Affiliate Marketing: Article Marketing, Pay-Per-Click, and Making Money Online

How I Make Money Online: My Internet Marketing Story and Guide

How I got started in online marketing and how you can too. Resources and more forthcoming. Please, if you’re interested at all in internet marketing bookmark this lens and keep coming back. I will try to make this one of the best “FREE” resources online.

Remember this before continuing, some of what I am going to tell you requires NO PURCHASE OR MONEY, so don’t let the programs and offers out there fool you. This can be done for free.

Feel free to re-post any information on this article, as long as you link back to it. That’s all I ask.

Thank you for stopping by, and I honestly hope that this lens has helped you out.

Good luck!

P.S. – One of the biggest reasons that I’ve made this lens is for my friends and acquaintances that wanted to know what I’m doing online and how I’m making money from internet marketing. I’ve spent too much time repeating information to people who offer to help and end up proving to only have a mild curiosity that I’m just basically sick of repeating myself.

A Friend and Affiliate Marketer: My Story

Late November 2009,

I was working for a well-known company for a night. Three-hour night shifts forty-five minutes from home for something like an hour. I came out after gas (I was driving a full-size truck that actually got somewhat decent gas mileage). The warehouse in which I was working just so happened to be very close to a Taco Bell.

It wasn’t pretty.

I was 21. Still living with my mother and had nothing better to do during the winter months than to watch TV or get on the internet. However, I would sometimes stop at a relatives house to watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia on Thursdays.

One night, I stopped in he had a blank sheet of paper in front of him and was typing random sentences into Google and writing down search results. I had not idea what he was doing. He began telling me about how a friend of his (more of an acquaintance of mine) was making pretty serious money online (upwards of ,500.00 a month).

I couldn’t believe it. I immediately thought that he was going to give me this spiel about how it wasn’t a pyramid scheme and it was perfectly legal and so on.

Well, he did. And, I told him, “Man, you do realize you’re getting pulled in hook, line, and sinker to a pyramid scheme, right?”

He explained to me that this wasn’t a pyramid scheme. I was still pretty skeptical. I mean everything he said screamed SCAM and PYRAMID SCHEME. So, I just sat and listened and decided to do my homework later when he wasn’t around.

It took around two weeks of me reading everything I could find online about the type of “business” this was and the program that his friend had recommended. Turns out, it was real (or for everything I read, it seemed to be).

One night, I was bored and just browsing more of the same online, still reading and debating, I decided to check out the program’s website. To sign up it was around .00 and I figured that I had blown my money in far worse ways (scratch-offs, poker games, horse races, fast-food rip-offs, alcohol).

So, I decided to whip out my credit card and let the dice fall as they may. I didn’t have anything to lose and it seemed if his friend was being genuine that I may have everything to gain. And, I did know quite a bit about the guy and he was pretty big into religion, had a steady job with a local business, and worked in a family-owned store. He also hung around a good crowd of guys that I knew better than him, so I wasn’t going in totally blind.

Long story short, almost two years later I’m paying my rent with my “online money” or the money that I make from affiliate programs. Sometimes the money is better and sometimes it’s not, but I’m consistently making my rent every month at the very least.

The program that I bought into (thinking that it was probably nothing but a scam) was WealthyAffiliate.com and I haven’t regretted my decision at all. If you do decide to put down a little money for anything affiliate marketing related, this is where to lay it down. I recommend this to the beginner or intermediate 100%. Also, the biggest resource on the website is the forum.

Yes, that is a sales link. If you sign up through that link I do get paid. I’m not going to lie to you. The way I see it, if you are going to make a living online because of something that I introduced you to or persuaded you to sign up for, then you shouldn’t mind that I’m making a little bit out of it.

P.S. – The price of the full membership of the website has went up, but they’re introducing two separate packages: Gold and Platinum. If you’re a dedicated person and can manage to put thirty minutes or more a day into it, you can make quite a bit of money while you sleep or work at your day job until you can do it full-time.

It takes persistence and determination. Most importantly it takes more than reading, it takes ACTION.

Online Marketing 101: Intro to Internet Marketing

I know this sounds like common sense, but sometimes it’s better to hear it from someone else. If you don’t have a large amount of cash (or any), DO NOT WASTE MONEY on expensive programs. Sometimes you can get a better bang for you buck at the smaller guys programs, or even find the information that you’re looking for free.

That’s a big part of this lens. Getting everyone started for free.

The biggest portion of the money that I’ ve made online has come from free methods rather than those that I’ve spent money on. Personally, I’d much rather spend a month working on free methods than taking a chance on losing ,000.00 trying to learn from the school of hard knocks if something works or not.

And, yes, I have been “schooled” a little.

Most Popular Formats for Online Marketing

PPC (Pay-Per-Click): This is a very lucrative, expensive, and dangerous way of getting the word out about products that you are promoting. Have you ever noticed those little advertisements on the right side of Google when you’re browsing? Those are PPC advertisements. When you click those, you’re costing someone money and making Google money. (If you buy something, you’re making someone very happy.)

Article Marketing and Video Marketing: I lump these two in together because they’re basically the same thing. Two different formats, same purpose. The real difference depends on you and your target audience. Some people prefer to watch a video than read an article, and other put more faith in an article than a video. Also, some people are more convincing when they’re speaking than when their writing, and vice versa.

*In the beginning of this lens I’ll be putting more time into article marketing, because I very highly recommend this route to all the beginners out there.

