Monday, August 31, 2009

10 Basic Steps to Start Making Money with Affiliate Marketing

Presently, it is a highly common thing to make money online as an affiliate marketer, because virtually anybody can earn money as an affiliate internet marketer. In the followings, we will go through 10 simple but vital aspects to consider when you are earning money with affiliate marketing.

1. Choose a Niche
This step is among one of the most significant steps that you have to take, to go for a niche suitable for your interest and predilection. Instead of joining numerous affiliate programs promoting hundreds of different products, you should join two or three affiliate programs advertising similar products in the same niche.

2. Choose Affiliate Programs
First thing you have to do is to sign up for a couple of affiliate programs before you can start working. A thorough investigation is required before completing the sign up process. You will definitely have to explore and evaluate the affiliate programs, ensuring that the particular affiliate programs are offering products in accordance with your niche. Furthermore, it is recommended to join well-known affiliate programs with positive reputation, like More Niche or Commission Junction.

3. Build an Affiliate Site
All affiliate marketing experts will tell you the same thing: build your very own affiliate website! It is vital to have one, a theme affiliate website. The affiliate website’s theme must be closely related to your niche and to the selected products. For best results, it is essential for you to publish top quality and original contents on your affiliate website!

4. Identify the Budget
The very next important step is to promote your website. Being a beginner in affiliate marketing, you might not have much money to promote your website. If you are on a low budget and can’t yet afford paid advertisement, you have to turn to a couple of free traffic generating marketing methods.

5. Drive Traffic to Your Affiliate Website
Let’s face it: in lack of top quality traffic driven to your website, it is impossible to earn a considerable amount of money. Where and how you get the needed quality traffic? Well, that is mostly up to your budget. You can drive traffic to your website for free using a couple of free marketing methods, like: article marketing, PR submission or social book marking. Another free long term marketing method is SEO – search engine optimization – work. The main disadvantage - on short term - of SEO is that it requires time to produce its effects, meaning to generate traffic to your site.

6. Build a Product Review Blog
It is also a good idea to build a product review blog, reviewing all the products that you are advertising, placing in the same time all your affiliate links, as well as the link to your affiliate website we mentioned earlier. Don’t forget that the product reviewing is just another great free method to drive quality traffic and thus targeted visitors to your site, increasing your sales.

7. Build Your Email List
Make your own email list with your affiliate website. Remember, most of the time, visitors will not give you their email addresses voluntarily; you should offer them something for free in exchange. It is a good idea to offer them free e-books and reports about various popular topics. They just have to subscribe to download them for free. It is essential to have an email list, it is a valuable resource for you to earn money.

8. Interact With the Potential Customers
Take the time and have a close connection to your prospective clients. In affiliate marketing, the proper management of client relationship is crucial, even if you are not personally selling the products to them. You are always required to have enough time to reply to your prospects emails. That is how you build up trust; once they trust you, it is more likely to make a purchase from your site or affiliate links.

9. Build a Network of down line Marketers
Don’t miss out the chance to sign up with a few multi-tier affiliate programs. They will allow you earn much more money than just by yourself. To earn additional money, it is essential to keep in touch with your referrals on a regular basis, keeping them up to date with everything.

10. Work Hard Constantly
Almost certainly, it is the most significant step from all of the above. Just like in any other job, or real life, in order to make money, you have to work for it. A constant and regular effort is required! There is only one way to earn money with affiliate marketing: working hard!

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Paid Surveys: Can You Make Money With Them?

Guest Post by Joe Land

Paid Surveys have a ton of hype and controversy surrounding them. In fact there are over four million results for the phrase "paid surveys” on Google. There are tons of sites out there that are scams and that will do nothing but take your hard earned money. On the other hand there are a select few that can make you money.

What to Look For

When you are looking for a paid survey site or any money making opportunity in general, you have to be aware of a couple of things.

1. Is it free – When a survey site is free to sign up with then there is a good chance that it’s legit. Why? Because they make money from the companies who want their products surveyed not you.
2. Proof of Payment – If you are able to find lots of checks and proof that the site actually pays then you should go ahead and sign up.
3. Dig Deeper – Read reviews from other blogs and websites to gain other peoples perspective on the site.

Why Surveys Are a Legit Opportunity

Survey sites are labeled to be scams by lots of people. Here is why they aren’t. It all starts with companies like Dell and Pepsi. They need opinions on their products from people who use them everyday. So they go to research companies and ask them to distribute the surveys to users (you). When you complete the survey Pepsi gets their needed opinions, the survey site gets paid by Pepsi, and you get paid a small amount too. That is how survey sites are able to make money and stay in business.

