How to Make a Million Dollars While You Sleep

Make Millions: No Work Requried

People have been trying to earn more money for millenia, at least as far back as Judas, who sold out Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, and probably much longer if we looked at historical records. :Earlier this year, Forrester estimated the affiliate marketing industry would grow to $4.5 billion by 2016"

source:http://marketingland.com

You've heard the same story hundreds or maybe thousands of times just like me, from companies promising great riches in a short amount of time with little or no work required. Maybe, like me, for a brief time, you were taken in by the hype and actually invested in one of these "pie-in-the-sky, get-rich-quick schemes." But, the cold, hard truth is that unless you win the lottery, it is very unlikely that you'll ever see overnight riches. The fact is, financial successs on the Internet may come fast and easy for some people, but for most of us, making any money takes time, patience, diligence, and being a constant student of changes going on around us.

My last encounter with one such company was one called "My Mobile Money Pages," who promised software which would automatically set up a website and post content at specified intervals based on whatever criterea one entered into the program fields. It was already set up to accomodate Amazon associates, so it seemed, in theorty to be a great idea. Plus they also offered free hosting on their domains with the users own subdomain. I had set up several websites, and was getting 2,000 to 3,000 visitors every day, with 30 to 50 orders being placed on Amazon every month. It wasn't a great income, but it was some income.

Then Google changed the game, and started penalizing any sites that were using autoposting to post content by knocking the down in page rank and the number of visitors to my sties plummeted to about 10% of what it has previously been. To add insult to injury, My Mobile Money Pages was sold to new owners, whose first order of business was to shut down all of the sites on their servers that had free hosting. Evidently, they don't want Americans to make any money. Maybe they are members of Al-Queda?? All of those sites that were set up, still show up when I type the URL into Google, but none of us that had sites there can log into the admin page of any of them. The new owners just change the header of every site to the word "Money." I don't get it, maybe I will never get it, because everyone who was doing business with them has been stabbed in the back, and I don't know how the new owners can make any money that way.

The concept was good originally, but Google frequently changes the game, and what made good money today, might not make any money tomorrow. Consequently, I had only two sites left that were on other servers, and they were only bringing in a little bit of traffic each month.

I decided that the best course of action was to start from scratch, learn what I could about SEO, get more reliable hosting, and expand my affiliate resources beyond Amazon. Even with the difficulties that I have encountered, I believe that affilliate marketing is the best hope to make some extra income, but to make it work, you have to be willing to invest time, and you have to be patient, and don't expect things to happen overnight. They say challenges make us stronger.

Why Be An Affiliate Marketer?

Affiliate marketing offers several advantages over selling products direct to the consumer yourself. You don't need to have an inventory, you don't need to worry about shipping products, you don't need to worry about returns, and you don't need to worry about losing money if a customer sticks you with a bad check or PayPal payment. The downside, is rather than getting a specific profit margin that you set for yourself, each company that has an affiliate program pays you on a commission structure, which varies from company to company.

Nearly every major retailer in America has an affiliate program, including K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Sears, Target, Boscov's, Best Buy, and a plethera of others, including many more specialized retailers. The key to affilate marketing is #1.) Understanding the importance of SEO, #2.) Realizing that you have to offer visitors to your site something of value other than just pictures of products and prices, otherwise customers could just as easily go directly to the retailer's website. So, what do you offer them of value? You, like nearly everybody, have certain products that you use all the time becuase you prefer them over other products, so you can let other people know about these products and why you like them so much. Write a product review. It is also beneficial to set up some small websites of your own, and you can get low-cost hosting for small websites on GoDaddy or HostGator, and maybe some other services.

Many Hubbers here are already Amazon associates, but you can expand your markets by becoming affilates on a few other services, such as LinkShare, ShareASale, Commission Junction, PepperJam or others, and it will also expand the range of products you will have available to write reviews about. Some companies will even offer reviewers a free sample of their product to write a review about, if the affilliate or reviewer can show them that it will create value for their business.

