good summary of Content Management Systems that you can read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_content_management_system
Recommended Free CMS #1 – Wordpress
Wordpress was originally designed as blogging software but with the latest releases, can be used as a full blown CMS.
A Wordpress site can be professional in every aspect. It will have a beautiful design, the content will be Search Engine Optimized, it will allow for RSS subscriptions and email subscriptions so you can retain customers who may be interested in your products but not ready to buy yet (research also shows that a visitor will visit your site several times before taking action), and keep existing customers up to date on new products and services you release.
Wordpress is the software I use to run my main LCOnline1.com site so you can check it out to see an example. You can download Wordpress from www.wordpress.org.
Note: There is also a Wordpress.com where you can create a blog that will be hosted on Wordpress.com (example: your-blog-name.wordpress.com). Running Wordpress on your own website is infinitely better so make sure you go to the .org site and download it. I’ll talk about installation instructions a couple paragraphs down.
Recommended Free CMS #2 – Joomla
If blogging is not your thing, then I recommend building your site with Joomla which I used for LCOnline1.com for about 2 years before switching to Wordpress at the beginning of this month. Joomla is very easy to use and allows you to create very professional looking sites in a matter of minutes by simply changing the theme.
The default theme included with Joomla is somewhat boring so I use and recommend Rocket Theme for my Joomla themes. It is membership site that provides one new Joomla theme each month and shows you how to make a truly beautiful looking website. You can get a 12 month membership for about $75 which may seem expensive but when you consider a lot of web designers would charge hundreds of dollars for 1 professional site, 12 awesome looking themes for just $75 is really a pretty good deal. You can also get a 3 month membership for $50. If you don’t plan on changing your site very often, this may be the better option for you. To see what a Joomla site can look like, check out the demo pages on Rocket Theme to get an idea of what you can do with Joomla.
Installing your CMS
Once you decide which system you want to go with, you need to install it on your 1and1 website. This is actually very simple with 1and1 and the whole process can be done in about 15 minutes. First of all you need to download either Wordpress or Joomla from their websites and unzip the files to your computer. Next you need to upload the files to your website using an FTP client, I recommend and use Filezilla which is free. Then you need to create a MySQL database in your 1and1 account. Now direct your browser to the directory you just installed your CMS into and start the installation process, copying your MySQL database settings to the installation screen when prompted. Once the installation is complete, you’ll be given an administrator user name and password that you’ll use to log into your CMS so that you can start adding content.I have a lot of experience with both Wordpress & Joomla so if you need any help or have questions about the setup process with a 1and1 website, or need help designing your site, just post a question in the Everything About Websites category in the support forums and I’ll be glad to help! If you’d like, I can even install this software for you. Just shoot me a PM (private messege) on the community forums if you are interested.
Wordpress Recommendations
Feedburner RSS and Subscription Features – Feedburner (recently purchased by Google) is a free service that helps you promote and monetize your blog. It allows you to add easy RSS subscription options and a lot of other cool features that will help you get a lot more traffic to your site thereby greatly increasing the revenue your site will produce.
Joomla Recommendations
As I mentioned earlier, Rocket Theme is a membership site that provides you new beautiful Joomla themes each month. The look of your site greatly affects how much money your site can make. No one wants to buy something from a site that looks like junk. So spend a few dollars and get a subscription to Rocket Theme and make a beautiful site that can realize its full money-making potential.
