The One Year Millionaire

Before you do anything online you should; at the very least, have somewhat of a Game Plan. An idea of how you are going to make money… and how you are going to accomplish it. If you don’t have a clue what to do (or more specifically: what you want to do) then you won’t even know where to start.

There are so many ways to make money on the internet. If I tried to count them on my fingers I would probably have to borrow a few set of hands. So I am only going to cover a couple of them that I personally know can generate some serious cash! These are:

1. Google Adsense
2. Private Advertisements
3. Affiliate Marketing
4. Freelancing
5. Paid Surveys/Paid To Click

Google AdSense
I am starting with Google AdSense because it is (in my opinion) one of the easiest way to make money online. This is especially true if you are relatively new to internet marketing. If you don’t have much experience in online marketing I am sure that you have came across a few dozen different pages that offer to teach you adsense secrets that will make you tons of money… but the fact is that simply knowing the secrets won’t do it alone.

To achieve success with AdSense there are a few things you are going to need to do. If you don’t know where to start with AdSense then continue reading.

1.Keyword Marketing.
I am sure that you have already heard somewhere that different keyword clicks will pay more than others. This is a fact. While it is not highly suggested to new marketers because of the difficulty of the process and maintaining a site purely made to accomodate a certain keyword in AdSense. Obviously when I talk about keyword marketing I am not talking about MFA (Made For Adsense) sites which would probably get banned for Google. Those are the kind of sites that you see plastered with AdSense ads everywhere with little to no content!

There are many different ways to go about creating a website to generate keyword ads that will bring in the big bucks. The best thing to do would be to research a recent keyword trend and try to take advantage of it while it lasts. Remember that a keyword may pay $8.00 today but a month or two down the line it may just pay $0.20! The market is always fluxuating and unless you can control the economy and demand of certain products or services then you can control how much your ad clicks cost.

I came across a great keyword research tool that was suggested on an internet marketing forum. Check out http://www.spyfu.com for information on keyword trends, and even competitor information!

2.Niche Marketing.
The idea with Niche Marketing is very similar to keyword marketing. Instead of targeting a specific keyword you will be targeting a specific niche! Niche Marketers are the webmasters you find online with over 100 websites with auto-generated content. While this isn’t always the case, this happens often and is how a lot of people have made money online in the past.

The theory is simple. You create many sites targeting different niches to profit off of Adsense instead of having Adsense on just one site. It is a lot easier to create 100 websites making $1/day than to make 1 website making $100/day. This is if you know what you are doing of course! Check this article I have written if you want to learn more about this concept: My Multiplication Rule!

You can also Build a Niche Store (BANS) with ebay. This is a great way to create a simple website store that has ebay products as a marketplace and you can collect commissions on these products. This is probably the easiest way to make some quick cash doing niche marketing. This is a product/service provided by ebay that gives you the opportunity to easily create an online store without ever having to actually sell a product! All you do is select from ebay’s products and collect commissions! Check it out over here.

3.Ad Placement.
If you are new to Google AdSense then you would probably know that the way you place your ads is extremely important. The placement of your ads can affect your page’s CTR (Click-Through-Rate) in a positive or negative way. The best thing you can do is make sure that you ads are visible and above the fold. You don’t know how many times I have reviewed a website’s ad placement on a forum and I had trouble finding their ads.

Another thing that many AdSense users are unaware of is that Google clearly tells you on their website what ads (skyscraper, leaderboard, etc) will have a higher click rate and where you should place them. A good tip would be to make the border the same color as the background in order to make it more fluid with the surrounding page. Remember that there are only a certain number of ads allowed to be displayed on each individual page, so make sure not to break the Terms of Service.

4.Basic Things to Remember.
The way that Google AdSense works is simple and everyone knows it. The problem for most people who use AdSense is that their readers/surfers become ad blind over time. This is especially true if your website is in the internet marketing or web development niche, because everyone knows exactly how the ads work! If you want to learn more about AdSense you can read this earlier post of the ‘ONE YEAR MILLIONAIRE‘.

Private Advertisements
If you know what you are doing and how you want to do it then this is for you. If you are good at negotiating and selling then this is for you. Private Ads are usually either banner or text ads that are bought privately on a website. An example of this would be if a link building outsourcing company asked me if they could buy a banner at the top of my page.

The great thing about this is that you can make a lot of money with a single page. I know of a couple sites that make thousands of dollars per month from private ads alone! This is become more and more common in the internet marketing niche.

