How To Make Money From Home

Finding profitable niches can be difficult.  Finding one that isn’t extremely saturated can be intimidating when you’re just starting out as an Internet marketer.  The key to finding niches that are both profitable and have little competition is drilling down a top-level niche to find profitable sub-niches with fewer competitors. 

For example, let’s say you’re interested in creating a site that has to do with beauty.  You can drill the beauty category down into several different sub-categories.  You could choose hair care, skin care, fitness, organic beauty, cosmetics, or any number of niches related to beauty. 

But these categories are still too broad to be profitable with small numbers of visitors.  You need to drill down further.  Let’s say you decide to tackle the skin care demographic.  Sub-categories of skin care might include eczema, acne, blackheads, wrinkles, age spots, psoriasis, and dry skin. 

Now you have a list of smaller niches that you can begin to narrow down.  Acne might still be too broad. You can drill down even more by targeting teenage acne, infant acne, and adult acne.

While you want to find niches that are narrow enough for you to dominate, you don’t want to choose niches that have too little traffic available.  Don’t be afraid to spy on your competitors.

Go to your favorite search engine, like Google, and search for things like “how to get rid of acne.”  This is obviously a niche desperately seeking a solution.  If you drill down too much, like targeting “blackheads,” you might find it’s an annoyance, but maybe not something people are desperate enough to spend money solving.

You should verify that your idea gets a decent level of search volume by using a keyword tool like WordTracker or Google Keyword External.  When you look for the niche on Google, see if there are plenty of AdWords ads on the right sidebar of the screen.

If so, this means people are making money in this niche.  Any time you can come up with an original slant on an idea that’s already churning profits online, you’re poised for instant success.

If you rally want to get into the eBay niche, don’t go after a broad, eBay for beginners niche. Target something unique such as “eBay Businesses for Baby Boomers.” Pick a specific target audience and then cater to their needs instead of approaching the mass public with a broad idea.

The word “minisite” can refer to a number of different things.  Some people call small niche article sites minisites, but that isn’t the general use of the word.  In Internet marketing, the word “minisite” is generally used to refer to very small websites that are set up to sell a product – usually an eBook or other digital download.  

Most minisites are only 1-5 pages.  Some of them are only a single sales pitch page, plus perhaps a thank you page for after the customer orders.  Others have a contact page, a terms of service page, a frequently asked questions page, or other general pages. 

For the purpose of this tutorial, we’ll just work on creating a single page minisite, and we’ll cover only the design – not the sales copy.  Most minisites have several key parts.  They usually have a header and footer, although some have only a header, or may have neither. 

They also have a sales letter of some sort, which is used to sell the product.  Finally, they have an order button that is clicked when a customer wants to purchase the product.  Some minisites also have an eCover, which is a computer-generated image that mimics what the product might look like if it was a physical product. 

For example, if the product is an eBook, the eCover might look like a hardcover or paperback book cover (sometimes a spiral notebook, too).  If the product is a membership site, the eCover might be a membership card.  Software products usually have a 3D software box as their eCover.

The first step in creating a minisite should be creating your eCover, if you intend to use one.  Most people create their eCovers with Photoshop, because most eCover action scripts only work with Photoshop.  If you don’t have Photoshop, you may need to create it from scratch, or have it made for you by a professional graphic designer.

After you have your cover design, you’ll need to create a header.  Although some marketers don’t use headers, most do.  A well-designed header can draw attention to your headline, and it can make your site look more professional. 

The header should contain your product’s name and a tag line – like a one-sentence blurb that tells what your site’s about.  It should also contain a photo that’s related to your niche, and it might also contain a small version of your ecover – all tied into a theme for your demographic. 

Let’s say you’re creating a minisite to sell your dog-training eBook.  Your header would potentially contain a picture of a woman pointing at a dog, and the dog sitting down.  Then the text on the header might say something like the following: Dog Training 101: The Ultimate Guide to Training Your Puppy or Adult Dog!

Don’t make your header too large.  If the header is so large visitors can’t see the headline without scrolling, it’s too big!  It should attract attention to the headline, not hide it.  Headers are generally between 700 and 800 pixels wide and 100-200 pixels in height. 

