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.

Google provides a website with the 100 most-searched phrases every several hours. (http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends) I learned a long time ago that if a phrase appears on here, there’s something going on that’s making people search for this phrase. If you can get some content on your website that’s related to a hot trend phrase, you can get tons of traffic.

For example, from JUST ONE phrase I found on Hot Trends, I ended up with 5000 visits to one particular blog post one day, and several thousand each day for a while after that. I was making $20 in Adsense revenue each day from that ONE POST!

Unfortunately, a lot of the phrases mean nothing to me.

So, I created the Hot Trends Research Tool. This tool provides a ton of information on each of the keyword phrases that appear on Google’s Hot Trend list. It allows me to research topics quickly, and write articles/blog posts super-fast. All the data is on one page. In fact, I even provide some keyword research data (if it appears, from Google), so that you can come up with alternative related phrases.

There’s a ‘How To Use This Site’ page there, too, explaining exactly how to use the tool. Once you poke around, you’ll get the idea.

Check it out!

Hot Trend Research Tool
http://hot-trends.noduplicatecontent.com

BUT…should I waste my time on certain keyword phrases?

It’s pretty clear if someone is looking for “cheap antique clocks”, that they have commercial intent…in other words they have a high likelihood to BUY.  As opposed to someone searching for “colon cancer”.  Those folks are probably just reading and researching, with no intent of spending money.

The difference between “cheap antique clocks” and “colon cancer” is obvious.  It’s easy to tell that one might have commercial intent and the other doesn’t.  But what about phrases that aren’t as obvious?

There is a new tool that can help:

MSN’s Commercial Intent Tool

The tool gives a score of commercial (or non-commercial) intent.  You enter the keywords, check the ‘Query’ radio button, and hit ‘Go’.  The scale is 0 to 1, so just multiply by 100 and you have the percentage that the keywords entered have the intent listed (either commercial or non-commercial).

So, if you have a choice between multiple keywords, try using this tool to help discern what is in the hearts of the visitors to your site.

One of the things that I seem to be doing A LOT lately is niche research.  Trying to show my buddies the significance of finding a good keyword phrase that has many searches and few competition is important.  It teaches them how to think about wording article titles or blog posts.  And, the really cool thing is that I can show them immediate results…when they do what I tell them with a good phrase, they can see their page on the top of Google right away.

There are several good ways to do keyword research.  I have several tools available that I show the gang, but the one that I personally use the most, and the one I show them the most is in the video that follows:

Video – Niche Research Tool and Article Marketing

I use this tool almost every day.  Even when I’m writing a quick blog post on a topic about which I’m an expert, I still use this tool to help me figure out the title that is going to get me the most searches, and has the fewest competition.

For example, if I have a blog about Home Improvement, or Tools, let’s assume that I have an affiliate relationship with a hardware store (like Ace Hardware, through Commission Junction).  I can write a great article about cordless screwdrivers, and put links to those screwdrivers on my blog post.  Let’s assume I was going to title it something like “Best Cordless Screwdrivers”.  A quick check of the tool shows that people only search that exact phrase 40 times per month.  And even though an exact match of that phrase in Google shows only 6 results, I won’t have enough searches to be worth it.  (Both of that data is available super-quick in the tool…as is the same data for alternate suggestions.)  But, if I specifically mention “Black and Decker Cordless Screwdriver” in the title, there are hundreds of searches per month, and still very little competition.  (The tool even checks to see how well-optimized the competition is to see how hard it would be to beat them.)

The Video shows exactly how to find good keywords and walks through a strategy for making money from the niches you find.

Video – Niche Research Tool and Article Marketing

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!

This is a frequently-asked question: “What’s the best, most profitable niche?”

This reminds me of the question asked to the really good fisherman: “Which of your lures catch the most fish?” The answer: “The one I use the most.” In other words, whichever lure he picks, if he uses it the most, becomes comfortable with how to work it, and it’s the lure that spends the most time in the water…THAT lure will catch the most fish.

Likewise, the niche you put the most effort into will be the one that is most profitable for you.

With that in mind, the common advice is choose the ‘niche that you know’.

If you are going to be creating content for a site, the more interested and knowledgeable you are about the subject matter the more you are going to stick with it, and like everything else in life, the work you put into it is going to drive the benefits coming out.

Here’s a question that I like to use to help people figure out what niche they might use:

“What do you know that someone might be willing to take you to lunch to discuss?”

Even if it’s a cheap lunch…if one person is willing to treat you, others will be, too. And chances are that if you know enough about a topic to actually talk to someone non-stop for an hour over lunch, you know enough to create online content that is marketable.

Here are some other questions to help you get started:

• What are your hobbies, that you spend lots of time thinking about?
• What message forums do you browse/read or even post to alot?
• Do you have any special training, either from school or through work?
• What do you spend your discretionary money on?
• About what do your friends consider you the ‘expert’?

(Stay tuned – I’ll have another post about how to refine the niches and keywords to figure out the right way to monetize the niche.)

So how do we go about it? Here’s the main objective:

Create a website that draws many visitors that then take action (click or buy).

Think of it this way…have you ever seen a billboard along a highway? Farmers who are lucky enough to have land along an interstate can profit by leveraging the space they own. People (ie: potential buyers), are riding down the highway, and advertisers want to get their messages to those potential buyers. So they pay the farmer to let them use some of his space where people will see their ads.

Internet Marketers speak in terms of “virtual real estate”. In other words, you get to create your own farm land. And then you get to re-route traffic to drive across it. And if you want to, you can create more and more of it (UNLIKE actual real estate).

Got the picture?

So you’re going to:

1. Create your own virtual real estate (web site).
2. Put advertisements (easily) and affiliate links to other people’s products.
3. Drive traffic to the website (through a variety of marketing techniques to be discussed later).
4. Profit.

It sounds simple.  And it really is.

Granted, there are thousands of details and ways to go about doing this.  But on this site I try to make it as simple as possible for you.

1. Advertising.  Someone pays you to use some screen space at your site.  There are various types, which I’ll cover in another article.  Some pay you for clicks, some for the number of times their ad is seen.
2. Selling someone else’s product/service. This is known as ‘affiliate marketing’.  You become an ‘affiliate’ of some company, and then when you refer a visitor to that site and they take action (like buying something or subscribing to a service), the company pays you.
3. Selling your own product/service. Eventually you will want to develop your own product to sell.  It’s nicer when you get the full cut, not just part, and it gives you focus.  Rather than casting your seed to the wind and hoping something takes root, it gives you a singular purpose.

There are many people making money from each of these three ways, and I will explain how to do each here on this site.

This site is devoted to methods and strategies that can make you money from the internet.

Where possible, I show how to do it without any cost to you, and at other times, with only slight investment in various tools (such as web hosting).

I learned how to make money from the internet by trial and error, and by reading what tons of gurus who had gone before me had to say. On this site, I try to boil it all down so that it’s easy to use.

Browse the articles, learn and enjoy!