Let me make this a bit easier to understand with an example. Knowing how to narrow down a niche means you understand that people who are interested in Fishing are actually interested in a multitude of facets of this sport. There are those who are looking for fishing tackle, fishing bait, fishing information or even fishing boats. But this is only the first step of narrowing down a niche. Within each of these sub-categories of the fishing market there are also many much smaller groups: deep sea fishing tackle, boat fishing tackle, rods, reels, line, lures etc. And in large markets there may even be sub-categories of these sub-categories.

Knowing how to narrow down a niche means you are targeting the exact people who are looking for an exact product and making your promotion more meaningful to them, thus increasing your conversion rates. This is especially relevant for keyword focussed marketing. There can be a big difference, for example, between writing a campaign entitled “Mackerl Lures for South East American Amateur Anglers” and “All About Lures”. If you were an amateur Mackeral fisherman in South East America and you had to choose between visiting these two websites, I’ll bet my house I know which one will be picked.

The secret to niche marketing is getting the attention of people who are looking to buy (not just browse). This is done by identifying the kind of keywords these money ready searchers are using. They generally have more information about the general niche under their belt already and have moved on to searching for exactly what they want. That’s why you have to know how to narrow down a niche. To get in front of these folks and not just the masses.

It’s esppecially  important to know how to narrow down a niche and target only the most ready-to-buy segment of the market if you are paying for leads or spending your advertising budget on a cost-per-click basis. You don’t want people costing you money to visit your site with no intention of spending. It is far better to get 5 visitors a month to your site and 1 sale and make a profit than 500 visitors and 5 sales to make a loss. Niche marketing is about quality, not quantity.

How To Narrow Down A Niche is a post from: Make Money Online | Making Money On The Internet

Let me illustrate this with a story I read recently on an online forum.

The author of the story was someone who was well known on the forum and moderately successful for several years. His contributions to discussion (the forum is about making money online) were excellent… and then one day he just seemed to dissapear. I know a lot of forum regulars missed him and this became even more apparent when he ‘reappeared’ several months later without anyone having heard even so much as a peep out of him in the meantime.

As it turns out, as he explained when he made his first ‘come back’ post, was that he had realised that his online work was going along at a snails pace compared to where he knew it ought to be and that he found he was spending a lot of time on distractions (including the forum where he had been very active). In an effort to increase his online productivity and his success he decided he would devote himself entirely to building his online income for three months without doing anything else. No forums, no surfing, no anything except his core business.

When he returned after those three months at the grindstone he reported he had gone from a moderate online income to earning $40,000 in the three months he was at it full-time – equal to the amount he had made in the year before. He had put in 18 hour days and gone back to the essence of his business plan and it had paid off big time. Now that he has his business growth under his belt from this effort he has been able to afford a bit more time to contribute to the forum and has motivated and inspired a lot of other members to do similar things and achieve similar success with their online money making.

So persistence pays. Distractions are called distractions for a reason. They take away from the power of channeled energy and focus and can cost huge dollar in unclaimed potential. So the next time you are tempted to read a blog, forum, newsletter or just browse aimlessly when you should be building new sites, growing old ones, chasing leads or backlinks ask yourself what an extra $40,000 would do for you in the next three months and get back to business.

Why Persistence Pays In Online Business is a post from: Make Money Online | Making Money On The Internet

Making money online is the goal of a lot of everyday people. It’s particularly something that appeals to people who want to work from home for whatever reason. In fact, this is the reason I started trying to make money online in the first place. I was in a good job, cruising along and enjoying life, when I found out the company I was working for was having a cash crisis and I was the first to have to go! This was crushing for me, but it made me think a lot about my financial security and made me want to put my finances into my own hands rather than relying on someone else to make sure there was a job for me to do.

I also wanted to spend more time with my young family and to have the freedom to work my own hours.

If you’re desperate to make some money online for any of these reasons, or for other reasons of your own then let me show you some great ways to go about it.

The basic ‘theory’ behind making money online goes something like this: people are searching the internet for information and products to solve problems they have in their lives and they are willing to invest in those solutions. To make money online all you have to do is get the right solution in front of the right people at the right price. On the internet this is done by building a website that answers the problem and then monetizing this site.

