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DIFFERENT PATHS TO MAKE MONEY WITH AFFILIATE MARKETING

When people talk about making money with affiliate marketing, they think about signing up as a publisher and trying to get people to pay them for advertising on their sites. That's definitely one way to make money with affiliate marketing, but it's not the only way! You can make money with affiliate marketing as a publisher, an advertiser, or as an owner of an affiliate marketing network. You don't even have to limit the paths you take. You can try all three!

MAKING MONEY AS A PUBLISHER

This path is the most downtrodden, but very few people explore all the potential to make money, even here. That's because most people are creatures of habit. They find one way to do something, and they never venture from that path, even when they find that the income isn't what they had hoped it would be. The fact is that if you limit yourself to just one advertiser, like Google, you won't be able to really explore the potential for affiliate marketing models that might work better with your niche audience.

So, while we are going to tell you that you can make money using Google Adsense, it's not the only advertising network out there. You can spend a lot of time trying to publish content that gets search engines to serve up high-prized ads on your site, and researching keywords to make campaigns that target high-paying ones. Or you can explore a few other places like Adbrite.com or independent affiliates at different affiliate banks who might give you a bigger return on your investment of time.

The key is not to join the biggest network out there, it's to understand your niche and your audience. To make money as a publisher of other people's affiliate offerings, your job is to match up your audiences wants and needs to the offerings that best meet them. So, you don't necessarily have to know a thing about keywords to get started being a publisher of affiliate offerings, but you do have to know what your audience will buy.

So, let's assume you have a website about winter sports. You can sign up for different affiliate programs that offer everything from winter sports equipment to exciting vacations at mountain resorts. All you have to do is locate those offers and publish them on your site and collect a commission. For that, you'll have to
probably join an affiliate bank so that you can find offers within your category and get started fairly quickly. We'll go over those a little later in this report.

MAKING MONEY AS AN ADVERTISER

Okay, now why would advertisers pay you to publish, if there wasn't money in it for themselves? Obviously, the returns can be a whole lot higher for the advertiser than the publisher, but most people don't figure that out when they think about making money with affiliate advertising. They think that affiliate advertising means they are the publishing affiliate partner, not the advertising partner.

Well, it can pay very well to be an affiliate advertiser who has created an affiliate program for their products and services. For one, you aren't paying a team of sales people to market your products without getting some results, whether it is more online exposure, a lead, or a sale. The best ways right now to make money for advertisers is to use a “cost-per-action” affiliate program that only pays publishers if a lead or a sale is completed. That way, you can measure the return on your investment in a quantifiable way.

For that, you will have to have enough credibility to be accepted into a CPA network and also enough upfront cash to pay for any fees associated with the program. While the returns for setting up an affiliate program as an advertiser are more than as a publisher, it also takes more money to start. So, that's why many people don't realize that there is money in advertising, otherwise, people wouldn't be doing it, but it does cost more to get off the ground.

MAKING MONEY AS A NETWORK OWNER

Let's say you are very technically savvy, have quite a bit of money to invest, and want to make some good money? Why not develop your own affiliate network. You will have to get a site up and running, and hire people to maintain it and do customer service, but you will also get to charge advertisers a 20 to 30% transaction fee in some cases. Or, you can use a model that has them pay a setup and transaction fee. As long as you have the pull to bring in both advertisers and publishers, you can set up your own profitable network and just enroll people into your program. Set up tools to track the affiliates and reports to help optimize programs. Hire affiliate managers who can manage the accounts too. As long as your advertisers are making money, you'll make money from their enrollments too.

WHAT YOU NEED TO GETTO MAKE MONEY ON THE THREE PATHS

There are really only three things that are important, whether you are a publisher, an advertiser, or a network owner. The issue is how to successfully market some product or service online and for that you need to get the three following things to happen:

• High Level Of Traffic As a publisher, you will want high levels of traffic coming to your offerings and doing the action necessary to collect a commission. As an advertiser, you want high levels of traffic too, so that you can make leads and sales. As a network owner, the more traffic your members get, the better odds that they will succeed and you can keep charging enrollment fees.

