People have been selling information for many years. The most obvious kind of information product is the traditional non-fiction book. But there are many other kinds of information products. Audio recordings, for example books on tape or on CD; videos – like “How to improve your golf swing” DVDs; software products; seminars, training and workshops.

People are always interested in learning new things. You might think that you can find out how to do pretty much anything on the Internet, and to some extent that’s true. But many people don’t have time to do the research to find and collate all the information they would need to learn to do something outside of their area of expertise.

If you can find out what people want to learn about, you can create a product and sell it to them. And these days, it’s easier than ever to find out what people are looking for. You’ve probably seen Google’s handy-dandy keyword suggestion tool. It pops up automatically while you’re typing in the Search box.

Give it a try. Go to Google.com, and type in how to followed by a space, and wait a second. Google shows you a list of suggestions like this:

You can dig deeper by adding a letter of the alphabet like this:

Look for interesting topics that you know something about. Here’s an example – I typed how to get more:

The next step is to find out how many people are searching for the keywords you’re interested in. Fortunately, Google comes to the rescue here as well. The Google External Keyword Tool is a free resource which can give you a good idea of the number of people searching for a particular topic every month.

Here’s the result of my search for how to get more facebook fans:

You can see that there are around 1000 people searching for that phrase every month. If you try similar phrases, like get more facebook fans and how to get more fans on facebook you’ll find that there are a few thousand people searching for ways to increase the number of fans they have on Facebook.

Another factor you need to take into account is the amount of competition for your chosen keyword phrase. There are two kinds of competition we’re interested in. Firstly, how many competing products are there? And secondly, how many competing web pages are there?

Competing products are a good thing. If people have created a product and are spending money to advertise it, it means that people in the target market are spending money, which is what you want. A quick way to check on competing products is by looking at the number of Adwords ads appearing for the search term:

You can see that there are only 2 competing ads. As a rule of thumb, before I spent the time and energy creating a product for a market, I would make sure there were at least 8 ads. Back to the drawing board!

We’ll take a look at competing websites in another post.

If you are looking for a simple step-by-step method to build an Online business, take a look at the Simple Cash Blueprint

A Simple Internet Business Model is a post from: Online Business Blog

If you’re prepared to put in a bit of work, some of these methods are very effective. Choosing a method which suits your abilities and your personality is important.

One example of an easy way to make money is simply posting on forums. You could be earning money from every forum post you make.

Another way to make money is from blogging. Once your blog is popular, you can earn money by allowing people to advertise on your blog.

There are of course more traditional ways to earn money online. Selling products is a good example – but these days, you can choose between selling digital products and physical products.

It’s not difficult to sell dozens, if not hundreds of products via an online e-commerce store. Or you could design a web page specifically to sell just one product.

If you’re going to be asking customers to enter their credit card information, you must be quite sure that you have a secure payment process to protect yourself from fraud, and to protect your customers as well.

Being dependent on one supplier, advertiser, web host or source of revenue is never a good idea. “Two is one, and one is none” is a good maxim to follow. Creating multiple streams of income is the answer. But it’s important to only work on one project at a time, making sure that it is creating an income before you start thinking about the next project.

If you have an online store, adding a blog could be a good idea. You can build a following and educate your customers and prospects by posting industry news, information and reviews about new products, case studies and helpful articles which explain how to use the products you sell and more. You can attract many more visitors to your website by publishing new articles regularly.

The key to success in any business is adding value to people’s lives. If you can explain the value that you offer, and communicate the passion you feel for what you do, you can’t go far wrong.

Download My Free Report – “15 Powerful Internet Business Models”

Online Business Models is a post from: Online Business Blog

People in the ‘Make Money Online’ niche tend to behave a little differently from those in, say, the knitting and scrapbooking niche. In some ways, they’re more jaded – they’ve fallen for all the Internet marketing tricks before. One time offers are no longer new and exciting. Countdown timers, viral videos, artificial scarcity – they’ve seen them all. They’re well aware that when they sign up for a free report, it’s not really free at all – they’re trading their name and email address for the shiny new thing.

