It’s that time when the holidays are passing into a new year and people’s thoughts turn toward how they can make more money, especially on the internet. Just like the New Year’s Bowl games and cold weather, the dreams of making it big on the internet are an annual event that for most people fades into the spring as they quickly give up on this dream.

Of course there are a few good tips to keep your motivation and focus on earning more money on the internet. It’s generally not very easy, but then again nothing worthwhile is generally easy to obtain. By keeping these tips in mind, you can greatly increase your chances for success in making money on line.

Start Immediately – There is a great tendency for people to read up about every aspect of how to make money on the internet, yet not really do anything because they are afraid of making a mistake. First things first, everyone is going to make mistakes, that’s part of starting up a new business. Plus, the cost of getting a website is generally under $20. If you can’t afford $20, then you have far more serious problems than trying to start up an online business.

Find a Niche – You cannot compete with large department stores or the resources of big businesses, but you can focus your product on a small niche or market that can produce a high volume of profit. What you are trying to do is avoid major competition by having products or services that appeal to a small, but vibrant group of people who will pay for them.

Keywords are the Key – When people search for products, they use search engines such as Google or Yahoo and use keywords or key phrases to find them. By structuring your website, content and promotion around those keywords, you improve your chances of having your online business appear closer to the top of search result pages. That means more people will click on your online business and visit your site. Continually research on the best, most effective keywords will keep your online business working.

Focus on Building Traffic – The old saying, “It’s not selling a product, it’s finding a product that sells” sounds really good. But unfortunately the greatest product ever created for the human race won’t make you a dime unless other people know about it. Once you have established your website, the next step is focusing all of your efforts to generating traffic to your business. For every one person that makes a purchase, you’ll probably have 50 to 100 to 1000 or more people just visit your site and pay nothing. You must strive to build as much traffic as possible every day.

Once you Start, Stop reading Blogs – Stop reading, start doing. That pretty much is how a successful business is run. Why spend time and effort learning techniques that you will never use. Of course, you will want to stay up on new techniques that may apply to you, but blogs are generally not where you find them.

Be Persistent – Nothing in the world takes the place of persistence. Keep trying, keep doing and your efforts will pay off.

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Is Your Blog Dead? Breathe Some Life Back Into It!

In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about making money blogging. Spurred on by the claims of those who have supposedly done it, inexperienced internet marketers have taken it up in droves, hoping to replicate the success of big-time bloggers, only to find out that simply throwing up a blog doesn’t guarantee success. Now, just because a person isn’t currently making make money blogging, doesn’t mean that they can’t, just that what they’re currently doing isn’t working. With a few tweaks (or perhaps a massive overhaul) it is often possible to turn things around.

A person that isn’t experiencing as much success as they’d like blogging, has a few options. They can wait it out and hope that things improve, take a second look at their SEO efforts, particularly the keywords they are targeting, experiment with the monetization of their blog, change their business model or enter a different niche. We’ll talk a bit about each of these options in more detail, below.

Wait it Out: If a person is just starting out, not experiencing immediate success is not a reason to quit. As long as the blog isn’t that person’s primary source of income, they can probably afford to wait for traffic and then hopefully sales to improve. Developing a following and gaining visitors’ trust can take time. Consistent advertising, great content, integrity and regular content updates are all effective ways to develop a following and hopefully income from one’s blog.

Re-Consider Ones SEO Efforts: It may be necessary to re-examine the keywords a person is targeting. If they are too competitive, an individual might not ever see any traffic from the search engines.

Experiment with Monetization Techniques: If an individual’s current monetization efforts aren’t working, they may need to change them up. There are all sorts of options, for instance, Adsense, ad space sales, affiliate products, ones own products.

Change the Business Model: A blogger who is writing general-info blog posts and hoping that their visitors will eventually purchase one of the products advertised on the blog may find that writing well-balanced reviews on products people in their niche are interested in, is a better money-maker. If so, they might want to change their business model. Another option might be to only place ads on their site from companies that are willing to pay for the space.

Enter a Different Niche: If a person is in a niche that is difficult to drive traffic to or which is tough to monetize, it may be time to go into a different niche.

If a person’s blog isn’t experiencing as much success as they’d like, they have a number of options. They can wait it out, re-consider their SEO efforts, experiment with monetization techniques, change their business model or enter a different niche.

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Intoxicated with the Idea of Overnight Success? Get Over It?

The internet is the land of false promises. Charlatans reign supreme hoping to part naive and hopeful ‘newbies’ with their hard-earned money. Fortunately, there are legitimate ways to make online. It’s just a matter of knowing what to look for so that you are able to spot the good opportunities sidestep the bad ones. In this article, we’ll discuss how to succeed at blogging, which is one of the former. It is easy enough to do and perhaps best of all, it doesn’t require a huge influx of cash.

