Magic Bullet of Internet Marketing
There are a LOT of people who search online each day for "make money online fast" or related terms that boil down to getting rich quick. Almost everyone is attracted to the idea of making a TON of money in little to no-time with little to no-cost in either time or money. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that this is normal, or even possible. The Internet marketers who make a lot of money online know that it takes times and hard work to get to where they are at.
There is no magic bullet out there that is going to enable you to make a six figure income in less than a month's time. If someone actually knew how to do that, why in the world would they be selling you an ebook for only $47? They wouldn't. If everyone else started to do whatever this trick purported to be, it would no longer make the person selling it anywhere near that much money.
Along with pointing out that there are no get-rich schemes that I can teach you I also want to make sure that you know that Internet marketing isn't all that hard. You don't need a masters in computer science, psychology, or marketing. I don't want you to think making serious money online is an unsurmountable challenge because it's not. You can do this if you do your research and actually put in place the exercises that I teach on this site.
What you have to get through your head is that if you want to have success in Internet marketing then you have to treat it just like you are starting your own business. That is exactly what you are doing. Don't worry about discovering the next secret that nobody knows about. There are no shortcuts. Instead, concentrate on building a successful business that you can run for the rest of your life, or sell for a ton of money to someone else. Over time you might get to the point where you can earn over $100,000 per month, but it's going to take awhile to get to that point.
Market Research
If you want to build a sound online business then you need a solid base. This base is where you will do most of your work early on in order to ensure success down the road. What is the base I'm talking about related to Internet marketing? Market research. Unless you take time to research markets, you are setting yourself up to fail. It's the MOST important thing that you can do to make sure you are profitable. Market research training isn't difficult and I'll show you everything you need to know to get started with one simple article.
The market research that I do gives me an idea of what kind of products or services the market wants and will actually buy. It also ensures that there are quality products and services out there with affiliate programs I can join. When I am finished with my market research I know whether I am going to actually make money on that niche or not. Obviously if it's not worth my time I'll start over on something else.
So what all goes into the best way to do market research? It can easily be broken down into three categories: Niche, Product, and Keyword. You need all three or else you should move on to another market. I'll give a general overview of all of them below, and provide links to more detailed information later down the line.
Niche Research - Picking the area you are going to focus on. You need to find profitable niches that have plenty of customers that are willing to buy online.
Product Research - What can you sell? If you find products or services that have been selling at a high rate for a long period of time, you can rest assured that you will be able to sell it as well once you generate traffic.
Keyword Research - How many visitors can you generate based off of organic SEO?
The success of your campaign is determined by the three factors above. I've seen people fail because they pick out a niche that nobody is interested in, there isn't a large market for that product ONLINE, or there isn't enough traffic to be had through the search engines. Do the work early on, and you won't waste your time building a site and marketing a product that doesn't stand a chance to make any money. If you do the work early on, then you will at least know that you can make money in that niche and start generating some serious income.
Niche Market Research
A niche market serves a highly targeted group of customers. Why do successful markets focus on tiny niches instead of creating super-sites? Because sites that focus on a tiny segment of a larger market can be developed and promoted quickly. You can rank a whole lot easier for a small set of keywords than trying to capture a large number of them. Plus, when you get down to the tinier markets there is less competition.
The key to niche marketing is to do your research. You have to find people that are looking for a product or service to solve a problem. Once you know what the audience's problem is, you have to find products that solve hat problem. The perfect niche is one that finds people who are desperate for a solution to their problem and are glad to pay to have it solved.
What do you need to know about a niche and if it's a good one for making money online? The four things that I look for are:
Identify the Audience and their Problem
You want to be able to put together a picture of the members of your niche. Are they male or female? How much do they make in a given year? What do they worry about? Do they have kids or significant other? What do they do for fun and for money? What are they having problems with? What solution are they looking for? Get as specific as possible, that way when you are marketing to this person you can identify with their situation as closely as possible.
How Important is it to Solve the Problem?
You want to find people who are desperate for a solution. If someone has a few dandelions in their yard they might not be in a huge rush to get rid of them. If that same person has spiders infesting their house and biting their children you can bet their is a high urgency to find a solution. The more important a solution is to the audience, the more likely they are to buy something from your site.
Can You Solve Their Problem?
I don't mean that you personally have to be able to solve their problem. Are there products or services out there that do? Can you become an affiliate of those products? Do they pay out a high enough percentage or flat fee to make it worth your time?
