I don't think a day goes by without me seeing a get rich quick e-mail or web site selling an e-book on how to get rich online. I'm so sceptical and always think that if that person really was making money online they wouldn't be writing an e-book about it. I make most of my money online so I thought I'd share my findings on here. Please let me know if you find this information useful.

Over the past few months I've been doing a shed load of research and talking with some friends of mine that make a living 100% online from home! What I did was interview all the people I could, this was done through casual chat, e-mailing for advice and some other routes.

I then drew up a list of all the common traites that their business models revealed. This highlighted three main ways that they are making money online. I see no harm in sharing this info here as each persons model is different but I'll outline the basics of the model they use. If you know of more good methods that I should list here then please share them with me philw at ukconsulting.co.uk and I'll take a look.

1/ Affiliate Marketing
2/ Domain Trading
3/ Click Trading

So for now I'll cover Affiliate Marketing, the others I'll cover in at a later date (when I can get off my backside and find some time).

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is where a company allows you to sell their product in return for a percentage of the sale value. With online sales this is easy to achieve and you will be given a special code that you use when you promote the product or service. This code then allows the company to track the sales that you have driven to them. For example if I was selling products from my web site the normal address to my site is http://www.acrazy.com if I allowed you to sell some products from my site as an affiliate the address that you would use is http://www.acrazy.com/?affiliate=YOURID

What then happens is that you promote that link via search engines, e-mail or in the newspapers etc. Anyone that comes to my site from that link will get a small cookie on their machine so that when they buy anything I know that the visitor and purchase came as a direct result of your efforts. Nice huh.

For people that have online marketing experience you will see just how powerful this can be, especially if you know how Pay Per Click Search Engines work. I won't go into beginner pay per click courses on here as there are some useful links below that will help you with that. A breif overview is that you can pay Google (or Yahoo or MSN) so that when someone searches for a word, your advert will appear at the top or on the right.

If you look at www.google.com and search for "ear plugs" you will see there are Sponsored Listings shown in the results page. You can put an advert there too, its easy. And more importantly you can do this for near enough any word or term. (Some words are not allowed, such as casino or gambling etc)

If you don't know how to get started with Google Adwords then you should read this ebook (Google Cash - how to earn online with Google), this will show you how to get setup with Google Adwords and also it will provide some excellent hints and tips on how to make money with Google. But you'll need more than just this so carry on reading :)

Affiliate programs are everywhere, I mean everywhere ! The hardest part is finding affiliate programs that pay out well, have good margins and have good demand online. Let me first make one big point about affiliate marketing. Of all the people that I spoke with one thing stood out.. in fact is was shouted at me by a few people !... DON'T CHOOSE AFFILIATE PROGRAMS THAT ONLY PAY OUT LOW PERCENTAGES... now that sounds obvious, but most affiliate programs will only pay you 10 or 15% of the sale, so by the time you've factored in your promotion costs and time you end up with a few dollars per sale... which is crap.

So stay away from low percentage affiliate programs. If you want to find good affiliate programs you should sign up with one place and one place only. That is Click Bank.

Click Bank is the daddy of all affiliate programs as you will normally receive %50 upwards of the sale value. But before you start looking for products to promote you need to be armed with some facts. These facts are:

• How many people are searching for this type of product
• How many other people are trying to promote this product online
• Can you promote this product any other way

So this is how you do this.

Search engines will sometimes publish the number of times a word was searched for each month. Yep thats right if you want to find out how many people searched for "ear plugs" in December 2005 I can tell you that the number of people in the UK was: 3713

I can also tell you that in the UK over 16 people are currently advertising ear plugs using Google Adwords and 18 people are promoting ear plugs in Yahoo. So competition is high. However I can tell you 103 people per month search for "diver ear plug" and no one is promoting that in Yahoo at all ! - Ahh I think you get this now.. you see just how powerful this can be and there is now limit to how far you can take it.

So how did I know that information? Well here is a secret that I haven't told many people. Its called Keyword Analyzer, written by a friend of mine Chris Lee. This is a brilliant application, in fact its better than that. You can enter into keyword analyzer any word and not only will it show you the demand for that word, but it will also show you the competition for that word in each of the main search engines. You can get you own copy of this app at the Keyword Analzyer web site. Lets just stop out making money online subject, just think how powerful this is; maybe you are thinking of starting a new business, with this tool you can tell what the demand will be like for your new product and more importantly how competitive that market is !

