Most affiliate programs suck. Few visitors care about them, few visitors end up buying them, the payout is low, and it’s usually just a one-time pay out. If this sounds like your program, think about starting over. Your success depends on your program: if it fails, you’ll fail. If it’s hopeless, the best thing you can do might be to just start fresh.
To find the best affiliate program, just do some number crunching. I know, I hate math too. But this is essential.
Let’s say you are selling an ebook. The ebook is 30 bucks. Let’s say that you have a great conversion rate, and about 1% of people will buy your program. For most ebooks, this is unrealistically great. But let’s play with the idea for a second. Let’s suppose the affiliate program is generous and you make 10 bucks a sale.
If a thousand people go to your website every single day, and one thousand people see an advertisement for the program, let’s pretend like you’re a great marketer. Your amazing copywriting gets about half of these thousand visitors to click. That’s 500.
Now let’s say that these individuals click the link, and 1% of them convert. They decide that they just can’t live without this program, and that it’s worth spending 30 bucks to read. That means that you make 50 bucks. After hours of work and years of labor, you’ll make about 15k per year. And that’s presupposing you have a super-high source of targeted traffic, which isn’t going to happen for most people. This is unacceptable.
While writing this, I actually laughed out loud. It’s so sad, really. It takes over a thousand targeted visitors to make 50 bucks for most affiliate marketers. If this is true for you, do yourself a favor: Start over with a better program.
I market SiteBuildIt almost exclusively, because I would be wasting time to market anything else. SiteBuildIt is basically an all-in-one hosting package. It’s marketing, hosting, ebooks, community, blah blah, amazing amazing, blah blah. I’ve used it before, and it’s actually what it’s cracked up to be. But that’s not why I market it. I market it because to NOT market SiteBuildIt would be stupid. Remember the 1000 visitor statistic above? Let’s look at how SiteBuildIt works with it. Let’s say I have a webpage about websites and making money online. I can turn pretty much any article about internet marketing, making money online or working at home into a long subtle landing page for SiteBuildIt. This means it’s easy to get the 1000 visitors.
The program has an average conversion rate among the entire industry of about 3%. That means you make 3 sales per hundred visitors. Supposing I’m an amazing copywriter like the one we talked about above, this means that 500 people will click the link. My conversion rate is about 5%, but let’s just downplay it to be realistic. Let’s keep it at 3%.
This means that I make 15 sales per thousand visitors. We’re just getting started. Most ebooks or programs would pay 10-20 bucks. SiteBuildIt pays $75.00. That’s $1,125 per thousand visitors. That’s a buck a visitor. The best part? It’s not just a one-time payment…it’s residual. That means that if I keep up the 1000 visitors per day, Ill make over 300k the first year. Since it’s residual, I get paid again next year from last years traffic… PLUS next years traffic. That means next year I make 600k. Next year is 900k.
It’s pretty simple. If you market affiliate programs related to finance, making money online, or anything like that, you can’t afford to not market SiteBuildIt.
$50 or $1,125? Do the math. Click here to join the SiteBuildIt affiliate program.
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Entire books have been written explaining various ways to make money online. Yet several years ago when I first began my online business journey, I simply couldn’t find one article which explained the entire process. Instead, I spent my time reading a bit on domains, a bit on hosting, a bit on marketing, a bit on link building, a bit on advertisements, and wasted time bouncing from one article to another, often more confused than when I started. Such a hodge-podge, hit and miss approach to learning how to successfully make money online wasted months, while I spent countless hours while committing horrible errors.
One comprehensive how-to article would have changed my life.
This article is to fill in the gap, and provide you with a one-stop tutorial that covers the basics of making money online, specifically without spending more than $300. This is the basic investment, and can end up earning literally tens of thousands of dollars.
Why You Should Read This
This article is pretty lengthy. It would be easy to skip it for a shorter, “more fun” website, that is filled with hype. However, the information provided here is proven to work. Professional “make money online” “gurus” spend entire websites, filled with hundreds of articles explaining how to do what is listed in this one article.