A small 125X125 banner on a PR4 blog can go for $10-$100/month. I have seen a lot of people sell their ads dirt cheap and have also seen them sold at prices that would give some people a heart attack!

If you want to look into Private Advertisement there are now a lot of third party companies that are trying to connect advertisers with publishers. They aren’t too hard to find and offer a great service!

Affiliate Marketing
When it comes to making money online, nothing beats Affiliate Marketing. There is nothign a normal webmaster can do online that will make more money with higher potential than Affiliate Marketing.

For those who don’t know ‘Affiliate Marketing‘ is a term used for marketing other people/company’s products and collecting commissions. If you don’t know much about affiliate marketing you can check out issue 14 : Everything you need to know about Affiliate Marketing.

I don’t really want to repeat too much of what I’ve written before so I will just try and summarize it and add a few important key points.

With Affiliate Marketing the basic idea is that you have to be able to sell! You will never technically need to spend a dime doing affiliate marketing because you necessarily need a website. Most affiliate pages will have a landing page with your affiliate ID so they can track your sales! All you really need to be able to do is turn a visitor into a buyer. This is no easy task, but some people just happen to have a gift for it. In the next issue I will be writing about some specific techniques that you can use to guarantee affiliate sales!

One of the reason why a lot of affiliate sales will get shot down is because of the alarm that goes off in someone’s head when they notice an ‘Affiliate URL‘! Most surfers who have been using the internet for a while will be able to tell when they see one, and most internet marketers will be able to know when they see one that is cloaked! Sometimes you can’t please everybody so I will re-direct you to a post I wrote about Cloaking Affiliate Links so that you can mask your affiliate intentions from surfers.

If you happen to run a blog of your own then you should check out this issue on ‘Affiliate Blogging‘.

Freelancing
Making money on the internet can be easy if you have a talent in a specific area. If you are a content writer, seo specialist, web developper, graphic designer, etc. then you can make a lot of money on the internet through freelancing.

There is always a high demand for these services! If you want to make some easy money by writing short 400 word articles then you can easily generate a good income from that alone! If you are a writer interested in making money online then you can surely find work.

If you don’t know where to look to find freelancing jobs then you should check out a lot of the internet marketing/wed development forums. There is also a site called eLance that provides freelancers with the opportunity to find work from employers!

Paid Surveys/Paid to Click
This is probably one of the lowest paying things you can do on the internet. Getting paid to click on links at a rate of 1 cent is probably not the best way to make money! Using the ideas we have gathered up as marketers we know now that when you do things online then it is all about referrals! If you are going to be participating on Paid-to-Click sites then you need to have at least 50 referrals under you doing the same! A lot of the programs out there offer to get referrals for you… but all you have to do is pay a fee to buy them.

If you are in to this kind of money making venture then I guess you should go for it, but I will warn you that you should be able to build a down line of referrals before you can make a decent amount of money. If you want to know more about Paid Surveys, then feel free to check out issue 4 : Make Money Completing Surveys!

So this is just a basic guideline for you to follow if you want to make money on the internet. The internet is huge and has vast space for opportunities, this is why you should take those opportunities when they come around!

There is one final thing that I have to say about internet marketing that will help you a lot depending which area you are focusing on. Traffic! You need traffic to your website to be able to convert a decent amount of surfers into profit! If you can generate a lot of traffic to a web site then you are almost guaranteed to make a lot of money online. If you don’t know much about how to increase traffic to your website you can read up about Search Engine Optimization, or you can check out issue 5 : Generating Traffic to Your Website! Finally, you can submit articles to social bookmarking websites like digg and stumbleupon.

In the next issue of the ‘One Year Millionaire‘ I am going to talk about how you can increase your Affiliate Sales!

Welcome back to the ‘ONE YEAR MILLIONAIRE‘. Today I am going to talk about a social networking web site that has recently been a new trend that bloggers, webmasters and internet marketers have been raving about. Of course I am talking about Twitter! The facts are simple… they allow you to post messages that are a maximum of 140 characters in length and you can follow or be-followed by other twitter members. While this may sound like nothing compared to similar social networking websites, it seems to have a flare that a lot of new users are attracted to. You can easily see what all your friends have been doing lately and you can be notified of any marketing projects.

If you had previously believed that Twitter is only a time waster where you can post short messages about what you are currently doing then you have been mis-guided. A lot of people think it is just a social website for people who have nothing better to do, but the fact is that any great marketer can take a simple web site like this and use it to their advantage! It can be used as part of your marketing efforts to increase your company or web site’s exposure.

