The Best Way to Make Money Online? (For Beginners)

Maki from DoshDosh has put up an interesting post asking for people within the community to come up with their own ideas about the best way to make money online. He says that beginners have a large amount of information to get through, and I agree there.

Then and Now

When I did Internet marketing before from 2000-2003 I used mainly affiliate marketing using PPC to drive traffic. But in those days I was getting thousands of clicks for $0.01. Nowadays I see people raving about how they bought traffic for $0.20 a click and that just makes me gulp! I cannot say what is the best way of making money online but one thing I would say, is that if this is aimed at beginners it needs to be cheap, quick and low on technical knowledge.

Marketing to the Long Tail

This is the strategy that was basically taught in the Thirty Day Challenge so all credit goes to them, I did not come up with this. This is my own very brief breakdown of the process and it is something that any beginner can do.

1) Step 1 - Find A Viable Market

This is the first but also the most difficult step. A viable market requires several things:

• An audience who will part with their cash
• Enough traffic to enable sales to be made
• Low enough competition to make it viable
• Affiliate products to sell with decent commission

The key to this first step is to do keyword research in your chosen market to look for phrases that have a reasonable amount of traffic, not too much competition and make sense - you can write about them.

2) Step 2 - Create Keyword Optimised Content

Once you know what keywords you are after, the next task is to create content that ranks well for that keyword. The 30DC teaches a neat technique that allows you to leverage the authority of existing sites such as Squidoo and Hubpages to enable your content to rank more quickly. This is an important asset for the beginner because results can be achieved in days rather than months.

3) Step 3 - Monetize That Traffic

If sufficient content has been created and ranks well for the keywords then those pages should be receiving traffic. In order to make money, that traffic should now be monetized. You can do this in a number of ways but for a beginner the easiest way to get started is to promote an affiliate product that relates to the content. Many info products such as ebooks can be found that offer commission rates as high as 75%.

4) Step 4 - Create a Real Business

If you build your own website from scratch you may need to work on it for months only to find out that there is just not enough traffic, or the competition is too fierce, or perhaps the market simply doesn’t buy. With all the time invested, this can be a tough lesson. However by using steps 1-3 you can test a market very quickly. Only once it has proved profitable would you move to step 4 and create a real business.

This is where you build your own content site, you build a list, perhaps you replace the affiliate product with your own product and so on.

Conclusion

As Maki points out, there are an overwhelming number of ways of make money online. This is just one of them. I am using these same techniques myself in three niches at the moment and I document my progress on the blog.

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