Been thinking about ways to make more money? Maybe looking at some things online that might bring in extra cash to help keep up with the ever growing cost of living?

Here in Moncton cost of living increases weekly. It’s either gas, furnace oil or electricity but something goes up. Then there’s the grocery store. How many times do you get grocery that something has gone up in price.

It can be most frustrating and that’s why so many are looking at possible ways to make a little extra income without taking on a second or third job.

This is where the Internet becomes a very powerful place. There are so many work from home opportunities on the web and they don’t even require you quit your day job.

Some work at home online jobs require fast and accurate typing skills which would leave me out in the cold but fret not there are lots of ways to make money online, even using hunt and peck typing.

My preference for work from home business ideas is affiliate marketing , where I can promote and sell other people’s products and service to earn commissions.

I work a number of different niches or markets so I belong to a variety of affiliate networks as all affiliate networks don’t focus on the same markets.

Before I continue there is one thing that’s will make all the difference in the amount of success you gain and that’s training.

Learnin’ Earnin’ First

I work from my home in Moncton, New Brunswick marketing online full time. I’ve even helped a few others get started online.

It sure beats working for other people. I am my own boss, which takes a bit of self discipline. I can set my own schedule which allows me to enjoy life more than when I was working my butt off all hours of the day and night.

You may have heard it before but here it is again.

It’s not hard to make money online…

… once you learn how to make money online.

I started my work from home business making websites locally but it wasn’t long before I wanted to make money marketing like those I was building web sites for.

I spent the next year spinning my wheels trying this and that. The thing is I didn’t try to get any training at all, none.

If I was making my living designing web sites I would either have starved, gone back to working for others or if I was smart I would have looked for proper Internet marketing training.

Eventually I admitted to myself that I was clueless about online marketing. I went to Clickbank and looked for a few good marketing ebooks.

I choose Clickbank because I know I will get my money back if I request a refund. That’s important as I have been ripped off by people that wouldn’t give me a refund even though they said they would from their website.

You can trust Clickbank to be on your side.

Once you learn how to make money it’s time to find a niche or market to research. It’s also important to research each niche and sub-niche for products or services you can promote comfortably.

Knowledge Is Power

Having taken the time to learn online marketing you know have knowledge on your side. This is the time to put that new knowledge to work.

I would suggest part time, about 3-4 hours minimum a week.

Brief Overview of Market Research

I know I just said you need to find a good ebook on the subject but allow me to give you a little overview to give you an idea of what to expect.

1. Find Something To Promote

You of course will want to find something you are comfortable promoting. The trick is not to find it and then run with it. Do some research first.

Places like Amazon, eBay and Magazine sites are great places to see what people are buying.

2. Research Your Niche And Product

Once you find a product or service that has your interest you need to know if that product has the interest of people with money they are willing to spend.

If no one is buying in that market you could spend months trying to figure out why you’re not making sales.

Google’s Free Keyword Tool is the place to start checking for the words people use to find what they are looking for. These are called keywords or keyword phrases.

Just type Google Free Keyword Tool in Google and it will most likely be the first item listed.

You will need to determine whether a keyword is too competitive and if it is actually a buying keyword phrase. You really want your keyword phrases to get enough traffic to make it worth your time but not so much that you can’t get traffic to your webpages.

For people starting online marketing these days it’s the golden spot to aim for. Not too much competition you can compete against it but enough to still make money.

It will vary for each product or niche so I can’t give you a target value of monthly traffic to aim for but a good guess would be to go for searches volumes between 1000 and 10,000.

You will also want to check the keywords you find while researching to see how many competing pages you’re up against.

3. Evaluate The Top Ten Web Sites

As part of your research you will want to put each potential keyword phrase in a Google search to see how many other websites are ranking for that same phrase.

Once you have your first page of listing open those top ten and look through the page to see what they have done.

There are a number of factors you can look at to see how much work you would have to do to move a head of that page.

Some factors are:

  • Is the keyword phrase in the domain name?
  • Is the keyword phrase in the page name?
  • Is the keyword phrase in the Title of the page?
  • Is they keyword phrase used throughout the page?
  • What is the keyword density. The number of words on the page divided by the times the keyword phrase is used.
  • Is the keyword phrase used in the hyperlink text. The links on the page.
  • If you view the page source code is the keyword phrase in the description tag?
  • Are there images on the page? When you mouse-over the image does a text tag appear? It’s called ALT text.
  • If there is ALT tags on the images are they keyworded.
  • How many backlinks does that page have.
  • What is the page PageRank

There are a lot of factors that go into putting a money making keyword phrase on the first page of Google search results and it can take some time to check the top ten sites but it’s worth your time.

I spent days and weeks doing this manually but once I was making a little money I purchased Keyword Elite 2 as it give me all that information on one screen so it just take me a couple of minutes to evalute a keyword phrase and believe me time is money.

The more you evaluate potential competition and learn what’s needed to do better so you get on that first page of search results the better your chances of making good money online working from home.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Tagged with: • • • • • • •

Filed under: New Brunswick • affiliate marketing • make money • work at home • work from home

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!