Do I Like this Niche?
Some of you might not think it's important to have an interest in a niche as long as it makes a lot of money. I disagree. How are you going to spend hours of your life on something that you have no desire in learning about? Are you going to be able to write articles on the topic if it bores you to death? Pick something you are interested in and it will show in your finished product.
How to Do the Research
So now that you know the questions that you need to ask before deciding if a niche is worth going into, you might be asking how exactly I go about figuring out the answers. There might be other niche research methods out there that I don't know about, but I use these myself and can attest to their usefulness.
Forums - Do a google search for "(your keyword) forums" and check the results. Go into the forums and see if you can find a recurring question from users. If you see the question pop up multiple times, you know it's popular. If you see a thread about a problem getting a lot of views then again, lots of people are interested in the topic.
Yahoo Answers - This is very similar to finding forums. If you go to Yahoo Answers you can find questions from people all over the world. You can dig through the site to find the categories you are researching, or use the search tool to find your keywords. See if you can find a common pattern of questions being asked. Those are the topics that you want to find solutions for.
Google Hot Trends - The great thing about Google is they will tell you what people are searching for most frequently right now. These hot topics are obviously very popular and if you can give searchers a quick solution, then you can generate a lot of traffic quickly. The problem is that a lot of the searches are general in nature and about news topics. Is Bill Cosby dead is an example. I'm not sure how you could make money off of letting people know he's still alive. However the Princeton Review's best party schools for 2010 could generate a lot of traffic if you are targeting 18-23 year olds.
Clickbank - A great method for doing niche research that will quickly allow you to see if there are also relevant products is to search Clickbank. There are thousands of merchants looking for people to help sell their products. You can scroll through the categories or enter a keyword into the search box. A couple of other decent sites built off of the clickbank marketplace are CB Engine and CB Analytics. Those sites both display stats for Clickbank products in a user-friendly fashion.
As you can see, properly researching niche markets isn't all that difficult. With just a little work, you can find profitable niche markets where you can make money.
Product Research
It doesn't matter if you think you have a profitable niche and you are getting tons of visitors to your site. If you are not selling products or services that people actually want, you aren't going to make any money. Don't waste your time trying to market a dud, do your product research first.
The first step to product research is to decide what kinds of products you are going to sell. Are they going to be physical products or digital? These are two different areas to tackle and while it's best to diversify into both down the line, it's better to start with digital.
Digital Products
This is anything that can be delivered directly over the Internet. The most popular digital product is the ebook, but can also include programs, videos, audio and much more.
The main advantage to digital products are the high commission rates. The merchant does not have a lot of costs to cover and does not have to keep an inventory.
Physical Products
These products actually have to be delivered to your customers home. This can include televisions, video game systems, cell phones, or about anything else.
You want find as big of commission rates with physical products because the merchant has a limited inventory, and has higher costs built in to their products. They actually have to pay people to put the product together and ship it to the consumer.
When searching for digital products a great place to get started is Clickbank. It's easy to signup and there are over 10,000 products that you can choose from. Clickbank makes it easy for you to find products that are selling. There is this thing called "gravity." Gravity refers to the number of affiliates who have earned a commission by promoting a particular vendor's products. The higher the gravity score, the more affiliates that have earned money promoting their products. The problem with high gravity is increased competition, but you at least know people are having success pushing that product.
Internet Marketing Goals
I get contacted quite a bit through my various sites and in the offline world about my Internet marketing experiences. Some people see or hear about me working at home, setting my own hours, and running my business from whatever location I happen to be at and want in on the action. If people are unemployed, unhappy with their job, or looking for a second income the questions really start pouring in about how they too can become successful at Internet marketing.
One of the reasons that I created this site was to help guide people to make money online. I started off as a noob just as everyone else in this business did at one point so I wanted to create a site that would help people learn some of the creative ways to start their own Internet marketing business and be prosperous in doing so.
I am trying to amass as much knowledge as possible for those of you who are ready to work hard and want to learn different ways to make money online. You have to be able to do your own research and find your own niches. I won't be giving you mine so you can see what I make and try to put me out of business =).
However, I can't tell you exactly you can make $X amount each day, week, month, or year. I can't show you exactly how you can make your living online or how to invest $X amount of dollars that you have and have a ridiculous return on that investment.
If you have questions about a specific topic, I'll do my best to answer them with timely posts displaying what I do know about that area. I might not get back to you immediately via email and I probably will just delete the question if I've already answered it. If you don't bother using the search button, I won't waste my time with a reply.
