| A Beginners Guide to Making Money on the Internet |
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This article is an introduction to internet marketing for the beginner. It cites the three most popular ways to make money on the Internet and describes how they work. It also lists the pros and cons of each. The three ways to make money covered in this article are by use of Adsense, affiliate marketing and via eBay.
If you've ever thought about making money at home via Internet Marketing, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that you can make money on the Internet. The bad news is that it's not as easy as some "Gurus" would have you believe. There are a number of ways to make money on the Internet. For the beginning internet marketer or newbie, there are three easy ways. The first is by creating a website with Google Adsense on it. The second is by becoming an affiliate marketer. And the third is through eBay. Google Adsense Google allows anyone with a legitimate website to add what it calls Adsense to the site. If you're not familiar with Adsense, it's those little three line ads you see on web pages - a headline, a couple of text lines and then a URL. The way you make money with Adsense is by placing the ads on your website. Then, when someone clicks on one of these ads, you earn money. The amount you earn depends on how much the advertiser has to pay for that click. Some of these Adsense clicks pay $2 or more, while others pay as little as $0.05 or less. To get started, you apply with Google for an Adsense account. Once you're approved, you can choose the size of your ad units and place them on the pages of your website. Affiliate Marketing Affiliate marketing is when you sell someone else's product for them. The way you earn money is that you get a commission on anything you sell for them because you have "marketed" the product on your site. For example, you could create a website extolling the virtues of natural cures with links to a website that sells vitamins, If you do your job right, the visitors who come to your site read your copy about these wonderful vitamins and then go to the seller's site and make a purchase. The best part of affiliate marketing is that all you do is the marketing. The company with the site that sells the product takes the orders, collects the money and ships the product. eBay If you've ever purchased an item through an eBay auction or a Buy Now, you already know half the story. The other half is, of course, selling something through eBay. The process is very simple and eBay will gladly walk you through it from start to finish. In short, you create a listing with a description of the item you're selling, set a starting price, and decide how long you want the auction to last. The pros and cons Without question, eBay is the easiest way to make money on the Internet. This is because the other two methods - Adsense and affiliate marketing - both require you to attract traffic to your website (more about this later). In comparison, eBay gets the traffic for you. The downside of eBay is that once you've sold all that stuff lying around your house, you have to find a steady source of products to sell. The simplest way to do this is via drop shipping where you find a wholesaler or distributor who will let you sell its products and will ship them to your customer for you. As indicated above, the weakness of affiliate marketing and Adsense and money-makers is that in both cases you must learn how to drive traffic to your website, a task that can be much tougher than the gurus would have you believe. Driving Traffic There are basically two ways to get traffic to your site. The first is called free traffic. One way to get free traffic is to write an article that ends with a link to your site. If a person clicks on the link and goes to your site, viola! You have free traffic as the only cost to you is the time it took you to write the article. The second way to get traffic to your site is called Pay Per Click or PPC. The prime example of this is Google's Adwords which turn into Adsense on other people's websites. Here, instead of earning money whenever someone clicks on the ad, you pay for the click, hence the term pay per click. Without going into all the details of PPC, suffice it to say that it can get very expensive and should be approached with caution. A niche, a niche, my kingdom for a niche You can make money on the Internet. In fact, there are people sitting at their computers as you read this article who are making thousands, I'm not kidding, thousands of dollars a day. But to do so, you must first spend time learning the ins and outs of Internet marketing and you must find a profitable niche, i.e., a group of people who have money and a desire to buy the kind of product or service you're selling. For example, there are people out there whose computers have become as slow as ice melting, and would gladly pay $29, $39 or more for a quick fix - hence this represents a great potential niche for affiliate marketing or even a website. |