Making Money Online, Google Adsense & Online Auctions

Is Your Site A One Trick Pony

Posted on 16th November 2009

Copyright 2004 John Gergye

Don't know about you but I really look forward to watching The Apprentice on TV each week. Because it almost always offers a lesson in online marketing.

Take the recent episode where the two teams were charged by The Donald with making money any way they could selling services to dog owners.

Drama aside, the team that lost was a so called "one trick pony". They pinned their success on one thing - dog washing. A good idea but not quite good enough. Because the winning team not only offered dog washing but dog massage plus nail clipping too. I don't think it's a coincidence that by offering a variety of services they earned three times as much.

Income diversification is also a winning strategy online. One I mention to all who will listen. That's because it's dangerous to depend on one product's cash flow for your site's survival.

So here are three ways to avoiding the fate of most one trick ponies.

===== > Promote Your Own Product

I strongly believe you should have your own product to promote.

Ideally something digitally delivered like an eBook or software? This way your "bread and butter" can't suddenly be taken away from you should the product owner decide to no longer use affiliates. Which happens you know?

Even better it's smart to develop a higher priced back end product that offers even more help. Doing so knowing that if you offer a high quality product a certain percentage will want even more ideas and solutions from you. And these back end sales are the easiest kind.

Oh and don't think I didn't hear that groan two paragraphs ago. But anyone can develop a starter info product in 24 hours.

» Develop a list of 25 pressing questions those in your niche want answered.
» Have a friend interview you for an hour over the phone asking you those questions.
» You provide insightful answers while taping the call.
» Transcribe the audio tape and convert the text into a PDF file.

There you go - nearly instant product. If it sells flesh it out further and raise the price to reflect the added value. If not try again with another topic.


===== > Promote Related Affiliate Products

But what if your visitors don't want YOUR product? Well, don't let them slip through your fingers without a fight. In this case affiliate products ARE the perfect solution.

Because a site focusing on weddings can not only sell a wedding planning book it can also offer one on how to throw a bridal shower. Or another how to get the best deal on your honeymoon.

Now to find such related eBooks available at Clickbank I use Affiliates Alert. It's time saving software that runs from your desktop. With it you can find top selling products by keyword or commission payout by searching the entire Clickbank Marketplace or just a selected category. Best of all you can download it for free from www.AffiliatesAlert.com.


===== > Cash in on Waste Traffic

Still not every visitor is going to buy from you no matter how many tempting solutions you dangle in front of them. In fact the vast majority won't. But that doesn't mean you still can't make money off them.

The most common way to cash in on waste traffic is to use Google's Adsense. That's where you display Google Adwords ads on your site for some unspecified cut of the action.

The nice thing about Adsense is you can be up and running in no time. All I do is incorporate the Adsense code in my page templates using SSI or server side includes. That way every new page added gives me more opportunities to make money.

Now if the mystical and magical nature of Adsense is a turnoff, there are other services that offer similar revenue sharing programs. Even better some, unlike Adsense, let you specify the keywords you wish to target. Here's a short list of them.

Searchfeed www.searchfeed.com
RevenuePilot www.revenuepilot.com
AllPPC www.allppc.com
BidClix www.bidclix.com
Azoogle Ads www.azoogleads.com

Of course maybe you don't want to settle for pennies and would rather shoot for dollars? Okay so what if the ads served up were for ClickBank products? Here are several ways to do that.

CBAdwords http://cbadwords.com
CB Clicks www.cbclicks.com
ClickAdWords www.clickadwords.com
CB Ad Generator www.procoversdeluxe.com/cbgenerator

The thing to remember about Adsense, or any of the alternatives, is visitors can't click on the listings if they can't see ''em. So make sure you display the listings front and center. In the visitor's face. If at all possible within the actual page content. For sure not at the bottom or below the fold somewhere lost in the recesses of the web page.

So there you have it. Three ways to diversify your online marketing efforts. Play your cards right and you won't end up washing dogs for a living.


About the author:
John Gergye shares more ideas like this in his just updated eBook "Traffic From Google in 35 Days". Find out more
here: http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/j/tfg35cl.shtmlOr test your search engine IQ by taking his seo quiz
http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/search-engine-quiz.shtmland get the free special report "Coming Out On Top".

Is Your Market Already Saturated

Posted on 16th November 2009

Copyright 2005 Willie Crawford

I recently offered my ezine subscribers a free gift easily worth over four hundred dollars. It was the free master resale rights to 106 niche products (mostly PDF ebooks). Some of these are products I'm actually selling from some of my websites (or offering as bonuses with other products).

Several subscribers emailed to say that they'd seen some of these products for sale on Ebay or other places. They questioned the value of the free gift I offered, and wondered if the market for these products is already saturated.

At Gary Halbert's recent Fusion Seminar, I brought up the issue of market saturation. Mark Joyner, Michel Fortin, Gary Halbert, and John Carlton - all world-class copywriters - were quick to point out that market saturation is rare. It's all a matter of how you define your market. Mark pointed out to me that the segment of the market I was targeting was a TINY fraction of my potential market.

Whether or not your market is saturated does depend upon how you define your market. It also depends upon how you define your product.

When Henry Ford first mass-produced the Model-T, he offered it to the railroads. Viewing themselves as in the railroad business rather than the transportation business, they weren't interested in his vehicles. Now, many of those railroads are out of business, and many times more goods and services are moved by truck in the U.S. than by rail. If some of the railroad owners had defined their markets differently, they could be transportation tycoons now... or perhaps dominate the trucking industry.