Learning SEO Basics
So what exactly is Search Engine Optimization, commonly refered to as SEO? It is when you optimize your site to rank highly in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. There are other engines out there as well, but those are the Big 3 that really matter (and out of that group, Google is really the only one that matters.)
The reason you want to learn SEO basics is that it is the best way to get targeted traffic. The users finding your site will do so after entering specific keywords that are tailored to what your site is all about. You don't have to pay for this traffic and if you keep up your rankings you can ensure a steady flow of new visitors for a long period of time.
If you have been reading at all about SEO, then you probably have seen the term SERPs. SERPs is an acronym for Search Engine Results Pages. These are simply the pages full of site listings that is returned when you query the engine for a keyword.
There are two types of SEO that we need to worry about when optimizing our site. On-page and off-page.
On-Page
On-page refers to the content actually on your site. While it isn't as important as off-page optimization, it will still play a role in how high your site ranks in the SERPs. The basics of on-page SEO optimizing are keyword density, internal linking structure, and title tags.
Off-Page
The most important part of your SEO campaign is off-page. This entails building up the link popularity of your site with both quantity and quality of sites that send links back to yours. If you can get links back from high quality, high PR, and relevant authority sites that use the keywords you are going for in the anchor text, it's not going to take long for your site to rocket up the SERPs.
Those are the basics of what optimizing SEO is all about. We will get into more details about both on-page and off-page with additional articles down the line.
Getting LASIK in Des Moines
I didn't have terrible vision, but I couldn't see very well at a distance. I wore contacts for about 10 years, but started to have problems and was forced to wear glasses. That wasn't a big deal, but when running or playing any kind of sport the glasses could be kind of inconvenient when they fogged up or slid off of my face. So, I decided to have LASIK surgery.
I talked to quite a few people who had experience the procedure before deciding on who I was going to trust to operate on my eyes. I didn't want to go the cheap route because the complications due to a bad surgery could be total blindness, dry eyes, glares, night halos, or just as bad of vision as you had before. In the end I took my physicians recommendation and saw Dr. Sarno at Des Moines Eye Surgeons. He has been operating on eyes for over 25 years, so I felt like if he didn't have enough experience, nobody does.
It took a month to make an appointment for my evaluation, which was about an hour and a half process where they tested the thickness of my cornea, pupil dilation, and how bad of vision I really had. Supposedly around 10% of people aren't even a candidate. After deciding I was a candidate it took only 10 days to schedule the actual procedure. Evidently only set aside one day out of each month for all of the operations, and some months they take off completely. I had the option of either June 14th or I would have to wait until August. At this point I was too committed to delay.
The procedure itself was at times better than I thought it would be and at other times worse. The actual cutting of the eye wasn't bad, but when they made the cut with the laser I actually went temporarily blind, kind of scary. The removing of the corneal flap took longer than I expected, which almost caused me to panic thinking that there might be something wrong. In the end though, everything turned out normal.
My eyes are extremely blood shot, but I am seeing 20/20. I have had to take drops almost every hour for the past three days, but in the end I have been very happy with the results and the ability to wake up and see without needing my glasses or contacts.
If you are thinking about getting LASIK in the Des Moines area, then I would recommend Dr. Sarno without a second thought.
Marketing Sales Funnel
It seems like most new Internet marketers focus very heavily on traffic. They want to get as many visitors to their site as they can. In their minds, the more eyes on their signup box or that see their product offer, the more money they are going to make. The Internet marketers who only worry about traffic are only taking care of the first step of their sales funnel. What is a sales funnel you ask?
The sales funnel is the process that begins when you capture the attention of prospects. This would be the visitor to your site. As you move down the funnel the visitor interacts with your site in some way, whether it's filling out a form, following you on Twitter, liking your Facebook page, whatever. As you continue to interact with the potential customer you need to demonstrate to them that you can solve some kind of problem or need for them. As you continue to move down the funnel, customers fall off who are not all that interested in what you have to say, so the ones that are left are very targeted. This targeted list is a gold mine as you can offer highly tailored products and services to them at higher prices. This is where the profits are made.
You need to optimize your funnel each step of the way. Are you using PPC ads? Then make sure you are targeting the right traffic. Are some keywords performing better for you than others? These are the ones to focus your SEO efforts on. How well does your hover ad convert visitors to leads? Have you tested it against different wording, a different special bonus, or just a different design? Continue testing until you have achieved the highest conversion rate of visitor signups. Once the visitor has signed up, how well are they reacting to your offers? Do you need to tweak your autoresponder system to get better results? How about your email blasts? Are you trying to upsell former customers? The different ways to optimize your funnel goes on and on.