Here are a few things that you can do on Twitter to help Public Relations and Marketing for your website or company:

- You can promote a special event
- You can generate more traffic to your website
- You can send out a press release
- You can offer your opinion about something in real time
- You can network with others in your niche
- You can build business relationships

Those are just a few of the real simple things you can do which can give you a little extra for a small amount of effort!

If my word isn’t enough to convince you to join a web site that can give you an edge, and take just a couple minutes to join, then you can simply do a search on Google to see what everyone is saying about Twitter or you can just check out the page and see that there are hundreds of internet marketers using it. All the top Internet Marketing Gurus are on Twitter, and they aren’t just using it to tell you that the weather was nice in their area!

If that still isn’t enough then you should know that there are many million dollar corporations that are currently using Twitter as another part of their online marketing strategy. These companies include big names like Amazon, MTV, Dell, CNN and Delta Airlines!

If you are going to be serious about online marketing then you need to keep up with the trends. If you do join twitter, feel free to follow my Twitter profile and I will be glad to follow yours as well. Twitter is the way to go!

In the next issue of the ‘ONE YEAR MILLIONAIRE‘ I am going to review a lot of the ideas brought up on the blog about making money online and provide examples.

After building some familiarity with blogging you will come across many terms that you may have never heard before. In fact, since I’ve started doing Internet Marketing a little over one year ago I learned a multitude of new terms, expressions and phrases that are known only to those who are passionately involved with online marketing and those who would like to be! As a seasoned blogger and webmaster I obviously know exactly what Technorati is and know a lot about it; however, I am sure that over 50% of the world have never heard the word before.

If you are unfamiliar with Technorati then you should go and read Issue 59 : Technorati before reading on. Today I am going to talk specifically about ‘Technorati Tags‘ and what they can do for your blog!

The first thing that you need to know is that a Technorati Tag is based on the same concept as most other tags that are used on the internet. It is a way of associating keywords with an item/page and making it a lot easier to organize. For example, if I had a web page about shoes I would have tags like “shoes, shoe laces, boots, running shoes, formal shoes, etc” It is also a way to easily notify search engines about the content of any given page.

Why should you use Technorati Tags?

The most simple reason that I could give you is that it could increase your traffic! The idea is that there are millions of people using Technorati.com’s web site every single day and a lot of these people are doing searches! If they make a search for a word that you have tagged then your blog post will come up within the search results! It is just another great way for someone to find the content of your page!

If I use tags like ‘Millionaire, Make a Million Dollars‘ in my posts then people who make searches for Millionaire will find my page in the search results. This is a great way to increase traffic and also a great way to stay organized with what you have written!

Many people may not already know this; but if you use Wordpress then the category that you post your post under will be taken and assigned as a tag for Technorati! That means that you may already be using it your advantage, but you might not be making the best out of it. The best thing to do is to use between 2-10 Technorati Tags per post so that you can get those extra hits, but you don’t want to use tags that have nothing to do with the topic because it will be annoying for surfers who do use the search.

Creating a Technorati Tag is simple… All you have to do is know one line of HTML code! Here is it:

< a xhref="http://technorati.com/tag/millionaire" rel="tag">Millionaire

The code above would be used to create a Tag for the word “Millionaire”. If you would like to create a tag phrase with more than one word, you would put a “+” between each word like this:

< a xhref="http://technorati.com/tag/one+year+millionaire" rel="tag">One Year Millionaire

So as you can see it is really simple and doesn’t require much effort. You can also write multiple tags by separating each piece of code with a comma (,). This short process can be done in seconds after you post new content and can help your blog get noticed on Technorati! The best thing about this is that a lot of the people who search Technorati Tags are webmasters and if they find your page it is more likely that they will link to it!

Easy things like Tagging your content can bring your blog up the ranks without taking too much time, so go ahead and start doing it! In the next issue of the ‘ONE YEAR MILLIONAIRE‘ I am going to take a look at the new social bookmarking phenomenon: Twitter!

You just finished writing some amazing new content for your blog! Now what?!?

While you may think that readers will just come to your website and find your content on their own, it takes a good amount of internet marketing experience to be able to rank high in the search engines with no help at all. The best way to keep your blog growing is to steadily build up traffic, rss subscribers and build backlinks! Until you have established yourself as an authority on the subject, surfers won’t just float over willingly to your website if they don’t know that it is out there!

