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!