Keywords Explained: Digging for Gold

Keywords are the gold that we’re digging for in this virtual money mountain that is the internet. Your campaigns will live and die by the worth of the keywords that you are using to promote the programs you choose.

How easy is it to search for them? Easy. You can type in quotation marks (“like this”) when doing a search, this will provide you with results that are constructed exactly as the phrase within the quotes.

How easy is it to find quality keywords that will produce a profit? It’s pretty difficult, although we all hit and miss most of the time. There are certain techniques that you can use to reduce the time wasted on worthless keywords.

Article Marketing

Article Marketing, ideally, is internet marketing that uses free article databases such as “EzineArticles” to promote affiliate programs. You basically will be writing articles filled with your chosen keywords (so that your articles will show up in the search engine results) and posting them on the free article database.

Now, with EzineArticles you will actually have to pay very close attention to their guidelines as they are pretty strict about the content appearing on their website. You’ll want to eliminate most contractions such as “you’ll” (contraction of you and will) and other slang terms from your articles. If the article sounds too “salesy” then their likely to reject the article as well (which your intention as an affiliate marketer should be to help point customers who are looking for a solution to their problem to a product that will help them…not simply give them a sales pitch).

Also, may sites are getting much more strict with people promoting affiliate programs because many are obviously just sales pitches, reaching for a buck, and more or less…SPAM.

You don’t want to be one of these guys. You need to be on the good team. A good affiliate marketer will try to solve a problem for someone and profit from helping them as well. It’s more symbiotic that way and less parasitic.

So, you can’t really just directly link to the affiliate program anymore. You will need to create a landing page. I recommend using Squidoo or another free-hosted website to satisfy this requirement. The article will show up in the search engine results and link to the landing page which is more information and sort of a pre-sale for the product that you’re promoting.

Video Marketing

With Video Marketing you apply everything I just went over with Article Marketing and add the benefit of adding a face to the product that you’re promoting. Adding your face creates more of an impression, it basically humanizes you and opens people up to trusting you slightly more than when they’re simply reading your text on a website.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing consists of the same ideas discussed in Article Marketing, however you have the possibility of building a list, or group of people that will sign up to your mailing list just to hear your ideas on whatever topic that you’re covering.

The best thing about a list is that the people on your list will already have a basic understanding of what you’re offering and are interested in hearing more about whatever that is. They signed up for a reason, didn’t they?

So, now that you’re getting a following you can recommend similar solutions and relevant products that go along with the main one. Just don’t promote off the wall things like shark bait and dinette sets. They must be relevant.

You can promote multiple products to the same people on your list, so instead of making a single sale because they found your website, now you have the potential opportunity to make a series of sales.

*Twittering falls under this catagory, I didn’t think that I needed to go into detail with that one. Tweets show up in search engine results as well as benefit with an email list like following. However, you’re limited on the amount of text per “tweet.”

Pay-Per-Click or PPC Marketing

*I only recommend this after you have a significant amount of cash flow coming in from article marketing than you can stand to potentially lose in failed marketing campaigns. When I say significant, I mean something like around ,000.00 or cash coming in every month for a period of time with about the same sitting in a bank account for “cushion.”

PPC is a form of marketing that I’m not an expert at. I’ve tried my hand at it a couple of times, but each time it’s hardly ever been profitable enough to continue. It’s not something for beginning or intermediate marketers. You need to have a firm grasp of what you’re doing when you begin pay-per-click marketing.

Don’t get me wrong. It can be the most profitable of any form of internet marketing, however it can also be very risky. There are ways to do PPC on the cheap and still make great amounts of cash, but I recommend having quite a bit set aside before you even attempt this.

This revolves around keywords just like the other forms, but you’re paying for each click and those clicks can be costly if don’t know what you’re doing.

Action

Just like anything else in life, if you’re serious about doing it…DO IT. Don’t sit around and read for hours upon end, just jump in and see how you do (…be smart…do the free methods though).

For example, you probably know someone who spends more time reading “How To” books than putting anything into practice. You don’t want to end up like that, because before you know it…that’s all you’re doing…reading.

Relevancy

Relevant content. Google loves it. It helps you by pulling you up in the search results and it makes the people visiting your website very happy when they find that what they searched for actually brought them results on the topic/item that they’re looking for.

This is kind of your online first-impression.

Backlinking

Using sites like Delicious, Digg, Reddit, and other social bookmarking sites you can create backlinks to your website fast. This adds weight and value to your website and will help you in the search results.

Networking

Not only is networking helpful in the knowledge trade, it can produce very fruitful co-produced campaigns. Sometimes you’ll meet someone who brings a certain set of skills to the table that you don’t possess. For example, your knack may be writing while theirs is website design.

Websites: Pitfalls of Having Your Own .COM

Website Hosting packages and Domain Names cost you money. Websites in general (even if they are setup to be self-appending or operate independently) cost you time.

Enough said.

Purchasing Campaigns or Websites

Purchasing campaigns or website can be a bad move, mostly because that person can take your money and build a replica of the website (if they don’t already have one or more) and dominate you in the search engine results, which will eventually bleed your profits. They know the campaign thoroughly if they’re making money from it.

Why would they sell something that’s making them money while they sleep?

Sure, you can tell yourself that you’re the lucky one that found a website of someone that wants to quit, but be smart about it. Do your own homework.

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