Make Money Online

Find a Niche

Possibly one of the hardest things to decide when you start to blog is “what do I write about”.  This has a number of elements to it’s answer initially dependant upon your desired outcome.  If you are looking to connect with your audience about a passion then obviously you need to choose a niche that you have a great deal of knowledge about, something that offer you an endless opportunity to spout and scribble.

If your intention is to make money with your blog then you need to take a more scientific and analytical approach to your blogging.  Niche research is a greatly under-performed principle when approaching the art of making money online, there are many things to consider before writing a post, deciding on a theme or a host etc etc.  Check my find a niche category and refer to the research which I carried out on the Camper VW niche before I decided to put any work into starting the blog.

This really is the most crucial part of blogging in my opinion, after all it takes just as long to set up a site to fail as it does a site to succeed and make money online.

Blogging is a very effective marketing process and can be a very profitable tool if used in the right manner. Making money online from a blog is just a matter of seducing the attention of a prospect or audience without directly selling to them. By following these steps to blogging you will begin to see results over a 4-6 month period.

1) What is the best starting point?

There are a number of free blog hosts and blog platforms available online today, Google offers possibly the largest of all platforms with it’s popular Blogger Service.  The aim of a blog is to create a body of work using words, pictures and videos to entertain, educate, inform of seduce your audience so the platform is quite important.

I always opt for Wordpress, independently hosted with Bluehost as I always like to remain in control of my destiny, at least more so than the hosted versions of Blogger and Wordpress offer.  A wrong word or a slip of the proverbial tingue can result in your blog being de-listed by Google Blogger or Wordpress, so the moral of lesson one is “take control of your blogging destiny”

It’s finally arrived, your making money online veins have just been given a huge bypass, with the arrival of YouTube Sponsored Search!

There have been rumours about this service for some time and Google have obviously been planning an income stream from their video search engine superstar.  Michelle McPherson has posted an early heads up on her Social Marketing blog today.

In Michelles blog she details the whole ‘how to ‘ on using the service including the integration with Googles Billing facility.  So what does this really mean??

YouTube is known to be the internets No.2 Search Engine and the 3rd most visited site in the world today  (Quoted from Social Marketing) so the reach of this marketing behemoth is almost unbeatable, currently receiving in the region of 32,000,000 visitors each month with an Alexa Rank of 4.  The ability to reach the audience on a targeted level similar to adwords marketing but using video within a single site structure provides a totally integrated marketing forum.

Early days yet, who knows how this is likely to deliver, are the YouTube crowd in a buying mode or an entertainment mode?  Are they so used to receiving unlimited FREE video resources that they are not in the buying mindset whilst inside the YouTube framework??  Only time will tell!

“Make Money with the Long Tail…”

The long tail was not effectively put into action until a few years ago. When the idea of effectively targeting consumers for smaller niches all of the sudden became very feasible and extremely profitable.

So why is the long tail so effective? Years ago, if you typed in the search term, online automobile insurance quote, you would probably not get what you were looking for. The long tail is so effective because there are millions of niche topics out there that are not targeted by marketers. The search term, Nike shoes, will return thousands and thousands of targeted results. The search term, Nike shoe retailer in Indiana, may result in thousands of results as well but very few will be targeted relevant results.

So, why is this important? The main search terms have a lot of competition. The niche topics have fewer visitors but a lot less competition. This means that if you can create one site for a certain niche, you can make a few dollars a day. If you can make 100 sites that make five dollars a day you have five hundred dollars a day. Replicate this process more and more and you will find yourself making loads of money online.

Many people are making money online because they are targeting these niche topics. A lot of the money that is being made comes from several small websites composed of a few good articles will information on that niche. Once the small site is created, google ads are placed on the page along with affiliate links to monetize the site. Once the site is setup and ready to make money an article is written everyday and submitted to well known article directories. The more articles you can write and submit, the more visitors come to the site. The more visitors you get to your site, the more money you make.

There are several tools you can use to speed up the process and many tricks of the trade that will make the process for efficient but now you know the basics. You can start making money online with the long tail promoting niche topics from the knowledge you have obtained from this article. It is not rocket science but it does take discipline to keep going. Anyone can do it but many do not. Those that choose to go through with it are becoming very wealthy making money online through long tail marketing.

Often is the question from marketers during coaching sessions on building content sites is wether to use Adsense or Affiliate programs.

A general rule of thumb is always go where the most frequent and high payouts are, but in making the decision between Adsense or affiliate programs, there are a number of things that should be considered.

Initially, it will all depend upon your niche or market. If an affiliate program exists  that converts well and also pays well, then you should take the affiliate program route, you can check this out simply by researching the marketplace details within Clickbank, Commission Junction or whichever Affiliate network is your preferred, in my experience Clickbank offers the simplest method and the highest rates of pay per product, however CJ can pay small percentages but on higher ticket items like digital cameras. I’m sure you would rather make dollars than you would cents, so using an affiliate program in this situation would be your best bet. However, if there isn’t an affiliate program, using a pay-per-click service such as Google Adsense will at least allow you to earn a little money from your content site.

This leads to another question though. How do you tell if the affiliate program you are looking at is a good one or not?  The answer to that question will take some research, but will be well worth your time. One of the very first things That I would encourage you to do is to contact the  affiliate manager and ask what the average conversion rate is for the affiliate program. You could also ask if they have any affiliates that would be willing to email you their experiences with the product. Once you have the answer to that question, visit a few affiliate marketing forums and ask if anyone has promoted the program before or if they have any experience with the owner or affiliate manager of the site. Usually if it’s a bad program, many people will tell you about it.

If you are finding it difficult to locate any suitable affiliate programs/products for your niche, then I would suggest using “Google Adsense” or any of the other Pay per click programs similar to it, perhaps Yahoo or MSN search marketing. Always check though to make sure you can’t make more money from something else. You don’t want to be making pennies on a site you could be making dollars from. In most cases Google  only pays out pennies per click, therefore if you receive 100 clicks and made say $2.00, and then conversly you received 100 clicks on an affiliate link and made $50, it obvioulsy makes a great deal of sense to focus on affiliate programs?

Testing and tracking with a good quality tracking system like Google Analytics is a great way to definitively decide which is the very best method of promotion for your site…in my humble opinion I would use both as long as the larger of the income streams isn’t eroded by the smaller!