Online success comes after trying a bunch of things that didn’t work, i.e., experience or being fortunate enough to get good advice early on. An honest and successful mentor can go a long way in this regard. The second best thing would be find to a successful online marketer who dispenses quality information via a blog or website, where it can be easily and freely accessed.

The first thing that you should know is that vast majority of people making money online, weren’t overnight successes and they certainly didn’t build their businesses sitting on their rump doing nothing. Online success requires a good plan, fortitude, hard work and patience. With that being said, let’s discuss blogging and how to go about it successfully.

Don’t Oversell: Think Quality Not Quantity: You’ll want to avoid posting ads all over your blog. Find a few things that you’d like to promote and then advertise them in a way that isn’t offensive to your reader. Also, avoid including tons of advertisements in your posts. Your readers want quality information. They don’t want to be sold to.

Provide Quality Content: It doesn’t matter if your blog is populated with 100s of post if none of them are of good quality.

Think Viral: Try to create pieces that your readers will want to tell their family, friends and community about.

Optimize, Optimize Optimize: Optimize your blog posts for the search engines. Free, targeted traffic is the best traffic of all. Posts of 500 words or more are generally better than short blurbs.

Be Consistent: Adding a few, new posts a week will often be sufficient. Some people will want to add content everyday.

Cross Promote: Write on topics that are related to your primary one but which differ in some way. For instance, if your blog is about weight diet programs, consider creating a few posts on exercising or weight training. Your audience is likely to be interested in related topics and it helps to mix things up a bit. Happy readers are more apt to buy from you.

Blogging is a great way to make money online. To be successful, don’t oversell. Provide quality content, optimize your posts for the search engines, write regularly and learn to cross-promote.

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Most people do email marketing wrong. They offer people to signup for updates about their website, but no one wants updates about their site. Then for the few people that do signup for their list, they barrage them with affiliate offers. People want information, videos, products and images that will help them solve their problems. You should email your list new blog posts and videos that you make, and occasionally products you release and affiliate products that you really believe in and know will actually help your list members. You should also offer people a free report that helps them with one of their main problems to encourage them to join your list. Do not think too hard about email list management, just think of your list members like your real life friends and send them good stuff. Always ask yourself before you send an email, is this going to make my list members like me more or like me less? If you send them too much junk, they will start ignoring your emails, so always be creating and looking for the best stuff to send them.

Now lets talk about some pay per click metrics that you should be looking at. Remember, it is very important to have your own product and affiliate program when buying clicks because everyone you are competing to buy clicks with has their own products and if you do not your return on investment will be too low to do it profitably. When buying clicks from search engines, it is important to really think about the keywords you are bidding on. You have to ask yourself if this is a keyword that is going to make you sales. If your product is skateboards or a guide on how to skate better, should you really be bidding on words like rollerblades or free skateboard tips? No, because those words are not going to convert well for you, your click through rate is going to be low, and your quality score is going to suffer so you are going to end up paying way more than your competition for those clicks. Stick to your core keywords like buy skateboards and skateboarding guide and expand from there. Make your campaign profitable with ten words, then add one a day and watch carefully.

I saw the rock band ACDC on a year 2000 episode of Saturday Night Live today and thought how strange it is that some people are able to make so much money from such simple things like short three minute songs. Some industries just make more money and have more potential customers in them, that is just the way it is and if you want to do better you should figure out a way to move into those big industries. Some niches are so lucrative because they have such mass appeal, everyone likes music. American Idol is the most watched show on the planet because people like to watch people sing, it is just a fact and something you have to accept and look for other things that you can sell that have mass appeal. People in the music industry make so much money because all seven billion people in this world like music, so pick a topic that has a lot of interest so you have a good shot at doing well even if you only capture a small amount of the market share. When you are picking niches and creating products, you have to really think about how many people would be interested in it.

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Many website owners make the mistake of setting up their homepage with a block of text with no links in it. Visitors arrive at their homepage and read it, and get to the end of the text with no links to click and no idea of what to do next. You have to really think about what pages of your website you want your visitors to go to, and add links to those pages within the text of your homepage or within your sidebar. People have a tenancy to take the first choice you give them, so give them the choice they are looking for or the one you want them to take. Search results prove that people take the first choice because of how many more people click the first choice compared to results two through ten. Also, it is important to not clutter your site with too many links to your social media profiles so that you do not leak too much traffic away from your website.

It is very hard to get venture capital funding especially with how badly the economy of the world is currently. You are really only likely to get funding if you already have a profitable business. Venture Capitalists do not just give money to people with ideas, they usually only give it to people who are already succeeding and are looking to expand quickly. Focus on making your business profitable before seeking funding from outside sources, and even then be careful that you do not lose control of your business.

