1. create site with ads or affiliate links
2. drive traffic to said site
3. PROFIT!!

Oh, if it were only that simple!

First, the creation of content for the site can be tedious…especially if it’s in a niche about which you only know a little.

Second, driving traffic is a function of having good content on the page, as well as a good backlinking strategy.  And one of the best backlinking strategies is article marketing.  But it can get tiresome writing article after article.

I know from experience, as well as from lurking on lots of Internet Marketing forums, that CONTENT IS KING, but Content Creation is one of the biggest hills to climb for most folks.

So I created “Uniquification“.

It is a program that helps people who need content.  Whether it’s writing posts for their blog or website, writing articles for article marketing, or creating a “free report” to give away for an opt-in, this program can help make content creation FAST AND EASY!

Check out “Uniquification: Unique, Original Content…Fast“.

For the last 10 years I’ve been a Data Analyst at one of the nation’s largest banks. But I have finally cut back my hours to 20 per week, since my “hobby” of making money online is earning me enough to do so.

It’s not as satisfying as quitting altogether. But, I like what I do at the bank, the pay is good, and the benefits are phenomenal. Ie: I still have my and my family’s health care benefits paid for from the bank…that’s almost worth working 20 hours per week for anyway.

I know I’m one of the “few” lucky ones. My wife does not work. Scratch that…my wife is a stay-at-home mom (so she works ALOT…she just doesn’t get paid for it). My kids have me around a lot now, which is especially good during the summer. There’s nothing like stepping away from the computer for a bit in the afternoon to play with my 8-year-old son!

I love the freedom. And I know many of you who read this blog are looking for the same thing.

So here are my pieces of advice of how to get here:

1. Diversify. The expression “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” is especially true in the world of Internet Marketing. Google changes it’s search algorithms, and it’s Adsense and Adwords policies which might make it harder on IMers. eBay is notorious for making on-the-fly changes to its affiliate program. Other affiliate programs change, products change, niches change. I’d rather have a little income from each of these than all my income from one.

2. Work. If you treat Internet Marketing like a part-time hobby, it will treat you the same. If you treat it like a business, it can be a business for you. People think that IM is EASY (mostly because all of the people trying to sell internet marketing products are trying to convince you this is true). But, the few who actually make enough from it to earn a living will all tell you the same thing: it takes work, like any other job. (Unless they’re trying to sell you something.)

3. Go Offline. Once you get your feet wet and start making some money on the internet for yourself, find a way to help other people in real life do the same. The education you give yourself by building your own websites, doing your own SEO, etc., puts you WAY AHEAD of the average business owner. And those folks are willing to pay you a premium to help them do what you have been doing.

4. Plug the holes. Find the things you are really good at, and things you really aren’t good at. Be honest. Then find a way to plug the holes…to get the things done that you aren’t good at. It might mean being willing to pay someone (outsourcing anyone?), but if a little out of your pocket keeps you productive on the things you are good at, it’s worth it.

5. Test and Measure…EVERYTHING. Test ad copy on your sales page. (Split test with Google Web Optimizer.) Test your Adwords ads. Measure conversion rates. When you pick a product to target, pick several in the same niche and horse-race them. You can get a huge increase by focusing 80% of your effort on the 20% of the products that are the most profitable.

6. Have a Supportive Spouse. Not much more I can say about that!

Well, those are a few pearls of wisdom from someone who has been in the trenches. I hope it helps those of you starting out on this journey.

But it’s a common problem.  You want to make your blog profitable, but you run out of ideas about which you can write.

I have developed a package called Uniquification which solves two problems:

1. getting over writer’s block and finding topics to write about
2. generating unique content quickly and easily

In fact, I’ve created an entire blog over at No Duplicate Content (www.noduplicatecontent.com) to help document strategies to solve those two problems.

If you have trouble coming up with you next post, or if you don’t know what to write, check out the ideas at No Duplicate Content.  The Uniquification report is free!

