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Internet Marketing With An Online Business

I suppose that like me you have been around the web for a few years and you have heard a lot about internet marketing and online business and how everyone except you is making a small fortune working at home. Heck, your inbox is probably jammed every day with emails from internet Gurus who can

guarantee you an income better than your boss's using some work at home scheme. It sounds inviting doesn't it? First thing you have to do is buy their eBook or training program. You may even have tried out a few of these schemes. I won't ask how you got on.

Well, actually there are ways to make money in internet marketing with an online business without spending huge sums to get started. I recommend that you start small and when you see what works for you, follow the money. If you are sure that some is not working out after you have tried them and tweaked them to death, then drop them. The following are some of the ways you can earn some money working at home with internet marketing.

Adwords, Adsense and Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs and Adsense are the backbone of internet marketing. Affiliate programs are systems designed to help internet marketers to be able to easily locate products to sell and producers to find sellers for their products. The sellers and producers each get a share of the profits. If you have developed your own product you can sell at auctions or do things the old-fashioned way doing the donkey work yourself or you can get an army of affiliates to sell it for you.

Adsense is part of Google’s pay per click (PPC) system. The other half is Adwords. Adsense is where the ad is displayed on websites. Adwords is where an advertiser goes to get his ad into the Google system. It is just a convenient way of separating the advertiser (the person who pays for the ad) and the publisher (the person who displays the ad).

At the time of writing the best way to get started in internet marketing is Google Adsense and affiliate programs. All you need is a site and traffic. No list to sell to or accounts to keep. Just keep track of your money. There are even ways to make money from these systems that do not involve owning a website. There are now several PPC companies. Yahoo, Google Adsense and Bidvertizer (to mention a few) all of which cost nothing to sign up to.

With PPC ads on your web site you get paid every time someone clicks on a PPC ad on your website. The advertisers bid against each other for the ads so the amount you get paid for the click varies. These variations depend on ad position and demand for the keywords used in the ads and other factors.

The great thing about these methods is that they do not involve you handling products making phone calls, dealing with customers directly or handling money (except your own). These systems would suit most people who are starting out in internet marketing because the cost very little to start up. It is a great system if your site has a good flow of traffic.

If you do not already have a lot of traffic, you could sign up for Google's Adwords program. You only pay when someone clicks on your advertisement, no matter how often the ad is shown. Google Adwords has the potential to make or break your business. If you are careful, choose your keywords carefully and cap your spending at a reasonable leval, you can learn a lot and earn from this program. See this free eBook for more, Adwords Made Easy.

Simply put you just build your site including the advertisements and wait for the cheque. However, there is a little more to internet marketing than that. I can hear you saying, "Of course there is a catch." The only catch is… actually there are two catches.

First: you need to have a good flow of traffic (unless you are using Adwords). After all, only a small percentage of the people who land on your site will buy your affiliate products (it is your job to increase this percentage rate). That is where Adsense comes in. You get paid for every click on an Adsense link. You don't need to sell anything. The amount paid to you is a lot less than you would be paid for a sale of an affiliate product but it's regular… if you have a good flow of traffic.

Second: you need to have your site built in a certain way to maximise your clicks and your income. You could get lucky and put the ads in just the right place and in just the right way etc. by yourself; or you can do what the experts do. Have a look at this site. This one is not free but it is worth every cent. Adsense Videos.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is of great importance to internet marketers. SEO is about making your pages look good to the search engines and thereby getting increased traffic and a higher page rank . Of course, they must look reasonably good to your visitors too or they wont come back. If your site has not been Search Engine Optimised (SEO) then download the FREE eBook from this site: SEO Made Easy. There is lots of information in there, in fact, I would say that just about everything you need to know about on-site SEO is in there. It is the best free SEO eBook I know of and is better than many that are not free. (we'll say no more on that) Even if you have good traffic following the advice here will improve it, if you are not already implementing the strategies they advise.

Every internet marketer knows that you will need to have quality content on your pages. That may seem obvious really, but to rank highly on the search engines you must have something they want to show their searchers in the first page. After all how did you react when you clicked on a search result and landed on a site thinking you were going to get the information you wanted only to discover that it was a rubbish site little or no content and full of advertising, just there to make a quick buck? By the way that type of site seldom does anything but scare people away. We all want to make a buck, but nothing for nothing right?.