Also, most websites are created to teach you how to simply make money online. We’ll be covering that as well, while also taking it a step further: we don’t want you to just “make some money”, we want you to become independently wealthy. That’s what this article teaches.
We’ll start with the very basics, and look first at how to succeed at anything. Then we’ll move on and cover the possible ways to make money online, and then will narrow those ways down to the one way that has the most earning potential. From there we’ll take a step-by-step approach to success so that anyone who follows each of the steps will be in a position to make money quit their job, work at home and manage their new home business.
This is an incredibly exciting topic, but, unfortunately, the guides found on other sites are often filled with hype and false promises. This is a no-hype zone, and will cover the disadvantages and difficulties of every step to making money online with reason, caution, and a healthy dose of common sense.
First things first, let’s talk about how to succeed at anything. This will be the foundation of the tutorial, and every point after this will be referencing this section of the guide.
A World of Systems
Children are notorious for constantly asking questions. Their reasoning is simple: people, even “little people”, try to organize everything they know so that it makes sense. Children ask “why” because they think there just has to be a reason. Everyone knows that things just work in a certain way. Most people who are looking for business opportunities know this as well.
This is why there are so many scams out there, with “automated” formulas for becoming a millionaire, with “systems” that will make you millions without any work. Of course, these systems are false. But it proves a point: these marketers are trying to take advantage of people who know that there has to be a system to everything, including making money online.
To get a system to work for you, you have to work the system. To work the system, you have to know the system. It’s been said that “the first million is the hardest”, and it’s completely true. There have been millions of millionaires who spent years building that first million, but once they hit the first one, the second and third and fiftieth suddenly were much easier to achieve. This is because to make that first million, these businesspeople had to have some sort of a system for making it. It’s all about having the right system.
Once you figure out the system, you can use the system to generate success over and over again. It’s like having a cookie cutter, only you aren’t making cookies, you’re making hundred-dollar bills.
The only question is “What system is best?” That’s where our next section in this tutorial comes in. There are an incredibly large number of people who earn their livelihood with online businesses, jobs and opportunities that they have taken advantage of.
Before we analyze the possibilities for success, let’s discuss what it means to be successful, and what the perfect opportunity would look like.
Know What You Want
This is one of the most vital sections of this tutorial. Lean back, and imagine a detailed “perfect” lifestyle for you. Think of having everything that you could want? What’s the ideal existence for you?
For some, it might sound kind of obvious. Travel, fast cars, big houses… but, of course, everyone is different. A perfect lifestyle for some would be to have enough money to live in a small cottage, have enough to eat, and spend most of the day with an adoring family and/or friends. For others, it would be weekly trips to Hawaii, monthly hikes in the Alps and shopping sprees in NYC. It’s completely relative to the person.
The amount of money we make is essential to achieving the lifestyle we want. It might not be a lot, or, for some, it might be an incredible amount. It depends on the person. The purpose of a dream is to achieve it. I’m a firm believer that the Internet has opened up the possibilities of incredible wealth to anyone who has the determination to achieve it.
Get a pen and paper out, and sit with a friend or loved one. Write down in detail exactly what you want in life. Once you are finished, post it somewhere you will see all the time. This is the goal of your online journey.
One word of advice: Don’t give up. No matter what happens, no matter what people tell you, no matter what — don’t give up. Having an achievable dream is vital to becoming the person you want to be and achieving the life you want.
If your dream is ambitious, it will be incredibly hard to achieve it. But barring the laws of physics, there is no limit to what you can achieve. It doesn’t take a high IQ, amazing writing skill, an amazing personality or anything else to make money online, as we’ll be talking about in a minute.
The Right System
The perfect way of making money is not to work for your money, but to have your money work for you. This is the secret of professional investors. They take what they have and double it, then double that, then double… you get the point.
The crucial key to the ultimate system of making money is this:
Build a money-making system, not a time-based job.