Here’s a taste:

• special searches you can do for your niche to find hot topics
• one of the biggest sources of content that is NOT indexed by the search engines, but easily lends itself to creating blog content
• how to convert exisiting content on the web into your own, original, unique content for your site

I even have some macros that you can run in your web browser that automate some of the brainstorming and content-gathering.

So check it out, and drop me a line to let me know how you like it!

Uniquification – Generating Unique Content Quickly and Easily

Oh…these ideas apply to way more than just blogs.  If you are doing article marketing or want to develop your own free report (or paid report!), these ideas will help!

The strategy:

Use a plugin called KB Linker to automatically link certain keywords in your blog to eBay (using your affiliate ID, of course!).

KB Linker lets you create pairs of keywords and links. You create a list of these pairs in the plugin’s configuration panel. Then every time that keyword appears anywhere in your blog, it will be hyperlinked to the URL you have designated.

For example, in the configuration panel you can set it up like: google->http://www.google.com
wordpress->http://www.wordpress.com
make money->http://www.how-to-make-online-money.com
Digital Point Forum->http://forums.digitalpoint.com

etc.

With the configuration above, any time the word ‘wordpress’ appears in a post, it will be hyperlinked to WordPress.com. Any time the phrase “Digital Point Forum” appears in your blog, it would be linked to those forums.

You can understand how this would be useful for making money, once you start tying keywords in your blog to your affiliate links.

The difficulty with eBay is that its links are so long and convoluted.

The tool:

So, I used Microsoft Excel to create a tool that allows me to input my Campaign ID, keywords I want linked, and phrases for eBay to search, and the tool creates the right output to paste into KB Linker.

For example, I want the word “wristwatch” to be linked to an ebay search for “rolex watch” everywhere in my blog, or the word “Canon” to be linked to the ebay search for “digital camera -battery”.

You can grab the tool (an Excel file) from:

eBay KB Linker Tool

http://www.how-to-make-online-money….aykblinker.xls

Summary:

• Install KB Linker plugin in your WordPress Blog.
• Grab the free copy of the excel tool (donations welcome)
• Use the tool to create a long list of keyword/link combos.
• Copy/Paste the list into KB Linker.
• Enjoy the new traffic coming to eBay from your Blog!

In the past, people have sold lists of high-paying Adsense keywords, or built tools to figure out the best ones.

Now, Google itself has created the tool.

Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool provides all the information you need.

Go to that site, and ignore the idea of putting in a website URL to check.  Just click the link at the bottom that says ‘see top keywords across all categories’.

Then browse the categories on the left side to your niche and the results are displayed to the right.  You will see the phrase, expected number of searches per month, and suggested bid value.  Keep in mind that the bid value is for Google’s Search Results Adwords, which cost more than Content-Network bids (which is what you’d get paid with Adsense on your site).

But still…even though you might not make that dollar value per click, you can get an idea of what the high-paying phrases are.

You can even export the results into Excel (well…a .csv file which can be opened by Excel).  In Excel, you can use the AutoFilter option to eliminate phrases with low searches, and sort so you can see the highest-paying phrases at the top.

I know I plan on using this new Google tool.  I’m sure once you start to use it, you’ll find other uses, too.  (HINT:  spy on authority sites in your niche to find relevant keyword phrases)

I was one of the casualties hurt by eBay’s decision.  I had an ebook that had been selling well every month.  For a while it was making me a ton of money.  As more competition crept in, it ended up making me only a small amount.  However, the ebook was loaded with other affiliate links…so I was happy anytime someone took it, even if I was just barely breaking even.

So, when eBay decided that they weren’t going to allow Digital Delivery, I pulled down my auctions, and my ebooks sat on my hard drive.

Until now.

I received an email newsletter the other day with information on a new book about using Kindle to sell ebooks.  Now, I get about half a dozen newsletters a day, usually with some pitch to some product to help me make more money…and I usually pass, since they are nothing new.