Author Bio:
So you want to make money with surveys but don’t know where to start. There are only a few sites out there that are worth your time and effort. For starters I recommend CashCrate. It’s a site that is great for beginners. Not to mention it has great help and support in case you have questions.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

What You Should Know About Domain Name Registration?

When you plan to set up your own website for the purpose of making money online, selection of a proper domain name is essential. Domain name is the name which describes your website. When your website comes up in the search engine results, the domain name provides some information about it to the searchers. It should not be irrelevant or misleading and should match with the content of your website. Domain name selection is the first step to get your website online. Therefore, proper care should be taken when selecting the same.

The domain name selected should be short, memorable and easy to spell. It should relate to your core business. If your domain name contains more than three words, use hyphens. There are different domain name extensions available, such as, .com, .net, .org, .info etc. Of all these, .com is the most popular domain name extension (.org for non-profit organizations).

Domain names are easy to register. They are also cheap ( as low as $1.99). There are hundreds of domain name registration companies online. Some of the popular ones are, Yahoo, Register.com, Go Daddy, NetworkSolutions etc. These companies are all ICANN accredited. You can register your domain name for as many years as you want or you may register it for one year and extend it at the end of the year.

Before registering your domain name, make sure that it has not been already registered by somebody else. Even if a domain name has been taken by someone, it may be purchased from the owner. You may want to buy a particular domain name (which has been already registered) due to it's high page rank. You may buy used domain names through certain forums and websites such as, Digital Point, Sitepoint, Namepros etc.

When registering your domain name, you are generally given an option to keep it private. This will keep your details like name, e mail ID etc. out of the international data base.

Friday, August 28, 2009

Article Marketing: How To Make Money

Article marketing is the web marketers’ favorite tool. It helps to promote the website and it also helps you to make some money. Promotion of the web and the business is a fact that every one knows today but the money making part is still unknown to many. Even the people who remain constantly around this business do lack some basic knowledge of this ability of the articles. Here are a few things that you should know before you start the article writing for the money making purpose.

• You should only and only publish original content because this is the only to get some money from publishing the articles.

• Try to be as unique as possible. You should stand out of the crowd to make a real impact in the market.

• Try to find the niche that interests you and then concentrate on that particular niche. Trying various niches is not a good thing for the new comers.

• There are various niches that you can try your hands at. Try to be clever while selecting the proper niche for you. Try to start with a niche that is not a competitive one and focus on a rarely discussed niche. This will help you to gain loads of experience and you will learn better strategies.

Picking up the right niche is very important. You should research the niches and should select the right niche for your articles. There are various things that you should keep in mind before choosing the niche. The niche should be of interest to you and to the readers. Make sure that you do not choose that is being practiced all over the world as this will require extreme skill and you will need management skills of top class.

You can make money by writing articles. There are various methods to make money from the article and content writing. The best way to make money is to make a personal blog or website and then publish the articles that will direct the traffic to your website. This will help you to make money by Adsense and other similar programs that will pay you for the advertising that they will put on your website. You can also get individual advertisers and make good money.

You will also find the websites that will actually pay you for the number of visits to your articles on that websites. That means you will be paid for the visits that are made to your articles. Here are also websites that will pay part of the total earnings that they will get from the advertising using your content. Both these are smart ways and you can make residual income. But you should make sure to publish a large number of articles if you really want to make some reasonable income from these articles. The more articles you publish, the greater will be the number of visits.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

How To Choose Web Hosting For Making Money Online

Guest post by Jason VanTrees

When considering how to choose the best web hosting to use for making money online, there are some important things to consider. One should make sure that the web hosting of choice provides all the tools, resources, and value to use when creating money making web properties.

Benefits of Having Good Web Hosting

When marketers look for the best web hosting plan available to host their web properties, they should make sure it is fully equipped with the resources needed. Things to look for would include unlimited bandwidth, disk space, email addresses, add-on domains allowance, FTP Accounts, MySQL Databases and such. Along with so many unlimited options, there should also be access to well designed website templates to use on all your domain names hosted along with a Control Panel (Cpanel) loaded with useful features.

Web Hosting Coupon Codes and Guarantees

When it comes to valued and honorable web hosting, there are hosting companies available that go the extra mile by offering discount and promotional codes for new and even sometimes existing customers. One would also find that some web hosting companies will back there services up with full refund money back guarantees. By providing the customer with such value like these just goes to show how confident they are about their web hosting services.

