The Honest Truth About Making Money Online

The truth about making money

In stark contrast to popular belief, making money online can be difficult at first to understand and very frustrating. There's a lot of conficting information out there from so called "Gurus" who give extremely vague information on the steps to actually making money online. Hopefully this article will give you some clarity on making money online and give you a clear "path" to follow to get traffic and earn money in today's Internet market. Ready? Let's dig in!

Internet Marketing in a Nutshell

What exactly does internet marketing mean? Well, in it's most basic definition it means just what it sounds like. You're marketing and promoting products on the internet. Those products could be your own, or they could be products you promote through affiliate links or a combination of both, which is what I recommend.

So What's the "Best" Products to Promote?

"What are the best markets to get into?" In my opinion, this is the wrong question to ask. A far better question to ask yourself is, "What products will I market online?" (The riches are in the niches). This is where people who are new get confused but let's look at the process step by step.

What are your interests

The first thing you need to do is figure out what interests you. Whether your interests are money, health, running, or fashion, think of things that interest you. Why should you base your online marketing venture on things that interest you? There's actually two reasons. The first is, when you're building your website or blog and developing content the process should be enjoyable, if you're writing about a topic you hate, you won't having fun and the content you produce will not be as good as if you were writing about something you enjoyed on a personal level. The second reason why you want to base your internet marketing business on things that interests you is so you won't quit! Contrary to what a lot of people believe, when you start marketing on the internet, it can be very difficult especially in the beginning. If you're not marketing products you enjoy yourself, you'll quit as soon as you feel you aren't reaping the benefits(money) as fast you thought you should. Remember, internet marketing should be fun and rewarding, it shouldn't feel like a chore, hard work at times? Yes! But not a chore.

Getting a Website or Blog

Once you've taken a few minutes to think about what your interests are, next thing you'll need to start your internet marketing venture is a website or blog. If you make it yourself, it's relatively cheap. The first thing you'll need is webhosting which is where your website's images and content will be stored for the entire world wide web to see. Your webhosting will cost roughly ten dollars a month. Next, you'll need a domain name(i.e. facebook.com) This will cost about twelve dollars per year. Some of the more popular webhosting companies are Hostgator.com, Bluehost.com, and Justhost.com. Once you've purchased your domain name and webhosting, you have a couple options as to how you're going to make your website look attractive. The first option is to have someone build it for you, this can easily cost you anywhere from four hundred to several thousand dollars depending on how robust you would like your website to be. The second option you have is to install free WordPress themes. Each of the aforementioned hosting companies have quick and easy WordPress installation processes that allow you to install attractive WordPress themes for free. If you're new to WordPress and are a visual learner go to YouTube.com and perform a search for, "how to make a website with WordPress". This should get you pointed in the right direction.

Get Traffic

If your website or blog has no visitors it will be impossible to make a sale. Getting targeted traffic to your website is the most important aspect to becoming a successful internet marketer. How do you get traffic to your website? There are tons of ways, both paid and free. Let's discuss a couple of the most common free methods first. The first and perhaps the easiest way to get traffic to your website if to make sure it's optimized for search engines, one of the most common ways to do this is to make sure you site has the appropriate keyword density. For instance if you're marketing a book on how to get lean abs, you want to make sure you're using the term "lean abs" in the content of your website, that way when the search engines send "spiders" out and they "crawl" your website, they'll know your site talks about lean abs. Consequently, when someone performs a search for "lean abs", if you've used proper keyword density along with other SEO techniques, your website will have a better chance of ranking high when the search results come back. Though keyword density is important if you want your website to rank high in search engines such as Google, you want to be careful not to be guilty of "keyword stuffing" where you keep repeating the same keywords over and over to the point where it's sounds unnatural if read aloud. Google doesn't like such repetition and may penalize your website by giving it a lower ranking if you're abusing your usage of keywords.

Another free way to get to get traffic to your website is through "backlinking". Backlining is when you put a link to your website on someone else's website that has similar content. In return, they may put a link of their website on your website in what's called a "link exchange".

Getting Paid Traffic

Now that we've discussed just a couple of free strategies, lets discuss some paid strategies. Google AdWords is among the best and most powerful paid ways to generate traffic to your website. Google AdWords ads are displayed along the side of search results and at the top of search results. Google AdWords is Google's main advertising tool and is a Pay Per Click advertising model that allows you to advertise to people when they search for keywords you've bid on. For instance, say you're selling basketballs on your website, and you bid on the keyword "basketballs" when someone searches for basketballs on Google your ad could be presented to them, directing them to your website. Google AdWords also provides a highly customizable way in which you can pay, you can set a cap on how much you pay per day and will not be charged more than that. There's also no minimum requirement to how much you have to invest in your Google AdWords campaign. Google AdWords can definitely generate targeted traffic, but there's also a downside if you're inexperienced. If for some reason Google decides that something on your website violates their advertising terms of service, they will suspend your account and the money you spent will not be refundable. I recommend if you're new to Google AdWords definitely do your homework and invest small until you become proficient.

Another very powerful tool for generating targeted traffic is paying for solo ads. When you buy solo ads from someone, they send out your promotion to their email list. It's important to do your homework on solo ad venders and find out which niches they cover. It's important to find what niches they cover because the key to effective internet marketing is advertising to targeted traffic, after all if you're niche is in eating healthy, sending your promotion to people who are interested in MLM marketing won't convert well into sales, make sense?

Commit

You have to be committed! After you've laid out your game plan it's important you take action, follow through, and see it to it's completion. Putting it off and procrastinating will only postpone your success, or even worse make you quit on your dreams. When starting your internet marketing venture, the most important thing you can do is take action and apply what you learn. Without the application of your education, you'll never see results. As the old saying goes, "Don't try to eat the whole elephant at once". Apply what you learn one step at a time, if you're new to internet marketing and decide to promote your website via Google AdWords use that form of promotion, and that form of promotion only until you become proficient at it. If you try and pull yourself in twenty different directions, you'll find that you'll be able to get a lot less accomplish than if you focused your energy to one thing at a time.

In closing.

Becoming an internet marketer is a journey not a get rich quick scheme or a sprint. The internet is an ever evolving monster and changing you're strategies is paramount if you would like to remain successful. If you want to be successful, you must commit to being a student of internet marketing and constantly educate yourself on what it takes to become and remain successful in this great industry. Have fun and enjoy the journey!