So breaking this down there are several things you’ll need to do if you’re desperate to make some money online:

1. find out what problems people have that they are looking for solutions for online (this can be done through keyword ressearch)

2. find out where those people are already searching for these solutions (ie on other websites or search engines)

3. build a website of some sort or description and optimize the site for the places people are searching (ie by optimizing for being linked to by other websites or listed in search engines)

4. learn how to promote your site through paid or free advertising or search engine optimization

5. pick the best monetization method for your traffic and market (this could be through advertising revenue or affiliate sales or selling your own products)

The more you become adept at doing any of these things above and the harder you work at it the quicker you’re going to be able to make some money online – but don’t expect it to come quickly. Many people who want to make money online find it is a long and hard road to success. There is a lot of competition on the internet for people’s money and a lot of quality products and information. But if you’re desperate to make some money online you can find a way!

Desperate To Make Some Money Online? is a post from: Make Money Online | Making Money On The Internet

Blogging is a great platform for people who want to learn how to make money, but don’t have a lot of experience up front. It’s easy to learn and can be a lot of fun. And this is important. Too many would-be online marketers give up before too long because of how difficult and boring creating websites and marketing them can be. But blogging allows you to be a bit more flexible and to generally contribute to more of a community discussion than provide straight-up information.

If you want to get started really fast and find out how to make money with online blogging then just sign up for a free blog at Blogger.com. This is a great way to test the waters to see whether you’ll enjoy posting and creating blogs or not. Also, it allows you to easily integrate Google Adsense text ads into your site to start earning some money from your traffic.

And web traffic is fairly easy to start to get with blogs as opposed to some standard format websites. This is because the search engines have been known to favour blogs because they are updated regularly and allow user participation. The regular updated content drives the blogs to the top of a lot of search engine listings and makes them highly relevant to users. They also attract a lot of links from other bloggers and this builds authority.

As an alternative to using Google Adsense for monetization you could also try affiliate marketing or even creating your own products or membership sites. Or you could use any number of other monetization strategies. It’s really all up to your own imagination. I know one blogger who had a lot of traffic to his blog and began driving that traffic to the website of an offline service provider who started to see a lot of extra leads and sales as a result. The blogger then contacted the vendor and explained what he was doing and negotiated a price to continue to link to him. Now that’s ingenuity.

It’s also easy to learn how to make money with online blogging as there is a lot of free information (like this) available on every aspect of the processes bloggers need to learn on different platforms and for different markets and montetization methods.

How To Make Money With Online Blogging is a post from: Make Money Online | Making Money On The Internet

I want you to stay with me for a few minutes while I discuss the ‘simple’ part of making money online because soon I’m going to write a little about the not-so-easy part – traffic generation. This is the absolute key to making money online and if you can wrap your head around it, apply it and start to get a steady stream of people visiting your site then you can then put the simple formulas for making money into action and start to see a return on your investment.

In my opinion the easiest way to make money online is to create websites that host Adsense text link ads.

This isn’t necessarily going to be a huge money maker at first, but in terms of enabling you to see ‘some’ money coming in quickly it can’t be beat. Simply write a blog and post  every day and in a couple of months you are almost guaranteed to see some people coming to your site from the search engines for ‘long-tail’ keywords. This is something that happens because of the sheer volume of content you’ll have on your site before too long. But you have to post and ping everyday. In fact, if you do this consistently for a year you’ll earn yourself a page rank of at least ’2′ just from the content.

Now, as for making money online from Adsense, you could be earning anywhere from $0.02 to $1.00 per click  and getting a few click s a day at a minimum, so it’s not going to be much, but imagine if you had 100+ simple sites all running Adsense. Can you see how this can work?

Adsense is really how I make money online. Adsense and affiliate marketing. I sell a few products that I have created myself and that I own the resell rights too, but most of my income is generated from hundreds of sites that earn just a few dollars a day from Adsense.

Other ways of capitalising on your website include hosting affiliate banners or doing reviews, CPA offers or even promoting your own digital products. For example, you might write a short report with some ‘inside’ information about a topic and offer it for sale through Paypal and redirect your traffic to a page on your site where visitors can purchase it for a reasonable price. This income could then be paid directly into your Paypal account. Simple!