If you want to see a great anti-war movie check out Paths of Glory. I saw it tonight on the Turner Classic Movies channel and really enjoyed it. It was directed by Stanley Kubrick who also made other epic masterpieces such as 2001, The Shining, Clockwork Orange, and Doctor Strangelove. His movies usually show the darkest sides of man but are always very uplifting too.

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If you want to learn how to track your web traffic, KissMetrics has compiled fifty guides to Analytics which you should have a look at. As soon as you start your site you should add analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Once you know which websites are sending you visitors, you can try to think of ideas to increase your visitors from those sources, like buying banners on their site, or asking them if they will do an email blast to their list for you. If a certain keyword is sending you a little bit of traffic, try to rank higher for that keyword and get more traffic from it.

Nielsen has released a big Social Media Report with fourteen slides and all kinds of data. Smart phone use is on the rise, but ninety-seven percent of social media is still accessed by computers. People spend more time on social networks than any other type of websites, so it is important to have a business presence on them. Their reports show that mobile users are really into downloading and playing music, games, and browsing the internet so try to think of some ideas for ways you could incorporate music and games into your website. High quality written content, videos, and images can go viral on social networks, but the key is they have to be very high quality and cool enough for people to share with their friends. Try to make yourself a high converting product website so you can afford to profitably buy traffic from social networks.

When you launch your products, a good way to increase traffic and sales for them is to have other websites review them and ask your customers for reviews. You can add quotes from the reviews to your pitch page to increase your products perceived value and conversion rate. You can get customer reviews by asking your customers through email what they thought about your product or to review your product on their website if they have one, or you can send website owners your product for free and ask them to do a review.

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1. How To Increase Traffic To Your Website

A domain name is the address of your site. For example “Yahoo.com” and “DeviantArt.com” are domain names. Dot com domain names are generally worth ten to twenty times their dot net and dot org equivalents, because they have such world wide recognition. The largest domain registrar in the world is GoDaddy.

Your domain name is extremely important in determining whether or not you will make money online, so choose it carefully. All successful websites have good domain names. Your domain name should be easy to remember, easy to say out loud, spell, and people should know exact what your website is about by just reading it. You can see the Domain Sales chart at DNJournal.

Your domain name is the first thing that people see, so it has the potential to draw them in, or immediately turn them off if it has hyphens or numbers in it, or has words that make no sense.

The problem is most good generic domain names are already taken.

So it you want a domain name like
“VideoGames.com”

You might consider adding a word to the end or beginning like
“VideoGamesWorld.com”
“CoolVideoGames.com”
“VideoGamesForGuys.com”

It is always a good idea to have one of the main keywords for your subject in your domain name. For example if your site is about “Running Faster” then include that in your domain name as it will help you rank for search terms related to that and allow people to remember it easier.

A good keyword tool I use is Word Pot. Put in a keyword related to the subject of your website, and it will give you a list of keyword with the number of times each is searched for per day. For example the word “Skateboards” gets searched for around 1,000 times per day. If you can rank in the top 10 for that keyword, you will be able to get a percent of that search traffic. Whoever ranks number one usually gets about fifty percent of the search traffic (since paid ads get about thirty percent) and positions 2 through 10 get around 10% to 1% the lower you go in rankings.

To buy domains that are already taken, like exact match keyword domains, you should look up the owners email address through a tool like Whois Lookup. Then email the owner and ask them how much money they want for the domain name. When they write back with a price, offer them half of what they want, then negotiate from there.

Usually they will want a ridiculous price that you will not want to pay or not be able to afford, but sometimes you will find domain name owners that reply to you with a reasonable price. I have bought some really good domain names from people this way, including this one. Give it a try.

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1. How To Increase Traffic To Your Website

Here is a diagram of the two main internet business models, and the four best ways to get visitors. The two main internet business models are having a website where you sell your own products, and having a website where you sell affiliate products or ad space for other people’s products. The four best ways to get visitors are from search engines, affiliates, paid traffic, and your email list.

(Click to Enlarge)

Lets look at each of the four ways to get traffic.

1. Search Engine Traffic

There are two ways you can get search engine traffic. First, you can target a medium to high search volume keyword with the homepage of your domain. For example, if you want to target the keyword “video game guides” you should get a domain name like “videogameguides.com” or if that is taken add a word to the end of it like “videogameguidesworld.com”. Then build links to your homepage with variations of the anchor text “video game guides”. If you look at the search results for most high to medium search volume keywords, you will notice that its mostly homepages with keywords in their domain names that are ranking in the top 10 results.