But Kindle Secrets was different for me.  It gave me the tools I needed to start selling my ebooks again…with LESS effort than eBay. With eBay I had to go in every two weeks and setup a bunch of auctions.  With Kindle, I set it up one time and I’m done.

Not only does Rebecca teach how to use Kindle to start moving your ebooks (with the power of Amazon and all its affilates behind you!), but she provides some excellent ways to find content for new ebooks!  I’m talking EASY (and FREE!) ways of getting a ton of new content for whatever niche you have.

I’m now taking that tool and creating new ebooks every day!  And I now have a world of blog content using the techniques she shows in her book.

The Kindle Secrets guide is an awesome way to help you create a digital delivery network of your own.  Combining those strategies with some of the other strategies here on this blog, and you can really jumpstart your online revenue stream!  Check out Kindle Secrets!

Video Proof:

If you want to see a really quick video that gives a great overview of how this works, check it out:

Video of the Kindle Secret

Let me share a strategy that I use from time to time. I don’t do it every day, but it only takes a few minutes. So if I have a few spare minutes, I’ll use this to make some money for free, very quickly!

I’m assuming that you have a blog with Adsense. (If you don’t, read the Step-by-Step Profit Guide from the menu at the top. It tells you how to setup a free blog and put Adsense on it.)

So, how do you get a surge of traffic to your site, spending very little time on it?

Three quick steps:

1. Hot Keywords – go to Google Hot Trends
2. Thought Stringing
3. Social Bookmarking

Hot Keywords – Go to Google Hot Trends.  It shows what people are searching for RIGHT NOW…the top 100 phrases by search volume.  (It’s updated every hour or two, and tells when the last update was.)  See any words that look interesting to you?  See anything that is related to a product?  Keep in mind that many of the searches will be of celebrities.  But you can find hot news stories, or hot products that are being searched heavily.  Something got mentioned on CNN or Oprah and everyone’s checking it.  You can click on the keyword phrases Google lists to see what the top news and blog articles are.  (Hint:  you have almost instant content.  Read a few of the articles and restate them in your own words for unique content relevant to a hot topic!)

Thought Stringing – Thought Stringing is the process of connecting related thoughts.  So, if a hot topic is the phrase “Madonna Divorce”, think about a thought that might be related to that phrase, or even use that phrase.  (You usually don’t want to copy that exact phrase because there will be WAAY too much competition for it.)  So, think about related phrases:  “madonna split up”, “madonna break up”, “madonna custody”, or think of a sub-phrase (one that contains the hot phrase.  it won’t get as much traffic, but will pickup some): “madonna divorce settlement”, “madonna divorce terms”, “madonna divorce agreement”, “madonna divorce rumors”…  The point about thought stringing is that you need to think like someone searching for information about the hot topic.  Pretend you just caught a snippet of the story on the news, or over-heard someone talking about the story.  If you wanted to learn more about it, what keywords would YOU use?  Chances are, others will, too.  (Maybe “madonna getting divorced”?) If you are stuck and have a mental block, you can use a tool like Keyword Elite, which lets you plug in a phrase and it comes up with thousands of related phrases very quickly.

Write a blog post on your blog, using your thought-strung keyword phrase as the title.  In addition to making it the title, make sure it appears in the first and last line of the blog post.  I prefer to re-type the title, and enclose it in <h1> header tags at the top. (That tells search engines that your page is primarily about this topic.)  I restate my conclusion at the bottom, using the phrase again, and surround that statement by <b> bold tags.

Almost there!  Now you’ve got good content about a heavily-searched keyword phrase…and a unique phrase that possibly hasn’t appeared on the web before, meaning less competition!

Social Bookmarking Marketing – copy the URL of your specific post (not just the main page of your blog), and head over to SocialMarker, and submit your blog to the major Social Bookmarking sites there.

