I feel like sometimes people are almost whoring themselves out for $5, but it just adds to the amusement of what people are willing to do for a few bucks…

But here’s the thing…

There’s a lot more to be made over at Fiverr if you do things right.  Here’s how you can pile up some good paying customers and build a buyers list pretty quickly:

1.  Offer some kind of a normally free or cheap service for $5 as a trial or as a starting point to a larger sale.  For instance, maybe you offer to analyze their website and offer SEO suggestions for $5, but you then try to market an SEO service to them for something like $97 / month or so (or whatever).  Or another example would be that you offer to help them pick out some kind of high price point product online (maybe they need help buying a tv, computer, jewelry, furniture, etc.) and for $5 you’ll help find them the best deal …. and then use your affiliate link when you give them the suggestion (ensuring that you get that cut off your suggestion).

2.  Sell some “secret” or “tip” for $5 that is part of a larger package of yours.  For instance, maybe you have a guide on how to improve your golf game — you can offer personal tips on how to improve their putting for $5 and hope that some buy your larger package.

3.  Similar to #2, you can sell similar tips in the form of a newsletter or even just charge $5 to get them to sign up for your newsletter with all sorts of goodies.  This builds a list of buyers and lines them up to buy more in the future.

4.  Search for the “wanted” section there to see what people want, and then find a targeted customer base there and give them what they want using one of the other steps outlined here.

5.  Contact any of the sellers of hot items / services and try to see if they’re willing to do a deal where you can sell their services for more to others …. and then market their services on forums, your mailing list, websites, classified areas, etc. for a huge market (or even hire some of those $5 offers to get them to market you — haha).

So that’s how you can turn $5 to a lot more and start making some easy money online over at Fiverr.

Since Keyword Elite and Micro Niche Finder turned down my offer of saying their tools are the best keyword tools in exchange for a measly $2,000,000, I’m going to take the route of giving you my honest opinion. 

Now, having said that, I already see some people assuming that I’m against Keyword Elite 2 and Micro Niche Finder — that’s completely not the case.  Both are pretty cool tools, but I’m going to focus on the free keyword tools for now as many draw from the same sources …. it’s just in how they display the results and what features they have that make all the difference.

So now, back to my honest review.

There are two main free keyword generation tools out there:

1.  Market Samurai

and

2.  Google’s Keyword Generator

Having said that, Market Samurai essentially pulls its results from Google’s keyword generator anyway, and Google won’t try to sell you other stuff.

Google’s keyword tool is pretty nifty, and if you enter in a few relevant keywords, especially more long tail keywords, you can get some very relevant results that will show you how many searches they get a month, how competitive it is to advertise there, etc..

I love this tool and use it all the time, especially because it’s web-based and very easy to access.

The only major downside to it is that they don’t really allow you to sort the results easily.  It’s still easy to see mostly what keywords are good and what ones are bad, but it’d be nice to offer more filtering features.

That’s where Market Samurai comes into play.  The interface I don’t like nearly as much as Google’s own keyword tool, but they do a nice job of allowing you to sort through the results, rank the results by order of traffic or competition level, etc..

Since the keyword tool on Market Samurai is free anyway, I say use it if you’re going through HUGE keyword lists.  They have some nifty filtering features that make it worthwhile.

However, since it’s desktop based, if you’re looking for a quick search and aren’t wanting to sift through hundreds of results, Google’s own keyword tool is just fine and easier.

Now, having said that, here’s my personal tip for finding awesome keywords:  focus on keywords that get AT LEAST 1,000 searches per month and have at least a little Adwords competition (meaning that at least someone finds value in that keyword).  Then see if domain names that are .com, .net, or .org are available with the keyword phrase in them (like [keyword phrase].com).  If they are available, grab one (ideally .com, then .net, and then .org in order of preference).

Then make the keyword phrase your page title (what appears at the very top of the browser on any webpage), and you should have a decent chance of getting ranked well doing just that.  Your chances will go up even more if most of the search results in Google don’t have the keyword phrase in their page title — to find out, do a search with the phrase in quotes on Google and check out how many sites have the keyword phrase within the page title (the blue link).  If not many do, you have an awesome keyword to go after.

Comments / opinions — please leave them below. 

My next two reviews will deal with traffic and leads, and both of those will have some awesome tips to get rich online … or at least make a little extra dough….