Recommendations for both Joomla & Wordpress
Aweber Opt-In Mailing List – Many internet marketers will tell you that the most valuable asset of their online business is their opt-in mailing list. If you don’t have a strategy in place to retain the visitors that come to your site, you’re missing out on a ton of revenue. Maybe a visitor finds your site and is interested but not ready to take action by buying one of your products that particular day. By adding an opt-in mailing list to your website, you can capture an interested visitor’s email address and give them periodic updates on what’s going on with your site, what new products you are releasing, etc., etc. Research shows that most people need to visit a site multiple times before deciding to buy. A mailing list is the absolute best way to ensure that those visitors come back and do buy. I recommend Aweber for your opt-in mailing list. They allow you to send out an unlimited amount of emails to your subscribers for a base monthly fee. You can even write your emails in advance and set them to be sent on a certain date at a certain time. An unsubscribe link is automatically inserted at the bottom of each email sent out so you never have to worry about any spam complaints. They also provide detailed statistics showing when and where a subscriber signed up for your mailing list, how many people are reading your emails, and how many are clicking on the links in your emails. 24 hour phone support, live chat with customer service, and tips on how to maximize the success of your mailing lists are also provided.
About Me / This Site Page – Take a few minutes and write up an About Me or About This Site page for your website. Visitors want to know more about your site and this is a good way to tell them about who you are and what you do.
Members Forum (optional) – Another thing you should consider is adding a member’s forum to your website so visitors can talk to each other about whatever it is your website is. Build a large enough community and your forum will become the place to hang out and to meet and talk with people from around the world who share common interests. Then you can add several affiliate links throughout your forums and you will be set! I use phpBB which is free forum software that you can add to your 1and1 website very easily. It is very similar to the installation process for Wordpress or Joomla, you download the software and unzip it, upload it to your 1and1 site, create a MySQL database, and then navigate your browser to the directory you just uploaded the files to and follow the installation instructions. If you have any questions, just ask in the support forums and I’ll be happy to point you in the right direction.
Part 1 - Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is the easiest way to make money on your website. Whatever your site is about Vehicles, Finance, Gardening, Video Games, Photography, Computers, Travel, Celebrities, Fitness, Outdoors, etc. etc., there are companies who sell products related to your website topic who are willing to pay you a generous commission to send potential customers their way. The best thing is that you can send one, one thousand, or one million customers to your affiliate and never have to create, ship, or handle customer service issues for any of these products. So how do you get started with affiliate marketing? Well, first you need to find some affiliate products that you want to promote on your website. Now I’ll show you some of the affiliate programs I use and that you can use to get started.
eBay’s Affiliate Program is a great place to get started as eBay likes to say, “You can find anything on eBay.” There are millions upon millions of items listed on eBay and you can promote any of them and receive 50% of eBay’s revenue just for sending them customers. To get started, you should have an eBay account. If you don’t already have an eBay account, you can get one for free at eBay.com. The next thing to do is to sign up for eBay’s Affiliate Program. Then you can start using the tools that eBay provides to add affiliate links to live eBay listings directly to your Wordpress or Joomla website. eBay also provides really informative video tutorials and help sections to help you get started.
Amazon’s Affiliate Program (they call it their Associate Program), like eBay, gives you essentially an unlimited amount of products to promote and pay out up to 10% for each customer referred.
Commission Junction is a leading affiliate marketing company that handles the affiliate programs for some of the internet’s largest companies including Buy.com, Home Depot, Circuit City, Experian and Yahoo and thousands of others. While eBay and Amazon handle their own affiliate programs, Commission Junction represents thousands of companies that you can choose from and receive all your commissions in a single place which are sent out via check or direct deposit twice a month. Some Commission Junction advertisers must approve your site before accepting you into their affiliate program. This is where having a quality Wordpress or Joomla site full of great content will pay off! Commission Junction is where the bulk of my affiliate commissions come from. I like to promote products from CJ because most of their customers offer a set dollar amount for each referral instead of just a percentage like eBay and Amazon. For example, if you have a financial website you can sign up as a Citi affiliate and promote one of their credit cards and they will pay you $25 for each customer that fills out an application.
Linkshare is another leading affiliate marketing company like CJ that handles the affiliate programs for a lot of large companies. It is very similar to CJ with the main difference being the customers they represent.
and lots of others.
You can find out more about Linkshare and their advertisers at www.linkshare.com.
Commission Junction and Linkshare are the two affiliate programs your should join if you want to advertise for the large, well-known companies.