Billions of people around the world have their entire lively-hood on the line, every day. If they miss a day of work, their entire source of income is demolished. If an emergency comes up, they are completely wiped out. If they are fired, they are completely wiped out. They make money completely hands-on, meaning they have to show up to work. This leaves them incredibly vulnerable. They work for their money, their money doesn’t work for them.
Having an income that isn’t directly tied to the hours you work is vital to creating an income that has no limit. Few millionaires are paid by the hour.
Those who have spent their lives, not slaving for an hourly job, but instead to build a system that was designed to grow, with or without any more work — they’re the ones who are the millionaires.
Next up, let’s talk about a way you can establish your own system that doesn’t require you to constantly micromanage once you are established. This is what I have done, and am actually already doing with this website and every other website I own. I’ve spent almost no money, but generate my entire online income in this manner. It’s simple, but it’s not easy. But one thing is for sure: it’s completely changed my life.
Making Money With a Website
Every day, millions of people around the world head to Google or other search engines. They might have a question they want answered, or they might just be surfing. Thousands of people every day search for “make money online” and “work from home”. They are looking for ways to get some cash while at their computers. This is just the start. There are million of searches about real estate, base-ball cards, celebrities, movies, video games, gardening, travel — you name it, they’re searching for it.
So what does this have to do with making money online?
Next time you’re driving down the highway, notice the bill-boards on the sides. Someone owns the little strip of land next to the highway, and has rented a little spot of their property to someone else to put up advertisements. If it weren’t for the highway, and consequently the traffic on the high-way, the bill-board would have never been put up, and the property owner wouldn’t have that extra source of revenue. But the highway existed, and he recognized that that was a great income opportunity.
The same thing is true for the Internet. The Internet is the information super-highway. Billions of people use the Internet every day. Websites are kind of like the property that’s next to the highway — the highway traffic sees what’s on the property in the same way that Internet users see what’s on websites. All you have to do is recognize the opportunity the Internet holds for you, and act accordingly.
The Internet allows you to create a resource for people searching for a particular topic, regardless of anything. Internet users who are searching for that information will stumble across your website. You’ll have “bill-boards” and banner-ads, meaning that the traffic suddenly equals money, at least for you. You don’t have to actually sell anything — you just market information. This is how I make money online, and it’s incredibly simple. It just requires four steps.
First, find a topic to write about on your website, called a “niche”. Example niches would include “personal finance”, “recipes”, “movie reviews” or anything else. Some people even have made a full-income writing about birthday parties.
After picking your niche, you get your actual website. After this, you start writing and putting tother some quality articles and generate traffic. Then ad advertisements. It’s simple — no techy knowledge is necessary, if you use SiteBuildIt, a program we’ll be talking about later in this tutorial.
Let’s go through each of the steps in the process.
1. Find a “Niche”
Imagine spending all day, every day writing about the economic cycles of Brazilian currency. Can’t imagine doing that? Me either. Your interests will play an amazingly huge role in what will work for you when creating content for your website and/or blog. If you want to meet success, your blog has to be about something you know and care about.
Just ask yourself, “what are the top 10 most important things to me?” Whether it’s pets, politics vacations, algebra, books, philosophy or child-raising, the Internet probably has a slot open for you. You can be successful writing about almost anything. You just have to care enough about the topic to completely exhaust it — because that’s what you’re going to do.
Once you have figured out what the topic is going to be, you can move on to the next step — making a website.
2. Make Website
For some reason, many of my friends believe that I know lots of computer coding, and could rewrite the scripts for Facebook or Google. I can’t. I have a collection of websites, and I can’t even remember how to do HTML like links — I have to look it up every time. What’s my point in saying this? If I can make a website, you can. Don’t be intimidated by what popular culture might say about the Internet and websites — you don’t have to be a geek to unleash the Internet to your financial favor.