Now, as I’ve said before, the hard part in all of this is getting traffic!

I mean, seriously, why would anyone come and visit YOUR site when there are millions of other sites on the web that are already providing information and solutions to your target market’s problems?

The reason this is hard is that there is serious competition standing in your way to success. And the answer to this is simply to learn to compete. Get to know who your competitors are through thorough keyword research and promote your site to webmasters who are providing information that is complementary to yours. You could exchange links, arrange to write reviews of their products and sites and promote your site on social bookmarking sites, Facebook, Twitter and forums. Also, think about starting a newsletter that your visitors can subscribe to, or optimize your RSS feed if you’re writing a blog.

Gaining web traffic to make money online is a process of building momentum. The more promotion you do the more your reputation is built and the more people are going to naturally promote you to others. As you then get other people promoting you the effort you put into promotion yourself becomes magnified or multiplied and the effect of this over time is remarkable.

If you have some money to invest in your site you could accellerate this process through paid advertising. Using Google Adwords is a quick and easy way to start out and test the waters, but be careful to keep your cost-per-click bidding low to start out with as PPC can quickly eat up your resources if you’re not careful.

Finally, get as much knowledge as you can by subscribing to good forums, blogs and newsletters from people who are experts at traffic generation and start to put into practice everything you read.

In a nutshell, how I make money online is by generating traffic. I’ve become very adept at it and while I spend some time and effort writing content and creating attractive websites, the majority of my time is spent bringing in new streams of traffic. This is where the money is. This is the secret to internet marketing and online business success.

Let me just repeat this again: how I make money online is by generating traffic. I know the ways to make money online and I drive traffic to sites that are set up to capitalise on these methods. Without the traffic I’m simply dead in the water, or broken down on the information superhighway to use another metaphor.

How I Make Money Online is a post from: Make Money Online | Making Money On The Internet

Unfortunately the answer is, It depends. I’ve had a lot of people ask me, Can I make money online? and they seem to think it should be easy. Well, it is and it isn’t. But I’m repeating myself.

Put it this way, is it easy for Apple to sell iPods? Well, it is now. Now that they’ve marketed and branded them so successfully. But at first it was a hard slog. Mp3 technology was fairly primitive when the first iPods hit the stores and although they were revolutionary and appealed to a tech-savvy market immediately, their general appeal took some time to sink in.

See, it’s never easy to start a new business and it’s no different on the internet. In particular if you want to make money online you’ll probably encounter a steep learning curve in the beginning and wrestle with optimization and fierce competition. The good news is there are several well worn paths to success that you can follow and should you be diligent enough you’ve a good chance of success – given time.

Any one of the following could potentially be the easiest way to make money online if you put enough into it:

1. Affiliate marketing – selling other people’s products and being paid a commissions

2. Adsense income generation – placing text ads on your website and being paid everytime someone clicks on it

3. CPA (Cost per action) – being paid for leads and sales you generate

4. Selling stuff on eBay – a great money spinner for a lot of people

5. Completing surveys – although often difficult to make much from there are ways and means to make this lucrative

If you want to make money online you have to start somewhere and I highly recommend you create a free blog at Blogger.com or WordPress.com and then get in the habbit of posting to it every day. This will help you get familiar with the internet, with corresponding with people online, researching and writing unique content and experimenting with monetization. Just don’t do it for the money for at least 6 months. That way you won’t face so much frustration up front and won’t be tempted to quit when the money doesn’t come (and it wont).

Also, get involved in some online forums, read free newsletters and ebooks and blogs like this one regularly. You’ll be amazed at what kind of information you’ll be able to find for free.

The easiest way to make money online is to give yourself an easy target to meet in the beginning and grow it from there.

What’s The Easiest Way To Make Money Online? is a post from: Make Money Online | Making Money On The Internet

If that’s a question you’re asking yourself right now then I think I have an answer for you, but it may not be what you want to hear. Making money online is a way of life for a lot of people, many working from home and some running fulltime online businesses with incredible success.

If you’re wondering, Can I make money online? then yes you can. But how much you can make and how long it’s going to take you are questions you may have to wrestle with as well. For a lot of new internet marketers (a term I’m going to use for people making money online) there is a very steep learning curve – one that not only requires the gaining of a lot of knowledge by study, but also experience that can only be gained through action and experimentation, often very frustrating experimentation.