So on the one hand, they’re hard to impress. On the other hand, they’re quite happy to sign up for your list, provided you offer some value. And if you can get them to stay for long enough to become aware of you, if they see your name in their inbox frequently enough for them to become familiar with you, after a period of time you can get them to trust you.

How do you get them to sign up in the first place? One of the quickest ways to build up a mailing list is through joint ventures. But when you’re just starting out, it’s unlikely that you’ll be in a position to offer any joint venture partners much of an exchange.

A possible solution to the ‘chicken and egg’ dilemma is the JV Giveaway. This is a special kind of joint venture arrangement where you add your gift – a special report, an ebook, a free membership – to a list of giveaways from other marketers. Each marketer then promotes the giveaway event, using their own mailing list, their blog and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. You get credited with the number of subscribers who sign up using your unique link (as well as for any contributors who sign up under you).

The important points are that everyone who wants to download your giveaway has to sign up to your mailing list, and that you benefit from the promotional efforts of all the contributors.

JV Giveaways generally last for a short period of time, perhaps 2 weeks. The rules regarding the type of gift you can offer, the number of subscribers you need to get signed up and your ranking in the list of giveaways varies from site to site. If you don’t have a mailing list, or you don’t think you’ll be able to get enough subscribers to sign up, you can buy your way in – a paid membership generally gives you a higher rank in the giveaway listings, and may also give you premium promotional slots.

I should warn you that by signing up – either as a contributor or as a regular subscriber – you’ll be facing a veritable barrage of product offers. You’ll get upsells, downsells, cross-sells, upgrades, hard sells and soft sells. If you can stay calm in the face of yet another marketer advising you that “There are 3 kinds of people in the world: Those who make things happen, those who watch things happen – and those who say “What happened?”, you’ll be fine.

If you’d like to see how a JV Giveaway works from the subscriber perspective, you can sign up for the Christmas JV Giveaway here.

If you’d like to give it a try as a contributor, here are some up-coming JV Giveaways:

The New Years Giveaway (Jan 1st 2010 – Jan 12th 2010)
The Peoples JV Giveaway 2 (Jan 1st 2010 – Jan 31st 2010)
Self Improvement Gifts 4 (Jan 5th 2010 – Jan 19th 2010)

Build Your Mailing List With JV Giveaways is a post from: Online Business Blog

A Product
Having your own product is one of the best ways to make money online. Sure, you can sell other people’s products – but having something of your own to sell is the core of a real business.

It means that you can start to build up your own army of affiliates to sell your product. It means that you can team up with other marketers in your niche to form strategic alliances and joint ventures. It means that you have control over how much money you make and how quickly you can access it – no more waiting 6 weeks for your affiliate payments.

How do you create a product? Well, an easy way to get started is with a resell rights product that you can sell as if it was your own. Many resell rights products come with pre-written sales letters which you can adapt and modify to suit your own business.

A Website
Yes, there are ways to make money without a website. Most of these involve getting people to click on your affiliate links on other people’s sites. But having your own site is much better than relying on other people – what if they change their rules, so that you can’t use affiliate links any more?

Setting up a website is easy and inexpensive. You can get multiple-domain web hosting (you’ll soon want more than just one website) for under $7 a month, and domain registration should cost you less than $10 a year.

If you bought a resell rights product with a sales letter, all you’ll need to do is copy and paste the sales letter to your hosting account – not much more difficult than managing files on your hard drive. Sign up with Plimus – it’s free – and you can create a secure order page, upload your product to their server so that they take care of digital delivery and create and manage an affiliate program. Plimus lets you decide who to accept as an affiliate (or accept anyone automatically), and you can set commissions for each affiliate independently, if you like.

Don’t forget to change your sales letter to link to the order page, and sort out any spelling mistakes or text that needs to be changed.

