How to Start Making Money Online

Posted on May 16th, 2009 in Adsense, Affiliate Program, Clickbank, Free Business Model, Links, RSS, Really Simple Method, Strategies, Traffic Drill, Twitter, Web Traffic | 1 Comment »

ArticlesPeople are always asking us how to start making money online. The answer surprises most people: pick anything and take action.

I created an 18 minute audio to help you get started today. I talk about how to get started, what to promote and how to get traffic. It’s the perfect overview and I highly recommend you listen to it.

What to know what I talk about? Here’s the simple formula…

You start by doing some niche research, looking at trends, following smart people or just taking a complete guess.

Next, you need to decide what you’re going to sell or promote. You can be an affiliate marketer, you can sell your own products or you can start your own membership. Almost anything will work.

And lastly, you need to drive traffic using pay per click (PPC), writing blog entries, and writing articles. There’s a lot more you can do as well.

This formula is so simple but … IT WORKS. Of course, there is more to learn. There is a “secret” in the audio I created. When you hear me say it — and clearly explain it — you’ll see why the process I’ve outlined above is so powerful.

I’m not trying to scare you but you will FAIL if you don’t take my advice. You can pick the perfect niche, create the perfect product to sell or promote, and drive tons of traffic — but still fail. It’s important you listen to the audio succeed: How to Start Making Money Online (FREE).

By the way, if you like that audio, then you will love this stuff…

And, if you’re looking for other fantastic (very popular) blog entries, read these…

Cheers,

~ John

p.s. Please share this article with other people. Pass it along and link to it. And, if you have about 10 extra seconds, please Stumble or Digg or bookmark this blog entry.

p.p.s. Subscribe to Rhodes Brothers RSS feed.

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Internet Marketing Affiliate Program Tips

Posted on April 26th, 2009 in Advice, Affiliate Program, Clickbank, General, Membership Blueprints, PLR, PLR Club, Reports, Reselling, Strategies, Traffic Drill, Web Traffic | No Comments »

Finding a great internet marketing affiliate program is a daunting task. There are literally tens of thousands of internet marketing products available on the market, many of which have affiliate programs. So, how do you find the best one for your website or list?

The best internet marketing affiliate programs have the following characteristics:

* They track multiple sales. If you send a visitor to a merchant’s products, is your affiliate ID cookied (attached to that particular visitor) for future sales? A smart merchant will always follow up with visitors about upsells and offers, and you should be getting the credit for all of those sales.

* Sales are tracked for months, not days. Your affiliate tag on a customer shouldn’t expire for at least 30 days. Many merchants set a limit on how long a customer is “tagged” for, and if they purchase after this tag runs out, you no longer make any commissions from sales of that customer. The best internet marketing affiliate programs last for 60 days or more.

* You’re making a significant amount per sale. There’s no sense promoting a product if you’re not making at least $10 to $15 per sale. It’s barely worth your time. You should also be making at least 50% of the sale price. Some merchants offer 70% commissions or more.

* High conversion rates. If a product doesn’t convert, there’s no sense in promoting it. Also remember that lower priced products should convert much better than higher priced products. Track your numbers to make sure that you’re maximizing the value of each visitor you send.

* Pre-sales funnel built in. Many great internet marketing affiliate programs have a follow-up system built on that drastically increase conversion rates. This means more money in your pocket. It is also easier to promote these products because you’re offering “free content” to your website or list, not a sales pitch.

* Recurring commissions. Only a small percentage of programs out there offer recurring commissions, but getting customers into a recurring billing membership is invaluable because many customers will pay you for years to come, month after month. However, conversion rates for memberships are typically lower. Be sure to track your results carefully!

The Rhodes Brothers Affiliate Program offers multiple product affiliate tracking, high conversion rates, and pre-sales funnels ready to sell YOUR website customers or list. Click here to check it out.

Don’t have a website or a list yet? Check out my make money online post to get a step-by-step plan to make your first $1,000 online. (It’s 100% free.)

