Earn money online

I was wondering today just why it is that there are so many scams when it comes to making a living on the internet or trying to earn any amount of money online? It’s hard to tell but I suppose the main draw of the whole get rich quick market in general is the amount of money there is to be made from the un-suspecting public. It’s not a new phenomenon either as people have been looking for easy ways to make extra cash quickly long before the internet arrived on the scene.

In many ways the situation is reminiscent of the whole dot com boom at the start of the millennium where people decided to just throw money at the internet with the hope (and expectation) that it would just throw even more money back at them. As we know it worked for a while until the dot com crash when everyone suddenly realised there was no legitimate way to make that money back. The same is true of so many of these get rich schemes I see dotted around the internet today, their founding principle is because it’s using the internet its bound to make money and even better because its online you don’t really need to know how it works as the internet takes care of all that too!

Maybe it’s the emergence of new technologies but something tells me it has more to do with the age old issue of “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”.  The problem occurs mostly with people who have a little knowledge who then extrapolate that into a pretend understanding of a much greater problem. More often than not this problem relates to money and people seem to think that since they use Google or some other medium every day they are then qualified to make it work for them for great financial gain. In truth I don’t blame the scammers themselves in the get rich quick niche as they are often just servicing a need that is always going to be there. Namely a group of people who want to make vast sums of money with little or no effort, is it all their fault for exploiting this obvious group?

Not that they don’t use some pretty un-ethical means to promote these offers I have to say. Everything from fake testimonials to photo shopped cheques worth millions of £££ are used to “prove” their claims. If you made any of these claims on TV or even in a magazine without proof you would probably be sued immediately but you can get away with saying whatever you want on the internet (more or less), it’s like the new Wild West.

So after reading all that the question that’s still burning in your mind must be “are there legit ways to make money online”? Well yes there are but most of them are not shared around for free or even in a £99.99 eBook because with scale and overuse almost any technique for making massive amounts of cash will be burned to the ground. There is simply only room for a certain number of people in any kind of idea and that’s a fact. However expectations are important also, if you want to make millions then you really do need a spectacular idea (ie next facebook) but if you have slightly lower ambitions then there are definitely some great opportunities out there. Until next time.

So I was thinking the other day just how many people I see on a daily basis starting out ecommerce sites with just the hope that they will make money (just because they are there). I suppose this attitude stems from the offline world where if you open a shop you will get a certain amount of foot traffic (and thus sales) from people who are just walking by. Thing is people just don’t stumble across your website (well not usually) as we don’t just go around typing random we addresses in with the hope that one will eventually work.

Back to the point, it’s amazing how much people will spend on the creation of a new website when it comes to design and programming compared to how little is set aside for promotion. In my opinion your promotional budget should always be a couple of times what your building costs are.

This also brings me to another very important point. If you’re hoping to be making money with this ecommerce thing for a while to come then surely you’re going to want to have this skill in house? After all SEO is a full time job do you really want to be paying money to an outside agency for the rest of your internet career? The way I see it if you are starting an online shop you have a few options when it comes to increasing your earnings with SEO.

• Go with a marketing agency. They should have a number of employees in different specialities from social media to link building, this avoids being stuck with a “jack of all trades” character. There will usually be different plans available but most people go for monthly “pay as you go” type option as its ideal for a small start-up business. The main downside that I can see is there’s no real investment going on from your own knowledge or training point of view.
• You can hire a wiz-kid SEO to work for you. Sounds simple as you could have someone working for you on a full time basis who will probably be cheaper than a marketing agency. However finding them might not be easy and they might not have as much reputation as you would like so the safety net might not be there. Also since they have to be good at everything they do need to be bit special as it takes a lot of skill (and organisation) to pull off all the aspects of net marketing.
• Learn it yourself? Sounds daunting as internet marketing is a constantly shifting landscape, do you have the time to stay up to date? If you have some IT experience then it may not be too hard to learn but others from a completely different field could struggle. Of course even  if you do pay someone else to do the work it always helps to know the basics.

As you can see there’s 3 main options when it comes to increasing your sales (and hopefully money) via internet marketing but they do all have their downsides and plus points. Still internet marketing is never an overnight thing so you will probably have time to (and have to) go with all 3 methods at some point. Until next time.