My advice to you would be to try to set some very basic goals to start out with, particularly goals that don’t rely on you actually making any money.

For instance, I’d recommend you set yourself a goal to learn how to set up a wordpress blog and commit to posting to it every day for 3 months. If you need help here I’ve written about some free wordpress video tutorials that can get you started. Learning about blogging is a fantastic introduction to web publishing and will give you experience in a lot of aspects of being able to make money online.

From blogging you’ll learn the importance of writing useful, unique content and you’ll get an idea of how to track your visitors use of your site and interract with them. Being a successful internet marketer is 20% technical skill (you can make a lot of money online without understanding a lot about web programming and the ins-and-outs of computers) and 80% marketing skill. You need to know what people are searching for online in terms of things that they have as problems and need solutions for. Targeting these niches in particular and solving the problems people struggle with is where the real money is.

So… Can I make money online? Of course. But don’t make it your primary goal from the beginning. Learn the ropes and take making money online one step at a time.

Can I Make Money Online? is a post from: Make Money Online | Making Money On The Internet

Click here to go straight to the WordPress Video Tutorials download page.

Seriously, these WordPress video tutorials are impressive.

They will take you through the process of doing keyword research, registering a domain name, hosting, installing and setting up your WordPress blog, adding security to your blog, cleaning and customizing your blog, adding themes/plugins/widgets, autoposting, adding users, creating sales pages – everythings you could want to know about using WordPress to host your own money making blog.

Thanks Peter.

Free WordPress Video Tutorials is a post from: Make Money Online | Making Money On The Internet

Creator: Michael Jones

Check it out with this link now if you want to skip the review and just see what it is first (opens in new window).

Here’s a quick summary of the benefits listed on the sales page (in Michael’s words, not mine):

1. How to quickly and easily build a list of hungry subscribers that are LOOKING to buy what you’re selling…
2. How to use Twitter to get a ton of visitors that are ready to buy your stuff every single day (and automate the process)
3. The big secret you can use with your domain name to snatch some of the best free, targeted traffic you’ve ever seen
4. Why the only way to get the real, serious profits is to automate
5. How to know when your follow up emails are having the EXACT effect you want
6. Where to get hardcore buying traffic
7. The secrets behind settup up an online business that makes you fat chunks of cash even while you sleep
8. How to easily track the results of your business
9. The stupid simple techniques you can use to build a massive list of focussed buyers

In short (and in my own words)  “The Cash Code” is a good product for people who want to learn to make money online with their own product and avoid risking dependence on affiliate programs (that you can sign up for and work on for months – only to find they disappear before you have a chance to cash in on your efforts! This is a genuine problem that I totally agree with)

Can you trust it?

Well, Michael Jones has had a string of highly successful Clickbank products  so I guess this says that Michael is successful himself and so qualified to teach about making money online at the very least, but when I see a new product released by a guru that appears similar to previous offerings I’m always sceptical of getting any added value from something new.

This was actually my first thought when I learned Michael was releasing The Cash Code. I mean, how much new information can the guy really add to what he has already published on affiliate marketing?

On the positive side, despite the fact that Michael Jones has previously released a number of affiliate marketing products he’s tried to take a different approach with The Cash Code. The purpose of this product is not to teach you how to be a successful affiliate, but takes you to the other side of the equasion by showing you how to create your own products and market them through affiliates.

It ‘promises’ to teach you how to create and launch a product in ‘only 2 hours’ and make a six-figure income – which is really a bit rich and shouldn’t be take too seriously, particularly if you are new to the game. However if you take the course serioiusly you can learn the process behind creating digital products and selling them online quite effectively.

The best part of The Cash Code is the it’s trying to teach you how to create your own ‘unique’ products, rather than just guiding you through the process of rehashing PLR content.

Whether you are then able to get your product in front of ‘hungry buyers’ is debatable if you are a newbie.

The processes he explains are effective, don’t get me wrong, but probably a bit advanced for someone just starting out in the game.

Perhaps if you’ve previously read Michael’s affiliate marketing courses and you’re familiar with advanced traffic generation techniques this new course could be really helpful, but then if you can generate a good income from affiliate marketing I have to wonder why you need to go about the (tedious – yes I’ve created products and know how boring and painstaking it can be) process of making something of your own.

