Do You Want To Make Money Online?

If you would like to start making money online, or if you are already making some extra money online and would like to earn enough income on the internet so that you can quit your day job, you have found a great source of information about how to do exactly that!

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There are many different ways that you can make money online. Many people are able to earn some extra income simply by selling stuff around the house on eBay. Others make a full-time living just by creating a blog and sharing their ideas. Most people however, make money online by participating in affiliate programs.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate programs have been around for quite a few years now. The concept is fairly simple. As an affiliate, you promote products and services that other companies or individuals are selling. In return, they pay you a set fee or a percentage of the sale. In some cases, they might pay you for each click that you send their way.

Most affiliate marketers make their money by promoting “money making” opportunities. In other words, they make money by showing other people how to make money, kind of like what we are doing right here. The main question that comes to mind at this point is probably how you can make money just by showing people how to do something or simply by sharing information.

If you will notice, there are affiliate links on this very site. On the side of the page and even in the text on each page, there are links that when clicked, will take you to a different website. In many cases, that other website will pay this website a fee for sending them potential clients. So what will you find that you could buy on those other websites?

You see, making money online is not really all that easy. Around 95% of all those who try to make money online fail, usually within the first couple of months. Making money online takes time, dedication, luck and more importantly, a variety of tools. So if you follow one of the links on this website to another site, you will most likely find yourself on a page that is selling some type of software, tool or information that can help you make money online. These days, there is so much competition on the internet that it is getting to the point where even already successful internet marketers are giving up and getting real jobs.

Internet Marketing Full Time

Of all the people who attempt to make a living online, 95% will fail. One of the biggest reason for this is that they simply fail to follow through. They do not give it enough time. If you are going to try to be a full time internet marketer then you might as well get used to the fact that it is going to take some time to get your business up to speed.

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Taking The First Steps

You might think that the most obvious thing that you will need in order to get started would be a website. Although it is a very good idea to have your own website, there are actually some people who manage to make money online without one. However, since this is a fairly rare event, we will instead concentrate on what it takes to make money online with a website.

In order to get started, you will need a website, hosting for that website and a domain name. Hosting and domains names can be obtained from the same company. There are plenty to choose from but these days, most people just go with GoDaddy. Just because other people do this, you don’t have to. There are actually some better choices.

One of the easiest ways to make a website is to just use a WordPress blog. If you want to test out the waters without spending money on a domain name and hosting, you can even sign up for a free WordPress Blog and get started that way. As you will find as you get deeper into this particular rabbit hole, if you eventually do want to make money online, you will need to get your own stand alone website, separate from WordPress.org.

There are plenty of tutorials out there on how to set up a WordPress blog so we won’t go into all that right here. You just need to know that you will need to decide on a domain name, get a hosting account and then starting building your website. But we are kind of getting ahead of ourselves now so we will need to back up a bit.

Taking It One Step At A Time

In order to be successful, you cannot just go at this half cocked. It is important to take things one step at a time and to accomplish each task in order. Having said that, here are the suggested steps that you should take.

Research – You need to decide what it is that you are going to want to try to sell. Unless you already have a product of your own, this will most likely mean that you are going to want to sign up for an affiliate program so that you can sell something for someone else. If you are completely stumped for ideas on what to market, you might want to find out what people are searching for online. To give you a hint, some of the more popular markets are dating, making money online, financial services, electronics, weight loss and other health niches. Here is a tool that you can use to see what people are searching for: http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

After you decide on something to sell, your next step will be to gather all of the keywords that are associated with that niche and then build a website around that topic. Before you can do that, you will need a domain name. The domain name that you select should be as short and memorable as possible while also containing at least one of the words that you will want to target. For instance, if you decided to try the dating market, you might look for a domain name such as Datinghelpers.com or Datingsitespy.com, or something like that. You will find that just about all of the best domain names have already been taken but here is a tool that you can use to see what is available: http://instantdomainsearch.com/

Get Your Domain Name – Now that you have decided on a niche to target and you have collected and stored a list of keywords related to that niche for future use (very important!), you can go ahead and get your domain name. Just go to GoDaddy.com and follow all of the simple instructions that are listed there. Rather than give a step by step tutorial on how to sign up for a domain name, I will trust that you can simply follow the instructions that are provided on their website. I will partially take the same liberty when it is time to talking about web hosting as well. If you find that it is too difficult to get a domain and hosting set up through the instructions provided then you might want to think twice about making a career out of internet marketing.