The footer is usually the same width, but about half the height of the header.  It may only contain the product name or logo, but may also contain an image or copyright notice. Finally, you need an order button that draws a lot of attention.  Your button might contain your eCover, plus a brightly colored button and a call-to-action, such as “Click Here for Instant Access!”

If you have the money to invest, you might consider ordering a minisite package from a professional designer. For about $300, you’ll get the header, footer, eCovers, and sometimes extra banners that you can use for off-site promotions.

Your keyword choices are critical to your success in nearly any online business model.  Whether you’re pursuing PPC, blogging, VRE and AdSense, or any number of Internet marketing opportunities, the keywords you choose can make or break your success. 

Keywords are important for several reasons.  First of all, there’s traffic.  If you choose the wrong keywords to target, you’re probably not going to get nearly as much traffic as you’d like.  Whether you’re using PPC or search engines to get your traffic, your keywords are going to affect your ranking and link performance.

Another reason why keywords are so vital is the fact that you need targeted traffic.  Ten thousand visitors coming to your domain via the keyword “books” is probably going to be worthless compared to 500 visitors who come via the keyword phrase, “Harry Potter books,” if that’s what you’re selling.

Someone who is searching for “books” is probably just browsing.  They may not even be interested in buying anything – they could be interested in selling books, book bans, book publishers, and more. 

But someone who is searching for “Harry Potter books” is probably ready to buy something right then and there.  So it’s not enough to just get a lot of traffic – you need a lot of traffic that’s willing to take the action you want them to take. 

Whether you’re looking to sell eBooks, promote affiliate products, get leads for a CPA offer, or just get sign-ups to your list, you want targeted visitors who are likely to be buyers now or in the future.

Once you’ve chosen a niche you’d like to pursue, you need to research the keywords you’ll use.  If you’re writing articles, you’ll need to choose keywords to use in the titles and text.  If you’re building niche websites, you’ll need to use keywords in the domain name.  If you’re buying PPC traffic, the keywords you choose will likely be one of the biggest factors determining whether or not your campaign is profitable.

WordTracker is a very good tool for researching keywords.  If you can’t afford to get a paid membership there (even for a day), they have a very good free keyword tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com. 

Google has their own keyword tool, but they don’t show you numbers.  They only give you a general idea of the searches a keyword gets, as indicated by a colored bar: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.

First you’ll want to enter a base keyword for your niche.  Let’s say you’re targeting the golf niche.  You might enter “golf” into the keyword tool of your choice.  Then the keyword tool will show you a number of related keywords.

You might come up with “golf clubs,” “golf tips,” “golf swing,” “golf bags,” “golf carts,” and “golf courses.”  This is a short list of more broad terms. But you’ll want to generate a warehouse of keywords that you can use over the coming months and years, so grab them all!

While there are many ways to build a business online, building your own eBook empire is one method that creates long-term residual income that’s truly an automated “set and forget” system. Of course eBooks provide many perks up front. 

You don’t have to stock any inventory. You can keep overhead costs low (no publisher and agent cuts like there are with print books).  You have an endless supply that can be purchased at any time of the day or year.

 But they also offer many benefits that aren’t so obvious.  While a tangible book in Barnes and Noble might sell for $14.95, an eBook on the same subject could sell at anywhere from $49-99 or more online as a digital download.

You don’t have to be a professional writer to launch your own eBook empire.  The writing is very different for an online audience – more like you do every day via email than what you learned in a college-level English class.

Tiffany Dow, author of Building an eBook Empire, used to ghostwrite for dozens of top Internet marketers on a freelance site.  Then she discovered how profitable her eBooks were and decided to learn the entire process of launching those eBooks herself. 

Needless to say, she quit ghostwriting and now goes head to head with the very people who used to pay her $1,000 to write a 50-page eBook and make that money back in a period of two days. You can find quality freelancers to create your products for you at a fraction of the price, and turn around and launch it with your name on it – and it’s not only legal – it’s standard protocol in this industry!

So what does it means to launch an empire of eBooks?  You start with one, and then branch out – branding yourself as the go-to person for that demographic’s needs. You don’t write one definitive guide to wedding planning.

You write one about picking the perfect wedding gown, another on wedding flowers, one on honeymoons, and so on. Each smaller, niche idea that you drill down into gives you more selling opportunities.