Michael Jones is a successful internet marketer and the fact that The Cash Code is already selling well is testament to his ability to teach you how to make money with your own product, but as an established ‘guru’ he has a lot more resources available to him to launch a product successfully.

But really, anyone with a bit of knowledge of traffic generation and copywriting can launch a successful product of their own with just a little bit of common sense.

I don’t want to knock The Cash Code by pointing this out – it is a good product if you’re looking for some help in getting your own product out there – it just depends on where you are.

Personally, if you haven’t bought much internet marketing material before and you’re looking for a recommendation of something you can trust I will stand by The Cash Code and Michael Jones for these reasons.

Michael has a great reputation, creates excellent products and is very professional, and The Cash Code is reasonably priced at $77, but it’s still in the high-end range.

Here’s what I’d recommend: if you’ve been working on making money online with internet marketing for a while and you’re struggling to make a decent income from affiliate marketing (and you can afford $77) I’d recommend you seriously consider The Cash Code. But, make sure you work through it very carefully and apply everything, even if it means you have to stop and learn some more about things from other sources on the way. And don’t be afraid to ask for a refund if you seriously try and don’t succeed. There are a lot of outrageous promises on the sales page and as with all high-end products, if you aren’t satisfied you’re justified in getting a refund.

At the very least it has the potential to motivate you to try something different and you should be at a level where you can understand the principles of marketing he explains, and let’s face it, motivation is one of the most valuable things you can buy sometimes.

==> Click here to check it out for yourself.

Having said that, if you’re really new to marketing it’s probably beyond you and you would be better off spending your $77 on 2 or 3 more basic products or a few ‘experimental’ websites and hosting for a few months. You could even try dedicating some time to online forums and until you know how to generate at least a trickle of consistent traffic.

Anyway, if you’ve got any thoughts from your own experience leave a comment. It’s always great to get a lot of different feedback from people in these reviews.

The Cash Code – By Michael Jones is a post from: Make Money Online | Making Money On The Internet

(I know, that sounds pretty strange on a site called Make Money Online 4 Idiots!)

I hate to break it to you, but ‘make money online’ is the mantra of the 99% and what it usually means is ‘muck around online’!

Trying to ‘make money online’ will rarely get you into the top 1%. Retaining this mentality is highly anti-productive and ineffective in the higher stakes rooms and won’t serve you or help at all at the top of this industry.

To achieve a really significant income online you need to start thinking focus, systems and profit. This means you are going to have to commit to spending your time and money to create something of lasting value that works in a well managed way; something that creates more revenue than it costs to run day-in and day-out, even without you.

Call it a business, an enterprise, an empire, or whatever you want. If commitment and discipline are the barriers that separate the 90% from the 9%, then focus, systems and profit are the barrier that separates the 9% from the top 1%.

The good news is that they are not as hard to crash through as you might think.

I credit the paradigm shift in my own thinking about how to ‘make money online’ for being responsible for propelling me from part-time mediocrity and failure into full-time success.

For me it all started with a plan.

I had been doing a lot of business consulting offline for years before I started to investigate how to ‘make money online’. In fact I’m a qualified lawyer, accountant and MBA. At first I thought it would be a great way to supplement my salary, but I didn’t actually make any money for years and was on the verge of being disillusioned about the whole industry. I had made my commitment and had discipline, but not enough focus to generate the income that I knew could be made and I really wanted.

Finally I realized that although I consulted with offline business owners and encouraged them to write a business plan, set goals and create management systems – I wasn’t doing any of those things myself. I expect that if I was able to trace back and find the exact trigger that transformed my online fortunes, I would find it was the business plan that I decided to write one morning for my ‘how to make money online’ activities.

Writing a business plan doesn’t have to be a complex process for an online business because you are not limited to a small geographical area and faced with the same start-up and operational costs that a store or a restaurant in the bricks-and-mortar world would need to consider.

In the beginning something very simple will suffice. In fact I think my first business plan fit on about half a sheet of paper.

An example online business plan

Description

Summary: My business is going to sell weight loss videos online

Structure: Sole trader

Business type: retail (online store with one product)

Product/Service

Summary: Exercise videos for very fast weight loss.