Traffic
Traffic is indisputably one of the keys to building a successful online business.

There are dozens of ways to get traffic to a website. Some of the most effective ways are article marketing, blogging and social networking. Build up a network of friends and followers on Twitter and Facebook, and you can set up your blog to automatically notify all of them when you post something new.

Getting hundreds – even thousands – of backlinks to your website is important both for traffic and search engine optimization.

With just those three elements – a product, a website and traffic – you have the beginnings of an online business that can grow into a successful long-term source of income.

PS If you’d like to find out more about resell rights products and how they can help you jumpstart your online enterprise, you can download a free copy of “Resell Rights Profits Exposed”. No opt-in required!

Make Money Online With Resell Rights Products is a post from: Online Business Blog

With websites, the process is similar. You can buy and “re-hab” an existing site, or you can build a brand-new site with the intention of selling it quickly. Some website flippers prefer to add content and backlinks so that their sites build in value over a period of a few months before selling them.

Like most things in life, it’s a little more difficult than it sounds. You’ll need to do some market research to find topics that people are willing to spend money on. If you don’t know how to set up a hosting account or register a domain name, you might want to start by building sites on free services like Weebly or Squidoo.

There are a number of sites on the Internet where you can buy and sell websites. A few are free; most charge a fee of some kind – either a listing fee or a success fee or both. Some of the sites make it extremely difficult to find out what fees are actually charged.

Here’s a short list:

• eBay.com – eBay is quite popular, although bid prices tend to be on the low side. Try the regional sites,eBay.co.uk, eBay.ca and eBay.com.au as well. eBay has a complicated system of listing fees and success fees, which I won’t get into here – there is no listing fee for the first 5 items in a 30-day period.
• DigitalPoint forumYou need to be a member for at least 14 days and have made 25 or more posts before you can post in the Buy,Sell or Trade Forum.
• The Warrior Forum has a sub-forum called Websites For Sale. There is a $20 listing fee and you must be a member of the WAR Room to post offers ($37 once-off).
• ViperSelling – geared towards selling viable online businesses older than 6 months. No listing fee, 10% success fee.
• SiteDeal – currently no listing or success fees.
• WebsiteAuctionHub
• Webmaster-TalkNo listing fees.
• WebmastersMarketplace – $5 listing fee, no success fees.
• WebsiteBroker.com – 90 day standard listing fee is $9.95. No success fee.
• Flippa – a spinoff from the SitePoint Marketplace. They charge a listing fee of $19.00 and a success fee of 5%, which can be split between the buyer and the seller.

Other resources:
SitePoint’s Ultimate Web Site Valuation Guide
Justin Brooke’s excellent (and free!) “Easy Website Flipping” report.

Website Flipping – What’s It All About? is a post from: Online Business Blog

Here are a couple of the methods that actually do work:

1. Create and sell your own information products. This is one of the best ways to make money, because you have complete control over all aspects of the process. You can decide what product to create, how much to sell it for and how to market it.

2. Affiliate marketing. A tried-and-tested way to make money, affiliate marketing generates huge incomes for those who have the time and the resources to do it properly.

3. Building Adsense websites. Adsense is still one of the most reliable and efficient ways to generate an income online. The key is to build sites which provide useful information, and build a steady stream of traffic.

4. Generating and selling leads. In the current economic climate, many businesses are desperate for a constant source of qualified business leads. Internet marketing techniques provide an efficient and inexpensive way to generate these leads.

5. Membership sites. A well-designed membership site is an exceptionally effective way to share your expertise, and get paid for it.

You can read a good deal more about these methods, and 10 more, in my free report“15 Powerful Internet Business Models”.All I ask in exchange is your name and email address!

5 Ways to Make Money Online is a post from: Online Business Blog

Some business owners are even starting to understand that it’s not really about the amount of traffic they get to their website, but about the number of visitors who convert into buyers.

