Are you a stay-at-home Mom? A college student? Looking for a part time business opportunity? Maybe you are saving up for something special or just need to pay some bills? The bottom line is that you could use an extra source of income. Well, the Internet offers some great ways to get paid without going out to get a job.
Maybe you have considered doing something like stuffing envelopes from home as a way to make money. If you've searched on the Internet, you may have noticed that there are a lot of outrageous claims being made about how much you can make doing something like stuffing envelopes. But think to yourself: What kind of idiot would pay someone $5 to stuff one envelope? So you investigate further. They want you to pay a $25.00 application fee even to be considered as such a high paid "envelope stuffer." Look around the site and you'll notice all sort of links that might appeal to the financially desperate. They are trying to take advantage of you!
Don't let them. There are other ways to earn cash on the net, and you don't have to pay an application fee. You can get free money if you are willing to spend just a little bit of time.
There are companies out there that want to offer you an incentive for getting involved with their business online. Look at the various ways that you can earn free cash rewards on the Internet:
Get paid to accept offers
Get paid to read emails
Get paid to take surveys
Get paid to play games
Get paid to shop
How does it work? Well, it's simple. Businesses want you to visit their sites, become aware of their products, and take advantage of their offers. Reward programs partner with top online advertisers who pay to get connected to consumers like you! The reward program then passes most of the reward onto you. In essence, you get free money for spending some time getting involved with various advertisers.
So, don't go chasing opportunities that are too good to be true. While you are waiting for your costly envelope stuffing application to be processed, you could be earning real cash today through a quality reward program. Most reward programs even offer a cash reward (up to $5) just for signing up!
I'm sure that you've heard about how many start up companies fail when they first begin, and the reason that most (if not all) of their failures is because they don't create a good fountain to build on.
If we start right, it is easy to go right all the time. But if we start wrong, it's much harder to go back and get it right. So please pay close attention, get out your pen and pencil, and let's get to work.
When you first start, you need to decide which niche are you going to conquer.
When I first started my online business, I made the same mistake that 99.9% of people make. I read an ebook about how to make money online, and I decided that I would...
can you guess...?
I wrote my own book about "how to make money." I compiled all of the regurgitated information I could find, put a twist on it, and started to sell it. After 2 weeks and a little over $30 in sales I started to think:
"Why am I selling a book about how to make money... when I have NEVER in my life made any real money!?!"
You may laugh, but it took me a few weeks before I realized that there was a problem there. I decided to stop selling my book, and started to look for other ways to make money online. What I stumbled upon next really gets exciting.
I was going to college at the time, and my degree is in "Computer Information Systems." I knew some things about programming, but not enough to create anything real. What I did know is where programmers spend their time online.
So I started visiting places where you could hire programmers and got to know a few. I then started to search for a market that needed something.
What I came upon was the "Resale Rights" market. Basically this was people buying and selling digital products (ebooks and software) that they could then go and sell to other people. This concept really excited me. I purchased a lot of these products, but struggled to sell them because all of the products had links back to the author's websites.
These authors were making money every time I sold these products... on the backend. When I realized that, the first thing I thought was,
"I wish that had a way to brand all of these files with my own links."
And there the idea was born. I just needed to create a product that would brand these "resale rights" products. I wouldn't be competing directly with that market, but make a complementary product that would benefit them all.
I went back to the programmers that I had been building relationships with, and gave them my idea. Within a matter of weeks they created a product that is now known as Zip Brander. (You can see the product at www.ZipBrander.com)
I'm not going to go into how I marketed it in this lesson (I'll save that for another day), but with the one product I made over $1,000 my first month with it, and it made us over $50,000 in 2004 alone.
Since then I've been able to branch out to a lot of various niches and have had amazing success in most of them. In other issues I will share exact case studies of these that you will be able to model in your businesses.
How To Pick The Right Niche
I want to show you now how to choose your niche. Just follow these 3 simple steps.
Step 1 - Do not choose the "how to make money" niche. I'm not sure why, but I made this mistake along with thousands of other people. This is the most competitive niche in the world. If you want to fight against the marketers, good luck. But there is a lot more money (and it's made a lot easier) in the niches I'll explain below.
Step 2 - Look at your personal talents, and start from there. I have had this conversation more then once - usually every time I discuss an online business with someone.
I ask them what their hobbies are that we could market, and they almost always they tell me that they don't have anything they could sell. The problem is that people usually look at their current job, and can't think of ways they can market that skill.
Don't look at your current job, but look at what you do on your free time. The thing that is your passion. This is where you'll find your niche.
Here are examples of the last 3 conversations I've had:
Friend #1 - works construction, and couldn't think of a marketable skill. After 3 1/2 minutes realized that he has twin girls. Found there was a huge market for informational product in this niche and him and his wife are now working on their first product.