Whilst I'm raving about products Chris has also just released a tool that will help you with running Google Adwords campaigns, this is an application that runs on your computer and allows you manage your Google Adwords listings without logging into the Google interface. Another must have in the online marketing world. Adwords Dominator is here.

So in summary the process is this:

• 1/ Signup for a Click Bank Account
• 2/ Find affiliate programs that appeal to you by signing up with Click Bank.
• 3/ Sign up for a Google Adwords Account and a Yahoo Search Marketing Account.
• 4/ Buy Keyword Analyzer
• 5/ Using Keyword Analyzer look for words relating to the product that you want to promote that don't have any (or less than 8 people) bidding on them.
• 6/ Setup Campaigns in Google / Yahoo for those words.
• 7/ Make the Campaigns go to your affiliate link that you got from clickbank
• 8/ Watch the cost of the campaigns on a daily basis and also the revenue you make through clickbank.
• 9/ Sit back and watch the extra revenue come in.

Important: So here are some warning points that you need to consider.

Don't get sucked in and start bidding on keywords that cost a lot of money per click. Use Keyword Analzyer and find lots of keywords that have small amoutns of traffic but no competition. If you do your homework you will end up with many hundreds of search terms that you can use.

Lets take the Ear Plug example. These are the results from Keyword Analyzer:

So, as an example if you are promoting "ear plugs" then you would look at all the words where Overture (yahoo and Msn) show 0 campaigns. In this example I'd only promote the product in Yahoo as Google is too competitive.

The one trait that was demonstrated by the people I spoke to, time and time again was that you need to setup lots and lots of these campaigns, all paying very low amounts (0.10p) per click for the keywords. Then just find as many affiliate programs on Click bank that you can and promote them this way.

If you do this for say one hour each evening you'll soon start to grow a portfolio of affiliate links and campaigns and then just sit back and watch your click bank account. One other thing that important to say is don't expect high conversion rates. By that I mean just becuase you sent 100 people to an affiliate site doesn't mean that you will get a sale. I base my calculations on the following: for every 300 targetted people I send to a site I expect one sale; this can be up to 10 people, but I only expect one.

So if the worst case is considered. 300 people to a site will cost me Ј20 - One sale will generate me Ј30 so I have made Ј10. Some of my affiliate programs are making Ј100 off a Ј20 Pay per click spend so get it right and you'll be happy.. Also once you get it right the campaign can be left running so you carry on making revenue from a few hours work you did a few weeks prior, neat huh.

Phew. So I hope this has been useful. If so then please let know: I'd like to hear from you philw at ukconsulting.co.uk

UPDATE:

I have been e-mailed by a few people asking how I'm doing with this myself. I've been dabbling a little in affiliate marketing and I've done pretty weel. For example I have been promoting a piece of software online that has the best conversion rates I've seen.

This is my Google spend for the period:

This is my return on that investment through clickbank.

UPDATE: 28/1/06

I've been promoting this product each day for a week and things are looking good indeed. I spend now about Ј20 in pay per clicks and get a return of anything between $65 - $140 !






Now this got me thinking, what if I could get rid of those pay per click costs by creating web sites that will rank high in the search engines organically. For those of you that don't know what I mean by organically, this is where you create a web site with relevant content and keywords so that the search engines will index your site without you having to pay.

This is what I do for a day job and for some niche markets its easier than you think. So how do you do this ?

Well I start off using Keywords Analyzer to find terms that have a low RS (thats a column in Keywords Analyzer) the lower the RS the least competitive those words are for organic searches.

I choose about 4 -5 terms that have a good volume of searches and those that I see have a low RS. I then create a site, using standard SEO techniques (if you want to know more about this then I can provide 1 to 1 training - e-mail me for details) Once I've created a site then I use the secret weapon and for anyone that knows about search engine work this really is a secret weapon. Its called SEO Elite, you can find it at http://www.seo-elite.co.uk Let me explain why this is so good.

To get a site listed high in the search engines you need two things,

1) Well structured, relevant content.

2) Lots of other sites linking to your site.

Well SEO Elite helps you with identifying and contacting other site owners so that you get can good quality links into your site.

Anyway, let me know how you get on.