Make Money Online
Published By:
Andrew W. Irish on Smashwords
Make Money Online
Copyright 2011 by Andrew W. Irish
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this eBook may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any other means: electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright holders.
DISCLAIMER AND/OR LEGAL NOTICES
This eBook is supplied for information purposes only and, as experienced in this subject matter as the contributors are, the material herein does not constitute professional advice. This eBook is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher and the contributors are not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional advice.
If legal advice or other professional assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. The reader is advised to consult with an appropriately qualified professional before making any business decision. The contributors do not accept any responsibility for any liabilities resulting from the business decisions made by purchasers of this book.
*EARNINGS DISCLAIMER: Results are not typical. Your results may vary. We make no claim that you will earn any income using this eBook whatsoever. Where specific figures are quoted from individuals there is no assurance you will do as well. You must assume the risk that you will not earn any income from this product.
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Table of Contents
- If you are new to computers and making money online
DIRECT PROMOTION, AFFILIATE MARKETING AND LUMP SUMS
- Sites are ranked upon four factors on ClickBank
DIFFERENT SITES AND ELECTRONIC PRODUCTS
- How to make big money online in 2012
- How to get paid large sums of money online
- Straight to the point: My favorite “no cost” affiliate marketing strategies
- Using Pay Per Click advertising
- Using Pay Per Click advertising: (Basics)
- Signing up with Adwords for the first time
- Use Google Adwords to make Millions
- Advanced: Destroy your competition
- How one graphically challenged webpage made $500,000 last year
- Using an Auto responder; Building your mailing list and profiting from it
- Ever consider running a website? This is a quick philosophy
- Use your auto responder for Ezine blasts to create trust
- Write and submit articles to the article directories
- Leave comments on other people’s blogs with a back-link to your site
- Answer people’s questions on answers.yahoo.com
- Post in forums and have a link to your site in your signature
- Write a press release and use PRWeb.com for distribution
- Advertise your website on classifieds
- Start a Business using an Direct Mail Technique
If you are new to computers and making money online
In 2003, I was very “Anti-computer” and I hadn’t had any experience with the Internet at all. When they hooked up my Internet connection in 2004, I got addicted to it. I got addicted to marketing digital products, earning commissions from promoting department stores online, selling domain names, selling affiliate-driven websites and creating affiliate-driven websites.
We are going to go over all of these business models. It’s a lot easier than it seems. All of these applications have one thing in common: You do not have to do anything physical. All you need to do is use your mouse and keyboard. We hardly cover any business models in this manifest that require shipping & handling or speaking with buyers, except when you sell a website for $600,000 you probably will speak with the new buyer over the phone a couple times.
If you are making your living online in the 21st century, you are probably an affiliate marketer, a webmaster, a poker player, a buyer and seller of domain names and websites, or an inventor, like the guys who sold You Tube to Google.
Me? I am mainly a Webmaster and an affiliate marketer. Affiliate marketing is one of the most important elements of commerce today. Almost every company that works on a retail level online uses an affiliate program. (We will get into Affiliate Marketing in the next chapter.)
Some business models (Like affiliate marketing) are built on the concept of promoting products for commissions, some others have to do with hosting ads on your blog collecting revenue from them, or mailing out “promo blasts” promoting a product. You can also buy domain names for $8.00 & sell them for sometimes thousands of dollars, and so on. The possibilities are endless on the Internet, but the concept of digital promotion is the most powerful.
A good place to constantly learn new things, and get caught up with the basics, is at an online marketing forum. If you are new to the business, you might want to spend some time asking questions in the “newbie sections” of these marketing forums. We will go over the basics here briefly, but then it will get intense, so if you have any questions, visit those marketing forums, ask questions, drop me a line and I will collectively answer your questions in the next revision of the e-book.
DIRECT PROMOTION, AFFILIATE MARKETING AND LUMP SUMS
What is Affiliate Marketing? Affiliate marketing is the concept of promoting a product as an individual, to earn a commission when a sale lead or other action occurs.