Friend #2 - works as a manager at Office Depot. One the weekends loves to shot guns with his dad. They are creating a software program that helps people to increase their accuracy when shooting. They are also creating video demonstrations on how to improve your accuracy.
Friend #3 - came to me asking for help promoting a "how to make money online" course. He had to call me using a video relay because he's deaf. I told him that he was going in the wrong direction with what he was promoting. He had no experience making money online. I asked him what his hobbies were, and surely enough told me he didn't have any that he could sell. Before I even asked that question I knew what his niche was. He's been speaking through sign language his whole life, and there are thousands of people searching every month on how to learn sign language.
What do you do in your free time when no one else is around? Are you good at video games? Are you a good cook? Do you play any sports? Do you throw dinner parties? Do you collect anything? Can you play an instrument? What is your passion? When you can answer this... then you know what your niche is.
Step 3 - Research your market. Don't worry - this part isn't nearly as hard as you'd think. Within about 5 minutes I can usually tell if a niche is worth looking at. There are 3 things you need to do, and you'll know if it's the right niche.
First - Check out the search engines. There are a lot more advanced tools then this, but this one is completely free to use. Go to http://inventory.overture.com and type in your niche. This will show you how many times that word was searched for that month on their search engine. If there are a lot of people searching for it each money, the it's likely a good niche.
Second - Search for online communities related to your niche. People with similar interests migrate to the same places online. Wrestlers hang out at wrestling forums, poets hang out in poetry message boards, etc... Go to www.google.com and type in "________ forums" or "_________ message board" or "_______ groups" (put your niche in the blank). Visit these forums and see if they are active and how many members they have. You can often find forums with 10,000+ members in it. If you find good communities focused around your niche, then this is another good sign.
Third - Search for similar products. If you can find others selling products in your niche, then it's usually a good sign that there's some life there. Purchase their products and get to know your competition (because they are going to become your JV partners in another lesson).
After getting this far, you should have a good idea about which niche you would like to conquer, as well as some idea about if it is a profitable niche.
In the next lesson we are going to discuss how you can turn those talents into a product. Product creation is one of the most exciting parts of the game for me, so look out for that lesson coming soon.
Affiliate programs are the first choice of most newcomers to net earnings because they have many advantages:
1. All you have to do is to join a merchant program as an affiliate and send visitors to the merchant site
2. All other work such as making a sale, delivering the product or service, receiving payment, attending to the complaints or making a refund, is handled by the merchant site.
3. The merchant site also sees to it that you are paid commission when a sale is made through your efforts.
4. You are also rewarded when a sale is made through the efforts of an affiliate referred by you to the merchant site.
All easy and simple. But most affiliates soon find that in spite of their best efforts they are not making any money.
This is because the affiliate earnings depend not on how many visitors they send to the merchant site, but how many of them buy the product or service of the merchant.
So just sending visitors to the merchant site is not enough.
You can do this easily by joining traffic exchange or autosurf programs. Your merchant site will be seen hundreds of times but it will not make a sale. This is because these visitors are not interested in your site. They are looking at it to earn credits so they can show their site to others.
This is not to say that traffic programs have no use at all.
I have used them successfully to build my downline in free-to-join programs, but have never made a sale through them. Most members of such programs are promoting their own programs. They could get interested in joining other opportunities, but would rarely go for a product themselves.
So if you want to earn from affiliate programs, the thing to do is to send interested visitors to your merchant site.
Who is an interested visitor?
This is the visitor who reached your site by himself. He is looking for the product you are promoting. This is why he took the trouble of finding it from a search engine or from the particular kind of ads or forums.
This visitor is red hot for a sale. He is already interested in your product. If he finds what he wants on your merchant site, he is very much likely to look at the product's features, mentally compare it with other similar products, ask for more information by giving his email address. All this can lead to a sale and a commission for you.
How to target interested visitors
The best way to reach interested visitors is promoting your products through search engines submissions, placing catchy ads, posting in forums or through your own website.
This may sound daunting to newcomers at first but all these are do-able with a little effort. You can get help for mastering all these skills from the resources freely available on the internet.
Joining right affiliate programs can also help a good deal to gain affiliate mastery. While great many affiliate programs give you a few text ads and banners and be done with you, there are some programs that give valuable training to succeed.
Be positive
Most newcomers to internet earning fail because they expect to be rich in a week, if not overnight. When this doesn't happen as it rarely does in real life, they get discouraged. They are also influenced by others who like them tried but failed to earn with affiliate programs. The result -- they give up, frustrated.
The reality is that nobody becomes rich overnight in internet marketing. You have to work at it consistently. Most important of all, banish negative thinking from your life and believe that if others have succeeded, you, too, can and will.
That perhaps is the most important ingredient for your success.
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