The other way to get search traffic is to add a new article or blog post to your website every day. It should have at least 300 words, and it’s page title tag should be between 5 and 9 words long to give you a chance to rank for as many different keyword combinations as possible. Most people are too lazy to put in the effort to do this, but the people that do are usually awarded with good results.

2. Affiliate Traffic

The only way to get affiliate traffic is to have your own product with a high paying affiliate program. If your product is cool enough, converts well, and appeals to a large audience, then affiliates will promote it through banner ads on their websites and their email lists.

To attract affiliates, you should have a helpful affiliate resource page on your site with plenty of nice banners and pre-made emails they can send to their lists. You will naturally attract affiliates the more traffic you get, as some of the people that visit your site will become affiliates. You can also contact website owners in your niche directly and ask them if they will promote your product through a banner on their site or through their email list.

3. Paid Traffic

The only way to profitably buy traffic is to have your own product with an affiliate program. The reason is because you are competing to buy traffic with product owners, and they bid up the prices to a point where only product owners can afford to buy traffic because only they have high enough margins. When you buy traffic you have to factor in the new affiliates you get from that traffic, and your email list growth. If you buy traffic to your website and you don’t have your own product, you will not make enough money on people clicking your ads to cover the cost of the bought traffic, and since you do not have an affiliate program no one will send you that bonus traffic.

4. Email List Traffic

You can grow your email list by having an opt-in in your side bar, an opt-in for people to go to your product purchase page, and and opt-in after they buy to join your customer email list (your most profitable list, since they have already bought from you). You can also offer people a free report or video with some of your best tips to get them to join your list.

Once you have your list, you should email them new blog posts you write, new videos you make, cool media you find around the internet related to your topic, free things you can give them, occasional offers for your products and affiliate products, and anything else you can think of that will make your list subscribers like you more. Remember, you are trying to build a relationship with them so they will keep opening your emails, so only send them good stuff that they will like.

Those are the best ways to increase traffic to your websites. You should try to diversify your sources as much as possible so that if one dries up you will have others to fall back on. That is why it is so important to create your own products, because without them you will not be able to get affiliate traffic or paid traffic which are two extremely important streams. Always remember that everything takes hard work, so get started now.

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So a lot of people get stuck at the first step of building a website, which is getting ideas for a website to start. The key is to not over think it. Just pick one of your hobbies, get a good domain name, setup a blog on it, and post to it once per day so you start to rank for some keywords in the search engines. Then monetize your site once you have a flow of traffic with other people’s products (through ads or affiliate programs) or your own that you create.

The daily post you make can be short like Seth Godin style, or long and detailed. You can write about your thoughts, news from your niche, or new media on your topic like pictures and videos. The more you post, the more traffic you will get.

The second way is to look through the Top 100 Blogs according to Technorati. Go to all the sites in the top 100 listed there and you will definitely get ideas for websites to start. And just because someone already has a website on a topic you are interested in, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start a website about that topic. The most profitable topics have thousands of competitors in them.

The third way is to look at the top 500 most popular sites in the United States according to Alexa. This will give you ideas for all kinds of different types of websites you can start. Be ambitious, start a website that you think would be hard to create. The harder it is to build something, the more profits and less competition there will be.

And finally, watch some television. Think about ideas for topics while you watch your favorite shows. Try to pick a topic that could be popular with the social media crowd. Always be asking yourself if your website really is cool, and if its not, make it cool. Just about all websites that do well have a lot of effort and time put into them, start now.

Here is an awesome thread at the Warrior Forum on the Top Money Making Niches. There are tons of ideas there, have a look.

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By far the best and most popular online business discussion forums are Warrior Forum and Digital Point. Also check out Webmaster World for more advanced information. Go visit these three sites and spend some time reading them. They each get thousands of new posts per day and have some very smart people that will help you with any questions you have.

Be warned though, don’t believe everything you read because while there are a lot of good people that post on these forums, there are also a lot of new people on those forums that do not know what they are talking about. On the Warrior Forums make sure to mainly trust the advise of people with a lot of thanks, a feature of the forum that allows members to thank posters for their advise. Always test everything, you will learn a lot by actually doing things instead of just reading.

Penelope wrote a good post about how you need to keep learning to compete with Generation Z. Her posts always have great pictures.

Seth Godin did an insightful article on why its important to not worry. Worrying does not get you anywhere. Instead, just keep pushing and finish whatever you are working on. Then keep improving it.

As usual Copyblogger has a great post on how screenwriting can make you a better writer. Your story has to have good characters that people can relate to. If you watch a lot of television and read a lot of books, you’ll begin to notice that everything is pretty much the same story over and over again, but with different characters. As Humphrey Bogart said, its always the same old story, a quest for love and glory, and if you want your story read you have to give it deep characters that people can fall in love with.

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