There’s a step-by-step process for developing an eBook – which begins with finding your niche and ends with the launch of your powerhouse affiliate program.  You want to have an army of virtual salespeople out there pulling in profits for you while you continue adding another building block to your empire with a follow-up product idea.

You can use many free and low-cost tools to launch your first and subsequent eBooks online. It isn’t a business opportunity that requires a large investment of money, but you do need to commit some time to ensure it’s properly launched in a way that bolsters your reputation in the community.

Social bookmarking is extremely popular with marketers in every niche.  Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, and Technorati allow users to add links to sites they like and other visitors can grab those links and add it to their own lists, making your URLs go viral. 

Social bookmarking sites can be great for getting traffic to your own domains.  You can bookmark your sites yourself and then hope others will share the links and in some cases vote your entries up, like Digg users will do. 

If enough people vote for a particular story, it might make it to the front page of that bookmarking site.  A front-page listing can mean thousands of visitors a day.  But because of the very nature of social bookmarking sites, if you want to get a lot of traffic from the bookmarking sites themselves, then you have to make sure that the links you submit are newsworthy – not just your sales pitch page. 

Use the news to work your site into the bookmarking bevy of links. For instance – let’s say you’re in the gardening niche and you have a site on growing tulips. A simple how-to site may not get shared a lot.

But let’s say you read an article about a the discovery by a group of scientists that says people who grow tulips in their yards are 60% less likely to develop lung cancer, then you’d have a pretty decent shot at having a lot of users in both the gardening and health demographic share your links with others. 

If your sites tend to be less newsworthy and more general, then you shouldn’t worry about how many people vote for a story or share your links.  Just concentrate on using the social bookmarking sites to gain backlinks to your sites.

Concentrate on bookmarking the index page of each of your sites first.  Be careful not to bookmark too many of your own sites at first, since that can appear spammy – remember to bookmark other interesting sites you see that you don’t necessarily own yourself. 

The key to social bookmarking is to become part of the community who shares interesting information. Create a good profile that tells a little about you. Add a picture, and if the site offers it, start building a “friends” list.

Be careful about how many links you add per day.  You shouldn’t go crazy and add 100 links the day you sign up to a social bookmarking site.  Keep it to ten or less per day and you should be fine. 

After you’ve been a user for several weeks, you might be able to get away with up to 50 per day.  Just make sure to keep bookmarking stories on other websites.  Vote for a few of the stories that made it onto the first page.  Bookmark a story at FoxNews.com every once in a while, or a funny YouTube video.  This helps make your profile look a lot more legitimate in the eyes of the community.

Most visitors pass through one of two types of links.  Text links are when you string together a word, phrase or sentence that’s hyperlinked to another domain.  Image ads are things like banners, button, and pictures – graphical images that are hyperlinked with a URL. 

Both types of links have their benefits and drawbacks.  Which type you use will be based on your site and your traffic – and you should ideally test both types to see which performs best with your particular demographic.  

In general, text ads tend to pull a lot more clicks than image ads, because people have become “banner blind.”  That means people have learned to ignore banners, because they know they’re ads. 

Text ads are a part of every website, so they’re harder to ignore.  This is one reason why AdSense is so successful.  Of course, some sites could benefit from a few image ads.  If your site is primarily text, you might be able to make it look more appealing through the use of a few graphical banners. 

Choose attractive banners with a clear call-to-action, such as banners that clearly state, “Click here for ____!”  New Internet users may not realize they can click graphics, so it’s important for banners to have this kind of call-to-action. 

Just be careful not to overdo the ads on your site.  Two or three graphics per page is plenty.  If you put more than this, you risk your site looking like a banner farm, and visitors may leave before they even have time to read any of your content.

Text links are generally more effective than banners.  They can be blended in with your content and can look more like recommendations than ads.  For some reason, people prefer to buy through recommendations rather than blatant ads, so text links can help you get a higher click-through ratio than you might get with banner ads.