Clickbank manages affiliate programs for individuals and companies who sell digital items (eBooks, Software, Membership Sites, etc.). Clickbank products pay out a percentage of the total product cost but because these items are digital and costs nothing for the creator to reproduce or ship, you’ll find the commission to be much more generous than eBay or Amazon (50% - 75% on average and sometimes higher). So if you refer a buyer to a $60 item with a 75% payout, you’ll receive $45. If you are running an internet marketing, ebook, or computer / internet related website, you’ll definitely want to sign up for clickbanks affiliate program.
These are the main companies that I use for my affiliate marketing business. There are hundreds of others out there but you should be able to get a good start with the 5 programs I’ve just mentioned. Basically they all work the same. You sign up for their program and pick the products you want to promote, copy the code they provide you with to your website and start referring customers. You can promote any product but I concentrate my affiliate marketing to 10 – 15 products that I personally use and have found helpful. My advice is to write up a review of the product you are promoting, explain why you recommend it and how you use it and why your visitors should use it also. Don’t fill up your entire website with ads either. Continue to add new content and make your site a place where visitors want to come for good information and then place some relevant affiliate links throughout your site and then the commissions will start to roll in.
Affiliate Marketing Strategies
Once you get started in affiliate marketing, there are all kinds of strategies you can use to increase your revenues. First of all let me re-emphasize that you need to have an aweber opt-in mailing list because it will allow you to retain existing visitors and update them when you add new content and affiliate products. For example, say over the course of a year, you build your mailing list to 10,000 subscribers. You find a new product on CJ that you want to promote that pays out a set $25 for each referral. You add a quick write up to your webpage about this product and then send out an email to all your subscribers telling them about it and inserting your affiliate link.If just 1% or 100 of your subscribers take action, you could earn 100 x $25 = $2,500 and all you had to do was send out an email!
This is what the big time internet marketers do except they have a mailing list of 100,000, a million or even more. Then they send out several emails a month with affiliate links in them and generate tens of thousands of dollars from each email. Again, like with your website, don’t just send out emails trying to push a product. Send out several informative emails a month just to tell your subscribers what’s going on and to provide information relative to your website. That way you keep your subscribers happy and interested and when the time comes to promote a product, they’ll be much more likely to take action.In addition to an opt-in mailing list, you should have another way to keep your visitors active and intersted in your site. If you are using Wordpress, the comments section is a great way to interact with your readers and make it so that reading your blog is something they do on a daily basis.
Another thing you might want to consider is adding a members forum to your website so visitors can talk to each other about whatever it is your website is. Build a large enough community and your forum will become the place to hang out and to meet and talk with people from around the world who share common interests. Then you can add several affiliate links throughout your forums and you will be set! Refer to the section in Chapter 3 on members forums for more info.
Part 2 – eBooks
Selling eBooks (electronic books) on eBay is how I got my start in Internet Marketing and accounted for the bulk of my revenues until I discovered affiliate marketing. Even though almost all of my revenues now come from affiliate marketing links, eBooks are still an intergral part of my online business because they actually are a major contributing factor to affiliate marketing commissions. That being said, I’m now going to tell you why you should also use eBooks and how you can get started.
Why you should use eBooks to maximize your revenues.
First of all ebooks are a great product to sell because they can be delivered instantly and cost nothing other than time to create. You might spend 8 hours writing an eBook on something you are knowledgable about and then start selling it on your website for $5. If you’ve built a good site and have a decent amount of traffic visiting your site on a daily basis, selling 1 ebook a day shouldn’t be to difficult. In fact you should probably be able to sell several copies a day but for this example, let’s just say you sell one each day for an entire year. $5 x 365 days / year = $1,825. When you divide that by the 8 hours it took you to create, that comes out to $228 and some change per hour! If you sell several copies a day, that will of course be much higher. This is making money by selling ebooks on the front end but the real way to make money off ebooks is on the back end!