• Hot Niches It doesn't matter how much traffic you get, if what you are selling isn't interesting to a large number of people. You want to exploit the hot niches that interest a wide number of people and are profitable for you. It makes no difference whether you are an advertiser, a publisher, or a network owner. You have to start with a large amount of demand in the market to make it worthwhile to invest the time and effort to advertise products and services in that niche.

• Matching Demographics So, now you know, you can't make money without traffic or a market demand. What if you have great traffic, a hot niche of products and services, and the people aren't buying? It's because the demographics of the traffic have to match the niche. Once you have a match, the formula of traffic plus demand plus interested buyer yields you a nice profit.

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If you want to sell anything online, it’s actually not all that hard. I know that this is kind of a surprise to a lot of people. Some affiliate marketers who have been struggling would swear up and down that making sales online is nearly impossible.

Well, with the right traffic and the right sales materials, you are bound to generate sales from time to time. Closing a sale is not the problem. Generating consistent, high-value sales, that's the issue. Don't confuse the two.

Sadly, even if you are able to master the art of online sales, you may still continue to struggle. I understand that this is better than not generating any sales at all, but if you put in a lot of time, effort, and energy into generating online sales only to settle for a low middling mount, you're wasting your time. That’s the bottom line. As the old saying goes, “Either you go big or you go home.”

The name of the game when it comes to online sales success is return on effort. You heard that right. You’ve probably heard of the phrase “return on investment” millions of times before. Return on effort works on the same principle, but there is a slight difference.

With return on investment, you are trying to invest as little money as possible while getting as much return as you can. Pretty straightforward, very simple concept.

Similarly, if you're going to invest your time, attention, and focus in something, shouldn't you expect maximum rewards as well? This is the whole concept behind return on effort.

If you work for yourself, it's very easy to work around the clock for chump change. Believe me, I’ve done it. It's not pretty. Sure, you’re passionate about what you do. Oftentimes, it doesn't even feel like you're working. However, let me tell you, if you're going to invest your time, effort, and precious energy into something, don't you deserve to get the biggest reward out of all that investment?

Thankfully, there is a way out. You don't have to stick to the grind. You don't have to put in all these hours away from your loved ones just so you can put food on the table.

Using the high ticket sales secrets that I’m going to share with you in this book, you will learn how to maximize the return that you get for all your efforts. It is not rocket science. It all boils down to being at the right place, talking about the right things at the right time with the right people.

If you're able to line all those up, then you will get all the best results. At first, it may seem like this is very hard to set up. You only need to look at how high ticket sales people do it. When they started off, they were no better than you. In fact, in many cases, they knew less than you. Now, here they are, generating seven or even eightfigure annual sales. How do they do it? It all boils down to high ticket sales.

Make Sure You're in the Right Niche

Any discussion of high-ticket sales marketing must first begin with niche selection. Get this wrong and you are going to waste your time, effort and money.

This is non-negotiable. If you make a mistake with the niche that you pick to build your business on, you're going to fail. The truth is, not all niches pay the same.

Niches are essentially subject matter categories involving your target audience’s problems, needs, or interests. These are different subjects and they attract different audiences. Some audiences are willing to pay a lot of money. Other audiences are not as willing.

Even within the high paying audiences, there is a question of timing. There are certain products and service categories that compel people to spend a lot of money right away.

Unfortunately, these are relatively few. These are comparatively few when you line them up with all the other niches out there.

Ideally, this is where you should be. You should look for niches that pay really well, and people need to order merchandise or services almost immediately.

The Reality: Most Niches Pay Poorly

There, I said it. Most niches don't pay all that well.

Well, this might rub you the wrong way. You might tell me that when you check Google's Keyword Planner tool, you notice that a lot of niches that you're interested in actually command fairly high PPC (Pay Per Click) figures.

My answer is, "Look closer."

If you pay attention to those figures, it turns out that, in many cases, for people to click on an ad that pays that much, they must be really, really interested already. In other words, they have been prequalified and they are ready to buy.

That's usually not the case. Usually, people are interested in a wide range of topics, but they're not ready to buy.