How do you drive traffic?
For instance, an affiliate marketer will drive traffic to a website, by means of Pay Per Click advertising, Online classifieds, Search engines, and other methods to earn cash when someone purchases the service, eBook, Television, etc. We will venture into every aspect of promoting products on the internet. Some methods require financial investment; some methods are entirely free, no-cost. [top]
How do I start?
You join an affiliate program. EBay has one, Amazon.com has one, and the hottest and sometimes easiest affiliate programs to promote are those products that are registered with http://www.clickbank.com or http://www.paydotcom.com which are called “Digital products.” These products are so easy to promote, you can physically begin promoting them and earning commissions 10 minutes from now if you wanted to. (But please read the rest of this manifest first.)
Websites run “affiliate programs,” usually accessible from a link at the bottom of their webpage, where you sign up and then you start promoting them. Your efforts are digitally tracked; you promote these offers online and make commissions.
Affiliate marketers make money from earning commissions. Commissions are generally anywhere from $1.00 to $1000.00. An average commission for a digital product, (Like the products at http://www.clickbank.com) is $22.00. You receive these “commissions” from promoting website “offers.” Websites and services pay you these commissions when you refer to them a customer. Some website offers are software downloads; some are physical products like lawnmowers or stereo equipment. Before we get ahead of ourselves here, you must know that in this day in age, there is not just one way of doing things. As an affiliate marketer, you can promote different “offers” that function differently, some pay you only when a “visitor” or “consumer” buys something and some pay you when a visitor or “consumer” signs up. It is your choice, which offers you want to promote. You can start & stop at anytime. You can promote these offers using all sorts of different methods. Some methods cost money, and some techniques to promote the offers are 100% free. Once you get familiar with the way it works and the terminology, you will see it is actually very simple. You will gauge the performance of the product you are promoting with a measurement of success called a “conversion rate.” A conversion rate is the calculation of how many visitors it took to get a sale. If your website or offer gets one sale for every 15 visitors, you would have a conversion rate of 1:15 or 6%. If your website or offer gets one sale for every 20 visitors, you would have a conversion rate of 1:20 or 5%.
How these affiliate programs track your efforts and ensure that you are paid for each sale: When you sign up for an affiliate program, you are given a unique code, called a “hop link” or an “affiliate code” which looks like a web address. In a nutshell, you want consumers to click on this web address, which will take them to the site you are promoting, and buy whatever you are selling. You will get a commission. We are going to go over some pretty clever techniques you can use to promote your code, some of which include posting an ad on a “free classifieds” website, blogs, or search engine advertising, then at the bottom of the ad, you will tell visitors to click on your affiliate URL “to get started.” Part of my income up until 2009 was the occasional consulting and the selling of websites and domain names, which we will get into later.
Affiliate Marketplaces
The affiliate driven websites are part of a much larger “Affiliate marketplace” which the affiliate program runs on. These companies, the marketplaces track the sales, and you use their tracking ID, (Their hop link.) The biggest marketplaces are http://www.clickbank.com
http://www.affiliatetraction.com
http://www.onenetworkdirect.com
And then the CPA networks, (marketplaces that offer programs that are “action” based, paying you when someone clicks on an ad, instead of them paying for it.) Here are some CPA networks:
CPA pays you per lead, sometimes just for a consumer filling out a form with their name & address, so you can imagine the profits you can make. Sign up for as many offers as you can. Later on, we will get into how to make landing pages/squeeze pages for promoting CPA offers as well. I use the Clickbank marketplace for all my products as a vendor.
As an affiliate, you can use the marketplaces to find products to promote. With Clickbank, all you have to do is click on “create hop link” and it will make your hop link for you. You can also make a hop link manually like this: http://namehere.vendorid.hop.clickbank.net. Simply replace “namehere” with your affiliate nickname, and “vendorid” with the vendor nickname of choice.
