How To Make Online Money

I’ve been working recently with some folks who are beginning their venture into Internet Marketing.  One thing that they consistently wonder is, “How do you come up with niche ideas?”

I’m one of those “go-with-what-you-know” guys.  Start with something you feel passionate about, because that is something that you will most easily stick with, and you’ll probably have an easier time finding and building out content for your websites, ebooks, etc.

Still, we can all use some help when it comes to this kind of brainstorming, so here are some questions I like to ask to get the thoughts going:

• What are your hobbies?
• What problem have you solved recently?
• What information have you searched for on the internet recently?
• Go to Yahoo Answers, and plug in a keyword related to a niche you think you like.  Browse through to find out what questions people are asking about that topic.  Can you answer any of them?  (Don’t do it yet…wait until you have a site to link to.  But if you can answer them, that means you have content in your head that people are looking for!)
• What forums to you frequently read?  What forums are related to your potential niche?  (hint: google the word ‘forum’ with your niche keyword)  What questions are people asking on the forums?  What are the hot topics about on those forums?
• If someone offered to buy you lunch if you would present on a subject, and speak for 30 minutes, what would you talk about?
• What have you and your friends been talking about on Facebook, MySpace, etc.?
• What was the last exciting thing that happened to you?  Could you talk about that for 30 minutes?

With these questions in mind, you can usually narrow down from a broad niche to a specific subset.  The next question you need to ask is extremely important:  “How do I monetize it?”  That’s what it’s all about, right?

To figure out ways to monetize the niche, try some more Google searches (replacing niche with your specific one), like:

• affiliate niche
• review niche
• niche accessories

Then try searching Commission Junction, eBay (if you’re lucky enough to be an affiliate of theirs), ClickBank, PayDotCom, $7 Offers, etc., for related products to market.

Hopefully those questions will give you a place to start.  For me, once I pick a niche topic, it’s then pretty easy to drill down into the different aspects of that topic by visiting a site like Yahoo Answers.  That site is worth its weight in gold for determining what information people are looking for.

Before focusing on Off-Page SEO, you should make sure you have done everything you can for On-Page SEO.  On-Page is more easily in your control.  YOU are the one creating the pages on your site, so it’s easiest to make sure that you are doing the right things within your site.

Off-Page SEO is essentially about one thing:  in-bound links.  There’s more nuances to it than that, but overall, that’s the most important aspect of Off-Page SEO.

The job of a Search Engine is to return USEFUL results to a query.  One of the easiest ways for them to measure that is to see how many sites are linking to your site with a certain keyword phrase.

There are several factors regarding how valuable an inbound link is:

• anchor text used in the link to you
• rank of the site linking to you
• relevance of the site linking to you
• quantities of links

Let’s look at each of these.

Anchor Text -Anchor text is the text part of the link to your site.  In other words, if your domain is www.furryfootwear.com and you are trying to rank for Bunny Slippers, you would want people to build links with the term “Bunny Slippers” pointing to your site.  If you post a link to your site, for example, in a message forum, don’t just put the www.domainname.com as the link.  If you want proof of how important this is, google the term “Click here”.  I betchya Adobe comes up #1.  It’s because there are tens of thousands of links, many on high-ranking pages, that tell people that if they need Adobe Reader to view a PDF document, they can ‘Click here’ (with the link going to Adobe’s reader).  Get it yet?  Surely Adobe is not TRYING to rank high for the search term ‘click here’…it’s unimportant.  Yet they are number one because that is the phrase that people use when they link to the Adobe site.  Likewise, make sure people are using ‘Bunny Slippers’, and not just your domain name when they link (or when you put links on other’s sites).