They're ready to do a lot of research, they don't have a problem with comparing different sources of information, but when it comes to buying, they're not quite there.

This is why I can say, with utmost confidence, that most niches pay poorly when you look at immediacy.

It's not enough that people may pay good money for a particular range of merchandise or a particular type of service. That's not the issue.

The issue is how willing they are to pay.

Don't Build Your House on Sand

To make matters worse, the best niches (high pay, high demand) tend to get saturated very quickly. It's easy to see why.

You need to build your business on a solid foundation.

This means that your target niche must be lucrative enough and must have a high sense of buyer urgency. Otherwise, you are building your house on sand. You can build tons of these and end up making very little money.

Unless you want to play the volume game, where you are cranking out hundreds of websites, and each of these websites make, at best, a couple of dollars a day, you're going to have to be more careful about niche selection.

You have to be systematic and methodical regarding the type of business you build and the platform you choose to convert your traffic. You also have to be systematic about getting the right kind of traffic and qualifying it so it is more likely to convert. All of this boils down to selecting the right niche.

You Must Target the Right Client

In any kind of market, there will always be audience segmentation.

It's easy to think that just because you are targeting insurance as a niche, you can automatically assume you will make a lot of money.

On the surface, this seems very reasonable. After all, when you go to Google Keyword Planner tool and load up all sorts of insurance-related keywords, you get really high figures.

It's not uncommon for an insurance-related term to pay $30 or more per click. What's not to love? But here's the problem. That market has many segments.

Not everybody who looks for insurance online is ready to buy. Not everybody who is interested in buying an insurance policy is willing to pay top dollar.

In fact, in many cases, a lot of people looking for insurance would rather pay the least amount of money or take out the cheapest type of policy possible. Welcome to the world of market segmentation.

Audiences, in what seem like lucrative niches, have different needs. They tend to segment themselves.

There are people who are willing to pay top dollar immediately. There are people who are willing to pay top dollar later on. There are people who are not willing to pay market rates and are always looking for a bargain, but they are willing to buy now. Finally, there are people who are very cheap and are willing to wait.

Which of these audience members would it make sense for you to chase? This is not rocket science. It should be quite obvious.

Always Be Aware of the Differences Between Your Target Customers

Just because people are interested in the high value niche you are targeting, it doesn't mean that all your visitors will convert. If this is your assumption, I would not be surprised if you continue to struggle.

You're setting yourself up for a disappointment. You have to be aware of the differences between your audience members.

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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BACKEND PROFITS

Most businesses spend too much time trying to gain new customers and fail to recognize the immense goldmine that they have in their existing customers. The fact is that the people most likely to buy from you are those people who have already bought from you! That's why backend marketing can help to boost your profits, even when new customers are few and far between. As a strategy to survive and thrive in a recession, it's hard to beat backend marketing.

WHY IT WORKS

Backend marketing works because people are the most suggestible in buying behavior just after they've made a decision to buy. Once they overcome resistance to purchasing from you, they've given you their trust. You no longer have to market to overcome buying resistance; instead, you market to them to have them buy even more from you.

For the business owner, it works because it's easy to implement backend strategies, whether you are an online or a retail business. It just takes a bit of conscious attention to the actual purchasing transaction and understanding when to offer customers an upsell or a more expensive item. Once you get the hang of this, it's a very easy way to increase the bottom line without spending tons of time advertising.

STRATEGIES ARE SIMPLE

Strategies are deceptively simple and work best when implemented with consistency. While it doesn't take much to ask someone if he/she wants a pair of socks to go with a set of shoes he/she just bought, if you don't have that step planned out, you can miss that opportunity. It works best when you use these strategies at specific times and quite consistently.

When planning your sales funnel, you should include deliberate methods to sell backend offers. It shouldn't ever be an afterthought; it should be a carefully planned marketing strategy. It may look like a simple question or an additional ad that is carefully placed on a thank you form, but it's a planned attempt to get your visitors to open their wallets wider. Don't miss an opportunity to increase your bottom line, particularly when the customer is in the mood to buy – which is usually when they've just agreed to buy. By paying attention to your sales funnel and strategies, you can set up a maze of offers that are subtle yet powerful motivators to sell.