One mistake that I see new people to this business making again and again is picking the wrong niche to enter into for their new website or blog. You see one of the main thought processes that people have is that you should write about what you know and/or are interested in. It’s a good idea in principle but the problem is that so many affiliate marketers are of the same demographic i.e. male between 18 – 35. So what you end up with is a million thin affiliate sites all trying to sell iphone accessories or sports equipment. If you do start your business around one of these “traditionally” male tech/sports products you’re going to be competing with all these other people who also failed to think outside the box and 99 times out of a 100 you’re going to fail.

Now I know trying to think completely out of your own experience’s can be very difficult but trust me that the time spent are the start trying to find that untapped market can be recouped many times over down the line. Another big plus of the untapped market that no-one else is noticing is you can be completely under the radar for months (and even years) before people realise just how much money you are making. Indeed it is some of these more “boring” industries that often allow their owners to earn the most over a short period of time. So i suppose you are thinking just what kind of markets/sectors these might be? Well of course I’m not going to give away the farm in one post but here are a few sectors to think about.

• Make-up
• Clothes
• Shoes
• Office equipment
• Packaging

Ok so as you can see not very exciting but when it comes to earning an income online it’s the more boring the better in my opinion. So your also probably thinking at this point what kind of niches should you stay away from? Here are a few sectors that have ruined many an affiliate marketers dreams

• Iphones (or anything apple)
• Electronics in general
• Books (you know amazon does this right?)
• CDs (heard of mp3s?)
• Poker
• Loans
• Personal injury

Yes some of those niches are worth huge amounts of money, ie ranking on Google for something like “Personal injury claims” could be worth over £1000 a day just in commission. However most people get blinded by these kind of numbers and just forge ahead without evaluating the situation. Most of the sites in the niches above will literally have teams of people working full time on every aspect of SEO and not just to get the site to the top of the serps but to make sure it stays there. This doesn’t mean there isn’t huge amounts of cash in other sectors too (there is) it’s just not as glamorous and in most cases harder to find.

So how to you find this new niche that’s going to make you millions? Well the two keys are both patience and awareness. Anytime you’re searching the net for something (especially if it’s a gift for someone else) you should have seoquake on and have a quick glance at the competition in this market. After a while this will just become an automatic thing and before you know it you’ll be accessing the competition every time you fire up google, it can become a bit time consuming I have to admit but it will be worth it.

I must also mention that it’s not just markets that have little or no competition that you may want to start in, you also want to enter a market were you can offer something way better than everyone else. One of my favourite bloggers is Allyn Hane over at blogger illustrated who talks in some of his (slightly crazy) videos how he started a blog in the DIY niche. The thing about his blog was that he could offer real reviews on DIY hardware and not just the generic product descriptions that you get on most ecommerce sites. The best thing about his blog though is that he sold it for $30,000 to a venture capital firm, now that’s some serious cash!

So there you have it my advice on how to think outside the box (a little bit) in order to earn some real money on the internet. Until next time my digital peeps

Ok so let’s say you want to start up a new blog to help make some extra cash online. One of the biggest mistakes people make is just to start a general blog with the expectation that advertisers are going to want to pay lots of £££ to put up adds. When it comes to internet traffic quality is everything and if you don’t have visitors who are intent on spending money when they arrive at your site then there’s no way you or any advertiser is going to make any money off them. So what happens is many bloggers start a site about their own “pet passion” and hope it will automatically turn into a money spinner. Now this doesn’t mean you can’t write about what you are interested in but you must target it in a way that is going to create some kind of potential for earnings.

Let’s say you are interested in photography, the wrong move would just be to talk about why you love it so much and show all your pictures online. A much better strategy would be to target people looking for a specific camera and to write up a real quality and detailed review on this camera. Then promote this review by attracting links for it from other quality (related) sites. Hopefully with time and some luck you may be able to rank your review when people are searching online for this specific model. The key is that you know people who find this review will already be “thinking” about making a purchase and so this visitor is very valuable both to you and potential sellers of this product.

Many people can’t get over this concept that I’ve just explained as they only want to write about what they are interested in and don’t want to deviate from it for a second. Now i have nothing against personal blogs at all but at the same time you have to decide what your priorities are and if your mission is to earn money or to just entertain yourself and your visitors. This doesn’t mean you can’t combine your passion with your money making abilities, you just need to plan out exactly how you are going to tackle it.