For those of you out of the know, forced continuity is where you sign up for something (usually a free newsletter or a free plus shipping product) and then automatically get billed on a monthly basis after that with no upfront option of opting out (you have to call in after the fact).

Well, for those of you in the super know, you’ve probably heard that a lot of major internet marketers had their merchant accounts shut down in the past couple weeks because Visa and Mastercard were trying to lay down the hammer on deceptive forced continuity ….. where the customers didn’t really know they were signing up for such a thing.

So you can probably understand (and if you can’t, f*ck you!) how pissed I was to recently have Best Buy (the offline store — not their website) outright lie to me and tricked me into a forced continuity …. followed by making it almost impossible to cancel.

Here’s the story:

I go to a local Best Buy store here to buy a new laptop.

I was told by a salesman that for $100 more, I can get one pre-setup with 6 months free of an anti-virus software.

Not wanting to deal with the hassle of setting up the laptop, I pay the extra $100.

The salesman tells me that for the 6 months free for the anti-virus, he needs to scan it in and I need to swipe my card — he reassures me that I WILL NOT BE CHARGED for the anti-virus.  I asked if there were any charges whatsoever for it, and he says “no, the only reason you swipe your card is so we can acknowledge that you got the free software — I’ll immediately deduct the cost so it’s free, and then in 6 months, you’ll get an e-mail asking you if you want to pay for anything past that,” and I again ask “so it won’t ever charge the card?” and he says “no, it’s free — this is just to verify that you got it.”

Okay, cool, whatever…

But then, after I do that, I realize that the credit card monitor says that I’m agreeing to AUTO-REBILLING of my credit card.  I immediately bring this up and said that I don’t want to be rebilled, and he says “oh … [with some dumbass look on his face] you can cancel anytime you want.” and I say “okay, great, cancel me now.” and he says “we can’t do it here — you need to call 1-888-Best Buy — you can do that first thing tomorrow.”

I then ask if that number is written down on the receipt or anything, and he says no.  So now I’m thinking, how the f*ck would I know how to cancel if I didn’t ask that right then and there on the spot????  And more so, how the f*ck would the majority of the people even know that they agreed to the auto-rebill when this dude was bluntly saying over and over again that there were NO CHARGES and the only reason for the credit card swipe was to verify that we got it.  That’s an outright LIE!

But wait, it gets better!!!

So first thing right afterwards, I call up the 1-888-Best Buy number, explain the situation, and ask to be taken off the auto-rebill.  And guess what they say???  They said “sorry, you can only cancel at this number AFTER 30 days — you can call up your local Best Buy to try to have them cancel it there sooner.”

I’m seriously like ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!! ….. that Best Buy told me that the ONLY way I can cancel is to call up the 1-888 number, and that I can do it the very next day immediately (another lie).  Then that number says “nope, you can only cancel after 30 days.”

That basically means that they’re A) making it ridiculously deceptive that they’re even auto-billing you at all, B) they’re making it impossible to know how to cancel (if I hadn’t asked, I would have no information and no clue how to do so), and C) they’re purposely making rules that are aimed at making it difficult to nearly impossible to cancel.

On top of outright lying, they’re basically saying “call this number and hope that they’ll cancel you …. although they’ll probably tell you to go back to us and we’ll have you go in a never ending circle ….. unless you cancel after 30 days but before 6 months excluding Jewish holidays and Kwanza …. but you can’t cancel between the hours of 5 am and 1 am, unless your name is Bubba, in which case you can at 2:01 pm but not 2:02 pm, excluding every day except Sundays …. only if your first born son was born on that Sunday, and if not, f*ck you.”

This is ridiculous, and it’s making me PMSing over how they allowed this to happen.  This is worse than ANY internet forced continuity I’ve ever seen.  We’ll keep you updated….  Hopefully they’ll be smart about it and just make it easy for me to cancel.  Otherwise, they’ll have sh*t to pay for.  :)

Be warned….

I have a BOATLOAD of methods that I’ve tried, and I have a smaller boatload of methods that actually worked for me (still in the dozens).  However, rather than have all of the ideas come from me, I thought it’d be fun to get all of my readers involved in it ….. and non-readers too — I’ll spread the love …. as long as there’s no crabs or anything like that coming with it…..