THE PLANNED SALES FUNNEL

A sales funnel is the way that you can get an unidentified visitor to self-identify himself/herself and to join your marketing program. The first step is to turn anonymous visitors into real live email addresses that have given you permission to contact them. Without knowing who is visiting your site, you'll never be able to execute a successful sales funnel. That's just the mouth of the sales funnel. After that, you should have some steps set up to place people in particular demographic groups that you then intend to market to in some way.

Whether it is a new or an old customer, they should all be in some area of your sales funnel. Your sales funnel should include backend offers at regular intervals, in emails, in forms, in various types of promotions. It should include various email campaigns. It should track the sales of your offers and how to upgrade people to other lists if they self-identify themselves as big spenders.

THE DOUBLE OPT-IN FORM

When people first visit, your priority is to get them to register via a frontend offer. This can be a free report, ebook, discount coupon, or some other offer that is given to them in appreciation for subscribing to your email list. Once they've entered the mouth of your sales funnel, the double opt-in form, then you have a perfect right to market to them in any way that you choose, frontend or backend.

The double opt-in form also works great as a way to start the process of marketing to new clients because it weeds out spammers and fake email addresses. In order to receive the freebie, the customer has to verify his/her email address by going to his/her inbox and clicking a link to verify. This then verifies the account, and he/she is fully registered and is sent to the download area where he/she can see the freebie.

WITHIN THE FREEBIE, DO A BACKEND OFFER

While your first few emails should remain friendly and casual, whatever it is that you've offered them as bait to sign up, it should include some backend offers. If it's a report, you should include a description on some good tools or services that you're selling or on other products, even affiliate offers. Ask for referrals too for anyone that might like a free copy of whatever it is that you are giving away.

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NICHES: HOT SPOTS THAT DRIVE INTERNET MARKETING

Whether you are just getting into Internet marketing or have been doing this for a while, you know that developing a niche is key to the success of your Internet marketing efforts. After all, when you are in business on the Internet, you don't necessarily have to produce a particular product first to market it. You don't even have to provide a service to market that either.

Online marketing makes it easy for anyone to get into business, whether they have experience in any specific business or not. The entire world of products and services are open to market on the Internet, as long as you know how to market using infoproducts and affiliate marketing to sell online. So, where do you start? Isn't it too overwhelming? That's where a market niche becomes an indispensable tool to help you target profitable and interesting markets that can bring attention to your website and help you be successful in your chosen Internet marketing venture.

This report will tell you how to locate hot spots in Internet marketing topics in a methodical way that anyone can follow. This will save you from implementing topics that you may be passionate about, but in reality have very little market value. It will also help you locate the most profitable areas to be in and to time them to get in when they will yield riches without too much extra effort. When you know how to pick out great hot spots for topics you will find that your Internet marketing gets quicker and easier.

WHY PASSION ISN'T ENOUGH

Many experts advise you to follow your passion and the money will follow. While this may seem like good advice, the Internet is such a vast landscape that to maximize the potential that your passion matches what people are actually searching for online you need a better plan. So, while passion is a good indication that you will be interested enough to pursue a topic longterm, it's not necessarily the only ingredient you need to succeed.

You actually need to know what topics are popular and being search actively on the Internet, to start understanding how to locate a hot topic. In addition, as an Internet marketer, you want to pick a topic that is profitable, and there are ways to do that using tools like the Google Keyword Tool, which will be discussed later more indepth. And, finally, you want to know how competitive the niche is, so that you find a pool that hasn't been over-fished by bigger players.

In Internet marketing terms, what you want to find are hot spot topics that have the following characteristics:

• High demand Many people are interested in searching for this topic and they are keying in various phrases to the search engines that can be mined for traffic and profit.

• High Cost-Per-Click (CPC) Google establishes the CPC for keywords and phrases. Based on that, you can tell when one word or phrase is more profitable than another based on what advertisers are willing to pay a publisher per click of that keyword or phrase.