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Strategic Internet Marketing

Posted on April 23rd, 2009 in Affiliate Program, Clickbank, Free Business Model, Links, Simple, Simple Cash Blog, Strategies, Videos, Web Traffic, listbuilding | 1 Comment »

John and I hosted our first public teleseminar last night about how to get traffic to membership sites and how to make money online. One of the big things we talked about was strategic internet marketing – having a STRATEGY in place for your websites.

When trying to create traffic to their websites, a lot of people fail to look at the bigger picture. You can keep each piece of your traffic system simple, but when they combine, you have an EXTREMELY deadly force.

Let me show you a traffic strategy we have in place for one of our websites. It should give you some context what we’re talking about when we say “strategic internet marketing”…

We have FreeBusinessModel.com, which is a reverse squeeze page. We deliver a high quality video on the front-end which “hooks” in our visitors and convinces them to enter their name and e-mail address to watch a second video.

After they watch our second video, they are redirected to SimpleCashBlog.com, our $27 per month membership that gives away a wealth of business models. So, we immediately have the potential to make money from the traffic that we drive to FreeBusinessModel.com.

That means we can spend more money investing in driving traffic to that funnel. So, we hire out people to write articles and create videos for us, linking to FreeBusinessModel.com, and also advertise that site.

Cool, right?

Well, that’s not even the half of it. Here’s where it gets really good…

After someone opts in to our lists from watching the free video on FreeBusinessModel.com, we then send messages to them promoting not only Simple Cash Blog, BUT…

The ability to promote FreeBusinessModel.com and make money online from it. If you’re not following, we have an affiliate program built in to FreeBusinessModel.com, which means everytime that someone sends traffic to that site with an affiliate link that they create, they make a monthly commission from Simple Cash Blog (70% of the sale, to be exact.)

So, the more people that watch the videos at FreeBusinessModel.com and opt-in, the more traffic we get going to that site.

Are you following? — IT GROWS ITSELF!

Now *that* is strategic internet marketing. It’s not complicated to setup, it’s a bunch of extremely basic “building blocks” combined together to make one seriously kick-ass system.

That system will continue to churn money for us for years. We won’t be able to stop it even if we wanted to.

So, do you “do” strategic internet marketing like us? All it takes is a good idea and a few minutes of combining a few simple systems and you could have all of the traffic and cash flowing in that you can handle.

Check out FreeBusinessModel.com and see how our system works for yourself…

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Make Money Online MP3 Download

Posted on April 10th, 2009 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

If you want to listen to yesterday’s post in audio, download the MP3 here:

Download Make Money Online MP3
(right click the link and choose “save as” to save to your computer)

It’s about 30 minutes long, so you can listen on your way to work or during a walk. John also adds a bit of “jazz” and content himself, so even if you’ve read the post, it’s worth listening to.

He also makes a VERY good point…if you consistently follow through with the plan laid out in yesterday’s post, you’re going to have 300+ postings after one year. Google will LOVE you and you’ll be able to rank highly for just about any “long tail” keyword that you want.

(That means multiple streams of traffic to your site, more visitors and a lot more money.)

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Make Money Online – Step By Step Method

Posted on April 10th, 2009 in Free Business Model, Simple, Strategies, Web Traffic | 20 Comments »

No matter what your skill level, it’s completely possible to make money online from anywhere in the world. This blog post will enable ANYONE in the world to make money on the internet. Plus, it doesn’t cost you a single penny to implement.

Note: I could easily add some “fluff” to this or turn it into a video and sell it for $47 or more, but I’m tired of people saying that they can’t make money online. Follow the advice in this post, print it out, and consistently follow through with it. It will make a huge difference in your life.

