If you are thinking about internet marketing as a solution to financial freedom you have a good idea there but its time to turn that good idea into a great idea. You need to learn how exactly you will be earning money from the internet and how you can earn even more from it over and over again. When you are in the internet marketing business and you are a website developer, affiliate marketer or a niche marketer, you want to have your website(s) search engine optimized and monetized properly. Monetizing your website is essential to making money from your website, so you want to have a clear plan as to how you are going to earn money from your website. There are two ways to earn money from a website, through advertising revenue or selling goods and services. You can sell goods and services either through affiliates or straight from your website. I want to discuss how you can build a cash machine through optimizing your website for search engines and getting your website ready for traffic by monetizing it. Niche Marketing
“A niche market is a focused targetable portion (subset) of a market sector.” – As defined on Wikipedia
As an internet marketer or an affiliate marketer you have to think bigger, this is a business like any other business. If you owned a store or a shop of some kind, you would want people who are interested in what you’re selling to be coming to your store and returning to your store to buy more stuff. You want to think about your website like it’s your store, you own the building, and you run the store and you’re calling all the shots. Since it’s your website you get decide who advertises on your site and how much money you are going to earn from that advertising space. You also decide what you are going to sell on your site and the beauty about this being on the Internet is that you don’t actually have to have the product physically; you can sell products through affiliates and earn commission. As an internet marketer you want to focus on earning as much money from your website as possible through affiliate marketing and niche marketing.
“Niche marketing is the process of finding and serving profitable market segments and designing custom-made products or services for them.”
“Online niche marketing, an often used technique for affiliate marketers. By seeking out smaller segments of larger markets, a website can be developed and promoted quickly to uniquely serve a targeted and usually loyal customer base, giving the affiliate a small but regular income stream. This technique is then repeated across several other niche websites until a desired income level is achieved.”
Online niche marketing requires you to do some research to find out what people are looking for in the different niche markets. You want to find out what people want and you want to give that to them. How do you find out what people want on the internet? Find out what they are searching for. You find out what people are searching for online by doing keyword research. For any niche you can do the keyword research for that market in about 15 minutes and know exactly what people interested in that niche are searching for.
You need to find a good keyword tool to do the keyword research necessary. Usually when searching for keywords the keyword tool would give you the monthly average search for that specific term or phrase and the latest month’s search figures. Keyword tools usually display relative terms and phrases that are also searched for heavily. You want to focus on keywords and keyword phrases that are high in demand but low in supply. Write down the keywords and phrases that are searched for heavily and then take sometime to check what websites pop up on the first page of search engines like Google and Yahoo for the keywords you have written down. Even visit the websites and see how competitive your competition is for these keywords. If the competition for these keywords isn’t too impressive then that keyword is low in supply and is a great keyword to use for your website. It’s also good to make a note of main category keywords and sub-category keywords; you can utilize smaller sub-category keywords to build the relevancy of your site for your main keywords. I suggest making note of about 5 major keywords that you have found to be high in demand and low in supply and then about 25 keyword phrases and sub-category phrases that are also high in demand and low in supply. Once you have found the keywords you want to use for your website you are ready to optimize your website for search engines.
Search Engine Optimization
Remember when the internet was the new big thing and it was largely referred to as the “Information Super-Highway”, well that’s something I want you to always remember. Websites are real estate and you can do what you want with your real estate, build a business or build a house. As an internet marketer we are doing this to earn money then we need to think about our real estate as a commercial business. Since we are dealing with the internet you have to ask your self how do people find information online? They go to search engines. So you want to focus on your search engine optimization campaign as it is crucial for you when marketing your website through search engines.
When people go to search engines and look for things, search engines calculate the most relevant websites in their directory and then the results are listed back to us. There are 3 major search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN. With Google being one of if not the biggest search engine there is I feel it would only be appropriate to use Google’s page rank system to model our search engine optimization campaign from and you can also download Google’s toolbar which tells you the Google’s page rank of every website you visit by displaying a green bar. With Google it seems their search spiders crawl their indexed pages and high rank pages first before anything else because it’s based on popularity, link popularity. They also rank pages on their relevancy based on keywords and overall content relevancy. So I believe we should focus on these two key things when optimizing our website for search engines; link popularity and content relevancy.
On-site search engine optimization (content relevancy), is achieved through keyword placement in all your content, titles and descriptions. With all the keyword research you did initially you already have the high demand keywords, you have your main keywords and all your keyword phrases. You want to place your main keywords in your title, your description and all your meta tags and when writing your titles and description you want to still write legibly with correct grammar. You want to write so that a human could read it and it would make sense to them. Blogging has become a recent craze and it looks like it has definitely turned out to be beneficial and for that reason I suggest making your website a blog but hosting it yourself so that you can fully customize it your self.
Search engines seem to have a liking for blogs because blogs are set up with a database and it is easy for the search engine spiders to crawl through your website. Because blogs are essentially databases it also makes it easier for you to manage all your content and break your content into categories and tags whichYou also have RSS feeds and people can add your blog to their pages and get updated on all your content as you post it. So as long as you update your website often, use your sub-category keyword phrases in your posts and use them as tags and your main keywords as categories, you will find that Google and other search engines will quickly index all your pages. With your plan to execute your on-site search engine optimization you can start to concentrate on your off-site search engine optimization.