• Low Competition Since most Internet marketers know that they want a high demand or high CPC to get good niches for profit, they are usually highly competitive too. However, there are still some out there that you can find that are not as competitive and we'll show you how to locate them.

• Advertisers Present You want to also find hot spots that are of interest to affiliate or marketing advertisers. At least 20 advertisers for the hot spot shows it is good to try out.

TWO METHODS TO IDENTIFY THE HOT SPOTS

There are two methods to locate the hot spots in Internet marketing topics: brainstorming them or researching them. Brainstorming is not a bad idea, but if you use it, you should also research and analyze your ideas to make sure they are viable.

BRAINSTORMING

Here, you want to start engaging your creativity to find hot spots that you are passionate about that might have some potential to be great niches. One way to start is to just start trying to look at things from the point of view of a consumer. What are the burning issues consumers are trying to solve? These are the things they will be searching online to resolve.

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Introduction

Most entrepreneurs don’t fail because of business reasons. Business strategy is often easy to correct or fix. What’s more difficult to fix is the entrepreneur. The more you can accomplish, the higher your chances of success. Your productivity and time management skills are one of the most significant indicators of whether or not you will succeed.

The most valuable resource that you have as an entrepreneur is time. Unfortunately, time is a limited resource, and once lost we can never get it back. With the same 24 hours in a day that is allotted to everyone else, many entrepreneurs feel as though they don't have enough time to accomplish what they want. To be a successful entrepreneur, you have to learn how to manage your time effectively if you're going to increase your productivity and accomplish everything you set out to do.

Fortunately, with adequate planning, organization, and focus, anyone can learn how to effectively manage their time and begin to work smarter, not harder to reach their goals and achieve their dreams, without burning out.

To be able to manage your time correctly and effectively, it is crucial for you to understand the tools and techniques that are available that can help you improve the required skills that are needed to ensure you complete all of your tasks and activities to reach your goals.

If you don't already have a system in place to help you manage your time, the techniques and methods in this book can help you develop one. Utilizing the tips and procedures outlined in this book will help you understand why time management is so essential for everyone, not just entrepreneurs, for being more productive and finding success, as well as help you to start to put a time management system in place so you can accomplish more in less time.

Chapter 1 – The Importance of Time Management

Time is an incredibly valuable resource for entrepreneurs that can never be stored or saved for later use. Everyone has the same amount of time available to them, but for entrepreneurs, it becomes critical that they learn how to use their time effectively. You may not realize it, but time management affects your entire life. It allows you to get more important things done, which can dramatically boost your productivity. Over time, that increased productivity will snowball into marked improvements in both your professional and personal life.

Many people feel that they don’t have enough time to accomplish everything they want to in life. They often blame their lack of time for their increased stress, bad relationships, poor finances, and lack of exercise. However, with the proper time management skills, you can accomplish everything you set out to do.

Time management can help you to identify your priorities, as well as help you make conscious decisions so that you can spend more of your time doing the essential things that will benefit your business. Effectively managing your time can also help you reach your goals faster. Proper time management also helps you accomplish more things in less time and with less effort and stress.

The Benefits of Time Management

Time management makes you a more punctual and disciplined person. It prompts you only to work when you have to. For you to make the most of your available time, you have to prepare a to-do list or task plan. Proper time management requires that you develop a list of activities or tasks that you have to accomplish during the day. It is essential that you also include specific timeframes in your to-do list, as well as the level of urgency for each task. Your task plan, or to-do list, can provide you with a better sense of direction when it comes to getting your work accomplished. It can help you identify how your day should look so that you can work accordingly and achieve more in less time. Being able to manage your time effectively will also help you to become more organized. It can teach you how to organize your workspace better so that you can more easily find documents, folders, and files. You can benefit from your increased ability to manage your things more effectively as well, through the use of excellent time management practices.

Having a plan for managing your time can also help you realize your goals and objectives within the shortest amount of time possible. With proper time management skills, you can meet your targets ahead of schedule and finish your tasks on time.

Incorporating proper time management in your life can dramatically increase your productivity and help you accomplish your goals without having to spend more time working.