Ok! To summarise, this is what you need to do to start Internet Marketing with an Online Business.

1. Get a domain name. Ideally one that suits the topic of your site. If it is a travel site then the word travel should be in the domain name. You do not own your domain name. You only have the exclusive use of the domain name as long as you pay the registration fee. Usually around $8 to $10 per year. There are now many online businesses selling domain names, so they are easy to get.

2. Get hosting for your domain. Your host is where your site lives. The host stores your site on a computer called a server and charges you for this service based on the space you need for your site's code and the amount of bandwidth you want. This will depend on the amount of traffic you expect your site to get. It's usually not expensive starting off. There is a huge number of hosts out there. Shop around. There are bargains to be had but Google the host name to see if there are any skeletons in the closet, before you buy. Most hosts now have all the services and extras and guarantee at least 99% uptime. Uptime is time when your site is visible. In internet marketing is is essential to keep your web site up for the maximum time. Some downtime is usually necessary for maintenance. You may lose sales to the competition while down but that is unavoidable.
   Hosting could be a good online business to get into if you are any way good with computers. There are many companies selling reseller hosting accounts. So you do not need to own a server. Be careful. Check out the terms and conditions before you take on a reseller account. You do not want to find that you can be held responsible for any losses incurred by your customers due to the shortcomings of the service provider.

3. The Website. You will need to design a business web site. I spoke a little about this above. A business website is a little different from a personal site. You can buy ready made sites quite cheaply on eBay or other sites. However as a beginner you may end up buying a rubbish site and not being able to improve it. It is definitely worth getting web design classes if they are available in your area. Don't be afraid. Open your browser, at the top of the screen click on View and then Source (Page Source if you are using Firefox). This will show you some of the source code that built the page you are viewing. It looks like advanced mathematics. It's not, you would be amazed how quickly you can pick it up. Anyway, I would recommend a simple site. The complicated sites do not necessarily make more money. They are often too confusing and are not really suitable for internet marketing.

4. SEO the site. The engines like quality content and clean code and links from other relevant, quality sites to yours. Simple?

Quality content is obvious but I already said that above.

Clean code is needed so that the engines don't get confused. Did you ever hear the expression: "Does Not Compute". If the robot that is spidering (that's what they call reading your site) your site runs into broken code it may abandon the job and your site will not be indexed properly and maybe not at all. If it can still spider the site but with difficulty, it may give it a low rank. This means that you will get very few visitors if any.

Links to your site are like votes. A person linking to your site is giving his stamp of approval to your site and this is recognised by the robot and it will be a factor in its ranking of your site. Be careful who you link to. Linking to bad sites i.e. sites sending span or link farms etc. will have a major negative effect on you rankings and may even get you de listed from the search engines. The most valuable links are the one-way links to your site. You can quite easily get reciprocal links, i.e. they link to your site, and you link to their site. The robot knows that you have probably done a deal and rates this type of link lower than a one way link. Still, they are much better than no links. Go to my links page to see an example. The link is at the bottom of this page. If you get a lot of links you will have to build a more advanced page than the one I have here. You may need to separate them into categories ore even separate pages. This will improve the quality of the links for the sites listed on themed pages. A link to your travel site from a page about travel and full of travel links with travel in the title will benefit your travel site much more than a random irrelevant page.

If you are starting out you will not be likely to get rich overnight or even over a month or six months. But, there is money to be made in internet marketing if you put in the effort and use your head. Some people get lucky the rest of us have to work at it. The lucky ones are very much in the minority. The hardest thing about internet marketing is generating traffic. However, click on the link to the free eBook called "KE Case Study" for an example of one man who did very well.

The best traffic comes from search results and article links. These people were looking for a site like yours when they found yours. The best way to rank well in the search results is by having quality unique content and updating it regularly and having the pages optimised. You can use articles from article directories, e.g. urArticles or Article Desk. But if you do you should use, if possible use new articles that have not been used much yet. Then replace these articles from time to time. If you do not the robots will see that article on other sites and rank your page lower. The best thing to do is to write your own. That way it will be unique and it will not need to be replaced as often.

By all means work at home in your own internet marketing online business. But! Do start an online business. Start small. Think of it as a hobby until you learn the internet marketing ropes and grow at your own speed. You do not need to throw money at it. At least not until you know what you are doing and can be sure that you will get a reasonable return for your investment.