So i wanted to talk a little about why the content on your website is so important. One of the biggest mistakes people make when creating content for their site is that they make it way too formal. This can often put off people who are just casually browsing your site and looking for some general information. Indeed i think general is the keyword as it i would say 90% of the people who are surfing the web and browsing websites are not looking for technical information but a general overview of your subject, i suppose this is why people love bullet points and lists so much as it allows them to get to the key facts really quickly.

Speed is another important point when it comes to content, can the person browsing your site find the information they want quickly? If not then you could be in trouble as research has shown the average person will only wait around 8 seconds on your site before moving on sfgogomewhere else, can you capture their attention fast enough?

For many reasons the majority of the content on the internet is text but while it is the easiest medium to create its not always the best way to get information across to people, ie just look at the success of youtube. Text on the internet can be quite boring for people sometimes and a few pictures or videos here and there can really break up the monotony of a long article.

The way you write your content can also have a big impact on your overall sales, however many people still make the mistake of trying to sell to aggressively to their customers. People are now very wary of the hard sell and can often feel your content is a ploy to make you more money online, your customer should always feel like your product/service is there to help them first and foremost.

I know for some people creating content for the internet can be a real pain, this is why we see so many companies who just copy their generic sales brochures and product stats straight onto their new website. This is nearly always a mistake, if you can’t add unique value to your content then there really is no point too it. Similarly if your content is just another re-written copy of something someone else has created then it can often be pretty obvious to anyone reading it. For these reasons many people can be intimidated when trying to create content for the web, weather that is an article to help you earn money with your blog or a chart to show your latest sales it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you can convey the message quickly and clearly, essentially you need to give your visitors what they want (and not what you think they want).

Another big part of content building these days is creating content that people will want to link too. As i mentioned earlier links are the lifeblood of seo and anything that helps you to get more of them is a good thing. For many link building is a manual process but it doesn’t have to be if you are creating amazing content that lots of people want to reference on their sites and blogs. The key is to create something unique and compelling and that people feel the overwhelming desire to share. Easier said than done i know but if you can crack this particular problem then there’s a lot of money to be made with your blog.

One last thing i have to mention about creating content is that you should definitely create a lot of it. Of course you should always try to maintain quality when you are blogging but creating a lot of content will allow you to attract many more visitors to your site than you would originally. This is because people use so many weird and wonderful keywords to find things on the internet that if you do have one of these obscure key-phrases in your text then there’s a good chance you will show up on google if your seo is right. Indeed i remember a few years ago google mentioned that one out of every 5 keywords they get are new to them.  If its new to google then its probably new to a lot of webmasters too and so the competition should be low. Now i know your thinking how can i optimise for a keyword i don’t know anything about? Well you cant, but what you can do is create alot of good quality content and wait for people to find you using whatever means they can!

Ok so you want to learn how to make some money online but the start everything can seem pretty confusing right? Youve got a million and 1 bloggers all telling you that they have a new method that know-one has ever thought of and it can be yours for just £99, sound familiar? So i suppose the first thing you have to ask when you read these people is:

“If your making millions from this system then why do you need to sell it on the internet”

Its a good question and one that most people hawking these products wont have a serious answer for. I suppose at the same time there are enough people willing to ignore common sense and buy these ebooks or whatever it is in the hope that it could be the solution to all of their financial problems. Now i know its always good to be optimistic in life but you have to be a realist too! The most important thing to remember is that with any “system” the more people using it inevitably the less money is available for everyone. It just stands to reason as the minute a market gets saturated prices go down.

With this in mind i really don’t think there is any such thing as a “get rich quick” scheme because as far as i can see the only people who could possibly get rich are the ones running it. On the whole the people who really make it in the “make money online” niche are those who strike out on their own to earn a living. Now this doesn’t mean they have to come up with some revolutionary idea every day. Quite often the most successful money making ideas are just variations on other people’s ideas with a different spin etc. Also quite often it can just be that this individual puts alot more effort (and sometimes money) into making the process work, motivation can be huge and not just on the internet business world but everywhere.

One of biggest problems people have with Google and other search engines is that they don’t actually say how they work. For some people this is a problem as they want a nice safe system that they can follow but this is never going to be the case with SEO or even PPC, there is just too much money at stake and too much competition. Indeed even within the internet money making world people don’t share “real” information that often, after all would you give a competitor information that could ultimately lead to you making less money? I didn’t think so! So there you have it a little “reality check” for some who think they can just buy the latest ebook and get rich online in a fortnight!

