Online or off-line, making money really only has 3 most basic concerns.

Keeping in mind what these are and discarding anything that is unnecessary or useless will optimize your efforts.

1. You must have an irresistible offer.

Whether it is a product or a service, you’ve got to be selling something. It shouldn’t be just anything but something that fills a need or satisfies what people want. Thus, before you even choose what product to create or produce, you must first have to decide on who to sell to and what they are most likely to buy. This means having a sound knowledge of niche marketing.

In simple terms, niche marketing is the process of identifying profitable segments of the whole market and serving such segments or niches with relevant products/services. Dog training is a niche market. And so is forex, health, Internet marketing and so on.

Web promotion requires the investment of resources – time, effort and money. If you try to engage in more niches than you can handle, your resources will be spread out thin and you will lack the focus necessary to conduct effective marketing campaigns.

Knowing the needs and wants of your chosen niche market or audience is another area of serious endeavor. It is one reason why you will have to do in-depth research which, no matter how time-consuming, may involve some activity at relevant forums and hot product sections of online marketplaces.

As to the choice of what to promote, beginners who do not have their own products can engage in affiliate marketing and scout for relevant offers. Then there’s CPA too where you can just refer people to websites. However, to really make it big online, you have to be creating your own salable products. Having your own products is important if you want to build a big list of contacts fast.

A product or service may not be so irresistible in itself. You will need to package it in the best way you can. This can involve the creation of high-converting sales pages and/or having a unique selling proposition (USP). Your USP should persuade potential patrons to prefer you over any competition. Great-looking websites, squeeze pages and sales copy-writing come in.

2. Your offer must reach the maximal number of people in you niche.

This means targeted advertising to the max. Whether you want to lead people to your sales page, affiliate sales pages, review site or blog, your article or your opt-in page, you have to see to it that you get maximum exposure, not just to anybody but to those who are most likely to make purchases.

Exposing your offer or content to people who just click to earn advertising credits, as in safe lists and traffic exchanges, is definitely a waste of your time. More so if you also do clicking to earn credits. These advertising media have their uses, but mainly to those in the “make money” niche.

What you need to be doing is “catch” people who are searching for what you are offering. You should engage in search engine marketing (SEM). Pay-per-click or PPC advertising is the fastest, but in can be expensive and risky. On the other hand, search engine optimization (SEO) can be done for free but is a little slow. Even so, it has long-term benefits.

SEO, quite simply, is the “art” of getting your site or content on top of search engine result pages (SERPs). If you get to #1 on page 1 of Google, for instance, you’d be like the only one selling cold water in a desert. You’d get thousands of highly targeted visitors daily. And that means a lot more sales at no cost to you.

There is on-page SEO which has to do with tweaking your site’s META tags. Then there is off-page SEO which has to do with building quality backlinks to your site or blog. The latter is arguably more important and it has to do with a lot of online writing like article marketing.

Social media? If you want to be famous, yes. If you want to make money, stick with SEO first. Friends paying courtesy visits to your sites won’t generate much sales. Fresh visitors through search engines should be your target.

3. You must have the ability to make repeated offers.

This concerns building a contact list, something that webmasters with superior SEO may not bother doing but which you should consider employing. The rationale behind is that about 99% or so of first-time visitors to sales pages don’t take positive action. They just go. and they’re probably gone for good. However, if you can get their contact details, you have a good chance of making follow-ups and subsequent offers.

List-building involves email marketing. It basically requires a 2-3 page website and an autoresponder.

The first page of a list-building website is called the squeeze page. It is the landing page where searches can reach after clicking a link. In accord with the principle of irresistible offers, it should have a persuasive sales copy even if you only want visitors to subscribe to your list. Usually, there should be an offer to entice potential subscribers, like a free report relevant to the niche. This page is where you place your autoresponder opt-in form.

The second page, hidden, is the thank you page. It is here where a subscriber lands after submitting contact details. In a single opt-in, this is also the download page where the gift or free report may be downloaded. In a double opt-in, this is just a thank you page where the subscriber who just opted in is told that it is a double opt-in and that a confirmation link will be sent in a confirmation email.

After confirming in a double opt-in process, the subscriber is then led a 3rd page, the download page where the gift is accessed.

Once in your list, a subscriber will then be receiving successive messages preloaded to your autoresponder. These can be e-courses, a newsletter or anything that subtly promotes whatever you want to. You can also make random broadcasts whenever anything worth telling comes up.

The fastest way to build a list, almost literally overnight, is to have your own saleable product offered in a well converting sales page, and with a high enough commission offer to interested affiliates. Many affiliate marketers have existing lists, some very large. If they think they can make money with your offer, they will send you tons of potential subscribers.

That’s the secret. Even those who create products about other forms of advertising, like PPC and social media, rely more on the mobilization of affiliate armies than in their proposed methods.

Thanks for reading. I hope you gained something from this article and I have not wasted your precious time. To learn more about online marketing, just keep visiting this site.

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Filed under: General • Internet Marketing Techniques

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