Back to the simple niche ebooks that I offered my subscribers as a free gift. Take a minute to check them out now at:
http://WillieCrawford.com/free-niche-gift.html


I took many of these very same ebooks, packaged them as a bonus with my own cookbook, and watched sales increase by as much as $1400 in a single day. You can see how I bundled those ebooks with my pre-existing product here:
http://www.chitterlings.com/cookbook.html

I took some of these very SAME niche ebooks and bundled them with another product. At the same time I tripled the price on that product. Sales increased 62%. You can see how I bundled these same ebooks here: http://WriteACookbook.com

With the above 2 examples you can see that it's all about how you "PACKAGE" or present an item rather than how many others are offering it.

It's all about how you define your market and what segment of the market you choose to compete in. For example, I refuse to market most of my goods and services where you are competing on the basis of price. Ebay shoppers are looking for a bargain. Instead of offering the ebooks for a dollar or less, as many Ebay sellers do, I bundled then with something I was selling for $19.97, and then RAISED my price to $67.

Competing on the basis of price, with any product, is generally a losing proposition. You have to sell a lot more of the item to make the same amount of money. Since you have to deal with more customers when you're competing on the basis of price, you'll also have more customer service issues. Therefore, you generally end up earning less per hour. Do you really want to do that?

To answer the question, "Is Your Market Already Saturated?" ... your answer will always be no if you market properly. Define your market, and package your product so that it is UNIQUE. Then you won't really have any direct competitors. It's ALL about how you package the product. It's all about how you present the item.

Now that you have the proper mindset, you should be able to take any of your products that have just been "collecting dust," repackage them, or revise your web copy and sell them like hotcakes. It just takes a little brainstorming, but I've just shown you how easy it can be.


About the author:
Willie Crawford has been teaching Internet marketing to others since 1997. Grab a free copy of his comprehensive Internet marketing success course now at: http://WillieCrawford.com

It's All About Leads Publishing To Capture

Posted on 16th November 2009

Copyright 2005 Jack Humphrey

All online businesses are nothing more than lead capturing machines. They capture traffic from search engines and links from other sources and turn that traffic into leads which turn into sales of products and services being sold on their sites.

But there is another booming industry surfacing that utilizes specific niche content to attract leads for 3rd parties to convert into sales for banks, realtors, lawyers, and many other groups.

And in many cases these leads sell for a lot more than you can make from the same people clicking on your Adsense ads. A LOT more.

This is partially what is meant by going ''beyond Adsense.'' You are simply getting into the lead generation business. Which is the same as Adsense publishing, but with Adsense you are selling your leads for pennies instead of dollars.

You can certainly create sites that sell affiliate products to the leads they generate. Most people are operating under this business model in some fashion.

But you can also capture the leads and sell them to people who are willing to pay anywhere from $1-$25 per qualified lead.

What is a ''qualified'' lead? This depends on the deal you set up with the person you are collecting them for. Sometimes it means a lead has filled out an information request form. Other times it simply means they have signed up for an autoresponder sequence that guides them to a purchase or other action.

In all cases I have studied, the income per lead is far higher than having the same traffic come through your site and clicking on pay per click links.

It takes more work to find buyers and set up deals with them for the leads you can supply them, but once it is in motion, you are promoting your site with a greater return in mind than even selling a product on the site can produce per 1000 visitors.

How you find the niches and create the sites to attract these leads is a topic for another day. The people doing this most successfully are groups of publishers like those at Content Desk. http://contentdesk.com/csb

But today we are talking about selling the leads generated by your sites to people interested in paying anywhere from $3-$25 per lead.

To get into the higher paying lead sales you generally have to set up deals directly with lenders, lawyers, real estate companies and the like. And by directly, I mean visiting offices and doing face to face meets to show what you can deliver and come to an agreement on what that's worth.

There's really big money being made this way. I know people making over $200,000.00 per month with this very system of attract-capture-deliver and working deals face-to-face with the people willing to pay very well for the leads.

One of my partners has a client who went to a local real estate company selling condos in a very lively, large metropolitan area. He made a deal to get 10% of resulting condo sales in exchange for providing leads to the company.

He set up a simple content site on the area, relocation information, and other relevant, attractive content that people looking to move to the area would be interested in. He now gets $10,000.00 every time a condo is sold to one of his generated leads.

He set up the deal face-to-face and the company is happy to pay him for helping them sell out their inventory faster than just relying on old fashioned offline lead generation.

There are people in your local area, most likely, willing to do the same kind of deal and who are totally unaware of how easy it is for us pubshers to generate leads for them. They are mystified by the web and think you are a ''geek genius'' who they are happy to simply pay to do your magic!

This business sure beats going to the same places and trying to teach them to do it themselves as a consultant. First of all, they don't WANT to or they would already have started the long arduous process of learning and investing in an online presence for this purpose.

They want you to do it FOR them and will pay you to take the pressure off of them to learn how to generate e-leads.

Food for thought. This industry is growing in all directions and if you know how to build content sites that rank well in the engines and get a lot of traffic, you can make a killing selling leads instead of just peddling ''clicks.''


About the author:
Jack Humphrey is managing partner of Content Desk where publishers use cutting-edge site building software and tactics to turn content into cash. Learn the art of niche content site publishing here: http://contentdesk.com/csb