So here’s the deal:

Submit any / all of your money making ideas to me at cantgetrich [at] gmail.com.

By doing so, you’ll be giving me permission to use and talk about that money making method.

If I post the method and it’s actually good, I’ll Paypal you $10 and post a link to you for credit (if you want a link / credit).  If it’s not that good of a method … well … I probably won’t be posting it anyway so that doesn’t matter.

(But wait, there’s more! ….. including more money in it for you!)

Please have the methods be at least somewhat unique and not standard stuff — if you say “write a review of a Clickbank product with your affiliate link” and don’t provide any other tips or information or specifics on that, don’t be expecting me to post that (although you certainly could provide more details or tips on how to do a CB review and get it posted).

And to top it off…

The best one that I receive the first week will get a $100 Paypal prize.

So there you have it — not only will I enter you into a contest for a $100 Paypal price, but I’ll also PAY YOU if you have a good enough money making method that makes this blog AND you’ll get a link to your site.  I’m pretty f-ing awesome, aren’t I?

Two Random Announcements …… well, one is more like a rant:

First, the rant…. I know this is off topic, but it’s my blog so I get to be off topic when I want (dammit!).  I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sick and tired of reviews of products that are either worthlessly just trying to get an affiliate commission or just whining or bashing the product (that’s right folks, it goes both ways) … often times never even using the product or giving it a fair chance.

This past week, I’ve seen worthless products getting praised up the wazzoo, as well as awesome products get bashed.

Pretty soon I’m going to start writing product reviews and summaries WITHOUT an affiliate link and WITH awesome advice on how to use them (or at least how I use the products) with the good, the bad, and the f-ing ugly.

Announcement #2: This blog will be undergoing some minor maintenance sometime in the next day or two, so it might temporarily be down for several hours.  If that happens, don’t panic, take a paxil, and chill until I get back.

Oh, and e-mail me for this contest….

However, this next method IS deadbeat easy and can be done on a smaller scale or a super large scale with ease.  It’s also related to the Easy Make Money Online Method #1, but I much prefer this one and it can be a great source of recurring income.

Here’s what you do:

1. Do one (or more) of the following:

A)  Search for a worker who performs a web-related service (or post an ad) on a site like Craigslist (or any other such site).  Doesn’t matter if it’s a U.S. worker or Filipino or whatever (Filipino workers can be found searching the Philippine section of these sites).

B) Find an existing service package from a worker on a forum or classified site like above, but make sure that the package price is reasonable / cheap.

2. Then either raise the price of the package or add a few more tasks to the service to increase the perceived value (without increasing the price much).  What’s that you say???  You want some examples???  You bet!  Example numero uno — find an article writer who writes articles and instead of just charging more per article, sell a combined package of a bunch of articles, submission to article directories, keyword optimization, and so forth (you can keep going and make it a larger and larger package).  You can even combine it with simple stuff like blog commenting, forum posting, etc..  Example numero dos — find a backlink builder or commenter and put a large package together with xxx amount of links or comments.

Then not only can you charge a lot more than what your raw labor costs are, but you can take this to the next level and turn it into a monthly service to charge a monthly fee for both examples.  There are literally hundreds of different ways you could make money here with this, but these are just two easy examples.

3. Now that you have your team or service put together and profits figured out, it’s time to get more people to buy your service.  To do this, I recommend doing the following:

A)  Post in the services section on sites like Craigslist.

B)  Post your service on forums that offer free or cheap advertising (like the Warrior Forum) — there are tons of these.  This can be one of the easiest ways to get tons of sales.

C)  Search the web and the above places for people that might be interested in buying your service and let them know about it.

D)  Mail your list (if you have one) with the offer (it’s easy enough to whip up a simple sales page for it or hire a designer for $100 to do so), or start to approach potential joint venture partners with your new service — you can even offer to brand it in their name so they can either take a cut of the profits or just sell it for more than you.

E)  If it’s a good enough offer that converts, after you have a webpage for it (note that you don’t need one for most of these methods), you can do paid advertising like banner ads, PPC, etc. to test out the conversions there, but I only suggest this method after doing the above and having luck with those, as you definitely don’t have to spend a dime to make mucho money here.

Once you do this well, there’s awesome tools out there (more on that later) to do this 100x faster, but they’re not needed to start making money here.