I’m actually going to reveal one of my niches that I’ve used to make easy money online…I won’t give the exact site, but I do reveal the exact niche below. (It’s the example.) Why am I telling you this? Well…

While my website is only partially completed, it’s gotten ranked in Google for a few great keywords with VERY little work and it has made me a small, steady income on autopilot. If I had actually “followed through” with this particular website, I’d make a LOT more money…but there’s only so much time in the day.

(The lesson here is to FOCUS on the method below. Follow through with one website before moving on to the next.)

Anyone in the world can use the method below to get your website ranked well in the search engines, which means that you’ll be getting a lot of website traffic…and, if you can generate website traffic, that means you can make money with a variety of different methods.

Let’s get started…

This technique is going to have you create a “niche” website with unique content. Niche marketing, or creating a niche website to get traffic and then make money from that traffic, is quite possibly the most straight forward way to make money online.

Here are the literal steps that you follow…

Step 1.) Pick a niche and do keyword research.

Using a free keyword tool such as WordTracker’s Free Keyword Tool, pick a random niche and find some keywords. There are literally an infinite amount of different keywords that you can choose to get started with your website. For this example, we’re going to use the example of the parenting niche. So, type in parenting into the keyword tool. Parenting is a VERY hot niche, getting more than 34,000 searches per month.

(Don’t get worried about the term “niche.” It simply means “topic.” You can pick virtually any topic you want for your website. Do you enjoy pets? Working on cars? Traveling to Las Vegas? The possibilities are endless. Most topics will enable you to make money online.)

Of course, when we’re setting up our website, we don’t expect to rank highly for the “parenting” keyword directly. That is a very long-term goal that you can shoot for, but it’s certainly not feasible immediately. Instead, we’re going to be shooting for “long tail” keywords, or parenting-related keywords that don’t have quite as many searches as “parenting” itself.

Looking now, there are quite a few good ones…

Parenting tips
Teenage parenting
Parenting styles
Foster parenting
Parenting advice
Good parenting skills
Effective parenting

ALL of those would be excellent keyword phrases to target for your website. For this example, we’re going to go after parenting tips.

Don’t worry if you don’t find a “good” niche the first time around that you don’t think you can write about. What is most important is that you can write several articles about the topic, and that there are several long tail keywords available.

Why is it important that there are a lot of long tail keywords available?

You’re going to be writing articles about each of those keywords, targeting that keyword. More information on that later. But, you’re going to want to make sure you have PLENTY of topics to write about. For parenting, we have all of the topics we listed above, plus…

Tough love parenting
Spoiled teenagers parenting
Parenting toddler
Rules of good parenting
Parenting quotes
Parenting videos
Parenting plan

…and MANY more. I’m not going to list them all, but hopefully you get the point. Find a niche with plenty of various topics to write about.

CAVEAT: Don’t get TOO locked up on this part. Pick a niche, don’t doubt yourself, then continue. FOCUS, or you won’t be able to make money online. Too many people get caught up on this step.

OK, let’s move on…

Step 2.) Find a good name for your new blog.

OK, so you have that list of keywords from WordTracker open in front of you, right? What we’re going to do is go to Blogger.com and create a blog. It’s 100% free to do so, and from what I know, anyone in the world is eligible to make their own blog (please correct me if I’m wrong.)

We’re going to base the name of our blog on the keyword that we’ve chosen to target. If you recall, that keyword is “parenting tips.” So, ideally, we’d want the name of our blog to be:

http://parentingtips.blogspot.com
or
http://parenting-tips.blogspot.com

Chances are, those are probably taken. So, we can add a word at the front of it to make it unique:

http://bestparentingtips.blogspot.com
http://best-parenting-tips.blogspot.com
http://goodparentingtips.blogspot.com
http://good-parenting-tips.blogspot.com
http://myparentingtips.blogspot.com
http://my-parenting-tips.blogspot.com

…there are literally 1,000s of other variations you could go with, and most will probably be available. Pick one and go with it. Don’t worry too much about it, and don’t get hung up on it. All that is important is that it contains the keyword phrase in the proper order. If we were targeting a keyword phrase such as “good parenting skills,” we’d want to aim for these blog names:

http://goodparentingskills.blogspot.com
http://good-parenting-skills.blogspot.com
http://mygoodparentingskills.blogspot.com
http://my-good-parenting-skills.blogspot.com
http://goodparentingskillsinfo.blogspot.com
http://good-parenting-skills-info.blogspot.com

…Hopefully you get the idea. Don’t get too locked up on the name. An exact keyword phrase match is the best, but do NOT get worried if it’s not available. Just add a short word before or after the name as I show above, and try the dashed names.