So i wanted to address one the main problems i see when people pick keywords to target on the search engines. Been a while since my last post so thought i should enlighten all you folks about it.

One mistake i consistently see people make when targeting keywords for SEO purposes is not targeting specific “Buying keywords”. An example of this is the post here http://www.wickedfire.com/newbie-questions/60279-lemons884-journal-will-noob-succeed.html where Lemons884 is documenting his progress in the SEO world and how his sites are doing. Now i don’t want to criticise as hes doing more than most people as the majority of newbs overanalyze the whole thing and never actually get anything done. So far hes built a site about track and field events and dates when things are happening which on the face of it sounds good right? I mean he can probably sell sneakers and other running equipment to people while they browse right? Wrong, the majority of people who hit this site will be looking for information about track events and wont actually have making a purchase in mind. Does that mean he will never make any sales? No he will get some eventually but it will never reach the levels that he wants it too until he targets the right keywords. Instead of track and field events why not target the phrase “discount running shoes”, how many of the people who find you with that keyword have making a purchase in mind? Probably about 99%. If you want to make real money with SEO then a sale or purchase should be No1 driving force in both your mind and that of your vistors, everything else is secondary.

Ill give you another example, a friend of mine wanted to start a TV show review site. He was going to have listings of popular shows and reviews of each episode, then he would have affiliate ads for the TV show box set DVD beside it as people might want to buy. Sounds good on the face of it but its the same scenario as before. 90% of the people who hit his site will be looking for information assuming hes targeting keywords like “tv listings” or “southpark show review” then those people don’t have making a purchase in mind. Much better to rank for something like “region free sopranos box set”, everyone searching for that has a purchase in mind as it’s not information and you cant get it for free.

So there you have it a little information from my tiny brain, ill probably have another usefull post sometime next year

One of the biggest problems with the make money online industry is that the number of people actually making any money at all is quite low. This stands to reason as you have no way of verifying weather the people you are reading about are for real or not. One of my favourite bloggers is Grizzy bears and you can believe me when i say he tells it how it really is. His latest post is great as he really calls out some of the scammers in the industry like Derren Rowse. The reason Grizz himself is not a scammer when it comes to making money on the internet is because he actually details the method he is using to make money. That method is of course to rank in the search engines (mainly google) for keywords which are associated with a sale.

On the one hand this seems to simple but its really not, as SEO is a skill that can take a while to master. However once you have the basics down you can wash rinse and repeat. Also bear in mind SEO is not an exact science and anyone who says they know specifics of how google works is probably lying as google don’t say how their system functions.

One of the most common things you will see with these “make money sites” is they don’t actually say how what they are selling works or will earn you a living online. This method is not exclusive to the internet world, you have probably seen the “money system” adverts in newspapers where people talk about how they have made millions using a new system yet they offer no information on how this system actually works. It can be easy to get sucked into these schemes but what you have to remember is that if something is too good to be true then it probably is. Also think about the fact that if you were making £1000s a month from some “system” would you be selling it on? Especially when you consider that with almost anything the more people “doing it” the less effective it’s going to be.

So as i have hopefully spelled out a little the way i make money is not a system that i am trying to sell and not even really a secret. While i do make money on broad terms by “blogging” there is more to it than that. The key is that you are getting people to your site who are looking to buy something or purchase a service. Now getting these people could be really hard or really easy but what i want to get across as early as possible is the getting these people is the foundation of everything that i do, because once i have them the rest is easy £££!

One of the most general questions i get from day to day is if it is possible to earn money online by blogging. The reason i say this is a general question is that there is more than one way to make money from your blog and it will also depend on the type of blog you have. The first thing that you have to realise is that your earnings depend very much on the content of your blog. If you are just going to create a blog about yourself and what type of cereal you had for breakfast then its pretty unlikely many advertisers are going to want to pay for traffic coming from your site. The key is to consider weather your traffic is “buying traffic” or not, what i mean by this is does the person who hits your blog for the first time weather from search engines or social media have the intention of making a purchase? If the answer is no then you are going to find it hard to convert any of these visitors to your blog into real cash. Consider as well that many of todays advertisers work on a commisson basis and if your traffic isnt making them money then you can bet they wont keep you around for long. So supposing you do have traffic to your blog that is worth money, how can you monotise it?