You make money on the back end by selling ebooks by placing your affiliate links in the actual ebook and by allowing others to resell your ebooks as long as the content is not modified. You see a lot of people out there are just lazy. They don’t want to spend the 8 hours or so it takes to write an ebook, they just want to sell as many copies as they can for $5. So using the same example as above, you sell 365 copies in one year and 10% (37 people) of your customers decide to start selling the ebook too and they also sell a copy a day for the entire year. Then 10% of their customers decide to sell the ebook, etc., etc. At the end of the year there could easily be 10,000 or more copies of your ebook in circulation. If just 1% or 100 of the ebook readers take action on one of your affiliate links that pays $25, you could earn 100 x $25 = $2,500. Each year more and more resellers distribute your ebook and you start receiving thousands of dollars each month all for an ebook that took you 8 hours to write! That should be motivation enough for you to get started writing an ebook so now I’ll tell you how to do it!
How to write an ebook
Writing an ebook and inserting your affiliate links is actually pretty easy. All you need is an .html editor like CoffeeCup and an eBook Compiler program. I recommend a program called Activ E-Book Compiler. To make an ebook that will generate the type of revenue we just talked about, the most important thing is to make sure that your ebook cannot be edited. If your ebook can be edited, your resellers will just copy your work and claim it as their own and insert their own affiliate links. A lot of ebooks are distributed in the .pdf format which is great but can leave your ebook unprotected so that others can copy or print it. Activ E-Book Compiler on the other hand compiles your ebook as a .exe eBook and has built in protection features that you can use to prevent readers from copying your text and even printing your ebook. There is just no way anyone can copy or modify an eBook compiled with this software. So once you insert your affiliate links, they are there to stay! Compiling an ebook with Activ E-Book Compiler is as simple as writing your ebook in CoffeeCup and saving it. Then you open Activ E-Book, select the security features you want to enable, and build your ebook. CoffeeCup and Activ E-Book Compiler both come with a free trial so you can try them before buying. Download the CoffeeCup trial version here. Download the Activ E-Book Compiler trial version here.
How to sell an ebook
Once you’ve created your ebook you just upload it to your site and create a Paypal button so you customers can securly purchase your ebook. You should also set up your ebooks to instantly deliver themselves using a program like DLGuard or a service like e-junkie. I've been using DLGuard for a couple years now and am a big fan. It automatically sends your customers a secure download link once payment is completed that expires after a time limit or a number of download attempts that you set. The secure download hides the location of your ebook on your site and the expiring link prevents your ebook link from being distributed to others. You won't have to worry about a non-paying customer stealing your ebook with DLGuard. Another nice bonus is that DLGuard saves the customers email addresses and allows you to export them to your aweber mailing list. e-junkie also delivers secure download links that expire but without a lot of the extra features DLGuard provides. As far as pricing, DLGuard charges a one time fee of $120 or so for unlimited ebooks while e-junkie charges a monthly fee based on the number of e-books you are selling. e-junkie is cheaper initially but in the long run I think you are better off to go with DLGuard. Both are good programs though and will take care of automatically delivering your ebooks to your customers.
You can also sell your eBooks on Clickbank and start your own affiliate program offering others a commission to sell your product. This is probably the best way to get a ton of your ebooks circulating on the internet. If this is something you want to pursue, I recommend spending some time doing some research on Clickbank to get an idea of what kinds of items sell the best. Then write your ebook in Activ E-Book Compiler, choose a price you want to sell your ebook for and the commission you are willing to offer, and then register your digital item on Clickbank. Clickbank will automatically and securely handle the payments via credit card or paypal, the instant delivery of your product, and the payment to your affiliates. I recommend pricing your ebook at a minimum of $20 and offering a very generous commission (50% - 75%) to your affiliates. You won't make a lot of money from the sales that are made by affiliates, but this is the best way to attract a lot of affiliates and get a lot of copies of your ebook out there. Remember the money is made from the affiliate links and advertisements you place in your ebook! If you want to know more about selling your own digital items on Clickbank, refer to the Clickbank Publisher FAQ. If you'd like to know more about the Clickbank Publisher program or want someone to review one of your products, just post a message on the support forums and I'd be glad to help!