Benefits: fast results, weight loss, proven methods

Demand: growing every day (unfortunately)

Unique selling proposition: maximum weight loss/minimum time

Location: www.myweightlossvideos.com

Marketing plan

Customers: males age 18-30 with between 10-20 kg excess weight.

Market growth: fast (unfortunately)

How I’ll attract market share: subscriber list and joint ventures

Pricing strategy: Above competition – $197 (bonus personal consultation)

Competition

Direct competitors: www.weightlossfast.com, www.weightlossquick.com

Indirect competitors: www.weightlosssecrets.com, www.weightlossfacts.com

Competitor’s growth: steady/hard to determine

Competitor’s weaknesses: not very actively marketing (eg. no newsletter)

Competitor’s strengths: good website design, lots of good content

Product differentiation points: no video content

Advertising and promotion: joint ventures, blog (seo), ezines

Financial management

Start up budget: $1600 – domain, hosting, autoresponder, website, solo ads

Ongoing monthly costs: $60 – hosting, autoresponder, solo ads

Affiliate commissions: 75%

Accounting system: excel spreadsheet

Target profit: $10,000 per month before tax.

Business management plan

Staff: me, some outsourcing later on

Duties: writing emails, seeking joint ventures, personal consultations

The thing about having a written business plan is that it enables you to create a powerful focus for the application of your time and money. Having decided what you are going to do, you can get to it and confidently reject every other opportunity that comes along. Until you achieve your current goals and ambitions you can know that you have already worked out that being successful in these alone can make you a good profit and a lot of success.

Note: If other ideas or opportunities come along note them down for something to do later. There will always be opportunities. They will still be there when you’ve achieved your goals in the current opportunity, of if not, new ones will come along to fill the void. This is the aspect of discipline that you must have to ‘make a profit online’. Without it you are essentially going into a storm of unlimited opportunities surrounded by tough competition and you are going to get pummeled.

Again, this is a very simple ‘starter’ plan to get you going. As you progress I would STRONGLY advise you to make sure you update your plan on a regular basis so that it grows with your business. You might even consider doing a basic business community college course or search online for some resources to help you take it up from level to level as you progress.

My SWOT

Here’s another example of a powerful, yet simple planning and analysis process that can help you to focus clearly on your goals…

For any of you unfamiliar with corporate business terminology a SWOT analysis is an exercise in which you look at your goals as opportunities and analyze them in reference to the strengths, weaknesses and threats that can either support or hinder the achievement of those goals.

If you’re an MBA then you might look on this quick version of a SWOT as being somewhat oversimplified, but I’ve found that in building a new business it is better to stay away from the complexities to begin with because these can stifle creativity and momentum.

I’ve deliberately included this simple exercise and the preceding basic business plan in an effort to show you that it can be easy to create a massive boost to your initial business getting out of the blocks without getting caught up in the detail.

To help you see how this works, I’ve included the goals and analysis that I wrote when I started my first venture with a view to going full-time.

GOALS

1. Goals for the next 2 years: start a well planned, structured and systemized full-time online business and build it up to $10,000 per month profit. Re-invest my surplus income in the business.
2. Goals for the next 5 years: build my online business up to $80K per month profit and invest surplus income in a range of investments.

SWOT

Strengths: 2 years of learning and experimenting in internet marketing leading to a mentorship and a solid understanding of the methodology. An empowered mindset. $50,000 available credit.

Weaknesses: personal – impatience with the building process; businesses – not currently earning much income; time – working full-time limits the time available to work on the business.

Opportunities: build a $1million dollar online business and invest surplus income to become financially free.

Threats: possible changes in global financial conditions and resultant uncertainty; doubters among family and friends.

That was it. Now I am still working towards achieving these goals but I have already gone full-time and now I’m devoting the income I earn from the business and the new time I have available to building on those goals I set.

I have found that these goals acted as if they were a stick of dynamite for me and my business when I wrote them. They gave me a powerful catalyst for firing up my motivation and desire and they clearly showed me that I had opportunities that were highly worthwhile pursuing and strengths sufficient to propel me towards them.

A Winning ‘Make Money Online’ Mindset is a post from: Make Money Online | Making Money On The Internet