And that’s it!  Easy enough, right?  I thought so…  :)

Stay tuned, as in addition to some more cool money making methods of my own, I’m going to spice up the next post a bit and offer everyone here a contest to win some $$$$$.

Here’s a method that should make you anywhere from $100 to a couple hundred dollars each time you do it.  It only takes an hour or so of work, and it can be repeated almost as often as you’d like … to a point.  And you might even get lucky and land some profits even higher than a couple hundred dollars, but I’m just trying to be as realistic as possible for someone starting out.

Here’s the method:

1. Go to a forum / website that has a “websites for sale” section.  One of my favorites for this is Digital Point … mostly because they’re full of cheap bastards and low price point stuff.  The Warrior Forum also has a comparable section … but they’re kind of the opposite of DP — they’re often full of bastards who think they’re work is worth 10x what it should be.  So in this case, focus on the undervalued, cheap bastards.  :)

2. Once you find the sub-forums selling websites, locate the super cheap ones.  By super cheap, I mean $100 or less.  You’ll find more of these on DP than most other sites.  If you can get the price to $60 or less, you have almost a guaranteed winner.  Just make sure that the site looks at least semi-okay.  It doesn’t have to be awesome, but it can’t be absolute crap.

3. Steal underwear.

4. Buy up the cheaper sites that seem like they’re at least of okay quality … ideally with unique content (not autoblogs although you can make a few exceptions).

5. Go to a “higher class” forum or website selling place and list the website for sale.  Flippa.com is a great place for this, but there certainly are other places out there.  Do a 3 day or 7 day auction and have the starting bid at twice what you paid, and then have a buy it now for about $100 more than that.  Note that in some cases, you can triple, quadruple, etc. the price if the site appears to be worth it.  Make sure you ask the original seller to delete their old post / thread listing the site for sale.  :)

6. Watch and profit.

7. Rinse and repeat (except step #3, that’s optional).

Note that you don’t have to do this just for cheap sites — you can make even more money finding higher valued under-priced sites where there’s a lot more profit to be made, but obviously more of a risk to you, which is why I suggest that you start out as a cheap bastard (no offense Digital Point posters).  :)

Stay tuned next time for another online money making tip that will allow you to make several times more money than this tip with even less effort … but still give this a shot, as once you learn this for low price point stuff, you can make a ton applying it to the higher price points.

See?  And who said it wasn’t impossible to make money online … oh, that’s right, I once said that.  Oops.  :)

Now, there are probably hundreds of lessons that I’ve learned from this, but the biggest secret I’ve seen to making money online is that it’s all going out there and creating relationships and knowing what you can offer.

Before you walk away thinking “duh, everyone talks about creating relationships with their customers,” I’m not talking about that.  In fact, even though I think that’s useful, I think that’s a very MINOR thing when it comes to making serious money online.  It’s funny how everyone else preaches that, though.

Instead, I’m talking about business relationships with other influential people in your market / industry.

Sure, if you’re starting out like most people online (or like I was long before), you might think that any influential people in your industry could care less about you or helping you, and you’re probably mostly right about that … unless you have something of value to offer them!

Realize that every business online and offline is about making money.  Some of the guys making the biggest amounts of money online already have a lot of influence and know how to make money fast, and often times they don’t have nearly enough ideas, products, or services than they could be selling.

That gives you a window of opportunity.  If you can create a product, idea, or service and make it hands free for them, offer them a partnership (or give them complete rights to it) and give them a big cut of the sales if they promote it as their own and you take care of all the support and backend work, it’s really a no brainer to most of those guys.

They get a product they can call their own, they don’t have to lift a finger on the support, and they get a big chunk of money.

If you can offer that, you can approach almost any joint venture partner, business, or major player online.  Just make sure that a) you can create a cool product or service b) you can do a good job managing the support and taking care of the customers and c) you can offer them a big cut (50% would be a MINIMUM — the more the better if you’re just starting out to entice them to partner with you).

Once you land your first deal like that, they’ll be back for more if you do a good job.  On top of that, others in the industry will notice you and start to see if they can partner with you.  And if they don’t come to you, you can seek out other partners, mention that you’re associated with the more well known person or business, and gain credibility and partners that way as well.