Getting a website is simple. You have basically two choices. You can get a traditional full-blown website, or you can get a blog. A regular website is one which focuses on having set, concrete pages, meaning that the website generally looks the same most of the time. A blog is a specific kind of website that is constantly updated, and is based upon information that’s importance is based upon time. A blog is a great way to write about news and current events, whereas a website is a great way to write about things that are not affected by time. Either way, I’ll give you the information you’ll need to get either.
A Blog
Blogs are incredibly fun, yet time-consuming. Most blogs are written for personal use, though the professional blog is on the rise, as evidenced by this blog along with dozens of others.
To have a blog, you first need a domain name and a host. By far, the best host and domain serving company I have run into is IX Web Hosting — that’s who hosts this website.
The process here is incredibly simple. Sign up — in a few hours, you’ll have access to your website. Plus, IX Web Hosting is so cool they give you the domain name for free. Yep, for free. Don’t get cheaper than that. All in all, they’ll charge you six bucks a month for some great hosting and a free domain. By far the best deal I’ve run into.
Once you’ve got access to the website, check out Wordpress.org. There you will find a great blogging platform called, well, “Wordpress.” It’s shnazzy. Once again, that’s what Shaun Connell dot Com uses. It’s a great blogging platform that is almost completely customizable, looks professional, plus has a nifty “page” feature, allowing you to have lots of regular webpages, much like this one.
Setting up the Wordpress on your website used to be hard. Note the past tense. Some awesome guys here have offered to hook it up for you. For free. That’s what I call service.
This is if you are interested in establishing a blog. I actually don’t suggest blogging for money at first. Blogs are a great way to market products and build links for your websites once you have more than one. Blogging requires that you constantly are writing and working and adding more and more content. If you miss a week or so you can lose a huge number of subscribers. If you’ve never made a website before, I’d suggest starting with a traditional site. If you are seriously considering a blog right now, and you haven’t made a website before, feel free to leave this page to read this.
Traditional Website
If you aren’t interested in blogging, but want a full-fledged website, there’s only one way to do it — the best way. After creating several successful websites, one thing I learned was that putting a full-fledged site up can be time consuming and a general all-around pain. Then I discovered a company that is, well, perfect. No, I’m completely serious. I read reviews of the program from website experts well over a year ago. I thought they were stretching the truth. Finally, I bought the product and tried it myself. They weren’t kidding.
The company sells a product called “SiteBuildIt!” SBI gives you a domain, host, a design program so that you can design the website without buying another product, it also gives you a special search program that allows you to look at the best ways to maintain your website, along with special “collaborative” options that allow your site’s visitors to /add/ free content (the more successful you become, the less your write), free “search engine optimization” software that brings you tons of free traffic from places like Google, along with thousands of dollars worth of other free software. SBI is essential to anyone who is just starting out on the Internet, and can pay off the original 300 bucks thousands of times over.
But why do you need the programs that are built in for free? Here’s the proof it works. Over 60% of all the websites created through SBI are in the top 3% of the Internet. SiteBuildIt makes money only because they market themselves to people who want to make money. Other hosts are often just for people who want personal blogs or websites with pictures. SiteBuildIt is specifically for people who have the goal of making money with their website. That’s why the success rate is so high.
SiteBuildIt isn’t just a way to get a website, it’s a way to get a website that makes money.
3. Get Traffic
The next step is to generate visitors to your new site, or “traffic” as the visitors are called. After all, with no traffic there’s no income. Traffic is the driving force for internet-marketers — that’s the whole reason we do what we do.
Remember, the number one source for free traffic is through search engines. This means that you’ll need to make search engines happy if you want any traffic at all. There are basically two general ways of making search engines happy — lots of good content, and lots of others linking to you. We’ll talk about content first.
Content
By far, the number one top priority that you can possibly have regarding traffic, is to have lots of relevant content. If your website is about philosophy, write about philosophy until it hurts — if your website is about politics, write about politics until you see politicians in your sleep. The same goes with every other topic that you could possibly choose — write, write and write. That’s how to increase traffic.
