..........................continued from posts of Saturday December 4, 2010 and Sunday December 12, 2010.
(d) Work at Home programs where you have a website: in this case you usually provide a product or service from a personalised website. Such product or service is something in which you have an expertise and could be anything from gardening to cooking to home improvement to music to games, etc.
A website is your address on the internet like we have for google.com, yahoo.com, etc. You will need a registrar to register a domain name of your choice that is available for use (e.g. google.com) at an annual fee and you will also need a web host to hold your web pages that will contain information on your product or service. The web pages are hosted at a monthly fee depending on the web hosting company.
Some companies handle both services for you but the choice of hosting company is usually determined by the kind of service they provide, e.g. bandwidth available to host your pages particularly when a lot of customers come visiting at the same time.
Others issues to consider include the type of software and other simple scripts available to the user. Some provide website templates and others provide the What You See Is What You Get or WYSIWYG type website builders to help you build your web pages easily if you have little or no experience.
Some programs help you to build your website FREE once you join them while in other cases, you will have to build it yourself or get a professional to do it at a cost depending on what you want on the site and the number of pages.
You will also need to have a payment processor with which to receive payment for your products or services. There are a number of such processors and the one to choose will depend on the payment type(s) you wish to receive and whether the processor’s customer service is responsive to your needs when they arise.
As the site owner you will be responsible for advertising the site to get customers. The mode of advertising is similar for affiliate programs and this is where most people are unable to make headway to online success because they are unaware of the methods and manner of advertising available to get customers.
I want you to note here that you must have to make the advertising as targeted as possible to the customer you have in mind if you are to earn income from this method or from affiliate programs. For instance, you cannot be marketing information on sale of dog food to customers who are interested in software.
You cannot also be marketing information on sale of real estate to a group of people whose main interest is music equipment. The more targeted your advertising, the greater the chance of reaching the right audience to make a sale.
Some advertising methods are free while some require an investment to get results. Examples are:
i. Website submission to directories: e.g. google, yahoo, bing, lycos, exact
seek, entire web, alexa, etc. Some of these submissions to search engines are
free to do while some require some payment for inclusion in their directories.
While this could be a free source of good traffic to your site, you are advised not to spam the free submission directories. By spam, I mean submitting your site several times within a short period.
If you engage in this, your website would be blacklisted from search engines and you lose the opportunity for free traffic to your site to market your product or service.
The ideal resubmission period is usually monthly or every 30 days.
ii. Article writing for advertising: in this method, you usually write content of value to readers and submit articles to article directories.
As the article author, there is usually a resource box at the end of the article where you are allowed a link back to your website for visitors who read your article to click to see what is on offer.
Please note however that it is important that you read the rules of article submission for each directory you submit to so you are not accused of spamming. Spamming here would mean deliberately and continuously advertising your site or affiliate link directly in the article body without giving any useful information to readers.
It would also mean submitting the same article more than once and could get you banned from the site. To get your readers to be interested in clicking your link in the resource box, ensure to give them valuable information that does sound overly advertising.
The resource box could contain information on free software, e-book or some other gift of value that is linked to your site.
I would also advise against plagiarism, and by this I mean going to other article directories to take someone else’s article and posting on another site with you as the author in the resource box. This will certainly get you banned once it is discovered. You do not have to take advantage of people to succeed online.
iii. Classified advertising: you can advertise your website or affiliate links on classified sites. Some are free while others require a little investment. What is important again is to be targeted in your advertising to ensure the right people get to see your site or affiliate link.
iv. Reciprocal linking: this method would work if you are a website owner. You can exchange links with sites of similar content (e.g. work at home programs) for higher search engine ranking and increased visibility for your site. By this I mean you place a link to another site with similar content on your webpage while the other site owner also places a link to your site on their website. Usually, a links page is created to keep a record of all outbound links placed on your site.
You are advised to focus on exchanging links with sites with similar content as yours since search engines would not rank your site higher for content of any kind.
v. Forum advertising: this has to be a forum with members looking for the kind of information you want to advertise. Usually, the advert that has a link to your site is placed in the signature and not in the main body of your posts in the forum, which would be considered as spamming.
you have to read the forum rules before posting and ensure what you post is of value to readers because when they begin to see you as an expert from your posts, that would make them look at your signature and then click on your link to your affiliate program or website.
So, giving valuable information is the keyword here to succeed in this type of advertising. Some forum also offer paid advertising services to their members.
vi. Social media advertising: this is very popular nowadays because advertising on some of the social sites is effective because the advert is targeted at the right audience by various demographics (country, age, sex, interests, etc). Some of the advertising methods are free while some require an investment but it is a good advertising source for online marketers.
However, ensure to read the terms of the site owners before placing your adverts.
vii. Advertising through list building: in this method, what you do is offer a FREE and valuable resource (e-book, software, report) to users in exchange to sign up for your newsletter.
Thereafter, you then begin to send them valuable information on tools and resources to help them succeed online. At the end of your newsletter, you provide them a chance to sign up for your offer on your site or affiliate program.
This method requires a bit of automation and by this, I mean having an autoresponder e-mail software with which you prepare your messages of value in advance to send to subscribers to your newsletter on days you have scheduled.
While this method works for new comers to the internet who sign up for your newsletter, it may not work for experienced marketers who will need a lot more convincing to do business with you.
You will usually need to provide a way for subscribers to opt out of your newsletter at the bottom of each mail so that you look professional always. There should also be a link from your autoresponder to your personal e-mail so you can respond promptly to those who want to ask questions on your offer or information.
There are many other interesting ways people use online to advertise and market their affiliate programs and websites.
These are some of the ways people earn very good income nowadays on the internet and any one can do it. Fortunately, there are programs on the internet that have all these powerful ways of making money online all in one program.
Now let me recap. As I said at the beginning of this article and if you have taken time to follow and understand all I have said here, you will see that you will succeed online if you pay attention to the under listed:
(1) You must have the right mental attitude required for success. This is very important or else you will give up at the slightest challenge.
(2) You will have to invest some money either at the beginning or at some point to grow your business. Again, never let anyone tell you anything else because that would be incorrect.
(3) You must have valuable information because that is what most of the people who do not succeed online are in need of. With valuable information, you will definitely succeed online and see how easy it is to earn income there.
(4) You will definitely need a system in place most of the time to succeed. As writer and poet Oscar Wilde put it, “Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you will get the result”.
..........................CONCLUDED.
© copyright Gabriel Ama
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