Note: In our personal experience, it doesn’t matter whether you have a dashed name such as http://parenting-tips.blogspot.com or a “regular” name such as http://parentingtips.blogspot.com. Google seems to rank both equally to us, although some folks would disagree with us. You’ll be able to make money online either way, so don’t get locked up. :-)

OK, so, let’s move on to step 3…

Step 3.) Write content for your blog.

This is the part where most people will fail. It’s so easy, it just requires consistent work and focus…yet so few people can truly “handle” it. You’re going to need to spend between 15 and 20 minutes per day posting new content to your blog.

(Yes, this system takes a little bit of work, but it’s worth it. It WILL help you make money online.)

If you can consistently focus on one blog, making one keyword-optimized posting to it every day, you’re going to attract the attention of the search engines, generate web site traffic, then be able to use that traffic to make money online by selling advertisements, using Google AdSense, or as an affiliate marketer. We’ll discuss that in just a bit, don’t worry.

First, let’s talk about what kind of content, specifically, you should be writing for your blog.

Once again, we go back to our keyword list… :-)

You’re going to write an article, every day, revolving directly around one of the keywords that you found. Some of the keywords won’t make sense…that’s fine. You won’t want to write about those. But, as mentioned above, there are several different articles you can create using the keywords above.

Each of your articles need to meet the following criteria:

* the title should be the EXACT keyword phrase
* your article should be between 400 and 700 words long and should contain the exact keyword between 3 and 4 times, depending on the length of your article
* the exact keyword needs to appear in the first 50 words and the last 50 words of the article
* should contain 100% useful information that visitors would appreciate reading and builds credibility

…that’s all you need to do. Post one article, every day (or, at the very least, AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE) and you’ll be able to start generating traffic and then you’ll be able to make money online by monetizing the traffic. Of course, you need to get the ball rolling for the traffic to start flowing though.

Step 4.) Build links and get traffic to your site

Once you’ve started to write several articles for your blog, it’s time to start getting your site noticed by the world. The way to do this is with high-quality, one-way backlinks.

Many people get hung up on this part and think they need to buy backlinks, but you can get several backlinks for free. Here’s just a few free methods. Feel free to “mix and match,” you don’t need to use all of them…

1.) Go to Yahoo Answers, find 1-2 open questions related to your niche (use the “advanced” feature to search only for open questions) and post an answer. Use your website as a source for the information. Make sure your answers are high quality, not just cut and paste from your website.

If you do this once per day, you’ll have a ton of great backlinks directly from a reputable site. Plus, it takes only a couple minutes at most to post an answer.

2.) Go to a related blog and post a highly relevant, high quality comment on one of the posts. Post good content and a good response to whatever blog post that you’re commenting on, with a link back to your website.

Here’s a tip: Most blogs are setup so you comment using your name, URL and then the comment itself. Often, your name becomes hyperlinked and goes back to your site. To make your link more “relevant” from Google’s perspective, you should instead list your “name” as the name of your website.

So, for example, if we were commenting on a blog and our site was parentingstips.blogspot.com, then I would have “Parenting Tips” be my name. You’ll want to change it up…sometimes you might want to use “Good Parenting Tips” as your name, for example. Just post using a bunch of different “names” that are actually keywords and you’ll build plenty of highly relevant backlinks.