Now you can see why the marketers who focus on the sales funnel and optimizing it to perfection make the most money. Even if they do not get as much traffic as someone else, they refine their funnel so that they get more money out of each one of those leads. In the end that is all that matters. Traffic stats are nice, but how much money you make is really the only thing you should care about.
Making Money with Review Posts
Another great way to make money online is to write reviews of sites, products, or services. You can make money with review posts either by advertisers paying you directly or by earning a commission when reviewing products that you are affiliated with. Sponsored posts can either be a solid money maker or can turn out to be a real dud. The trick is to give your readers a comprehensive, honest review of the product that you are reviewing. Don't just throw something out there that you haven't used yourself and can't give an honest opinion on. It goes back to building up relationships with your subscribers. You can't do anything that will jeopardize their trust in you or this method of making money will blow up in your face.
The amount of money that you will be paid to write paid reviews depends on a few different things. If you have a higher Google PageRank, the outgoing links will be worth more. If you have a high Alexa rank and can show how many visitors and page views your site gets, you will get paid more per post. Some advertisers want to make sure they are getting click throughs to their site, so the visitor information will be more important to them. Others are trying to build up their presence in the search engines, so they are trying to acquire pagerank to help their rankings. It won't matter to them how many visitors you send them, they just want the bump in rankings for their keywords.
What should your review cover? Basically you should answer the questions your readers would have about the product like, what does it do, how is it different from the competition, what are the advantages and disadvantages, who is it tailored to, and where can you go if you are interested in buying. By answering all of a reader's question about a product, you are encouraging them to take action. If you include pictures, video, and examples those will help alleviate any doubts the reader has with the product.
Whatever you do, make sure that you include both the good and the bad with your review. No product is perfect for every person. There are going to be things that you either don't like about the product or it's going to do something that isn't for everyone, just be honest.
While you are getting paid by the sponsor to write the review, you have to remember that your real customer is the reader. Keep them in mind while writing your review and explain the product in their terms. Do not get overly technical and definitely do not recommend a product to them that you can't see giving them value that makes it worth the price.
If you want to start writing paid reviews on your blog, then make sure to add that fact to your advertising page. It also wouldn't hurt to put that information on your contact page if you want to increase the number of leads you receive. If you want help finding products to review, then take a look at Sponsored Reviews. It's easy to signup and to add your blog. You can then look for opportunities to bid on and once accepted, get paid 50% of the price for writing the review. Payments come bi-weekly and you can earn $5 to $1,000 per post, with no minimum payout.
Product Launch Success
There is a lot of hoopla being made about product launches right now and that is because Jeff Walker is getting ready to release his Product Launch Formula 3.0. He is talking a lot about these million dollar launches and while you might not be making that kind of money, you still should know whether your launch could be considered a success or not. Let's take a look at the factors to consider besides just the total amount of money brought in.
One thing that you have to realize is that these experts are talking about revenues, not profits. When someone is talking about making $40,000 per month or $1 million per launch, take it with a grain of salt. How much are they spending to make that amount? With a typical product launch you are going to have a lot of expenses. The first is credit card fees, which account for 2.5%-4% of your sales. Affiliates can take the biggest chunk, with some programs offering from 50% all the way up to 100% these days! Of course, you have to actually pay for the product to be made, either with your own time or by outsourcing. If you do a physical product there are shipping and fulfillment costs. Plus there are the customers who want refunds and returns, which unfortunately can come in around 5%. If you take all of that into consideration those revenues get dwindled down quite a bit to the point where the final profit can average around 25%-35% of the total sales.
How else can your product launch be considered a success if it doesn't reach the $1 million mark in revenues? The answer is simple, don't just focus on the short-term. With each launch you build a bigger list of (hopefully) happy buyers. You can then market to these buyers later with updated, revised, or similar products. Even if someone didn't buy, they should have been added to a free email list. Did you pay a lot out in affiliate money? While that might hurt your bottom line this launch, you made a lot of partners happy who will then want to promote what you are selling in the future.
Each launch builds on the previous launch. It doesn't matter what niche you are in. A successful product launch will help you build towards the next, and the next, and in no time at all you will be making big money yourself. Maybe even one of those million dollar launches.