• how to build a website that sells
• how to rank well in the search engines
• how to drive traffic to the website via social media
• and more!

As word got out that I was doing these things for myself, an interesting thing happened.  “Real”, off-line businesses started to ask me to help them with their companies and their internet marketing strategies.

So, I tabled the development of my own passive income streams and started helping other companies.  This is often referred to as “offline marketing”…doing internet marketing services for local businesses.

Later, I hit an obstacle that is common to many small businesses.  The energy required to maintain the sales engine was very high.  Building sites that I can fire up and let run on their own?  No problem.  Having to sustain a list of calls, prospects, doing presentations, closing, executing, all while trying to keep the pipeline full of new customers?  Problem.

The beauty of making money online for myself  is the simplicity of it.  I can work on it at MY pace, not someone else’s.  That is very freeing.  And the idea that most of us pursuing online marketing really cherish is the idea of PASSIVE income…money that comes in without doing extra work.

I have websites that make money each and every month, that I haven’t TOUCHED in over two years.  THAT is passive income, and THAT is what online marketing is all about!  No pursuing customers every day.  No spending 80% of the time contacting new prospects.  Take that 80% of your time, and pour it into building the next money-maker, or optimizing an existing one!

First, I used eBay.  Then, the $7 script.  Then Rapid Action Profits.

I won’t even talk about selling digitally on eBay any more, since the glory days are past.  And the headache I always had with the 7 dollar script and RAP are the setup…particularly the template editing to make the pages look right.  AND, it’s always been difficult to integrate those sales platforms into WordPress, which is what I build all my sites in (because of how easy it is, and because of the Google love).

FINALLY someone built what I’ve been requesting for a long time…a WordPress plugin that handles digital sales/delivery/security AND handle the affiliate side of things.

I don’t have to explain the power of having an affiliate program for your digital product, right?  I mean…having OTHER people sell for you…why NOT give them a cut of each sale?

Check out this WordPress Affiliate Program plugin called WP Instant Pay.  It is phenomenal.  It is SO easy, SO well-documented, and I can just plug it in and start selling on my WP sites!

When I found out this was coming out, I actually delayed a few projects I was working on until it was released.  I knew that it would be worth the wait, rather than hassle with RAP or $7 script.  And I was right.

Check it out!  And start selling through your WP sites, and recruiting your affiliates!!

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“.

In those first days, I would not spend a DIME out of pocket to make money.  Sure, sure, NOW I outsource coding work or SEO work to my Virtual Assistants in various parts of the world.  NOW I buy domain names like they are going out of style.

But when first starting out, I didn’t have the bankroll to invest like that.  And it was frustrating because all of the folks that were “making it” were all spending money.

It’s NOT true that to make money you have to spend money.  It does make it alot easier to make more money faster if you have some to spend…but if you don’t have anything to start with, how do you do it?

Here’s a quick list of ways to make money without buying domain names, or paying web hosting fees:

1. Leverage the free sites like Blogger, Squidoo, WordPress.com and HubPages.  You may be limited to a certain look or functionality, or may be at risk for having your site taken down if it’s too spammy.  But, it’s FREE.  And if you are doing IM correctly, there won’t be a reason for them to take it down.
2. Start with Adsense.  It’s the easiest way to start making money.  Affiliate marketing takes time to figure out.  With Adsense, it’s only a matter of having it on your site and getting traffic.  With Affiliate marketing, you have to do that, AND pick a good-converting product with an affiliate organization that is trustworthy.
3. Create your own content and publish it on Kindle.  Obviously this only works if you can write, but chances are you know SOMETHING that people would be interested in reading about.  Ask yourself, “what would someone be willing to take me out to McDonald’s to learn about?”  Whatever it is that you know in your head that is worth a burger, someone may buy for $7 or so on Kindle.  It adds up.
4. Lurk on the WarriorForums.  The War Room is worth paying for, but since this post is about free stuff, you will learn a TON of stuff from the site.  Even now that I don’t spend as much time there, since I’m actually DOING IM, and not just talking about it, I still go there weekly to be inspired.  Read, read, read.  Don’t pay for the guides…most of the guides are a distillation of what you can learn for free.  (Buying the right ones CAN be helpful because it clarifies and focuses you, but you’re trying to do this with no money, right?)
5. Offer your services for sale.  You can do this on the WarriorForum, or places like ODesk, eLance, getafreelancer.com, etc.  You can learn as you go, and earn as you go.

Remember…treat it like a business.  Put the money that you make away.  Then you can start investing in the easier ways to make money, which will include paying for domain names, hosting, an autoresponder like AWeber, etc.

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.

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!

When starting out with paid traffic, one question that arises is, “Do I direct link to the affiliate page or create my own landing page?”

To create a Google ad, you have to put in both a “destination URL” and a “display URL”. The display URL is the one that shows on the ad. The destination URL is the link that the click will actually follow. Google’s Terms of Use state that the domain on which the visitor ultimately sees after clicking should match the display URL. So, for example,

Direct linking is when the URL that your Google Ad points to is the one that belongs to the affiliate themselves. For example, if I were creating an add for the “Top Secret Magic Code” product at Clickbank, I can create the ad with a destination URL of http://makewowg.magiccode.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=MAGAD, but I MUST set the display URL to www.topsecretmagiccode.com, since that’s where the person clicking ends up. This is called direct linking. I’m using my ad to drive traffic directly to the affiliate page.

The main advantage of direct linking is that you don’t need any programming experience to build your own landing page, and don’t need to take the time or invest the cost in creating your own page. For some folks, it’s just easier to create a bunch of ads pointing directly to the affiliate page and let it go.

However, there are three disadvantages of direct linking:

1. ad rotation
2. direct traffic
3. some affiliate products restrict direct linking

Google rotates ads that point to the same display URL. If you and 99 other folks are advertising a specific affiliate product, and are all using direct link, you dilute the number of times your ad will be seen. Google will only return one ad per display URL when a search is performed.

Also, a good number of web users will type in the display URL directly to their browser rather than click an ad. (I have two case studies I’ll talk about in another article that prove this.) I’m not sure all the reasons why they do this, but some users are wary of ads. They figure that if the site is legitimate, typing the URL directly will take them there. That means you’re losing revenue by sending folks directly to the affiliate without ever having your tracking cookie planted.

Lastly, you need to check with the terms for your specific affiliate product. Some don’t let you direct link at all, and others restrict the keywords on which you can bid.

With those factors in mind, Direct Linking is already at a disadvantage over pointing clicks to a landing page of your own. There are several other advantages of using your own landing page which I’ll discuss in another article.