3.) Create a Squidoo lens and optimize it the same way you optimized your blog. Try to get your lens name to be http://squidoo.com/parentingtips or http://squidoo.com/parenting-tips/, for example. Put a bit of content on the lens, which you can steal from your own website. Just take an article or two from your website, re-write it a bit (takes 5 minutes or less) and then put it on the lens and link back to your site.

4.) Create another free blog on WordPress.com and point it back to your own site. You only need a couple high quality posts and then have them point back to your main website.

5.) Submit articles to our 3 main article directories: EzineArticles, GoArticles and SearchWarp. They should be keyword optimized, just like the posts you did for your blog. You can write about the same topics, but the articles do need to be unique. You should use the author bio box to point to your website.

6.) Post your articles on Digg.com. Even if you don’t get many Diggs for your articles, linking to your site from Digg helps increase your link popularity.

7.) Submit your website to DMOZ.org. It will take a while to get listed, but it’s a very strong backlink to your website. Note: your site must be high quality for them to accept it.

8.) Create a press release for your site. Using a press release service such as PRweb.com, you can submit a press release to all of the search engines for only $19. (Note: We are not affiliated with PRweb and don’t make any money when you submit a press release. It’s just worked out really well for us.)

This has gotten us a lot of high quality backlinks, but does cost a little bit of money. You can also submit a press release to many free press release sites.

9.) Use StumbleUpon to stumble your website. It will help increase link popularity a bit, and also give you some direct visitors.

There are literally 100s of other ways to build links to your site, but the ones above are some of the easiest and most popular ways. After you get several backlinks, your site will slowly start to get indexed and appear in Google. After 30 to 60 days, you should start to see consistent, growing traffic to your website.

To track how much traffic you have, use a free service such as StatCounter or Google Analytics and paste the code into your blog. This is easy to do by going into the blog’s editor. Don’t be intimidated by the code. Scroll down to the bottom of the editor’s page and paste in the code that StatCounter provides you. Then, you’ll be able to see how many visitors you’re getting and from what places!

OK, so, you have a solid, established blog that you post to as often as you can. What’s next?…

Making the money!

Step 5.) Make money online by using Google AdSense and affiliate programs.

Using Blogger, it’s extremely easy to put Google AdSense into your blog. Immediately after putting it in, you’ll start making anywhere from a few pennies to a dollar or two per click. It’s not much, but with a site with high traffic, it can add up and bring you a nice side income.

Note: Do NOT click on the ads yourself…Google will ban you.

The other way you can use to make money is by putting other people’s products on your blog. Using an affiliate program, people will pay you a commission (anywhere from 5% to 75%, depending on the product) for every sale that comes from a person from your website. It’s very easy to setup.

There are several affiliate marketplaces, but the one we’ll go with is Clickbank. They’re a digital retailer that sell other people’s information products. You can often sell products on the Clickbank marketplace and earn 50-75% of the profit.

Go to Clickbank’s Marketplace to take a look at all the various products available…weight loss, make money online, muscle building, health, gambling…just about any niche you can think of.

Go ahead and search for your own niche. We’ll continue with our “parenting” example, and search for that. Looks like there are quite a few products. You’ll typically want to pick one near the top of Clickbank’s list…they’re the highest converting products, which means that more visitors that you send to them will be buyers. Here’s the top 3 that popped up for me:

My Out-Of-Control Teen.  Audio/Video EBook(R) Plus Online Parent-Coaching For Parents With Out-of-Control Teens.
$/sale: $19.32 | Future $: – | Total $/sale: $19.32 | %/sale: 75.0% | %refd: 25.0% | grav: 19.38

PC Tattletale – Parental Control Software. Parental Control Software Pays 51% + Annual Recurring Commission. Earn $25.47 Per Sale On PC Tattletale Software. Help Parents Keep Their Kids Safe Online And Get Paid To Do It. Affiliate Promo Material & High Conversion Rates For The Industry.
$/sale: $22.91 | Future $: – | Total $/sale: $22.91 | %/sale: 51.0% | %refd: 35.0% | grav: 17.16