Get Your Hosting – At this time, I am going to recommend HawkHost.com for web hosting. They are very inexpensive and their servers are lightening fast. For about $4 per month, you can get more than everything that you will need in a host. After you sign up for a hosting account, you will need to get everything in sync. You will receive a web hosting welcome email that lists the DNS servers that you need to point your domain name to. In order to carry this out, just go back to where you bought your domain name and sign in to your account. Somewhere in your account you will find the option to change DNS configuration. When prompted, enter the DNS information that was given to you by the hosting company in the welcome email. It can take anywhere between 20 minutes and 3 days for your domain name to start pointing at your new host. Once this is done, you will know because you will be able to type your domain name into the address bar of your browser and the place holder for your website will show up.

Build Your Website – In the web hosting welcome email, you will find a link to your control panel. Sign in with your credentials and scroll down to where it shows the tools that are available to you there. One of those tools will probably be Fantastico. When you click on it, it will open up a page that shows a whole bunch of tools at your disposal. One of those tools is WordPress. Click on WordPress and then follow the instructions for setting up WordPress on your website. If all goes well, the next time you go to your website, there will actually be a blank website there. Now you will need to log in to the backend of your website.

Once inside your wordpress control panel, you can do many things. Once again, I will not get into all of the details of how to use WordPress as this would take several thousand words, just to create a summary. Rest assured, it will not take you that long to learn how to use WordPress and in the end, it will be a whole lot easier than trying to build a website from scratch with an HTML editor.

Working On Your Website

Now that you have a basic website on the internet, it is time to start spiffing things up. As mentioned earlier, there is quite a bit of competition on the internet these days. In order for your website to stand out above the crowd, it is going to need to be spectacular. It doesn’t really matter so much how it looks, although that can be important as well, but what really matters is the amount and quality of content that you can put on your website. You will need to make many different pages and each one will need to contain well written, lengthy articles that genuinely have some useful information.

Your home page should give an overall idea of what your website is about. Your supporting pages should be sub-chapters of your main topic. So if your website is about weight loss, some of the pages that you might include would be exercise, dieting, fad diets, diet pills, weight loss tips, etc. Each one of those pages should focus on a single keyword phrase. The idea is to be able to have your website show up in the search engines when someone types in one of the keyword phrases that you have chosen to target, such as exercise tips, weight loss goals, etc.

Getting good search engine rankings take a lot of work and quite a bit of time. Right now you should just be focused on creating content until your fingers go numb. If you cannot do this yourself then you might be able to hire a freelance writer to do it for you. This just depends on the type of budget that you are starting out with.

Promoting Your Website

After you have created your website and included plenty of good content, you cannot just sit back and wait for people to come to your website. For thing, even if they did come to visit you, there is not yet anything there for then to click on so that you could make some money. More importantly, they simply are not going to visit your site until it has been promoted. The only people that will know about your website at this point will be you and anyone else that you tell about it. It is now time to announce your website to the world.

There are basically two different ways to get people to come to your website. You can either pay for visitors or you can get free traffic to your site. If you have a decent budget, you might want to pay for some ads on Google, Yahoo! or Bing. Otherwise, you will need to concentrate on the “free” methods for getting visitors to your site, and that is what we will be concentrating on.

There are a number of ways that you can go about getting free traffic to your website. If you want to make as much money online as you can, you will need to get as many visitors to your website as you can. Search engine optimization (SEO) is probably the number one method that webmasters use in order to get visitors. It involves optimizing the pages of your website so that they will show up on the search engines for the keywords that you are targeting. There used to be quite an art to SEO but these days, it is more of a science.

You see, these days, you really need to be listed well with Google and they are a pretty tough cookie to break, even if you really know what you are doing. One of the things that Google looks for is links coming back to your website, from other related websites around the internet. Generally speaking, if a really good website links to your website, Google sees that as a vote of confidence from the other site. Again, there is way too much to SEO for us to be able to get into all the details right here but if you browse around this site, going from topic to topic, you will find that there will be quite a bit of information about SEO.