How Ineffective Time Management Can Hurt Your Business

Ineffectively managing your time, when it comes to your business, can lead to many problems and undesirable consequences. If you don't have strong time management skills, it can result in missed deadlines, poor quality of work, excessive stress, inefficient workflow, and more.

If you don’t effectively manage your time, it will become more difficult for you to finish your work on time, which can cause you to be seen as inefficient and unreliable. Your clients, customers, and colleagues will end up having far less faith in your abilities to run a successful business. Missing deadlines and tardiness will significantly hurt your reputation, which can, in turn, start to affect your personal life and wellbeing. As an entrepreneur, if you want to be successful and get more done in less time, then you have to master your time and figure out how to improve your time management skills.

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How To Build Traffic To Your Website

Building Traffic Tributaries

The World Wide Web (WWW) can be viewed as an immense ocean of traffic that is just waiting to be tapped for your online business. The traffic already exists, either on other people's sites or through online connections, that are plugged into terminals that go directly into a person's home or office. In this respect, you don't have to create traffic; you have to learn to build tributaries that lead from that large ocean back to your online offerings so that existing traffic has the opportunity to flow back to you. The inlet that brings this traffic from the ocean to your tributary is the numerous backlinks that you post all over the Internet in various places. It's these links that will bring traffic from one area of the WWW to your business website.

THE INDIVIDUAL AS A DROP OF WATER

Taking this metaphor a step further, each individual who is searching the Internet can be viewed as a drop of water that has the capacity to flow from one area of the Internet to another. If you also take into account not only the behavior of each individual, but also the way the water is distributed on the Internet, you will find that people congregate in various areas, and some places are not meant to hold traffic, but to distribute it even more, like search engines. Ultimately, a search engine will list results from a search that is done using a set of keywords, and based on that result, the drop of water or individual typically chooses a few places to hop to next. That's one way that water is moved across the network of tributaries on the Internet.

The other way is accomplished when the force of gravity itself pushes water from one area to another. On the Internet, this occurs when so many people find something of value that they start posting more and more backlinks back to the same area. When that happens, the popularity of the Web page increases and more water or people flow back to the site on the strength of mass exposure alone. We will explore these two mechanisms in depth to show you how to get more traffic to your site.

PAY SOMEONE TO BUILD A TRIBUTARY

Lastly, another way that is not as natural as the two ways mentioned above is to pay someone to come in and dig a tributary, or tons of links back to your site. If you do this through marketing strategies like affiliate and referral programs, it's considered okay. If you do this through spamming and coercion, you'll end up getting into legal trouble. It's important to note that when you are trying to get attention to your website, what you do has to fall between good, legal behavior.

Cybersquatting on someone else's trademark name as your domain name to grab traffic, for instance, may be doable, but it's going to get you into trouble and should be avoided.

Targeted Traffic

The Internet as an amorphous ocean of traffic is a great way to understand the dynamics of traffic flow. This network of waterways has already been very highly developed in some cases, with some people already experiencing great traffic flow on their sites. This is important to know because you don't really want to just put an inlet next to an amorphous ocean and drive tons of untargeted traffic back to your site. Each of those drops may represent a person who is online, but are they the type of person who is going to buy your products and services? Obviously not! There is much more to building traffic to your site than just numbers. It has to be quality, targeted traffic that stands a good chance of creating sales conversions.

TARGET TRAFFIC RELATIVE TO YOUR NICHE

Whether you're getting traffic from a search engine or from some other site, your backlinks should be showing up in areas where the niche is similar to your market segment. You don't want to be selling jewelry and posting backlinks on pet sites or adding keywords for pets. That would only bring in traffic that isn't interested in buying your products in the first place. In order to get high quality traffic that wants to buy, you have to first make sure that your efforts are being placed in the right demographic.

THE LARGER THE POND, THE BETTER THE EXPOSURE

You want your niche to be something that isn't so narrow that few people will be interested in it, yet not be so broad that you won't define your demographic well enough to target it either. If you find that the keywords that you are using to generate traffic from search engines has a low search volume, this indicates that relative to other niches, it probably is a smaller pond of water. It would be better to identify a niche that has some inherent strength in numbers before you actually start to market it online.