If you don’t feel like selling eBooks, you can also give them away. Include them as a bonus for signing up for your aweber mailing list, offer them as a free download on your website, encourage others to share them with their friends and family. Remember, the real money is made on the back end so as long as you are inserting your affiliate links or links to your other products into your ebooks, the more that are in circulation, the better!
Part 3 – Pay per click (PPC), Text-Link-Ads (TLA), and Pay-Per-Post (PPP)
Pay-Per-Click In addition to affiliate marketing and selling eBooks, another good way to earn money on your website and the simplest way is to place a few pay-per-click advertisements. PPC advertising places relevant ads on your website and you earn money everytime someone clicks on a link. This is different from affiliate marketing where a visitor has to click on an affiliate link and then buy the product for you to get paid because with PPC advertising you get paid for someone just clicking on an ad regardless of whether they buy or not. PPC usually pays a nickle to a dollar for every click so a lot of clicks will start to ad up. The most widely known pay-per-click advertising program is Google’s Adsense but there are a lot of other companies that do it. I’ve had the most luck using Adsense and Bidvertiser. PPC advertising is really simple because you just sign up, generate your code and paste it into your site. Relevant always changing ads start to appear and you never need to alter your code. Below are links and a summary to the most popular PPC programs that I recommend you get started with. You can click on the banners below for more information.
Text Link Ads
| Text Link Ads are a popular alternative to PPC advertising and works pretty much the same way. You sign up for an account, place the code on your website, and get paid everytime someone clicks on one of your ads. |
 | The two TLA programs I’ve used and recommend are TextLinkAds.com and LinkWorth. You can check out these programs by clicking on the banners. |
Note: A lot of the PPC, PPP, & TLA program I recommended above also have programs for advertisers. I’ve tried several of them with mixed experiences. The one’s that I’ve had the best luck with and recommend you starting with are listed below.
Buy Traffic using Google AdwordsIf you are interested in advertising your website on a CPC (CostPerClick) basis then Google AdWords is definitely the way to go. Your ads will be displayed as sponsored search results or on websites which are running AdSense ads.
As the name of this type of advertising (PayPerClick) suggests, you will pay for every click which is sent to your website. Generally, having a great landing page is the name of the game and AdWords campaigns should be treated as an investment: your goal should always be earning more as a result of a certain campaign than you have spent on it.
Always tweak and monitor your campaigns: there’s really no point in keeping the ones which are not performing well. Carefully analyze the market you are targeting and see which keywords and approaches work best for you.
While there are other similar networks you can try, it is a good idea to stick with AdWords if you are not experienced in PPC. Sure, you might be able to get cheaper traffic from other networks, but that traffic will not by a long shot convert as good as AdWords traffic. And what point would there to buying clicks at half price, for example, if the conversions would be 10 times lower compared to AdWords?
If you want to achieve great results, you need to work with the best. And, as far as PPC is concerned, Google AdWords is way ahead of the competition. You can sign up for Google Adwords using the banner below.
Buy Traffic using Bidvertiser
Bidvertiser is a program similar to AdWords that I’ve used and had success with. I still think Adwords is the best but Bidvertise is a close second in my opinion. You can get $20 in free clicks when you sign up for Bidvertiser using the banner below, so sign up, run a couple ads with the $20 signup bonus and then decide if it is a program you want to continue to use.
Purchase Paid Reviews using Review Me
Paid reviews are an interesting advertising method which more and more people are considering. Using a site like Review Me, you pay others to write reviews of your website on their websites, creating back links to your website. Using paid reviews gets you two important things. Direct traffic – you will be launching your website with a “buzz” and the story may even be picked up by other websites (with even more traffic being sent your way). Backlinks – the links which will be pointing to your website will also help from a SEO perspective. Again, your story could even be picked up by other websites, resulting in even more backlinks. Review Me offers you a lot of different features and gives you full control over who and how your site is reviewed plus provides detailed statistics on how much traffic the reviews are bringing into your site.
