You may be earning 100 times more than what your friends are earning. You may be earning all that sitting in front of a computer running an online business.
But when you are out with your friend’s or may be in a social gathering when someone approaches you and ask about your business, do you have a cool answer to tell?
The world out there is different. There are people who have not heard about Google adsense, there are company owners who don’t have a clue about affiliate marketing. Geez, do people still live in caves?
Don’t you hate when you hear someone bragging about making $400 a month in their day job. Dude, I earn that much in one week. Last week a person I know was going on and on about his $400 a month job. I admit, that’s a huge amount of money in a country like Sri Lanka. But is it really something to brag about? I wish I could go to him and say, bro, in my lucky days I earn that much in 24 hours. And even If I am extremely unlucky I could make that much in one week.
When you are around ordinary people there is no point explaining to them how the internet marketing works. It is much easier to convince them that you are working for Google rather than explaining about adsense. lol.
Not only it gives you a sense of formality, but when you are doing really well, to tax purposes, to deal with banks, to deal with authorities, it is very important that you register your online business. It is very easy to register your online business as a sole proprietorship or partnership and although it might be bit complex you can register your online business as a private limited company too.
Once you register your company, give it a professional look. Get done envelopes, cover letters, business cards, letter headings, rubber stamps, and use them whenever you can. As I said earlier formalizing your virtual corporation gives you heap of benefits. It will not just make your image evolve from the “guy who is sitting in front of a computer” to a real “business pro”. In some countries it is a legal requirement to register any activity if it is yielding financial benefits.
Although I cannot help you with the total process, I found a great company to get done your stationary. And the best thing is you can get 250 nice looking business cards for free. All we have to do is pay for shipping which is a very negligible amount considering the service we are getting. I went through their whole process to see if we are forced to buy something in order to get the free service. And to their credit, there were no such attempt. Instead if we are not happy with the free service we can pay $3.99 and get the premium service with hundreds of designs.
See what I came up with using their free service. And remember these are not just virtual cards; you get real business cards after paying the small shipping fee.
In the free service you get 42 different designs to choose from.
Get 250 Free Business Cards…from VistaPrint Today! I hope you will take care of other things and make your online business an established venture. Make your Mom proud about you ! Good luck to you all.
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There are no untouched niches in internet anymore. If there is one, you can be pretty sure there will be not enough customers to make it a profitable one.
If someone advise you not to join a niche because the competition is too high, then that should be the niche you should start promoting. There should be a reason for a niche to be so competitive. The first reason I can think of is there should be a huge demand, and as a result huge money to be made of.
Would you like to open a clothing store in sahara desert where there is no competition or would you like to open it in Paris? Answer is obvious and so it should be.
So the next time you here something like this, without getting disappointed, get motivated. You have found a great way to make money. The so called super affiliates are promoting it with their silk pygamas on. Why can’t you do the same thing? No one started off from the super affiliate status. They came in to this status after years of researches and hard work. I believe you are capable of doing both. Till you become one let’s talk about few shortcuts you can take.
Thanks to spy tools, you can have all access to what successful competitors are doing in their campaigns. Let’s say you wanted to promote a fat loosing product. And you decided to promote a click bank product in the health and fitness category.
As you can see both number 1 and 2 products have high competition. We can come to this conclusion by looking at their gravity. High gravity means high competition and vice versa. Let’s say you decided to promote “fat loss for idiots” which has a very high competition.
Let’s see what the super affiliates are doing in order to make lots and lots of money from “fat loss for idiots”. Let’s copy paste and see the extract key phase in Google. As you can see, there are lot of sponsored ads which means many people are promoting this using Google adwords.
What I would like to do now is perform a little research and find out who are the best affiliates are. Or else you can simply use what the creators of “fat loss for idiots” are using in their campaigns. We can easily spy them by using keywordspy dot com.
Or else you can get all related keywords by entering the competitors URL in to Google Adwords keyword external tool. Once you find the keywords they are using, you know what the best keywords which bring potential buyers are. You can use the same list in your campaigns. Of course you will not be able to compete with them in adwords since they have much more money than you to climb to stop spots. But luckily there are more than dozen decent pay per click programs emerged during last few years and you can use them to buy your traffic. True, you will not earn more money than your major competitors who are using adwords. But you will definitely be making lots of money.
In the above example I couldn’t show you how to do the research in finding the best affiliates. One thing I do is checking the main keywords in their ad title and domain. If you can find them, then do a whois check on the website and If it has been around for sometime and due the fact they are still running adwords they must be making money. This might not be a universal rule, but I have found great affiliates to copy using this method.
You can build great keyword lists using these methods. How to convert this traffic in to sales is a whole different topic. But one thing I can tell you is review sites convert well. And when I create a review site I do not hesitate to give space for great products even if they do not have an affiliate program. And I give lot of links to authority sites like wikipedia, Cnn or Forbes whenever I can. By doing this, my sales did not drop, but they actually increased over time.
Apart from selling affiliate product sales, by using this you can have a very clear idea about how much advertisers are paying for a click? If you create a content rich web page using these keywords and paste some adsense ads on it, it is a no brainier that your ad sense check has the potential to be disgustingly fat.
I didn’t invent these methods, so I am not a GURU. But I am successfully using them. And I know many readers here can use this knowledge to maximize their Income. I have hundreds of other methods which I use in my everyday life. I will post them one by one when I have a free time. I get lot of Emails from newbie’s who wants to learn everything from abc. I believe this blog is not the place to teach everything from scratch. But do not worry; I will do something to help them out in the near future. And, No I will not sell an e-book.
