Looking for a way to earn money online that does not involve start up costs? Try starting a blog.
Blogs (more correctly known as weblogs) began as a form of online journal for people who wanted to write about themselves, their families, their vacations, hobbies, pets or whatever without going to the trouble and expense of setting up a static website and learning hypertext markup language (HTML). Before blogs were invented, you had to know HTML to have any kind of website.
But with a blog, everything is much easier. You can sign up somewhere like blogger.com or wordpress.com and they have templates that you can just go ahead and use out of the box. Pick a topic and a name for your blog, choose a template that you like and start writing.
Since you want to earn from your blog rather than just pouring your heart out to the world, you need to do a little thinking before you select your subject. It needs to be something that you are interested in so that you stay motivated, but there also must be related products that people are willing to pay for. Without this, nobody will want to advertise on your blog and you will not make any money.
So you need to find what is called a 'hungry market'. This is a group of people who have a problem, need or desire that can be solved by the information on your blog and the products that will be advertised there. For example, people who want to lose weight; people trying to save their marriage; keen golfers who are desperate to improve their swing.
You need to be sure that your market will be prepared to pay for the solutions that you or your advertisers offer, and not expect to get the information for free. For example people often look online to find the definition of a word they do not know, but they will not pay for that. You also need to be sure that your market has money - the more the better.
Golf is a popular topic for websites and blogs for this reason. Golf is an expensive hobby and golfers are used to spending money on equipment, club membership and information to improve their game. You can probably think of other similar money spinning hobbies.
Your blog will be found by visitors faster if it is very specific. After you have your broad subject, there are many tools that you can use for keyword research to find words and phrases that people are searching for and which do not have too much competition.
You do not have to worry too much at first about finding products to promote. You can simply sign up with Google Adsense and run their ads on your site. This saves you having to look for individual advertisers. Use the time instead to fill the blog with plenty of posts and build links to it by leaving comments on other relevant blogs, rewriting your blog posts and submitting them as articles to directories, etc.
If you do not like writing you can build a great blog that is based around photos you took, royalty free photos that you download or videos that you can embed from YouTube.
Later you can find products to promote as an affiliate and you will probably find that this is more profitable than Adsense, especially if you have an opt in form on your blog so that you can collect visitors' email addresses and keep on emailing them about the products you are promoting. But all of this takes time. Adsense is a quick and easy option while you are getting started.
Having your own blog on a subject that interests you is a great way to earn money online while having some fun at the same time. You might like to take a look at the Easy To Follow Video Tutorials Showing You Exactly How To Set Up Your Blog. All You Have To Do, Is Follow The Paint-by-numbers System Weve Put Together. Its Never Been Easier To Learn How To Set Up Your Very Own Blog. Discover more at Learn How To Blog
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
4 Essential Ingredients of a Successful Online Work at Home Business
The internet changes daily as far as what works and what doesn't when it comes to making money online.
If you are new to work at home online businesses, your head can spin with all the hype, sales pitches , and outright lies as far as the reality of starting up an online home based business.
There are however a few things to look for in your search for a work at home business that can become some nice additional income, or even better, your "job". Working at home, generating $1000 a day is far from what I call a "job".
To help ease your frustration, and point you in the right direction for what you should be looking for in today's online marketplace, the following summarizes the 4 essential ingredients in a winning work at home online business opportunity.
1. SYSTEM- This may be the most crucial item to your success. You need a System that generates prospects, educates them on your business opportunity, sorts and weeds out those that are not interested in your offer, then closes the sale at a conversion rate that ensures profitability. The System must be as automated as possible so you aren't spending hours cold calling or following up with people that are probably not interested, then trying to use your sales closing skills to make a sale.
Think of the successful off line businesses such as McDonalds, Tim Hortons or Subway. Do you think they could duplicate those businesses all over the country, setting up new franchise owners to run these businesses, without a SYSTEM that works?
2. BIG Profits- This is important as the advertising needed to result in sales can be quite costly. For some $1000 price point business programs, it isn't unusual to spend $200, $400 or even $600 to make that $1000 sale. Of course, there are ways to also spend $0 in advertising, but the reality is advertising is often on the range where to make $1, you may need to spend $0.40. Your profit is still $0.60. Would you do that over and over if you had a automated system in place to make this happen? Big Profits allows enough profit so your advertising cost is well covered by your selling price. You can't do much advertising to make a profit on selling a $20 ebook for example.
3. Hot Products- Yes, the product must be tangible and have use and value. There are many new business opportunities that offer $75,000 or more worth of downloadable products that sell for $1000. That's pretty HOT, and full of value. Having a product that can be downloaded, means NO shipping. Now that is just way too easy.
4. Leads and Traffic- This is probably the most perplexing for most new work at home business owners. An online business will never make any money without a source of leads (prospects). The key to providing leads to an online business is they need to be targeted.
This means you need to advertise to a niche market of people looking for exactly what your offers. Seems so simple a concept, but so may people struggle in building their prospect list.
If you are new to work at home online businesses, your head can spin with all the hype, sales pitches , and outright lies as far as the reality of starting up an online home based business.
There are however a few things to look for in your search for a work at home business that can become some nice additional income, or even better, your "job". Working at home, generating $1000 a day is far from what I call a "job".
To help ease your frustration, and point you in the right direction for what you should be looking for in today's online marketplace, the following summarizes the 4 essential ingredients in a winning work at home online business opportunity.
1. SYSTEM- This may be the most crucial item to your success. You need a System that generates prospects, educates them on your business opportunity, sorts and weeds out those that are not interested in your offer, then closes the sale at a conversion rate that ensures profitability. The System must be as automated as possible so you aren't spending hours cold calling or following up with people that are probably not interested, then trying to use your sales closing skills to make a sale.
Think of the successful off line businesses such as McDonalds, Tim Hortons or Subway. Do you think they could duplicate those businesses all over the country, setting up new franchise owners to run these businesses, without a SYSTEM that works?
2. BIG Profits- This is important as the advertising needed to result in sales can be quite costly. For some $1000 price point business programs, it isn't unusual to spend $200, $400 or even $600 to make that $1000 sale. Of course, there are ways to also spend $0 in advertising, but the reality is advertising is often on the range where to make $1, you may need to spend $0.40. Your profit is still $0.60. Would you do that over and over if you had a automated system in place to make this happen? Big Profits allows enough profit so your advertising cost is well covered by your selling price. You can't do much advertising to make a profit on selling a $20 ebook for example.
3. Hot Products- Yes, the product must be tangible and have use and value. There are many new business opportunities that offer $75,000 or more worth of downloadable products that sell for $1000. That's pretty HOT, and full of value. Having a product that can be downloaded, means NO shipping. Now that is just way too easy.
4. Leads and Traffic- This is probably the most perplexing for most new work at home business owners. An online business will never make any money without a source of leads (prospects). The key to providing leads to an online business is they need to be targeted.
This means you need to advertise to a niche market of people looking for exactly what your offers. Seems so simple a concept, but so may people struggle in building their prospect list.
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