• The first i will mention is probably the most well known from google called adsense. Its very simple to use as all you have to do is put the code on your site and google works out what  your site/blog is about and displays the relevant ads. You can do some configuring as far as colours etc go but its pretty much what you see is what you get.
• Another way to earn money from your blog is allow other people who have blogs or sites to place their links on your site. For this you do need to have a reasonable popularity level for your blog and also some authority to go with it as this is what people are paying for. The main way to get these jobs is just to become and authority in your niche and wait for people to contact you.
• The last way i will mention is a little more work but can sometimes yield alot more money. This is direct affiliate marketing whcih involves you linking directly to another website or blog who sells the product or service that you are talking about. This will envlove a little looking around to find the best place that sells the product and not everyone has an affiliate scheme but most of the bigger sites will.

So there you have a short run down on quick ways to make money from your blog. As i said at the start these are not the only ways to earn money from your website but they are a start!

So its time for some practical advice here on earning money online as i want to give you guys some ideas that can get you making money on the internet straight away. One of the first im going to show you is a new market that has opened up on the internet where people get paid to write content for other people’s blogs and websites. While not necessarily a new idea the industry has really exploded over the last year or so. The main reason is that more and more people are creating websites but they don’t have the time to write all the content that is required to set it up. Also google has really changed the game as far as what is required on a website is concerned. Having lots of good quality content is very conducive to ranking highly in the search engines results. Why do you want to rank highly in the first place? Well for a start you may not realise that many of the things you search for on a daily basis on the internet are worth quite a lot of money to the right people. Yes everything from car insurance to home loans is monetized in one way or another buy the people trying to sell it to you.

So as we have established that everyone who is trying to get people to their website is in great needs lots of content to put on it. So where there is demand there is opportunity as it is possible for people like you and me who want to work from home to write this content on a daily basis. Now there are many ways to write content and people who require it but for the purposes of this review i am going to focus on just one to stop it getting confusing. TextBroker.com is a site that connects website owners and other people who need text content to writers who are willing to create content for them. Now one of the first things you are going to ask is how much money can i make doing this? Well there is no simple answer as there are obviously different levels of content that can be created and people with different skills. However don’t worry, you don’t need to be the next Shakespeare in order to get a job writing on the internet. Here is an overview of the rates below:

2 stars: legible  £2.10
3 stars: good quality £3.10
4 stars: excellent quality £4.30
5 stars: professional quality £15.00

Ok so as you can see there is quite a scale here depending on the level of content you are writing. This is good on the one hand as it means there could be a job for practically anyone who is capable of writing English. Its also worth noting that even if you do grade yourself as a professional content writer you will still need to build up a reputation through working for different people in order to get the highest payouts. The way Textbrokers work out these payments is as you can guess a manual process as they review all of your content by hand. The rating is decided by their team as an overall review of your work (usually the last 5 articles you submitted)

If you do complete alot of quality work for someone either on TextBrokers or another service then it is more than likely they will ask you to work outside of the service just for them. This can work out good for both parties as TextBrokers take 30% commission on the total amount of the project and you can the split this between you can your employer. However even with the 30% commission that they take i think this is a really good service that links both buyers and sellers together. Also you have to realise that any system like this that involves random people all over the internet is going to be open to abuse from both buyers and sellers. Having everything from the quality of the content to the payment process being managed by a third party is reassuring and sometimes necessary.

So back to your original question which was how much money you can earn by doing this. So obviously this is going to depend primarily on two things.

1. The quality of your content
2. How much you are going to write

Its worth noting that it is going to take longer to write 5 star content compared to 2 star but im not sure if it is going to be a massive amount. I mean you are probably going to have to do a bit more research for your higher quality content (especially if it is a subject you are not familiar with) but how much will depend on the specific requirements of the article. For instance many people are just looking for general content for their site and are not looking for incredibly technical documents on how something works. Often people are just looking to convey a simple message about what their website or blog does and to do it in a natural language that people will understand. Its also worth noting that many people who do start up their own site don’t know how to create good natural content that is going to appeal to their website vistors. Its these people who you can help and also earn money for yourself in the process.

So there you have a quick review of the whys and wheres of writing content online for money. As you can see its not an overnight path to riches but very few things are and i am always very sceptical of such claims. On this blog im hoping to promote practical ways that anyone can earn a living from the internet and i do believe that writing content is one of these ways. I think this method could appeal to stay at home moms or other people who may be at home all day and want to choose their own hours and workload. So check them out if you get a chance and let me know how you get on. P