You can also become a reviewer yourself and review other peoples sites to make extra money. Review Me offers payments via check (a $25 minimum limit) and Paypal (you can request a payout for any amount). Your overall rating will be based on a combination of Technorati, Alexa, Google, RSS subscriptions and ratings given by advertisers.
Submit your site to Directories
Submitting your site to online directories is a great way to bring additional traffic to your site. There are both free directories and paid directories. Most directories from which back links make a difference are paid ones. On the Web, just as anywhere else, you get what you pay for. Here are the paid directories I recommend (in alphabetical order), which are, in my opinion, worth every penny.
The Aviva Directory
URL: http://www.avivadirectory.com
Domain age: 2005
PageRank: 6
Page Strength: 6.5/10
Alexa: top 15k
The BestOfTheWeb Directory
URL: http://BOTW.org
Domain age: 1996
PageRank: 7
Page Strength: 8.5/10
Alexa: top 15k
The Business.com Directory
URL: http://www.business.com
Domain age: 1998
PageRank: 7
Page Strength: 7/10
Alexa: top 5k
The Yahoo.com Directory
URL: https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro/
Domain age: 1995
PageRank: 8
Page Strength: 9/10
Alexa: 1
Free Directories - Most free directories are not worth submitting to so being selective when choosing directories is a must. Generally, directories which look shady or have a low PR should not even be considered. Traffic-wise, free directories do not help, but if you are interested in optimizing your website for the search engines, free directories can be a good way of obtaining backlinks. If you are interested in a list of free directories, I would suggest visiting two great resources: addurl.nu and info.vilesilencer.com Again, you will find hundreds of directories listed there, but that doesn’t mean that you have to submit your website to all of them (remember to be selective). All in all a backlink from a shady PR1 directory on a page which also has links to tens of other websites is worthless, a DMOZ backlink, however, can make a difference. The authority of the website the link is coming from is extremely important and that’s why I recommend using the paid directories listed above if you are going to utilize directories to bring traffic to your site.
Write articles and submit them to free article sites
Article websites are another great way to increase the traffic flow to your website. All you have to do is pick a topic that you are knowledgeable in, write an article, and submit it to an article directory. At the bottom of each article, insert a link back to your website and provide a brief description of your site. Your articles will be picked up by the search engines and as more and more people start to read them, traffic will filter down to your website. Below is a list of the 10 largest article sites which are the one’s I recommend you start with. Take an hour a week to write a good article and then submit it to each article directory. If you do this for a couple months, you will start seeing thousands of visitors coming to your website straight from the link you provide in your articles.
Become active on related Blogs & Forums
Here is another easy and free way to get additional traffic to your site. Find other Blog and Forum websites that are related to your website topic and start posting to them. Just do a google search for the category of your website to find related sites. Include a link back to your site in your signature or at the bottom of your posts. Don’t spam these websites just to promote your website, just post a reply or comment and be sure that your link is included. Spend a few minutes a day doing this and again you will start to see more traffic coming to your website.
P2P Lending with Prosper ($25 Signup Bonus!)
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending is something that is becoming very popular on the internet. Basically people lend to other people and both parties benefit. The borrowers benefit because they can get a lower rate than they could at a traditional bank, with a credit card, or from one of those shady pay day advance places. Then lender benefits because they earn a higher rate than they would get keeping their money in a bank and often a better rate then they would get investing in stocks, bonds or mutual funds. An example, someone has a credit card balance of $5,000 at a 16% interest rate (not at all uncommon). They could use a p2p lending site and get a $5,000 loan to pay off the card at 8%. This would save them $400 a year in interest. By lending to this person, you could get a relatively safe 8% rate of return which is more than double what you will find at any bank.There are a couple different sites out there doing this. I use Prosper.com which was the first and the largest p2p company. Prosper gives borrowers a credit grade based on their credit report that you use when choosing to make a loan. The lending process is very similar to an eBay auction. A borrower creates a listing telling why they need the loan, how they are going to repay it, etc. Then prosper lenders bid on the loan. You can bid as little as $50 and pick the rate you are willing to lend at. Prosper then takes the best bids and uses it to create the loan. So if there is a listing for a $5,000 loan to payoff credit cards and 200 people make $50 bids, Prosper will take the first 100 bids with the lowest rates to create the loan. Then once a month, you receive a payment in your prosper account that you can transfer to your bank account or use to make additional loans.
