4 Ways to Make Money and Generate Traffic Online

Making money online is easy. Making a lot of money online is hard. Realistically speaking, a very small percentage of people manage to make a full time living relying solely on internet. I think it is better to view online business as a hobby, at least in the beginning. This hobby will help you make some money, learn new skills, and have fun.

There is essentially only one way to make money, and that is to sell something. Internet is a great place to sell real or digital products.  You can either sell your own product or promote somebody else’s. Do you have knowledge or particular area of expertise? Do you have a hobby or passion that you spend all your time on? Chances are you can convert it to a product that can be sold.

Selling somebody else product is called affiliate marketing in online world. Essentially you serve as a distributor for somebody else who has a product for sale. For your services you receive percentage of purchases made by your clients. The payout percentage ranges from 4% to 75% depending on various factors.

Chances are you are familiar with eBay – the online market place. I believe eBay is a good place to start. This is where I started. I collected up all of my old stuff around the house that I no longer needed and sold it on eBay. I actually made a lot more money than I expected. But most importantly it was my first exposure to the fact that transaction with “virtual” people can make real money. After that I experimented a little with creating my own products. At the time I was living in San Francisco, so I just went outside and took bunch of pictures with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. I used free software to create professionally looking screen saver and listed it on eBay. I only had it listed for about a month and was charging four dollar for a download. After the fees deducted by eBay, I made less than forty dollars in that month. It is not a lot of course. But I hope you can see the potential here. It is easy to create a product with little creativity. You can make an eBook, screen saver, instructional video etc. The best part about eBay was that fact that the listing was completely automated. eBay took care of everything. All I had to do is to go to my PayPal account and collect the money. (PayPal is an online banking system, which uses your email address as an account number).

Can’t create your own product? No problem. Creating the product, after all, is only small part of the equation, selling the product is the real challenge. Later in this article I will cover some creative ways to help you do just that, for now let me introduce to you a couple of Affiliate Programs.

Amazon

Yes, you can promote any products available on Amazon.com and receive your cut. What is the downside? You cut is very small, four percent for beginner to be exact(it goes up with the number of sales that you make). Nevertheless it is still greater resource since almost any product can be found there.

Commission Junction

This is THE Affiliate program of the internet. Brand name companies such as Weightwatchers and Netflix advertise through them. If you are serious about online marketing this is the site for you.

ClickBank

This is another Affiliate Program. While they also have a lot of products listed on their website, the majority of these products are less mainstream, usually created by one person or a small group of people. However, this does not mean that these products have a lower earning potential. Most importantly, I wanted to mention this site because it could be a good place to list your own product and have thousands of people sell it for you.

There are many other Affiliates Programs available on the internet, just search for “Affiliate Programs” in your favorite search engine. A large number of websites will have their own affiliate programs. Just look for an Affiliates/Associates/Webmasters link somewhere on their website. If you follow that link, chances are you will receive an offer to participate in their affiliate program.

This is a great question. There are literally thousands of ways to market your products limited only by your creativity. There are four areas however that I want to look into in greater detail: paid advertising, content rich sites, forums, and online videos.

Most search engine providers will offer you some sort of paid advertisement available through their networks.  Do you see the ads around this article? Somebody is paying Google to place them here.  The advertisers are usually charged on cost per click basis, with costs ranging from cents to dollars per click. Some people rely on paid advertisement to promote their Affiliate Products. While it is in fact possible to make money by pocketing the difference from the price you pay for advertisement and the payout amount you get from your product, I would not recommend it to beginners. In fact I would not recommend taking any kind of action that requires an overhead cost until you get fairly comfortable with the online market place. Definitely try your free options first.

Remember those special knowledge and talents of yours that we talked about earlier? It might be more beneficial for you to share your knowledge through a blog, than through an eBook. Make sure to write high-quality material and you are guaranteed a lot of visitors. Give people crap and nobody will like you. What do you do with all those visitors? You tell them about your Affiliate product. What else do you do? You let search engines providers place their ads on your site and have them pay for it. You must agree it is much better to have somebody pay you to use your virtual real estate, than to have to pay yourself to use somebody else’s.

The technology has advanced so much in the past couple of years that you do not need any experience to have your own blog. I highly recommend both Hubpages.com and Blogger.com as a free and easy way to get started. The benefit of Hubpages is that they help to promote and monetize your pages. The downside is that forty percent of the time when people visit your pages, they are exposed to Hubpages ads instead of yours. That being said, I believe this “price” is well worth it for the provided services. Blogger.com is completely free and also very easy to use. Blogger, however, does not promote your pages the way Hubpages do, so you won’t probably get as much traffic through them. Nevertheless, I would recommend it as a backup for your work and an additional source of income.

There are millions of forums available online. Find the ones that talk about your product and post reliable information there. Be careful not to spam though. Spamming ruins your good name, it provides no benefit to you, and could lead to suspension from the forum.

A great site for your self-promotion is Yahoo Answers. Just search for an open question that can be solved by your product, and direct people to it. Yahoo also ranks Yahoo answers high in their search engine, so your links will get high exposure.

Very many people underestimate the great marketing opportunity provided by YouTube and similar websites. The challenge is to create something that people would like to see and then link it to something that you are trying to sell. About two years ago, I was trying to use that approach. I made about twenty different videos, spending anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days for each. I had some successes, but noting major. I also made one very lame video, in about thirty minutes. I googled some picture of celebrities before and after weight loss. I threw them together using Windows Movie Maker, put some back ground music, and asked people at the end to visit my website at lose9.com so they can lose 9 pounds in 11 days. This video was as lame as it gets. I misspelled one of the words in the subtitles. I had Britney Spears on one of the pictures but she was not fat, she was pregnant. One of the pictures that I used was not even a celebrity. Nevertheless, somehow this video took a life of its own. Many people have copied it to their websites and currently it has had over 400,000 views.

Not nearly enough. By the time I noticed how popular this video got, half of the traffic was already lost. On top of that I was not sure what would be the best way to monetize all of this traffic. I owned www.lose9.com domain name but had no website hosted there. So I had all of my traffic redirected to one (bad) affiliates program. I got about two to three sales from it a month. I was not sure about the intentions of the Affiliate that I used and I felt bad about it. So I used Blogger to create a free lending page with some Google Adsense ads and then I had my domain name redirect traffic to it. Actually it was not nearly as good looking back then, but it still generated about twenty dollars a month in Google Adsense revenue. My out of pocket expense was only ten dollars a year that I had to pay for the domain name, compared to 10 dollars a month that you usually have to pay for regular webhosting. Over the course of last year this video has generated 52,663 visits to my landing page and I have made $668 of it from Google Adsense and another $555 from affiliate marketing. Not too bad for couple of hours of work.

As much or as little money as you’ll make, chances are your government is going to try to get their cut. I am only familiar with US tax code, but am sure that other countries have similar systems. In US you get taxed almost double for self employed income, so make sure you keep all of your receipts for business related expenses (advertisement, domain names, cameras, new laptop, miles driven for business, lunches with business partners, gifts to prospective clients, insurance etc). All of it is deductable. This will greatly reduce your taxable business income, and will increase the amount of money that actually stays in your pocket.

As you can see I am far from being the guru. But I hope some of the information that I shared was helpful. I would love to improve on this article, or elaborate in more details on some of the techniques discussed above (Blogger, Adsense, Affiliates Programs, Hubpages, YouTube, Windows Movie Maker, and etc.). Just let me know what subjects you are interested in. 

I want to wish you the best of luck in your financial adventures. Just remember that hard work, creativity, patience, and perseverance will pay off!