Coding a text link is very simple.  To create a text link on your site, you need to use the “a href” code.  A simple text link code might look something like this:

<a href=”http://www.domainname.com”>Here’s where the text you want hyperlinked will go.</a>

Coding a banner link is only slightly more complex.  You still use the “a href” code, but you also have to use the “img src” code along with it.  It should look something like this:

<a href=“http://www.domainname.com”><img src=http://www.yourdomain.com/images/banner1.jpg></a>

So the first URL in that piece of code is the URL where you want your traffic to go. The second one is the URL where the image is being hosted on your server. This will make the image show up and when the user hovers his or her mouse over it, they’ll see that it’s clickable.

Make sure you test your links to be sure they’re going to the right place.  If you accidentally link to the wrong place, you could end up losing a lot of money in commissions or sales, so it’s very important to make sure your links are in working order.

Link cloaking is a very important part of affiliate marketing.  In a nutshell, link cloaking is a way to protect your affiliate commissions from being stolen.  It’s not totally foolproof.  Smart individuals who are well-educated about the matter can still figure out how to keep you from getting your commission.  

Most people won’t go that far, so cloaking your links will prevent most commission loss. How do people steal affiliate commissions?  Have you ever hovered over a link and noticed that the link was an obvious affiliate link? 

 Some people type in the parent domain instead of clicking the link as a way of making sure the owner of the site gets paid 100% for the sale.  Some people falsely believe that if they buy from an affiliate link, they’ll have to pay more for a commission mark-up.

Some people actually do it for a different reason.  If you’re promoting a ClickBank product, especially to other marketers, many of them know they can insert their own ClickBank ID and get what’s usually a 50% or more discount on the product. 

This is a different type of affiliate commission theft, because the person doing it gets the affiliate commission themselves, rather than just making sure you don’t get it.  Most people don’t do that, of course. 

Most people are pretty honest, and don’t mind giving you a little affiliate commission in exchange for recommending a good product to them.  But it’s enough of a concern that you should take steps to prevent it.

You can easily set up your own link cloaking system.  What you would do is set up a directory on one of your domains.  Most marketers use the domain of their own name, as in bobsmith.com.  They typically have a subdirectory called /recommends/. 

Then in that directory, they create a new subdirectory for each product.  It would look something like this: http://www.bobsmith.com/recommends/awesomeproductname. In that directory, they place a very simple PHP redirect called index.php. 

Whenever they send someone to the above link, the script will redirect to your affiliate link.  All you have to do is create a file in Notepad or your favorite HTML editor and name is index.php.  Then paste the following information into the file and upload it to your directory:

< ?php
header(“location:http://affiliates.programhere.com/5555″);
?>

There are a number of link cloaking scripts available.  Most of them are relatively easy to install and use.  There’s a big benefit to using a script rather than doing it yourself.  Using your simple redirect, there isn’t an easy way to check how much traffic you’ve sent to your link. 

Most link cloaking scripts allow you to add new links very easily within an administrative area, and then each link is tracked so that you can see how much traffic is going through the link.  If you use your own file, the only way to tell how much traffic you’ve sent is through your affiliate stats, which may be inaccurate, or through your web server’s stats, which may be clunky to use or hard to understand.

Another way you can do it is to use a link cloaking tool, such as Go Try This.  This lets you enter the raw affiliate link and name your link whatever you want as an extension of your domain. Then you can log in and check stats to see how the top 10 links are performing using a diagram and bar graph.

Making affiliate links is very easy. First, you want to go to the site and register for a free affiliate (or associate) ID.  On ClickBank, they call it a nickname. On Amazon, it’s an associate ID, and on PayDotCom, it’s your affiliate member username.

On ClickBank.com, you’ll go to the marketplace, which is the link at the top of the page. Enter your keyword(s) and find the product you wish to promote. You can view pitch page to review the sales letter, but click Create Hoplink when you’re ready to get your link.

Enter your ClickBank nickname and click, “Create.”  You’ll see two options, as shown below:

http://Nickname.Publisher.hop.clickbank.net/

and

<a href=”http://Nickname.Publisher.hop.clickbank.net/” target=”_top”>Click Here!</a> 

The first one is your direct link, and instead of nickname and publisher, you’ll see your personal nickname and the publisher’s ID.  The second one is ready for insertion into a web page. This makes the words, Click Here hyperlinked to the site via your own personal affiliate link. 

On PayDotCom, you’ll log into your affiliate account and click on Promote Products at the top of the screen.  Next you’ll click on the option that says, “Create a new campaign…from marketplace.”