Even if YOUR page doesn’t get in the top 10 of Google quickly, chances are good that a Propeller page or a Digg or Mixx page will!

It took me longer to type this article than it takes me to enact it.  I can literally check Google Hot Trends, find a keyword phrase I like, thought-string it, post about it, and crank it out through Social Marker in about 10 minutes total.  FREE!  NO COST to me other than that time.

My results from this have varied.  I’m not promising that you’ll get rich doing this all day long.  BUT, I will say that I’ve had hundreds to thousands of visitors hit my site within 30 minutes of me posting a new post, cranking out the Adsense revenue!!  With that volume of visitors, people WILL click some of your ads (assuming you’ve blended them properly, etc.).  AND, the cool thing is that somehow these hot topics have a way of re-surging.  For example, two weeks after I made one of these ‘quickie’ blog posts, after traffic has gone away (because it wasn’t a hot topic any more), all the sudden a bunch of visitors hit my page again.  Some news agency picked up the story in some remote place and re-published it, or it made it into a magazine article that just got delivered or something, and there was another surge.  Once you create that post, it NEVER GOES AWAY, and you own that little piece of virtual real estate.

Keep trying.  You will have varying results depending on how good you are at thought-stringing, keyword competition, value of the Adsense that appears on your blog, etc.  Eventually you will start to ‘fine-tune’ the hot phrases you pick.  You will find that some work easier than others.  You will start to look for phrase combos that likely haven’t appeared before.  For example, if a hot phrase is “Fannie Mae”, because it’s in the news…chances are that there are MILLIONS of pages with almost every conceivable phrase related to Fannie Mae.  But a phrase like “Dillon Suicide” (totally fictional, assuming Dillon is a famous actor), probably hasn’t appeared before, and you can thought-string from there to find a common phrase with little competition.

One final thought…if you are lucky, you will find keyword phrases that you can also tie to an affiliate product. As you are examining the keywords, look for product-based phrases (which is tough…most hot topics are people-oriented, like celebrities). Almost any product can be sold through an affiliate. If you belong to some of the affiliate networks, like Commission Junction or LinkShare, then many times you can add links in your blog posts to your affiliate product. Generally affiliate sales pay more than Adsense, which is why I mention this.

Anyway, I hope you understand this method for making free fast money using hot keywords. It works if you work it!

Recently, I decided to give my wife her own blog.  She’s big into gardening, and very knowledgeable about it.  So I bought a domain name, installed WordPress on it, and customized a template that would fit her style/personality well.

I created an introduction post, and a page with some book recommendations (using my Amazon affiliate code and a cool Carousel widget).

When I showed it to her, she was tickled pink!  It took me all of about 20 minutes to teach her how to login and make posts.

I have admin access, so if she writes a post that has content that can be naturally affiliate-linked, I add the links in there.  That way she doesn’t have to do any ‘coding’, or even know HTML.  She just writes posts about her favorite topic!  She’s having fun, and it’s created another income stream for us along the way.

Her blog is a Vegetable and Flower Gardening Tips blog, called Green Thumb Momma.  You can find it at http://www.greenthumbmomma.com.

So if you have loved ones or friends who would enjoy having their very own site to blog on, give them a blog!  Tell them you’ll take care of coding in the background!  It’s a win-win situation!

When I say “child labor” most of the time the immediate image that comes to mind is a sweat shop where poor kids are working in dangerous conditions. But what I’m talking about is legal, ethical, and the kid will probably like it!

“Content is King”, when it comes to Internet Marketing. But usually the folks who are doing Internet Marketing are so busy with the marketing that they don’t have time for the content.

Before you go paying good money for Private Label Rights articles, or paying someone to write blog posts for you, why not leverage some good, free content? Tap the content rolling around in your child’s head!

Children’s opinions matter. They matter because of the marketplace. Most content can be related to a child. Find out what yours thinks and blog about it…or better yet, get them to blog about it if they’re old enough to type in coherent sentences.

