You'd like to make money online but you have no idea where to begin. This article will explain the basic components of a successful Internet marketing campaign. Internet marketing is not necessarily easy, but it is a skill set anyone can learn.
1. Your own websiteThe days when you could send traffic directly to your affiliate links and collect commissions are long gone. Many online article directories--proven sources for traffic--no longer allow you to publish affiliate links. Even if they did, today's Internet users aren't as easily sold. You need to gain their trust by first giving them lots of useful information--the content you add to your website. You need your own website to send your traffic to.
Fortunately, you can purchase domain names and hosting services inexpensively or even get them for free. Not only that, building a website is now easier than ever. You can write your content using wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editors and build up a professional site from a wide variety of template options. You do not need to know any java, html or other programing code. High cost and lack of technical expertise are no longer important barriers to building a website.
2. Your affiliate products
You do not need to have your own product in order to sell products online. Affiliate products are products you sell on behalf of another company with the company handling the payment and delivery of the item and any related customer service issues. Whenever you sell an affiliate product the company pays you a commission. Today there are literally thousands of different affiliate products to choose from. All you have to do is apply to the affiliate program and start publishing your affiliate link once you are accepted.
3. Your targeted keywords
Keywords are the terms Internet searchers type into a search engine such as Google to get information. The purpose of targeting keywords is to be able to intercept the Internet users who are looking for your affiliate products. Let's suppose you are marketing beekeeping products. A keyword you might target would be "buy beekeeping products." An even better one to target would be one that is more specific, such as "buy beekeeping suits" or "buy bee hive bodies."
You can brainstorm as many keyword ideas as you want to. Choosing the keywords you will target begins with keyword research. Keyword research involves getting more keyword ideas as well as learning about the competition and search volume for each keyword. You want to target keywords with low competition and high search volume. Low competition means fewer than 2,000 results come up when the keyword is entered in quotes. High search volume means lots of people search this keyword.
Targeting a keyword means you will dedicate a page on your website (it could also be a blog post) to that keyword. You will name that page with this format yourdomain.com/your-targeted-keyword and that page will be relevant to that keyword. So, if your targeted keyword was "buy bee hive bodies," you might write about the various available options for hive bodies, talk about the quality, price, features and benefits of each one, and make a recommendation as to the best option (which will of course be your affiliate product). Your content needs to be useful and informative to your visitors. If you try to sell your product too hard while providing no intrinsically useful content, your visitors will get annoyed.
Once you have your targeted keyword page completed it's time to write an article targeting that same keyword and submit that article to a directory. The article will generally be shorter than your content page but will cover basically the same information. The article needs to contain useful information. It cannot be a sales pitch. You include a link to the relevant page on your website in your author resource box. This is what allows people who read the article to find your website.
You want to create pages targeting as many individual keywords as possible, then publish one or two articles targeting each keyword. The articles will be published in big name sites such as EzineArticles.com. You are taking advantage of their high page rank to get your own content ranked quickly.
Your own website, your affiliate products and your targeted keywords form the basis of a successful Internet marketing campaign. Once you have built your website and selected the products you will promote, continuing your campaign becomes a matter of regularly creating keyword optimized pages, then keyword optimized articles. This is how to make money online for beginners.
How to make money online for beginners is one of many online marketing related topics I cover on my website Online Marketing 101. Visit Online Marketing 101 to get step by step instructions for launching your first Internet marketing campaign. |