Search the marketplace to find a product you wish to promote. When you find a product you’d like to promote as an affiliate, click the Promote link.  Here, you’ll see your raw affiliate link that you can use – as well as any other tools the product owner provides, such as banner ads, email announcements, etc.

In Amazon, you’ll log into your associate membership and then on the left sidebar, click Build Links. You can choose which types of links you wish to build, such as a text link.

Here, you’ll enter the full URL of the product or search results page you want to promote and enter the words you want to be hyperlinked. You’ll be able to quickly cut and paste the HTML code into your website or blog.

Each affiliate program has a similar system in place to help you create viable links. Basically, for each one, you’ll log in, enter your username, and generate a link to copy and use online.  It’s easy, but if you get stuck somewhere, email the product owner and ask for assistance.

Whether you’re an affiliate marketer or a product owner, you get to choose how much you get paid to promote something.  As a product owner, obviously you set the price. As an affiliate, you seek out products that have a good commission.

Digital downloads usually have a much better payout than tangible goods.  Of course, if you’re promoting a high-ticket tangible item, you might make more – but it could be harder to sell to the general public, too.

A digital download is a text, audio, or video file that buyers can download instantly onto their hard drive and access immediately.  Instead of waiting until tomorrow afternoon to run to Barnes and Noble, they log in at 3 o’clock in the morning when they can’t sleep and download a book on the topic they want.

A tangible book that costs $14.95 in a local bookstore can sell for $49 and up on the Internet as a digital download.  As an affiliate, your commission will probably be higher, too.

If you promote a tangible book on Amazon that costs $14.95, and you get 7% of that, you’re only earning a little over a dollar.  But that $49 digital download – an eBook about the same topic – offers you 50% commission, giving you $24.50 per sale!

It’s not hard to see which one pays better.  As a product owner, you can create eBooks to compete with tangibles. You’ll charge a lot more, but you’ll be able to pay your affiliates a lot for their efforts, too.

If you’re not a writer and prefer a different type of product creation for your digital download, you can choose to create a series of MP3 files – audio tutorials that teach your topic to a paying audience.  The public loves information they can digest on the go using their iPod or other electronic gadget.

You can also use a tool like Camtasia and create video productions as your product creation tool of choice.  Some people prefer to watch a lesson rather than read it.  With both audio and video digital downloads, your price point can go beyond the borders of what text info products can pull in.

Combine all three media elements and you may be poised to market a high-ticket digital download that takes in upwards of $1,500 for a single sale – something affiliate marketers will jump all over.

Tangibles are shunned by many Internet marketers who don’t want to deal with physical goods. It can be a nightmare if you factor in the nuisance of packaging and shipping, stocking of inventory, and suppliers.

There are three ways you can deal in tangibles if you want to focus solely on those or supplement them with your digital download links.  The first is to become a seller of tangible yourself.

This will most likely mean selling on eBay, but sometimes a marketer goes off on their own and launches a website to sell the goods from.  You’ll be plagued with making sure you have enough inventory on hand, and if an order comes through, it will be your job to box it up, take it to the post office, and ship it out.

If the customer doesn’t receive the goods, you should be able to verify proof of delivery.  In some instances, you’ll have to accept returns on the products, and won’t always be able to resell it depending on what the product is.

Another option is to become a seller of tangibles by using a dropshipper.  With a dropship account, you’ll usually have to pay a fee to get set up with your own website – for instance, wedding accessories.

The customer will find your site online and place an order, paying you for the items they purchase. You’ll then turn around and pay the dropship company a portion of those earnings and they’ll ship the inventory to your customer direct.

You don’t have to deal with any of the inventory, but you do have to deal with customer relations.  The customer won’t realize they’ve ordered from a dropshipping arrangement, so even though you’re just a middleman, you’ll be acting as the frontman.

Your third option for selling tangibles is to become an affiliate of tangibles.  Millions of people shop online, and around the holidays, an affiliate can rank in a lot of Christmas cash.

But holidays aren’t the only time when tangible promotions will work.  You can use an Amazon associates account to sell anything on Amazon.com. Likewise, you can get an ID from LinkShare and promote tangible items from flower boutiques, Wal-Mart, and even travel companies (like luggage)!