Rank – generally, a link from a ‘favored’ site helps you more than a site from a generic site.  Otherwise people could just spin up a thousand bogus sites and put their links on there to their main site.  (It’s been done!)  But the SEs are smart, and know that a link from, say CNN.com or some other authority site has more value than www.i-bought-a-cheap-domain-name1.com .  To find ‘favored’ sites, you can do two things:  you can look at the Page Rank of various sites (you need a plugin for Firefox or IE).  You can see what PR Google has assigned to a given page.  You can also do some searches on your niche phrases and see what sites show up at the top frequently.  Ezinearticles.com, Digg, YouTube…these are all favored sites.

Relevance – greater weight seems to be given to sites that have similar keyword content to yours.  Again, the SEs are looking for good relevance to the search term, so if your site is about Bunny Slippers, links from clothing or shoe-oriented sites will be better than links from, say, gardening sites.

Quantities of links – This is simple…the more inbound links you have (assuming they are of good quality), the higher you will come back in the SE results.

NOTE:  AVOID JUNK SITES at all costs.  DO NOT pay to be listed on ‘high-ranking’ sites.  Many offers will come your way to buy a link from a high-ranking site.  The SEs keep track of the IP addresses that sell links, and are constantly de-valuing the links from those sites.

NOTE 2: There seems to be evidence that ‘reciprocal links’ are not as highly valued as one-way links.  Again, this makes sense…otherwise junk sites could just reciprocate with each other and build their number of links.

A final note: Search Engine Optimization is usually about KEYWORD PHRASES.  When you decide to work on SEO for your site, you should focus on keywords or keyword phrases related to your niche.  Try to rank highly for one or two phrases.  As you build your ranking for those, pick a few more and target those.  Eventually your site will gain recognition as a valuable site to the SEs, because to succeed at this, your site will have to offer something of value.  (Otherwise folks will drop your link.)

In conclusion, Off-Page SEO is about getting inbound links from good, relevant sites, using your targeted keyword phrase in the anchor text.

There are three ways to profit from eBook Covers.

It all depends on your perspective.  First, if you have your own eBook, an eBook cover will help sales.  Studies show that having an image of something tangible will boost your sales significantly.  Actually, the qualifier on that is that the image has to look good.  If it looks like garbage, it can hurt sales.  So the first way to profit is if you have your own eBook and you add a cover graphic to your sales page.

The second way is to refer people to my new eBook!    I have recently created an eBook that gives step-by-step instructions on how to create an eBook cover using FREE software.  (Most of the programs out there that make covers require Photoshop, which costs $300…and the programs themselves cost an additional $50 to $100.)  So we compiled a detailed walkthrough on how to use GIMP (free open source graphics software) to create those cool-looking covers.  You can see some examples here: Make eBook Covers.

So how does that help you profit?  Simple!  You can refer people to a product that has its own niche.  (It’s much cheaper than any other solution to get the professional-looking quality.)  And you DON’T need an affiliate account with Clickbank or anywhere else.  All you need is a PayPal address.  Then you can refer people who could use this kind of book to:

http://www.makeebookcovers.com/?e=NAME@PAYPALADDRESS.COM

…only you replace the NAME@PAYPALADDRESS.COM with the email address that you use to receive PayPal payments.  That essentially is your affiliate ID.

I give you 50% of the sales from your affiliate ID. The way it works is this:  For the first purchase made from your ID, you get 100% of the sale.  I get 100% of the second, you get the third, I get the fourth, etc.

There is NO WAITING.  When someone you refer clicks the button to buy, the system determines which of us gets that payment, and it goes directly into your PayPal account when it’s your turn.  No accumulation of sales to a minimum amount and then waiting for a check.    You get the payment right away.

The third way to profit from eBook covers is to design and sell them.  There are lists of folks who are looking for eBook covers who can’t do it themselves and will pay someone else to do it for them.  If you enjoy getting creative with graphics, learn how to make the covers and start selling them.  (Of course, there’s a chapter in the eBook with resources of where to find buyers and sell to them safely.)

So, depending on what your circumstances are, hopefully you can use one of the ways listed above to profit with eBook covers!