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SHOW ME THE MONEY ON THE INTERNET!

Once upon a time, the Internet was used primarily for information searching; then, one day, someone realized that it would make an ideal business model too. Who would have suspected that the Internet would turn into a multi-billion dollar marketing tool that anyone can use to advertise and make money with?

Even nicer is the fact that Internet users have multiple options in terms of choosing a business model. Unlike a storefront business, the virtual world of the Internet enables people to run a cyberspace storefront business selling supplies or to operate a personal services business offering consulting or writing. But even more importantly is that there are even more ways to earn income using the Internet tools provided today. In addition to simply selling, you can earn income in multiple ways through an Internet marketing plan that takes advantage of opportunities like blogging, affiliate programs, and many other avenues.

In fact, the Internet offers many options for earning income, and you can build streams of income coming from multiple sources at once. By generating multiple streams of information, you are taking advantage of the true power of the virtual economy found on the Internet. You don’t have to go to a store, unlock the doors, and try to decide how to attract customers on a limited budget. Instead, you can develop a multi-pronged approach to generating income using a blended variety of Internet tools and then sitting down at your computer and getting busy. Even better is the fact that you have access to millions of potential customers and advertisers.

Internet marketing is a work in progress too. There are new opportunities to earn income introduced every day for the entrepreneurs who appreciate the power held in cyberspace. Because the distribution of information is instantaneous and the cost is minimal, everyone has an opportunity to make money. This is probably one of the greatest aspects of the Internet – its ability to level the playing field. Earning money through marketing used to be largely limited to large corporations with enormous marketing budgets. The Internet, on the other hand, can be used for marketing even when there is almost no marketing budget to access.

This report describes the various ways to generate income via Internet marketing. It is divided into broad categories as follows:

• Advertising that generates income
• Affiliate programs
• Blogs
• Internet business models

The report doesn’t pretend to cover absolutely every source of income potential on the Internet. But it does cover many of the most popular methods currently in use. You can pick and choose the ones that seem to hold the most opportunity for you and begin to build a variety of income streams. For those who already have an online presence, various Internet marketing strategies can be blended with your current business model to increase your income.

The Internet, above all, is an entrepreneur’s dream come true. With some information and planning, anyone can earn an income from the Internet.

ADVERTISING YOUR WAY TO

AN INCOME

There are multiple ways to use Internet advertising to generate income. A core element of Internet marketing is advertising, and it’s possible to take advantage of many of them for little, or sometimes, even no monetary investment. That’s because websites and search engines have designed ways to advertise that are complementary. In other words, you advertise and everyone involved makes money.

Streams of income from Internet advertising are generated in the following ways.

• Links
• Banner ads
• E-mail marketing
• Search engine marketing (SEM)
• AdWords and AdSense (Google)
• Other

LINKS

You can generate income by establishing a set of links on the Internet. The links can be placed in two basic ways. Some links will be embedded into your website, and clicking on them will keep the customer on your site by sending them directly to the Web page desired. The second set of links is those that take customers to a different website.

Internet marketing has reached a sophisticated level of strategies and techniques that allow you to drive business to your website. The only way to make money on a website is to have visitors. So a stream of income can be generated through well-placed links. You will notice the term “well-placed” is used because a link placed in the wrong spot on the Internet can be fairly useless. For example, if you are selling food products containing meat, it would not make sense to place a link on a website that caters to vegetarians. How many people do you think will click on the link leading to your site? Not many!

Links can work both ways. You can place links to your website on the sites of others or other site owners may pay you to advertise on your site. A reciprocal link program is one where you and the other site have links to each other’s sites.

Reciprocal links provide two primary benefits. The first benefit is the fact that you increase your website traffic, which should lead to increased revenue. The second benefit is that a reciprocal link can lead to a better search engine ranking since each customer clicking on a link to your site will count towards its ranking.

You can sell advertising spots on your website to generate income.

