Working Online is now a Reality

We all need traffic to our website.  No traffic equals no sales, guaranteed. What we need is free, targeted traffic, and we need it now. Here are the top 10 ways to do this:

1)      Article Marketing: Article marketing is still up there. Why? It gets you up in the search engines for great keywords (when you do it right) and it builds valuable backlinks. It also has a viral component, since people can use your articles and post them on their site – which gives you more exposure and backlinks.

2)      Forum Marketing: This is often overlooked but it is powerful. Find the top forums in your niche, build a profile and signature with your link, and start contributing valuable information. Do it now.

3)      Video Marketing: This is huge. Search engines love videos. Make some videos and post them on Youtube asap. They don’t have to be high quality production, but they should have good info.

4)      Social media sites: Make a profile at the top sites and start posting links to your blog, website etc. Join groups and start networking. They are networking sites afterall! And they have a lot of targeted traffic potential.

5)      Blog Comments: People read comments. This will give you exposure and potentially give you linkbacks (depending on the blog).

6)      Post regularly: Update your blog regularly to show search engines you are active. This also gives people a reason for coming back. This doesn’t always have to be original info, just find cool stuff related to your niche and post it.

7)      Submit to web directories: Get your site indexed and allow search engines to find you! Submitting to directories such as DMOZ is a must.

8)      Ping your posts: Let search engines know your site is updated. Check out pingomatic.com.

9)      Free give away: Give away free information – a report, video, newsletter, etc. This gives people a reason to sign up and also has a viral effect.

10)   Create a Yahoo Group: Create a group relevant to your niche in Yahoo Groups.

There are many options to choose from when considering making money online. You can create your own product, do paid surveys, or try affiliate marketing, just to name a few. The question is:  Is affiliate marketing the best option for you?

Affiliate marketing is when you sell other people’s products and collect a percentage of the income. This percentage can be as high as 75%, or as low as a few percentage points.

To determine if it is best for you, you have to look at the pros and cons of the other methods and see if affiliate marketing best suits your situation.

Take creating your own product, for example.

To do this you need to conduct a lot of market research, figure out what the needs of the market are, create a product to fill that need, then draft a sales page (which takes some ad copy skills) and so on. If this is sounding like a lot of work to you, then you are right, it is.

The pro here is that you are selling your own product and collecting all the profit. You can even set up your own affiliate program and have people sell for you. The con of course is that you have to do a lot of work to get started. Unless you have a lot of experience in this, it can be very challenging and a lot of beginners fail.

Paid surveys is another option. The pro here is that it’s super easy. All you have to do is sign up to a survey site and start answering questions. But of course, there is a con: You just can’t make a lot of money doing these. Also, there is no leverage: You get paid for the time you put in, essentially.

Now, affiliate marketing. Here are the pros: The product is made for you, the market research is done for you (if you choose the right product), the sales page is already made, marketing advice is provided, you can earn up to 75% depending on the opportunity, you can build your list of targeted customers and create your own product later on to sell to them.

What are the cons? Well, you of course do not own the product and therefore can’t collect all the profits or set up your own affiliate program. However, the experience you gain from affiliating will allow you to be better at doing this in the future.

In conclusion, affiliate marketing is a great opportunity for most people’s situation online. If you have a lot of experience and you think you are ready to create your own product, then you may want to take this route. For everyone else, affiliate marketing is a great option.

There is a bit of a debate out there regarding whether or not listbuilders work. Some say they generate useless traffic while others swear they get quality leads. Here is some clarity:

Listbuilders like Listjoe.com, Listdotcom, Viralhost.com and so on allow you to sign up for free and begin sending your message out to random people in the network, or your downline.

Generally, the people who receive the emails get credits for opening up the mail and clicking on your link. These people are on the listbuilding network for the same reason you are: To send emails out to the list.

From the description above it is easy to see the problem. It sounds like a bunch of people trying to sell to another bunch of people who are trying to sell. However, believe it or not this is not necessarily a bad thing.

First of all you have to understand the mindset of someone who is joining these builders. Likely they are beginner marketers who are trying to find ways to make money. This is a target market.

What I mean is, these people are interested in make money opportunities like affiliate programs or information products showing them how to make money online. These are the types of offers you should be sending out.

Second: Yes, they get a swarm of emails and yours will likely get buried. This is why your email headline is so important. Here is where another value of these services lies: Headline writing.

Since these programs are free, they offer a great opportunity to test your email headline to see if it catches people’s attention and leads to a good click-thru rate (CTR). If your headline can get a good CTR here, it can anywhere.

Third, you can test a variety of different offers and see the results for free. Yes, the traffic you get may not be of high-quality because people are clicking sometimes just to get credits. However, all things are relative:  If you send out 1000 mails and you get a low sign up rate of .05% from one offer, and then send out another 1000 with another offer and get a 2% rate, you know the second one is likely a more effective offer.

You can continue to test offers and see the results for free and instantly!! This is great for people with small budgets when compared to paid methods like Google Adwords, or people who need some results quickly, compared to article marketing which takes time.

The bottom line:

There is value in listbuilders. If you use them properly you will get leads and learn a lot about headline writing and presenting the right offers for the market you are targeting.

They may not be the best long term strategy to get traffic by themselfs, but they are good for quick results and extra traffic when combined with other methods. And hey, they are free!!

Affiliate marketing can turn into a very competitive game really quickly. A common occurrence is as follows: Many people scour affiliate networks looking for the ‘next big thing,’ and thousands of affiliates start promoting the same offer.

What happens? The market gets saturated and highly competitive immediately. Earl Nightingale stated, "Whatever the majority is doing, do the opposite, and you will probably never make another mistake in your life." This especially holds true to affiliate marketing.

Here are some tips and tricks to avoid following the crowd:

1) Alternative products and offers

Don’t go for the ‘next big thing,’ dig a little deeper in those affiliate networks and find the hidden gems. I say hidden gems because that’s exactly what they are – they are untapped gold mines waiting to be discovered.

While others are digging in the exact same spot, you can go off into less explored territories and cash in big time.  Here is what to look for:

Low gravity products in Clickbank that have a minimal marketing force behind them but are still of high-quality. To do this, simply look at the product’s gravity: If it’s extremely low compared to other products in the niche, this is a good indicator. You can create a hoplink for the product and then purchase it through your link (to save money) and review the product. If its killer and the market is hot, this could be your gem.

2) Find alternative market strategies

Often affiliate marketers all swarm to the same marketing strategies like moths to light. What happens is they bid up the costs of adwords and end up spending way too much money. Or, they try to target all the same keywords in article marketing, and their efforts get lost in search engines.

A better method would be to do this: Quickly do a look at what the current marketers are doing, see what words they are bidding on and find the less competitive ones (you can do this by looking at paid results in Goolge search). Use the less targeted words. Do this same strategy for choosing keywords to target in article marketing (you can do this by looking at results using the Google keyword tool and a Google search with your keywords in quotes).

Or, even better, find marketing strategies that are not being utilized in the niche. Local newspaper classified ads, for example, can be highly effective and are often over-looked by online marketers.

3) Find untapped niches and rising trends

This strategy is slightly harder because markets get tapped very quickly online. However, a good way to do this is to monitor affiliate networks, google trends, google keywords, fads in magazines or pop culture, and then tap these markets as they arise. If you get in early, you can beat the affiliate tsunami that is soon to follow.

These are 3 methods to help you stay above the ‘affiliate game.’ Any one of these methods applied properly can make you a lot of money.

To see an example of an amazing opportunity see our affiliate program which pays up to 75% and sells extermely well. Just follow the tips described above and check out the Fast Cash at Home Affiliate Program to get started.