Off-site search engine optimization (link popularity), is achieved through everything that you dont do on your website but everything else you do to build your link popularity online. You build link popularity by generating backlinks from other websites to your website. The relevancy of the backlink is important as it shows that your website is relevant to that niche. So you want to get quality backlinks from relevant websites to yours. There are two types of backlinks that you can have; one-way links and two-way links. It is said that one way links are more powerful than two way links. Also a great way to judge the power of your backlinks is by using Google’s toolbar to see the page rank of the pages that link to you.
Since one-way links are so powerful it would be wise for you to get high page ranked pages to link back to you and to get as many one-way links as possible. There are two great ways to build one way backlinks to your website(s); article marketing and forum marketing.
Forum marketing is the practice of marketing your website through your signature file in various forums. Essentially you join forums pertaining to your niche but not necessarily only pertaining to your niche you may also join free advertising forums aswell but you want to focus on high page ranking forums. Most forums allow you to leave your website url link in your signature file but some dont, you want to check that when signing up for forums. You can optimize your posts with your keywords as well, placing your keywords in your titles and within the posts, making the link to your website more relevant. Every time you make a post you will earn a one-way backlink to your website. I know you are beginning to see the power of this. As I said before another powerful way to build one-way links to your website is article marketing.
Article marketing is the act of marketing your website through writing articles. Usually when you join an article directory and post articles to them you are allowed to have an “Author’s resource box”. With an author resource box you leave a little information about yourself as well as your url link. You write your own articles, customize them with your keywords placed throughout the article as well as in the title, this also enhances the relevancy of your website to your niche. Everytime you post an article you get a quality backlink from that article directory, so its good practice to publish your articles to a directory with a high Google page rank. What also makes article marketing a great tool when it comes to search engine optimization is that when joining these article directories you agree that others have permission to re-publish your articles. When somebody else re-publishes your articles they have to re-publish your author resource box as well, giving you a one-way backlink every time your article is re-published. I know you can see how powerful a resource this can be when trying to build your link popularity. I think it is a wise idea to pick about 5-10 popular article directories and write about 10-15 articles with your keywords and phrases placed throughout the article and title, publish these articles to these directories over time. Google also checks for content similarity, so you dont want to post the same exact article to all these directories, you want to have about 3 versions of each article. In no time you will build many quality one-way backlinks through article marketing.
Now that you know how to conduct on-site and off-site search engine optimization for your website, you are now ready to monetize your website so that you can start earning money from your traffic.
Monetizing Your Website
I mentioned earlier that you can earn money from your website through sales or advertising revenue. So in monetizing your website we are going to focus on building your advertising revenue and making sales through your website. Because you have optimized your website, your organic traffic from the search engines will be targeted towards your keywords and therefore we know what they are looking for and can use that to our advantage by giving them targeted ads and targeted products to buy. I am going to talk about your options for generating advertising revenue and your options for making sales.
Generating Advertising Revenue
There are different ways you can generate advertising revenue, through running pay-per-click ads on your site or selling advertising space. I personally think its a great idea to utilize both ways to earn an income online. You can earn good money from ads on your site by displaying ad strips from your pay-per-click ad network on your page. Place the ad strips in different places and test to see which ad strips are giving you the best revenue. Customize your ad strips to blend in with your website layout because the less your ad strips actually look like ads the better they will perform.
Another great tool you can use is ad networks that sell your ad space for you. You join the network and add your site and the name of the ad strips and they sell the ads on their network, you decide how much you are going to charge for text ads or banner ads and they sell the space at your prices. They also display how many clicks you are getting and your Alexa rank aswell. So when doing this you get complete control over the ads that run on your website and how much you are going to charge and they do the work for you by selling your ads. When setting the price for your ad space you can also choose the ad packages you want to sell so you can sell a year, a month, a week or daily ad space, this giving you the advantage to sell off space in advance and get the money up front. This is an awesome income earning tool. In most cases they run PPC ads until they sell your space, this still giving you an opportunity to make money before you sell your space. With 2 or 3 banner ads selling, one text ad strip selling and some pay-per-click ad strips within your articles you can really earn some money from your website. Now to learn how you can make money online from your website by selling products through affiliate marketing.
Making Sales through Affiliate Marketing
Since you have taken the time out to optimize your website to get visitors who are looking for specific keywords you know what your visitors are interested in, making your visitors targeted visitors. Taking advantage of the targeted visitors you have coming to your website from search engines you can put ads infront of their faces that they are interested in already and if targeted properly they will click and buy something. When you are looking to join affiliate networks you want to join networks that are catering to your niche and when you join they will give you access to all their affiliate tools, ad copies, banners, text ads… etc. Now that the ads that you are putting infront of their faces are your affiliates you can really earn a nice commission when they buy through these affiliates, depending on the affiliate network you join you could earn anywhere between 10-60% commission through affiliate sales.
Many people haven’t made it big with affiliate marketing but that is because they didnt have an effective system and what I am teaching you here is what the the guru’s and the internet marketing success’ have done to earn a passive residual income through affiliate marketing. Just like with your ad strips you want to test your affiliate ad locations and track your affiliate links with some form of link tracker to see what positions on your pages are giving you the most traffic. With ad strips you can track your clicks through your ad network but with your affiliates you would have to sign up with a link tracker and track your affiliate links.
This is the “secret” to affiliate marketing and I know if you stick to the formula you will be able to earn money every time. Yes I said every time, that is the beauty of this formula, it can be done over and over again in different niche markets. I know you want to make more money so I suggest you execute this formula and do it over and over again to continuously build a residual income online. You will continue you earn more money as time goes along and you continue to add new content to your website. You can earn as much money as you want to with this formula and this is the true meaning of earning a residual income online, building a website today that makes you money for the rest of your life.
To Your Success,
-Alexander Day