BANNER ADS

When you go to the beach, chances are that you’ll see a small airplane flying and pulling a waving advertising banner. On the Internet, the banner is placed on a site and is usually long and narrow like a real-world banner would be. The most common size used is 468 pixels high and 60 pixels wide.

The banner ad can be static, and the website visitor will simply read what it has to say. If they like what is read, the customer then clicks on it to get to the website or product being advertised.

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EMAIL MARKETING METHODS DO WORK

Email is one of the many tools you have as an Internet Marketer to make a difference in your bottom line. Profits are likely to come in faster the better you utilize this tool. The good news is that it does not have to be difficult to implement a marketing program through the use of email. The bad news is that you have to work continuously at getting people on that list and to keep them there.

EMAIL REALLY MAKES SENSE

Email is one of the easiest forms of communication in the world. If you think back to the first time you used email, you may remember feeling like it was one of the best inventions ever. The fact is email allows anyone to communicate with anyone else, no matter where they are located in the world. From a marketing perspective, this is highly beneficial.

Compare email marketing, for example, to marketing methods of television commercials. As effective as they are, they still take a bit of luck. The right people need to tune in to the commercial at the right time to get the marketing message. The same is true for most any other form of marketing communication. People have to be in the right place at the right time. This is not as true for email, though.

With email marketing, you target those who are already interested in what you have to offer. For example, you are not wasting your marketing budget on people who may not have any use for your product. Only those who have already shown some level of interest are going to be marketed to. Plus, your email stays in their system until they read it. There is no limit or location issue here since the message is going directly to them.

Email does make sense to use as part of your business's marketing campaign. It is highly effective when you combine it with other resources and tools including:

• Search engine optimization
• Social bookmarking
• Ezine marketing

You also want to be sure you are sending your clients to the best place for them. In other words, you need a well designed website or blog where they can easily gather the information they need. When you combine several of these marketing methods, your internet marketing business is unstoppable.

THE LEGALITIES OF EMAILING

As an Internet marketer you know that spam is something that must be avoided at all costs.

According to Webster, spam is defined as, "a disruptive, especially commercial message posted on a computer network or sent as email."

There are laws in place in the United States, Canada, Australia and throughout Europe which limit the sending of spam. Yet, according to some estimates, up to 80 percent of all messages received are unsolicited. As an Internet marketer, you need to find the fine line between spam and sending email marketing messages.

Laws can impose large fines and commercial organizations that do not follow required laws. Most importantly, they can put you out of business.

To help you to define that line, consider the following.

USE AN OPT IN LIST

An opt in list is one created by you. People agree to allow you to send email messages to them. The process requires that they check a box or otherwise agree to receive messages from you. Once they do agree, their email address can be added to your email campaign. You should not email just anyone with your commercial message.

Opt in lists are relatively easy to create. At first, you can even manage it in your Outlook program. Yet, keeping some form of record of their signature (even the virtual agreement) is important. For this reason, you may want to consider email programs that can help you generate effective opt in lists that help protect your business in the long term.

Opt in lists can capture email addresses in various forms including just on your website or blog, through RSS feeds, through your newsletter and through the ordering process. All are safe options to help protect your business from spam and spam related problems.

PROVIDE A REQUEST OUT SERVICE

Nearly all countries with spam laws require that the email recipient receives some way of removing themselves from your list. To protect yourself from potential problems, be sure your email marketing place always offers a removal link.

If you have an email marketing system, this is very easy to do. Most programs will allow you to offer a personalized message that goes at the very bottom of an email alerting the reader to their ability to remove themselves from your list. The system then handles this fully for you, making it easy for you to keep those who want off, off your list.

DON'T SKIP YOUR CONTACT INFORMATION

In the United States, it is required by law that all commercial solicitations have some form of contact information on them. This is designed to allow those who receive the emails to be able to contact you ask you for removal. Often, all that needs to be provided is your email address or your business's mailing address.

If your area requires the use of this type of solicitation, use it. You do not want to find yourself out of business before you start.

In addition to providing your contacts with this legal requirement, by publishing your company's contact information at the bottom of emails like this, you help show them that your business is, in fact, authentic and this could help them decide to work with you.