What does work (part 1)

After all of the negativity of What To Avoid, you could be left thinking “Is there anything that DOES work to make money online”. Well there is good news and bad here!

The bad news is that the What To Avoid section can not possibly list everything that you should avoid. New schemes and programs pop up every day with lots of traps for unsuspecting people tied up nicely to look like great opportunities. Hopefully though, after reading the previous section, you will be more aware and be able to spot the bad ones more easily than you would have done before.

The good news is that YES there are good ways to make money online, many in fact. Some will be better than others, and different people will have different opinions on which are the best.

Ultimately though, this will be YOUR own little business that you will be building. YOU need to decide what you are more interested in or have better knowledge about. YOU have to make the decison about which opportunity to persue to make your money. I will merely guide you on what sort of thing will work and how best to maximise the opportunities that are available.

First and foremost you have to consider another golden rule:

Money cannot be created out of thin air. For you to make money, someone else has to spend it or lose it.

It seems simple, but too many people forget that simple rule and jump straight in to a ‘pie in the sky’ opportunity that promises them riches for doing nothing. You do nothing and you get nothing. To build an income I’m afraid you will need to actually put some effort, and maybe a small amount of money, into getting it started. That is the same with any business, not just an online business.

Simple businesses you can run without a website of your own:

Selling goods on ebay and other online auctions / sales sites.

Many people turned to ebay when the recession started to bite. Starting off with unwanted items around the house, they built up incomes and moved on to buying products to re-sell and keep their new incomes going. This is a fairly easy business to copy but you do need to do a bit of research into what products actually sell well, and what prices they usually sell for, before getting started. Jumping in with your eyes closed is a receipe for disaster.

If you’re thinking about selling something online but don’t quite know just ‘what’, you’re not alone. There’s a very lucrative business in selling items online and doing it is easier than you might think. You might think it’s something that’ll be logistically difficult but you might be in for a surprise when you read this post.

A dropshipping business can make a big difference for your ability to sell products people want for maximum profit in your pocket. A lot of people who are anxious to make money online know there is a lot of potential for selling things on the internet but the questions that arise make it seem like a pretty daunting process. Look at your options with online wholesale or dropshipping businesses.

When you want to sell something, you might think you need to inventory it, set up a warehouse, do product packaging and shipping and deal with accounting as well as post sales support. All those steps can really impact profit margins and make them pretty slim. It can also be an expensive proposition to set up.

Today, necessity for brick and mortar traditional selling with low margins and high effort are just not the norm any longer. Most that make money online do it through a dropshipping program which means no inventory, low to no investment up front, minimal cycles spent and maximum profit-earning potential. There are a lot of dropshipping and wholesale businesses to choose from and you can sell just about anything you can think of this way.

What is dropshipping?

In a drop ship environment, you send the item directly from the manufacturer (or distributor) to the buyer. Instead of warehousing and inventorying the item, you facilitate the sale and simply collect the profits.

Dropshipping vs. Wholesale

There are dropship vendors that will work with wholesaling companies and wholesalers that deal direct with end users as well. The scenarios depend largely on the type of agreement you arrange but it’s important to know that you don’t have to carry goods or have a warehouse and you can simply help to sell a product and collect the commission.

Dropshipping means that you are not handling the goods. Wholesale typically indicates you order an item, receive it into your inventory and then ship it to your customer. Wholesaling is profitable but often requires a large space, staff, investment and risk because of carrying stock.

How can you build a dropship business?

Many wholesale companies will work with those looking to do dropshipping from home to help you get your business off the ground. You can set up your own website with a URL of your own that you build with an online store. You can feed auctions such as from eBay or another wholesaler who will supply the goods and you simply get the people to buy. Many companies exist that can help you along such as: Worldwide Brands, Doba, Liquidation.com, Salehoo and others. Read some dropship directory reviews to find out which is the best scenario for you.

 

Affiliate sales on google and other websites.

It is not an easy job to create an out-of-world website to make a living online. Hence, if you have a look at the online blogs and forums, you will find out that people often ask a question like “How to make affiliate sales without a website?”

In a nutshell, yes it is quite possible to make a full-time income by working at home even with no website. Indeed, a promotion of a product or a service is all that you have to do in an affiliate program, if you intend to earn commission as a reward for helping the merchant to increase his sales.

So, what would be the optimal start right now?

To begin with, since ClickBank has more than 10,000 products that are top ranked based on the maximum sales and popularity, you could prefer to use it. When it comes to product selection, choose that kind of products that can fetch you more than $20 as a commission on each sale. You might not even get back your promotion cost, if you select some low commission products.

Based on a trial and error, I personally prefer to promote services that pay around $50-$70 per action. This will definitely wort the time and effort needed to achieve the success we are all looking for.

So, what would be now the second step after choosing your product?

You should use Pay Per Click ad strategy that is known as PPC advertising in order to drive visitors to your merchant home page and achieve sales through your hop-link. The PPC strategy, which was developed by Overture, is offered by most of the top search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN (now Bing).

Besides, I would recommend for you to use Google AdWords tool as it is also a good option to see how hard or easy the competition is in addition to have an idea how much expensive your cost per click is. In this context, a nickname or a certain ID will be provided for you when you sign for ClickBank. This link should be inserted in such a place where people would notice it and click on it.

And now, where should you insert your links?

If you were thinking where to insert the links obtained from ClickBank, then Blogs would be the best option. Indeed, blogs are the perfect marketing tool areas for inserting your hop-links. Visiting the websites of various blogs and finding out the ones that are frequently used by the people will also find you solutions for where to insert affiliate links.

This is not a tough job to do, if you search diligently and patiently. You will also be able to identify the best blogs you can insert affiliate links on if you must allot some time for searching and have a look at what other people are saying on their forums.

But how should you write your ads?

Writing a PPC ad with a catchy headline and posting it to a blog will be the easiest affiliate marketing method. To find the best keyword phrases, which will suit the product you are promoting, you might consider using Wordtracker. Wordtracker offers you one week as a free trial and then you will start to pay your monthly payments that is really worth to do. However, use it intensively for one month and the keywords you get out will keep you busy for months.

Besides, having well chosen and narrowed keywords will also make people tempted to click on your ad. Placing your PPC as strategically in blog websites will no be a difficult task for you now as you know where to post affiliate links.

Should you use a certain text in your advertising campaign?

Yes, I would strongly recommend using certain text while advertising. Specifically, there are many words that can be used to have tremendous psychological effect on people such as discover, achieve, protect, lose, satisfy, enjoy, win, enhance, make, seek etc.

Make sure that you have used these words in your title to make it catchy. The benefits of your product that you are promoting should be described in the body of your PPC ad. It must also contain some action calls such as order, download, buy, etc.

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