Obviously, though, you don’t want just random rants and raves on your site, you’ll need content that’s good enough to get you noticed. Writer and webmaster Steve Pavlina gives plenty of tips for generating great traffic through content.
Write Valuable Content
If your content is about something that no one wants to know or would be willing to read (for example, nothing but personal information), chances are — no one will read it. Or link to it. This means that your traffic will either die, or just never start.
Valuable content can really just depend on the topic. For example, if you’re writing about how to make money online, you don’t want to just say what all of the other “make money online” blogs are staying — no one would go to your site, they’d go to another one. Be valuable, and search engines recognize your value.
Write Original Content
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever seen regarding websites is their lack of creativity. Don’t rehash old news, and don’t just write about what the other websites in your niche write about — be yourself, stand out and the search engines will take notice. Why? Because the more original your content, the more likely other webmasters are going to be to refer your site to their friends, meaning that you get links pointing to your site, meaning that search engines love you more. Creative content gives you search engine love.
Be Honest
People can see through an insincere writing style. You need to actually care about both what you’re writing about and the people who will read it. Otherwise, you’ll just come off as an arrogant jerk. Search engines hate, and I mean hate jerks. Well. Other webmasters do at least, meaning you won’t get as many links as if you were sincere.
Links
Search engines like to list popular websites at the top of their results. If lots of people link to a website, chances are, it’s going to be a good website. Considering this, getting people to link to your website or blog is essential to getting free traffic on Google and other search engines. The only question is … how?
Content
As explained before, content is everything. Write good stuff, get good links. Write really good stuff, get lots of good links. It’s literally that simple.
Link Exchanges
Link exchanges are sneaky little clubs that people join to link to each other. This way everyone who joins gets lots of links pointing back to their website or blog. This sounds great, but search engines generally don’t care when they see that a website has lots of artificial links. But, if you want to try it, shoot for it.
The only link-exchange program that I’ve found that works quite well is BlogRush. It works by putting a little widget on the side of your blog. It’s professional and doesn’t look cheesy, but generates lots of relevant traffic. Most definitely a must-use for blog owners.
Link to similar websites
A link is “worth more” to search engines if it is from a website that is similar to yours. This way the search engine robots will think that it’s probably a legitimate link, rather than one that has been spammed all over the Internet. To find a website to trade links with, just do a quick Google search for your keywords either on Google or Google Blog Search.
Also, remember that by linking to my website, you’ll be getting an automatic link back to yours. I believe in sharing the link wealth. =)
Comment on similar blogs
It shocks me to no end how so many bloggers and webmasters expect to have millions of people read their website out of the blue. If people don’t know you exist, they can’t link to you. If you don’t link to you, then you don’t get a high ranking on search engines. If you don’t get the high search engine ranking, then people won’t know you exist.
Breaking this seemingly endless cycle is relatively easy. Go to the Google Blog Search type in some of your website’s keywords, and comment on the blogs with a link pointing back to your website. Doing this helps both other webmasters, and puts you on the map. Don’t expect everyone to link to you right off the bat — you’ve got to earn their trust first. How do you do that? It’s all about content.
4. Make Money
Here’s where we get to the good part — making the money. This is, interestingly enough, one of the easiest issues regarding the website. If you have a nice website with nice content and some traffic, monetization is going to make it all worth-while.
There are several ways to earn an income with your website, all without charging your visitors anything. How does this work? Remember the analogy at the beginning of the page, the one about the bill-boards? That’s just it. Traffic never has to pay to see billboards — the advertisers pay for the traffic to see the ads. The same works for websites.
There are literally millions of people who are willing to advertise on the Internet. These people will be your cash cow. But, the way the programs are set up, you’ll never have to deal directly with them. Instead, you just sign up for a program that automatically places the ads in the section of your website you decide.
In my experience, the best programs are AdSense, Bannerconnect and Kontera. The three programs work perfectly together, and split up the advertising styles. AdSense pays for every time someone clicks on the ad. Banner connect pays for every time someone sees the ad. Kontera pays for every click, but is special — changes random words into ad-links, meaning that it doesn’t look like an ad.