I’ve been using Prosper since May 2007 and have placed about 30 $50 loans so far. So far everything has gone just fine and my average rate of return has been in excess of 12% which has been a lot better than my mutual funds have done over the same period.
Prosper loans are not guaranteed. Just like any other loan, there is a chance that the loan could go bad and you could lose the money you lent. The grade of the borrower allows you to make loans based on your risk tolerance and prosper also has an independent collection agency that will try and collect on bad loans. By keeping your loans to $50, you can diversify with many loans spread over different grades so if one goes bad, it doesn’t affect you too much. So based on that, lending on Prosper is a great way to make a little extra money online and also help some very deserving people who are being screwed by the banks, credit cards, and pay day advance places.
If you want to get started with Prosper, you can use my referral link which gives you $25 when you fund your first loan. So right off the bat, your rate of return is 50% (you put in $50 and get $25!). This offer is not advertised and does not apply for new registrations on the website, so to get the $25 signup bonus click on the banner below. If you have any questions about my prosper experiences, just let me know.
Credit Card Arbitrage
Cutting expenses is another way to make more money online and become more profitable. Credit card arbitrage is a strategy I use to increase my profits and is a pretty easy strategy to implement if you have the discipline. We all know that credit card companies charge excessively high interest rates and ridiculous fees to make a lot of money at our expense. CC Arbitrage is a way to actually make money using your card instead. Sound interesting? Here’s how it works. First you pick a credit card that offers cash back and has a 0% introductory rate on purchases. You then use that card for all of your purchases and stash the cash you would of paid into a high yielding savings account and make the minimum payments each month and then one balloon payment to pay your balance in full the month before the 0% introductory rate expires. The result can be an extra couple hundred to a thousand dollars per year in interest and cash back. Basically you are running your business virtually expense free during this time. This only is a good idea if you have the discipline to not spend more than you are making, put the cash that you would be spending in a high yield savings account and save it for the balloon , and remember not to miss any payments.Note: An added bonus of using this strategy is that you have a detailed report of all your business expenses that you can deduct come tax time. Keeping track of your expenses and income is the best way to monitor how well your online business is doing and this is by far the simplest way.
If this sounds like something you want to do, here’s how I recommend you get started.1 - Apply for the Discover More Card. This card is my preferred arbitrage card of choice because it combines a nice 0% introductory purchase rate and the one of the best cash back rates you will find. I use it to pay my paypal fees, website hosting fees, internet service bill, and all my other expenses for my online business. You can find out more and apply using the link below.
2 – Get an Online Savings Account. This is where you’ll stash the cash you would normally be paying all your online business expenses with. These accounts pay interest rates that are typically 8 times what you would earn in a traditional savings account at your local bank and are very easy to use. I currently have two online savings accounts, one with HSBCDirect.com and one with FNBODirect.com. FNBO currently pays a slightly higher interest rate so I recommend starting with them. Feel free to contact me if you have questions.
This concludes my guide on How to Get Started Making Money Online. I hope this guide has provided you the motivation and information you need to start your own or improve your current online business. I plan to update this guide often whenever I learn and put in place new strategies for making money online so check back often and consider subscribing to my free Internet Marketing Newsletter so that you’ll receive notification whenever updates are made. Remember, everything I discussed in this guide are actually things that I am currently doing and I am more than happy to help anyone implement these strategies. All you have to do is ask on my free support forums and I promise you will get the help you need!
I hope to hear from you soon and I wish you all the best in success on your online ventures.
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