Making Math More Fun – Math Games Package. Fun Math Games For School Or Homeschool Education – Printable Board Games, Card Games And Game Sheets For Children. Educational Games Ready For You To Print And Play. Makes Math Fun And Easy. Kids, Teachers And Parents All Love These Fun Math Games.
$/sale: $11.91 | Future $: – | Total $/sale: $11.91 | %/sale: 50.0% | %refd: 49.0% | grav: 10.23

All 3 are pretty solid options, but I think it’d probably be best to stick with the first two in order to monetize “parenting tips” properly. We don’t know if their kids are being homeschooled, but you could eventually expand your blog to include some home schooling tips and products.

So, let’s just go with the first 2. First, though, we need to sign up with Clickbank as an affiliate. This is 100% free to do. I’m not 100% sure, but I don’t think everyone in the world can use Clickbank, so some people will need to stick with Google AdSense. You’ll still be able to make considerable amounts of money, even if that’s the case, so don’t worry.

When you sign up with Clickbank, you choose a “nickname.” We simply plugin our Clickbank username into the affiliate link that Clickbank provides. So, for example…

Our Clickbank nickname is “rhodesbros.” So, to promote “My Out-Of-Control Teen,” our link would be:

http://rhodesbros.drake333.hop.clickbank.net/

To promote “PC Tattletale,” our link would be:

http://rhodesbros.cybersam.hop.clickbank.net/

To create those links, you just need to click the “create hoplink” link below the description of the product in Clickbank’s marketplace. It should look very similar to the ones I listed above. Be sure to test them after you create them!

What you’re going to do, is go back to each individual post on your blog, choose one from your list of products that “fits” in the best with the topic you’re writing about for that post, then put a one-line link at the end.

So, for example…for our imaginary “parenting tips” blog, if we had a post about parenting security tips, then we’d probably want to post a short blurb at the end of that post with something like:

“Want to make sure your kids are safe online? Click here now to visit PC Tattletale. It’ll tell you exactly what your children are doing online, so you can make sure they’re safe!”

Another example…

If you had a post on your blog about teenage parenting tips, at the end of the post, you could add a blurb such as:

“Is your teen out of control? We have some more tips to help you tame your teenager. Click here to learn more and for a great report that will help you out.”

Then, you simply hyperlink part of that sentence (at least the “click here” part) to your affiliate link that you created before.

Something important to note here…do NOT “force” a product into a blog posting. If you don’t have a product that makes sense for a particular blog posting, you could instead link to another blog posting at the end of it.

Secret tip: Always link somewhere at the end of your blog postings…give your visitors somewhere to go and encourage them to keep reading! You could even create a list like this to post at the end of some of your blog postings:

“To read more Parenting Tips, click one of these links:

Effective Parenting
Teenage Parenting Tips
Child Parenting Tips”

…and, of course, each of those points to a different place on your blog. (This also increases your ranking with Google if you don’t overdo it.)

If you follow this step-by-step checklist, you WILL make money online. You cannot fail. You can even repeat the process over and over again…but, I HIGHLY suggest you first start out with one blog and make it profitable for yourself.

Some people have what it takes to make money on the internet, and some people don’t. It’s just a matter of pressing on when you’re discouraged. You’re constantly going to be facing an uphill battle…some people give up after 3 or 4 weeks and no money in their pocket, but others hold out and keep following the instructions above…then the money starts pouring in.

It truly is a “no-fail” system. It takes work, but anyone willing to put the time in WILL succeed.

If you’d like some additional help in getting started with the system above, click here to download a free report that reveals exactly what you need to do (with screenshots) to setup a blog on Blogger. We’ll also e-mail you even more techniques to get traffic to your site, plus show you some secret methods we use to extract even more cash from our sites.

Click here to get started with the system above (it’s 100% free)…

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