If you are serious about creating web properties such as blogs, landing pages, forums, and websites towards making money online, using the best hosting company that will provide everything needed at a reasonable price to get started is very important. Choosing a good host provider to help ease the stress of setting up your web properties can allow you to concentrate more time on promoting and getting traffic to your web properties.

Author Bio
Jason VanTrees is an affiliate marketer who uses the Hostgator Baby web hosting package to host many of his profitable web properties. He recommends using Coupon Code 'hgc25' to get $9.94 off your new hosting purchase when signing up for Hostgator's Baby web hosting plan as a new customer.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

My Blog Is My Fortune!

In this world of economic recession who doesn’t want to make money? And making money while sitting home and writing topics which you like the most, is definitely an inviting offer. Why not avail it? In fact the best way to do so is by creating a blog of your own. There are countless web hosting websites which help you do that, some good ones which I can think about are www.wordpress.com or even www.blogger.com . The rest depends on you and what you want to do.

Making money online is certainly not a trivial job. Ask those who make small fortunes online and they’ll tell you that how much they had to do, in order to achieve their goal. There are people who start blogs, are active at first, but ultimately their blogs die down. Why does it happen? Is it that they’re not good enough? No! Some people who start blogs are much more educated and talented than those who are already the “kings of blogging”. The reason is that these people are not consistent and eventually loose heart when they’re blogs stop getting traffic.

“I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires………”---Abraham Lincoln

Hence, keeping in mind the above quote, everything dies or expires when it stops its struggle, just like water becomes stagnant when it stops running. Therefore, even your blog expires when you run short of ideas and stop posting on it due to any reason, it may even be laziness.

To create a successful blog, let me give you some tips:

• The main topic of your blog should be the one in which you’re most interested,
• Set up a goal at the start of your month,
• Use flagship blogs to attract traffic,
• Be short and concise in writing,
• What you write should be clear and easy to understand,
• Know your audience.

Apart from the above points one basic thing that you should keep in mind is that the niche that you choose for your blog should be the topic about which you’re most knowledgeable. It can be anything, from your hobbies to your work or simple writing. Use the above points to start a blog and use keywords in your blog in order to attract more traffic. if there comes a time when your blog receives less traffic or no traffic at all than do not loose heart, be determined and keep on writing, in the end you’ll surely achieve your goal.

Make your blog more informative. Add plug-ins to your blog to make it colorful and versatile. If you have multiple passions than you can always write about them. Rather than launching products, give your honest opinion about them and always “BE ORIGINAL”. Write about anything you can and want to write and keep on writing and there’ll be a day when your blog will be overflowing with money even more than you desired.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Step by Step Process to Make Money Online with a Blog

Guest post by Anil Gupta

Making money online is not too hard in today's economy even if you have passion and will power to work hard. Here is the step by step process one can follow to start making money with a blog:

1. Start a blog - you must have a blog at least if you are aiming at earning some decent amount of money on internet. Create a blog around a topic you are most knowledgeable about and that people are interested in reading. You can use Google Trends service to see what people are actually searching most on internet recently. Once you have decided the topic for your blog, start a free blog on Blogger.com if you are new to blogging.

2. Seo friendly URL and Titles - if you are creating a blog about a particular niche, think of including any of your niche term in your blog URL. But try to limit your URL length to minimum. Because it will be ready difficult for your readers to remember your blog address if it contain lots of characters. Once you have decided a seo friendly URL for your blog, next comes your blog Title. Don't forget to mention the keyword you want to target with this blog in your blog title.

3. Write articles - write some articles on your blog with an aim to target different keywords of your niche. You should first start with less competitive keywords and create articles around them. If possible, you should include videos and images in your articles to make your topic more understandable.

4. Submit your articles on social networks - Once Google cached down your latest articles, you should think of submitting some of your interesting articles on social network websites like Digg, Propeller, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Reddit. With these networks, you should aim at sharing your favorite stories with your followers and friends on Twitter and Facebook.

5. Google Adsense widgets - once you see some traffic coming on your blog from search engines, look for ways to monetize it. And when it comes about monetization, Google Adsense is everyone choice. If you already have an Adsense account, add Adsense widgets in your blog template where you want to show Google Adsense ads. And in case you don't have an Adsense account, apply for one today with your best website or blog that you have.

Author Bio
Visit Anil Gupta's scopeformoney.com blog for additional ways to make money online and in case you want to drive more traffic to your blog check 26 ways to bring traffic to your website.