Don’t restrict your thinking to content related to Toys. That’s obvious. If you have a niche about toys you can regularly share your child’s opinions about them and have instant content. I’m talking about getting a child’s angle on other niches. Here’s a few examples of what I’m talking about:

• a niche about a hobby – get the child to talk about the hobby, how their parents got them started in it, what they like about it
• a niche about a product – find out what kids at school say about the product, crazy uses for the product (that only a kid could think of), etc.
• philosophical ramblings – explain deep thoughts to a child and get them to summarize it in their words.

Hopefully you could think about your particular niche and figure out your child’s perspective.  Heck, even something like ‘Global Warming’…if you had a blog about enviromental issues and could get your child to offer thoughts about it regularly, that could become a featured item that would draw visitors.  (You can just type it for them, using their exact words.)

It becomes even more useful if they’re old enough to type.  If you’re up for it, register a domain name for them, set up a blog, a cool-looking template, related to something that really interests them.  Put some ads on it (instruct them NOT to click them, ever), maybe create some pages with affiliate links, and let them do the rest.  Let them blog their thoughts, while you build traffic to it.  Then come back and show them while you insert some affiliate products.  Get them to review a product (from a teen’s perspective).

Bingo.  Free child labor.  Good, unique, relevant content.

There’s a well-known proverb: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” Basically what that means is to be wary of teachers or self-proclaimed ‘gurus’ that claim to know all the secrets and all the answers. ESPECIALLY when it comes to making money.

You’ll see many, many products on the internet offering ‘the secret’ to making online money. Ask yourself this question: “If this guy knows a secret to making thousands of dollars per day, why is he taking his time to teach others, instead of working his own system to make more?” Sometimes they anticipate this question and try to answer it in their sales letter. It usually is something like, “I’m so excited, I just had to tell someone!”, or “I sleep better at night knowing that I’ve helped others achieve their dreams.” Whatever.

The truth is that they know they can make lots of money by selling a product, and that many people trying to ‘get in the game’ will buy their stuff.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. And not that some of their products don’t have good information. In fact, it can be a service to compile tons of information from across the entire internet and put it in one place that’s easy to understand.

Before you buy any product about how to make online money, hop over to the DigitalPoint Forums or WarriorForum and do a quick search for the product name. Find out what the folks that are in the trenches actually say about the product first. If it still sounds helpful, go for it. Most of the time you’ll find that the information already exists out there (especially on those forums), and that it’s just not worth the money.

Lastly, you’re probably thinking, “OK, mister. Then why are YOU doing a website about making online money.” Glad you asked. That means you were paying attention!

I’m doing this site for two reasons:

First, I have 4-5 different friends of mine who are so interested in what I do that they are always asking me about how to optimize a page, how to build links, how to monetize a site, etc. It got tiresome answering the same questions over and over without one place to point them to. So I created a place where I can store all my links to useful places (like the aforementioned forums), a place that describes SEO, talks about link-building, keyword research, and all the other questions they ask. That’s how this site started. A dumping ground of all the stuff in my head so that I could explain to my friends what I do for a hobby.

Second, and I mean that it is the secondary, not primary reason, it is to make money. I’m always trying new methods, or tweaking existing tactics for making online money. I’m experimenting and testing. And this site is one of those tests. I figure, since I’m putting it up for my buds, other people might find it and maybe they’ll click an ad or buy an affiliate product. Maybe after I really build an all-encompassing site I might create an info-product and become a ‘guru’.

But for now, the reason I’m not here ‘teaching’ very much is that I’m busy ‘doing’. Aside from real life, I’ve been busy experimenting with some new Adwords tactics to drive affiliate sales, as well as testing out a new product that puts eBay links into a WordPress blog with ease. (It’s called phpBayPro, and my new test site is For-Sale-On-Sale.com.)

I’ll probably write again soon when I get some more definitive results from those two campaigns, though things are looking good for now.