One, must also learn the value of "niche" marketing. A website that has millions of random products may get a lot of hits from searches on Google, but probably sales relative to hits will be a small percentage. A very focused niche that has a limited market of people that would be searching for a specific product (and maybe one that is not really popular or well-known), and has low competition for keywords, might not get a lot of traffic, but the percentage of sales to hits will probably be much greater. If you can build a title or domain name around a low-competition niche that is something people may be using for many years, you stand a better chance of developing a lasting residual income from the effort.

The other obvious advantage of affiliate marketing is that you can work anywhere in the world where you have an Internet connection. Therefore, if you work at it,and develop a liveable income, perhaps you might like to start travelling and writing about the places that you visit. Plenty of people are interested in hearing about other places in the world that they might like to visit or they fantasize about visiting.

Nearly Everyone Can be an Authority on Something

Nearly everyone is good at least one thing in their lives, and if you establish yourself as an authority on some particular topic, and learn the proper ways to drive people to your articles or your websites, you can start to earn an income from what you know. It's not just as simple as making a website that sells anything and everything, what you really need to do is drill down and focus on a particular niche, or niches. For example, imagine that your great love is cooking and you want to make a cooking website, well, that would be a great idea, EXCEPT for the fact that you will be hard pressed to find low-competition keywords in a niche as broad as cooking. BUT, let's suppose you focuse on "Cooking--->How to Make Low-Fat Cake Frosting," now you have a niche that people will probably use those exact keywords to search for. The people who search may be fewer, but they will be looking for exactly what you have to offer them.

As a matter of fact, if you check Google AdWords and use the Keyword Planner tool, to look for "How to Make Low-Fat Cake Frosting," here is what you will find:

Keywords like: Low Fat Cake Icing Recipe (30)low fat cake, low fat cakes, cake frosting recipes, low fat cake frosting, low fat cake recipes, low fat frosting recipe, simple cake frosting recipe, cake frostings, recipe for cake frosting, low fat icing, low fat cake frosting recipe, easy cake frosting, cake frosting tips, low fat frosting for cake, low fat cake icing, best cake frosting, cake icing recipe, icing recipes, recipes for cake frosting, low fat cooking

Average Montly Searches 14,020

Competiion Low

As you can see, perhaps this would be a good niche, and you could write about, perhaps a special recipe that you have developed that would fit into this category. Now, what are you going to market in that niche? Well, nearly everyone who makes cakes and or frostings is going to use an electric mixer. What brand of mixer do you use? Do you like it? Why do you like it? How does it compare with other brands? How heavy is it? How much counter space does it take up? etc, etc. If you provide people with information that they want to know, they will learn to respect and trust your opinions, and perhaps make purchase direct from your links in your article or on your website.

Offer a small free gift for the winner of a recipe contest. Maybe an Amazon gift card for $25.00 for the best recipe submitted. Of course, you will have to prepare and evaluate the recipes submitted to make a fair evaluation and that takes time, patience, and money. So, maybe specify what ingredients must be used in the recipe submissions to narrow down on the potential for high expenses. The point here is that everybody loves free stuff, and free giveaways is a good way to draw traffic.

This is also a good way to build an e-mail list. If you keep in contact with people that already know and respect your opinions, you can always let them know about great things you've stumbled on in the course of your efforts.

"You've heard us say it before - don't buy email lists. Don't go borrowing them from social media sites either. No excuses. It's bad news in the marketing world. Grow a list the old fashioned way, give something away, or hold a contest. Give customers a reason to opt-in, and boom! Your email list can compound overnight and make you the big winner."Source: Manta Tip of the Day

Let the World Know You Are Online

Like anything else, if the world doesn't know what you have to offer, no one is going to be buying it. "Build a better Mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door." You can promote on Twitter, build a FaceBook Fan Page, use Pinterest and post everything new (somethings fit in multiple categories), you can post to various free site submission directories, and don't forget to Comment. Comment on other people's Hubs here, find websites that are similar to what your website is about, and comment there too. It is especially effective if you are using WordPress and you comment on sites that are using CommentLuv, because 1 or more of your most recent posts will be linked to your comment.

Will you make a million dollars? Probably not, but if you continue to persevere, be a student and learn as much as you can, and above all else never quit on yourself. The sad truth is that many affiliate marketers will quit before they make any decent money because they will allow themselves to get discouraged. Don't let that happen to you.