Literally all you have to do is find an e-mail of a few of these influential marketers or businesses and see what you’re able to do (or attend a seminar and do the same).  Just make sure that you’re able to put something together first instead of just saying that you will (they’re use to people who never follow through on stuff).

On top of that, most people fail here because they either a) have a crappy idea or product (in that case, you should learn how to create a good one) b) they never ask for help in areas where they suck (they assume they can come up with an idea, create the product, fund it, and market it without any help) and c) they offer a tiny cut to the marketer to market the whole thing for them thinking that they’re entitled to most of the profits because they thought of the idea (that’s stupid — ideas are worth a dime a dozen if they aren’t followed through or marketed correctly).

And if you have a killer idea but don’t know how to create it, find either a cheap worker (writer, programmer, etc.) on sites like www.bestjobs.ph, craigslist.org (local or foreign workers work fine — search other countries for some cheaper deals), rentacoder.com, freelance.com, elance.com, college job wanted classifieds, etc. and get it made.  Or try to make a deal with some of those guys to get a cut of the profits (if it’s an easier task or one that you know you can make a deal with and market) … or a combo thereof. 

Then if you’re dirt poor, you can still get your idea to come to life, and you now have something of value to offer those bigger players in your market.  If you can follow through and don’t slack off in any of these areas (and get a realistic mindset of what you can do or ask for just starting out), it’s almost impossible to fail when it comes to making easy money online or offline.

So if ever you hear someone asking “how do I make easy money online,” point them to this blog post and tell them to get working on it.  :)

1.  Do keyword research (Google has a cool keyword generator tool) on keywords in your niche.

2.  Select keywords that seem decent but aren’t too competitive.  One trick I do here is to search for more long tail keywords (for instance, if your niche was motorcycles, I would try to go for terms like “buy motorcycles online” or “where to buy motorcycles online” instead of “motorcycles”) or target the longer tailed keywords that you find using that Google keyword tool mentioned above.

3.  Once you narrow this list of keywords down a little bit, go to Google and put each term in quotes and do a search (this will only show results that contain exactly that keyword).  Then make note of how many times the EXACT keyword terms show up in the meta tag titles (the blue links that are displayed in the search results).  If there are no top ten results with the keyword, keep special track of those.  If there are less than 3 or so, also write those down in another category.

4.  Now take all the terms that had no results or very few in the meta tag titles and either create a webpage with the terms in the meta tag titles or do a blog post with the keywords being in the post title (the title of your blog post — like mine here is “Cool SEO trick that most overlook”).  If you have very little website skills, try using Blogger.  Do one post per keyword term (you can maybe do two keyword terms in one post if it makes sense).

5.  Now ping your blog post or webpage.  One of my favorite pinging services (free, of course) is Pingoat.com.

6.  Sit back and watch.  In most cases, you’ll see your post or webpage being ranked within a few hours tops — sometimes it might take a couple days, but 80% to 90% of the keywords that you picked (if you did your research right) should be showing up with your site on page 1 of Google.

Keep in mind that you might not get a ton of traffic from most of these keywords (although some certainly can give you a lot), but they quickly add up.  Even if each keyword gives you 10 to 100 new visitors a month, that quickly adds up when you do several of these.  When you do dozens to even hundreds of these, you can get some massive traffic that’s all 100% free from your new organic search results. 

Recently, I came across an electronic cigarette. Yes, you heard me right. Electronic smokes apparently are picking up popularity, and I don’t think it’s because they’re doing an awesome job marketing it — I think it’s because the product has an “wow that’s unique/cool/awesome” factor to it.

On top of that, the uses of it can be more than just a normal cigarette. You apparently can smoke it on airplanes, in non-smoking areas, etc. because it gives out water vapor instead of actual “smoke.” This again, is another “wow” factor that will market itself virally by word of mouth (not to mention the fact that it’s a ton cheaper).

Another use is to use it to stop smoking, as you can buy ones with high, medium, low, or NO nicotine, so all of a sudden you have a product with a ton of uses — those looking to smoke more, smoke less, and save money.

Throw on added value where there aren’t 2,000+ dangerous chemicals (only nicotine — unless you get the non-nicotine ones –, flavor, water, etc.), and you have a product that sells itself.