A great way to start getting your blog out there to be noticed is by pinging different blogging services after you complete a new post! This can be as easy as clicking your mouse on a button or link that is neatly labeled “Ping!”

When you send out a ping it is like a way of telling blog search engines that you have just recently updated and that your blog should be crawled. The search engine will then send out a ‘crawler’ to your blog and find anything new and it will be posted on their own website. This is an extremely simple way to build your blog’s traffic. There are a lot of ways to build traffic for a blog but if you know anything about internet marketing; sometimes you just have to combine them all for the best results!

Remember that while you may come across offers that require you to pay to use a pinging service, the process can be done for free.. so don’t fall into those traps! We are quite aware that there is a lot of scams and cheaters on the internet and the best way to be successful is to avoid them!

One of the better known blog bookmarking websites is Technorati.com and I recently wrote a post about why you should use Technorati.com to rank your blog! If you are looking for an easy way to ping multiple websites at the same time every time you finish posting a new article on your page you can visit http://www.pingoat.com or http://www.pingomatic.com.

Ping these websites after each post and you will notice an increase in blog traffic! Don’t let yourself think that just because it is such a small action that it doesn’t affect your blog’s performance!

In the next issue of the ‘ONE YEAR MILLIONAIRE‘ I am going to talk about Technorati Tags and why you should use them in your blog posts!

I remember looking back a couple of years ago when surfers didn’t look so carefully at a web site’s URL before clicking a link to it. All of today’s browsers will show you the exact URL of a website on the bottom left corner of the window when you hover over a link. Many webmasters are using affiliate marketing to earn extra revenue to either make some money online or even just to cover their web site’s expenses. The problem is that anyone who has been using the internet for more than a couple days will be able to tell the difference between an affiliate URL and a normal one and nobody likes to buy a product if they know that the webmaster who sent you there will be making money from it!

The reason that people avoid clicking these links is because if they think you are an affiliate pushing a product they know that you are going to try to make it look good no matter what! This means that even if it provides useless information, outdated ideas or re-hashed material that you will still be vouching for it! I don’t know about you but I would think twice (or even three times) before I purchase something that I found through an affiliate link. This brings us to the topic at hand, cloaking your affiliate links!

Link Cloaking is basically the process of disguising your links so that surfers don’t necessarily know what they are being linked to. This is usually used for the purpose of hiding the fact that a link on your site is actually an affiliate link that you are making money from! The benefits of hiding it are listed below.

The simplest reason to cloak your links is to make your link much more appealing to potential clickers! If they don’t have fear of an affiliate marketer trying to scam them then the chances that they buy a product or even just click the link become greater! Surfers could just Bypass your Affiliate Link and go directly to the site that is selling the product and you will lose out on the commission! The second reason you will want to cloak your links is to make sure that the search engines do not penalize you for passing on PR to those websites. The reason that you signed up and registered to become an affiliate was to promote their products and make some cash, it wasn’t so that you could give them free backlinks to boost their Page Rank! The final reason that I think it is best to cloak your links is because it prevents hackers from hi-jacking your links and stealing your commissions!

Since I know a lot of people out there may not know everything there is about the internet and how to make changes to htaccess that is generally for advanced webmasters I will just explain the simplest way to cloak a URL: by using a cloaking service!

If you want to increase your chances of collecting bigger affiliate commissions then think about using a cloaking service. They are offered for free at compacturl.com and tinyurl.com! I know there are probably a bunch of others, but these two seem to be very popular and easy to use.

You can also cloak links manually by using a technique which displays a full page frame in your html page. The process is pretty simple but you need to know a little bit of basic html to do it. All you have to do is create a new .html or .php page and write a small amount of code in the of the page. It is easy to do and isn’t messy. For an HTML page use this:

< html>
< head>
< meta HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”0; URL=http://affiliatelink.com/affiliatelink”>
< /meta>< /head>
< /html>

or if you are using PHP you can paste use this:

$url =”http://affiliatelink.com/affiliatelink”;
header(”Location: $url”);
exit();
?>

So as you can see, it isn’t too difficult to cloak your affiliate URLs so that you can make the most out of them! Try it out and try to monitor the resulting change from before and after you made the change! I am sure that your conversions will be much higher thanks to a few lines of code!

In the next issue of the ‘ONE YEAR MILLIONAIRE‘ I am going to take a look at an easy way to gain more exposure for your blog: Pinging!

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