If you like this post subscribe to our RSS feed to get the latest posts as soon as I hit the publish button. And the only way you can help me is by sharing this article. It is not easy for me to write a blog post every 2 days as I have to run few offline businesses too. I really appreciate every reader who has helped me in social networking sites. Emailed me with encouraging words and commented here. That is what keep me going. Thank you.
In my last post I promised that I will share something which I am currently practicing in order to make lots and lots of money.
If I am to give you an example without revealing all my secrets and protecting my current niches, I used to be an affiliate for “go to my pc” in 2004. For those who don’t know, it is a software which gives you the ability to use a remote computer as your own computer.
By using this, a person can work from their home computer as he is working in his office computer. And of course you can use it for different purposes. For example you can use this as a spy tool to gain access and monitor your partner’s online activities.
Just Google “remote pc” if you need more information regarding this. Anyway I started getting amazing conversions after I promoted it at my web site back then, ” software briefcase”.
Although I was getting a good commission , as a experiment I handed over a project to one of the developer’s in India to do a similar product but with less specifications (To reduce my cost.) He developed it for $350 and I started promoting my own product at my already established website. It was getting around 200 unique visitors back then and I ran an Adwords campaign to bring in more traffic. And I set the product price just under $10 to make it more reachable to a wider capacity of users.
Proving that I had done the right thing, I could cover the product cost which was $350 in 8 days. And after that every dollar I made was my profit. With my limited traffic I was able to sell anywhere from 10-25 units a day with a cost of only $20 in adwords. If you do the math you could see I was doing well with the program.
I know these numbers may be very insignificant for some people who are making over $1000 each day. But I believe those who visit my blog can take something out of this post. There are lot pf people who will be more than happy if they can make $100 daily.
After the initial success I thought of proceeding to the next level. I am a person who is not 100% depending on online methods to make my next sale. I always believe in the fact that off line marketing can be more profitable than online marketing. May be it is just me. But I am speaking from my own experience.
If you a web host provider may be you are selling plans at $4.99 a month. But if you approach small business owners in your area you can sell the same service for $9.99 a month.
With a help of a friend of mine I was able to put a small advertisement in an Indonesian weekly magazine with a cost of $15 a week. And boy, didn’t it turn out to be amazing. I put a small description about the product, mentioned the price and put the web address in the advertisement. And it started doing wonders from the next day. My sales were increased by at least by 12-15 each day. This means my daily profits were also increase by at least $100. This was a very good thing for me at that time. Just finished schooling and waiting for university entrance, $100- $200 a day meant a lot. Specially with the currency conversion rate of 1 dollar = 100 units of my currency, I did not need to do any thing else.
My run continued for about 6-7 months before a similar product came in to the market for a price I could not beat. Yes, a free product which was only asking your email in exchange for the software.
Even with that I was still selling 3-5 units a day. But later on when it was time for me to start university I thought of giving studies my 100%. (That thought only last about one month.) And I was offered a good price for my “softwarebreifcase” web site at site point which made me get rid of it. But I am more than happy with what I have done without sticking simply to the affiliate program I was promoting.
Even after that I have done more than dozen product developments through elance. And I must tell you, not everything you do will end up successful. Even though my first run was a very profitable one, I have experienced few bad ones on my way. Even one time the developer made an absolute disaster of what I was expecting and I couldn’t even launch the program. But as once great churchill said, success is looking at a failure and going for a brand new idea with the same kind of enthusiasm. The exact words might be different but this is what I remember. And I use this phrase as a motto in my life.
Everything we do will not end up where we plan to. But that’s life. And that’s the beauty of it. If everyone is getting everything they wish for the world would be pretty boring. I like the feeling when I am just about to start something. Not knowing whether it will end up successful or not. But one thing I know is I will give my everything for it.
Turning back after 30 years I do not want to wonder What if I have done this and what if I have done that.
As I once said in a early post also, everyday in life we will be given little windows of opportunities. Our destiny will be written upon how we are making use of these opportunities.
So if you are a person who is reading money making ideas everyday, But choose to do nothing about it, Start something today. And if you a person who has already begun something, May be a blog , hoping to do what is john chow or showmoney doing today, don’t give up. They have started doing these 3 years back and how long have you been blogging. For them it might have take 1000’s of new tweaks and ideas to make them who they are today. How many new things you have tried?
To summarize what I have written so far, once you find a good converting product as an affiliate, If possible try to get a similar product developed under your label. You can sell it under your own terms. May be you were not happy with the original product’s pricing, payment methods, Return policy but once you have your own product you can set all these things as preferred by you. Given that how easy you can get a product developed using freelance programmers, I do not see any reason why you should not try this. And do not under estimate the power of off line marketing.
In some cases it is more profitable to just promote your affiliate products rather than developing your own. As a businessmen this is where your decision making skills comes in to play. If you feel it is better just to promote the affiliate product, no problem, stick to it. But If you come across a product which you think you can make more money by developing a similar product, then go for it. No one can stop you achieving what you want to achieve.
The picture you can see in the middle of the post is my this month’s earnings, Rs 525,220/=. (Not from my blog Income but from product relates sites, forex profits and few off line trades.) If any one needs inspiration, see what a 23 year old is earning by working only 3 days a week. I spend 3 full days in my university and one full day at a hotel having a quality time. Which leaves me 3 days to work. And as you can see I have made the best of limited time I have. Who is saying government is responsible for poverty? It is you who is responsible for what you are and what you will be.