Rumor has it that several of these electronic cigarette companies are selling out fast and having a hard time getting more shipments, but I came across one still shipping out at www.ElectroBlu.com (if you want to test it out, I’d recommend getting more than just the sampler if you plan on having a good supply of it).

But seriously, I love how this can be marketed to smokers AND those looking to quit with major benefits for both. Again, it’s an awesome case of a product selling itself.

I think that is the best kind of marketing possible, and who knows how well they’d do if they were a little better at marketing themselves.

If you have a killer product, I think that’s perhaps the most important part to major success online, as everything else can just fall in place then.

Several top internet marketers are dishing out advice on how giving out free or VERY cheap products on the front end is the way to go. I completely disagree with 95% of that and think it will actually hurt more people than it will help.

Sure, their logic might make sense upon first glance:

Cheaper Price / Free = More Customers = More People to Sell on the Backend To

But let’s take a closer look at that…

Let’s say that you send 2,500 visitors to your site and convert a whopping 40% on your free offer (that’s a fairly high percentage even for a free offer — I’m being generous). That’s 1,000 “customers” and $0 profit.

Now, let’s say that you have a $97 product in the backend or as a one time offer. Those 1,000 “customer” never bought from you and are classified as freebie seekers as of right now. A 5% conversion rate on them might be very optimistic, but let’s assume that you get that 5% conversion rate. That’s 50 sales, or $4,850 for you.

Kind of sad for 1,000 “customers” — that’s only $4.85 each, which again is pretty optimistic.

But let’s assume that you want to take advantage of your paying customers now and you offer a $497 one time offer to your 50 paying customers. Since these are paying customers, they’re conversion rates will probably be a bit higher. So let’s say that 10% convert. That’s 5 sales, or $2,485.

We’re at $7,335 so far. Now I know what some of you are saying … the money’s in the list, and you have 1,000 “customers!!!” Well, not really. We have 50 real customers and 950 freebie seekers. Even if we doubled our paying customers, that’s still not much. You probably won’t make $1 per month per subscriber for a freebie seeker, so you might make a few hundred to maybe even several hundred dollars a month off that list if you’re good.

Now, I know some marketers offer a cheap “trial” of say $1 or so with a forced continuity in the back of $50 per month or so. You might think that this would be a better model even if only half of the original 1,000 “customers” bought. The problem there (and most marketers won’t tell you this) is that most forced continuity models will have a much lower conversion rate even if the original offer is cheap or even free. The few exceptions to this might include free/cheap trials to software, tools, services, etc. where the buyer expects to pay a decent monthly fee if they like what they get.

So what about the other guy…

Higher Price = Fewer, Higher Quality Customers = Higher Priced Backends to Sell To

Let’s take a closer look here.

Let’s say that you get your 2,500 visitors to your site and only 3% convert instead of the original 40% on a $297 product. That’s 75 customers or $22,275. We already have 3x more than the other model even BEFORE we include the backends.

Since these are proven buyers and higher quality, we can focus on bringing them higher price point backends. The backend should at least be the same price point as the front end if not more. So let’s just say that we do $497 on the backend. We should expect at least a 10% conversion on that because these are proven high price point buyers who’ve already bought from you (I’ve gotten as high as 66% backend conversions at similar price points). That’s about 7 to 8 buyers (7.5). Let’s just say 7 - that’s $3,479 extra. On the higher conversion end, you could easily top $20,000 extra.

However, with those 7 very high price point buyers, you can then go on to offer an elite one time offer or upsell at $1,000 or more and grab a small percentage there as well.

We’re already hovering around $25,000 on the low end. But it just gets better. Now that you have 75 decent buyers and several elite buyers, they’re worth significantly more to you and far more likely to buy higher price point products in the hundreds or even thousands of dollars. They’re also more likely to purchase some subscription programs at decent price points as well — probably worth far more to you than the prior list.

You can take this logic to the extreme and focus on even higher price points from the start or high monthly subscription products.

The key here is to have something that provides value and that people want. If someone wants something bad enough, they’re willing to pay for it. That’s a key to remember.

In addition, offering free or cheap products can always frighten off some of the normally high price point buyers too. And we’re not even getting into the quality of free/cheap vs. paid/high price point products argument yet — we can save that for a later time.

So before you jump on the bandwagon of the free front end trend, give it some thought. You might be shooting yourself in the foot.