And a standard Internet marketing tool, the autoresponder, provides an excellent way for any business to follow up with its customers – whether they’ve just bought a swimming pool or a can of paint.

What kind of services can you sell? Well, search engine optimization is a service which many websites desperately need. Increasing traffic through link building – article marketing, social media, bookmarking – is another useful service to offer. Copywriting, tracking and testing, and newsletter management are also in demand.

Business owners are interested in getting the Internet to work for them, but as a general rule they aren’t interested enough to do it themselves. They’d rather employ someone who has the knowledge and understanding of online marketing to handle their website promotion. And that’s where you come in.

At some point, you’ll probably find yourself explaining what it is you can do for your new small business client. Because they don’t have the background knowledge you have, it’s easy to lose them and be confronted by blank stares.

I’ve put together a short video training course aimed at small business owners, which is intended to give them a basic understanding of what Internet marketing is about. It’s pure information – no pitchfest here.

Take a look – hopefully you’ll learn something too!

It’s called eMarketing Essentials and there’s no charge – not even an opt-in.

Let me know what you think!

Selling Services to Local Businesses is a post from: Online Business Blog

With most paid advertising, once you stop paying, the traffic dries up.

On the other hand, with many of the ‘free’ traffic methods, the traffic keeps on coming once you’ve done the work – sometimes for months or years on end.

Article marketing is a great example. If you can get your articles distributed to a large number of other peoples’ sites, complete with links back to your website, they can provide traffic for a long time to come.

There are a number of article distribution services, such as ArticleMarketer and iSnare, which will distribute your articles to hundreds or even thousands of publishers. Some services, like Unique Article Wizard and ArticleMarketingAutomation, even allow you to create ‘spinnable’ articles, so that each publisher receives a unique version of each article.

But these services are not cheap. UAW is $67 a month now.

So I was quite surprised and excited to find a pretty good free article distribution service – Free Traffic System. This service distributes your spinnable articles to 30 keyword-targeted blogs.

The interesting thing about Free TrafficSystem is that it’s really free – there’s no upsell or premium service. They offer an affiliate program, but no money changes hands – you get extra link credits for each new member you bring in.

You also get credits for every WordPress blog you add to the system.

I have a couple of minor quibbles – the article spinning system is a bit clunky, and the process of selecting which blogs you want to distribute an article to is even clunkier (although most of the paid services don’t give you this much control).

But hell, it’s free.

Free Traffic is a post from: Online Business Blog

In the first six issues of my “Serious Income Secrets” newsletter, I’ll take you step-by-step through the process of building an online business – not a fly-by-night, “get rich quick” scheme, but a real, sustainable business which will generate an income for you for many years.

There’s nothing held back. I show you how to develop a plan, how to decide what to sell and who to sell it to and how to craft a sales letter for your product. I show you how to get traffic to your web page, and how to create a list of subscribers who’re eager to read what you have to say.

You can sign up for my newsletter by going to SeriousIncomeSecrets.com.
You’ll also get a copy of Terry Dean’s report, “Live The Internet Lifestyle – Retire Young and Wealthy”. Terry claims it’s worth $10.00, but I’ve paid more than that for ebooks which contained a lot less useful information. And you’re getting it for nothing. Bargain!

Serious Income Secrets is a post from: Online Business Blog

One way to solve this problem is for the business owner to identify the tasks which they do not want to do themselves – the repetitive, boring jobs which need to be performed consistently every day – and to get someone else to do them. In a brick and mortar business, this might mean hiring an employee. For online businesses, it usually means finding someone online.

Outsourcing repetitive Internet marketing tasks to someone thousands of miles away is easier than ever, thanks to websites like Elance.com, Guru.com and RentACoder.com.

I’m interested in learning about your outsourcing experience – maybe you could take a few minutes to fill in a quick survey for me, at OutsourceFreedom.com.

Does Outsourcing Work For You? is a post from: Online Business Blog