All in all, these are the best ad programs to use, by far. To learn more, just click the links/buttons below.
Sign up for Kontera.
Sign up for AdSense.
Sign up for Banner Connect.
Aside from these traditional advertisements, a killing is to be made through a system of advertising called referral marketing. Referral marketing allows you to earn money every time someone buys another product as a result of your marketing. For example, let’s say that I made a blog post advertising for a book that cost $49.00. I would only make money if I actually ended up selling the book — not just because people clicked the ad.
This is a great way to earn revenue if you can find products worth selling. There are literally hundreds of thousands to choose from. Check them out at Clickbank and Commission Junction.
Conclusions
The Internet is exploding. People are starting to turn to the Internet to answer their questions, learn new things, and discover valuable content. Because of this, millionaires are being made.
The number one way of tapping into this huge market is to establish a website. If it’s your first time to build a website, start with SiteBuildIt. It’s the cheapest way to have an entire organization guide you through the process. Their entire business goal is for you to make enough money online to work at home.
With an initial investment of hundred a hundred bucks, you can launch yourself into the online world of information marketing. The opportunities are, to put it simply, amazing and abundant. You don’t have to work your 9-5 — work for yourself online.
NOTE: Using SiteBuildIt is risk-free. If you decide you don’t want to do it after already owning it for months you can just contact them for your money back. So try it for a few months, and if you decide it’s not for you, just contact them.
Remember: those who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try nothing and succeed.
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The biggest business “sucker” is the person who buys because of emotion. An emotional sales pitch leaves them with a lame PDF and an empty wallet. Unfortunately, there are tons of these people. Unfortunately, a lot of greedy “marketers” have noticed this. They target the sucker, so they can suck money from the poor little mental sapling.
It seems both sinister and kind of smart. After all, you don’t have to have a great product if you are targeting the morons of the world, right? They’re morons, for Thor’s sake. They live their life making dumb decisions. They might as well make one that makes someone some money, right?
Most internet marketing scams do that. Rather than provide a quality service for a fee (like Ken Envoy’s Site Build It! or Brian Clark’s “Teaching Sells“), they’ve decided to write a 50-page e-book with stuff a half-hour spent a great blog could teach you. Sure, they do make some money…but they’re missing an opportunity.
Here’s a list of reasons you should target the smart people of the world rather than the idiots:
6. Smart people have money
The idiots of the world typically have less money. No, I’m not saying that if someone’s broke that they’re an idiot — there are brilliant poor people and genius idiots. But statistically, there’s more than just a correlation between being smart/discerning and having extra money.
Plus, if everyone’s targeting the idiot, chances are, they’ve already been ripped off. This means they have even less money, plus, they’re suspicious of you. Stupid or not, that’s a hurdle for your sales pitch.
5. Smart people + quality product = sale
If you have a great product, the smart people will know it. If you give your potential customer /enough information/ or a free report with enough information that they can trust that you know what you’re doing, your chances of making the sale increase incredibly.
4. Smart people become contacts
The smarter the person, the more likely they’ll succeed with whatever you give them to succeed with. For a lot of internet marketers, this means that a customer today is a contact tomorrow. Ripping people off doesn’t do this.
3. Smart people are under-served
There are a billion sites that are written with copy specifically for the idiot who will buy a product without any real knowledge about it at all. There are rarely (comparatively — there are some fantastic resources for smart people, like Steve Pavlina’s personal development for smart people website) websites geared towards the intelligent person. Target them, and you generally have less overall competition.
2. You still sell to the idiots
If you target the smart people, the idiots will figure it out too. They’ll still like the product, if the sales pitch is done right. Win-win.
1. You’ll feel better
We don’t want to be the person who goes to sleep at night thinking about the people they ripped off. Sleep better, market ethically, and make more money while you’re at it.
With good business, everyone wins. That’s why the billionaires of the world typically do good business. It just works.
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