You need to create and copy your tracking code, always test it to see that it is working. This is the code that you will be promoting all over the place. You will post it in certain places where targeted prospects lurk, clicking on the link resulting in you “locking down” your prospect, so if he or she buys, you get the sale. That’s how it works. Again, the standard Clickbank “hop-link” looks like this: [top]
http://namehere.vendorid.hop.clickbank.net
After you replace the two parameters with the site of your choice and your nickname, you are ready to start promoting that link everywhere. With Commission Junction, (cj.com) or one of the other marketplaces, hoplinks will look a little different. Clickbank is the simplest hoplink available. You may also want to either cloak your hoplink or re-direct a domain name to “arm” your hoplink, so that you can use that domain name, instead of an ugly confusing looking link. It is more effective to be able to direct visitors to click on something like www.awesomewaterjugs.com then clicking on something like http://67jim89.564738.hop.clickbank.net
I will use the term “landing page” or “squeeze page” frequently. You will hear me mention these terms a lot in the eBook. These are one page web pages that you should learn how to make. You don’t need too, because it is possible for you to direct link to the website you are promoting, but your competition uses them and I have insane methods that incorporate landing pages that you will want to take advantage of especially once you begin seeing those payments come through to your account. You also sometimes need a landing page because some classifieds and forums do not allow affiliate links, so you link to a “landing page,” where the visitor can then click on your affiliate link, or you can just have the page “re-direct” with your hoplink.
Some landing pages feature reviews, comparison charts, banners, and some simply re-direct immediately to the product. Depending on the individual demand of the product, your ad copy, competition and atmosphere of where you are promoting the product will dictate how you in turn you will want to promote the product to yield the best results. Addressing the landing page issue, if you have no expertise at making web sites you have two options:
The 1st Option: Direct link, without a landing page: Become an affiliate and use everything else, Or: Use geocities, blogger, pre-made web templates for landing pages, or pay someone to make them for you. (On Craigslist you can find someone to make you a landing page for as low as $20.00 each.
2nd option: Learn how to use Web site HTML Building Programs and then you will have the knowledge you need to build your own web sites, (and make updates frequently) yourself, and later, when you are ready to get your web site up & running with a marketplace like ClickBank, all you have to do is pay them $50 lifetime registration, Buy a hosting account with http://www.hostgator.com (that's the one I use) then get a $5 domain name and a program named “Transmit.” That Get a “reseller’s account.” It’s great because you can have as many web sites for the same low monthly fee of 20 bucks.
The Clickbank Marketplace
When you click on the “Marketplace” link at the very top of the ClickBank home page, http://www.clickbank.com you will then be at the ClickBank marketplace. This page you are on is where affiliates go to find the best sites to promote, and where vendors go to see where they are on the charts. The goal for a vendor is to climb the charts to the first page. The first page consists of multi-million dollar power web sites that have hundreds of affiliates.
Sites are ranked upon four factors on ClickBank
$Earned/Sale: Average net amount earned per affiliate per referred sale. Note that this is the net earned per actual sale, and so it is impacted by charge backs and sales taxes. (Effective 28 July 2005, unfunded sales, such as returned checks does not impact this number.)
Percentage Commission: Average percentage commission earned per affiliate per referred sale. This number should only vary if the publisher has changed their payout percentage over time.
%Referred: Fraction of publisher's total sales that are referred by affiliates.
Gravity: Number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the publisher's products. This is a weighted sum and not an actual total. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks we add an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added.
All factors are combined, and adjusted such that more recent sales activity is given greater weight. Products are not listed until at least one has been sold. To improve their Marketplace ranking products must show a history of reliably converting referred traffic to paying customers over the past 8 weeks. Products that maintain a higher ranking naturally attract more affiliates, and make more sales overall.
DIFFERENT SITES AND ELECTRONIC PRODUCTS
A) The Database Access site. These are sites like http://www.beats365.com. The customer pays anywhere from $20 to $50 for access to a database filled with listings, information and links. The sales page usually has a search option, and "frequently asked questions" or "FAQ" page/testimonials and contact as well.
B) The E-book and Program Site. http://www.topsecretautomaticmoney.com is an e-book and program site.