How Online Internet Marketing Works

First, you should understand that there is a very basic underlying philosophy for Internet marketing. You’re not selling a product or a website or an eBook. You’re selling a solution or an experience that the customer cannot get anywhere else. Moreover, most Internet marketing focuses on targeting customers with urgency in mind. You’re solving a problem with immediacy that keeps them from going to a book store or a local department store where they might find a slightly less expensive solution.

For example, consider an eBook for $37 about how to save a marriage. There are dozens of such books in print and the strategies in them are generally timeless. So, why would someone pay more for an eBook than the $24 copy of the same tips at a Barnes and Noble? Because they need those tips right now, not in a day or two when they have time to hit up a bookstore. Most online Internet marketing strives to influence this urgency and to remind the customer exactly how much of it there is.

How to Sell Your Products

When it comes to making sales to those desperate buyers, you must first find a market that you’re interested in. It’s very important that you have at least some interest in the topic before spending hours of your time and hundreds of your dollars marketing in that field. Imagine choosing a topic you have no interest in and finding after three weeks that your desire to be rich is being overridden by your supreme boredom. It’s a bad situation.

For online Internet marketing, you should turn to popular eCommerce hot spots like Clickbank or Amazon to research your products. You can also research niches on industry specific forums or blogs as well. After that, be sure to spend time developing a list of well researched, relevant keywords using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, Traffic Travis, and your own insights.

Eventually, you’ll need to build some sort of sales funnel. The simplest funnels may only involve one web page, while more complex ones might involve a Twitter account, Facebook Page, article marketing, Squidoo Lenses, forum links, and email marketing collection forms. Your goal here, however you decide to start marketing, is to reach as many of your audience as possible and to convince them that you have the solution to their problem.

Online Internet Marketing Success

To make sure you are successful, I recommend three very important things.

1. Learn to Influence Others – Study copywriting strategies and secrets from as many writers and researchers as possible. Learn the secrets of influencing others with the words you write or the videos you produce.
2. Outsource Everything You Can – Your time is more valuable than you will ever know. The more often you can outsource your projects, the more time you’ll have to build sites, research topics, and split test everything.
3. Test and Retest – If you build a site and it doesn’t draw a profit in week one, keep trying. Every good website goes through testing and yours will be no different.

Online Internet marketing is a complex process full of many little strategies that will take you time to master, no matter how much you read. But, if you are persistent, well taught and willing to learn from your mistakes, have no worries – you will make money.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a general category that includes dozens of ways to make money online. The basic idea, however, is that you’ll generate content that points prospects to a sales page. If they buy that product, you make a commission. Here are some specific marketing methods for this type of money making:

• Squeeze Page Marketing – Using a simple squeeze page that contains free content such as articles, videos, or blog posts, you can draw readers in through search engines and prep them for making a purchase. Simple squeeze page ideas include reviews, seminars, authority sites with content, blogs with opinions, or social media pages with a collection of everything.
• CPA – Cost per Action is a form of affiliate marketing that focuses on having a reader complete an action like filling out a form or ordering a free sample, rather than just buying a product. You can find CPA programs at OfferVault or Commission Junction among many others and can market through traditional affiliate marketing methods or banner advertising.
• Email Marketing – Usually just used as a tool for other marketing campaigns, email marketing is among one of the best ways to make money online. You’ll need a form to capture email addresses, either on a squeeze page or a sales page of some sort. You can then send sales pitches out among free tips and newsletters loaded with valuable information.

Product Creation

One of the best ways to make money online is to create your own products. Product creation takes quite a bit of practice and a direct audience to market to. Digital products are the focus here. Find a niche that you are well versed in and create something unique and valuable that can be marketed effectively. You’ll need a sales page and a collection of your own affiliate marketers to reach out to your target audience.

eBay Marketing

For most people, eBay is a tool in a greater scheme. However, there are many marketers who are able to create a singular business using eBay. Of the ways to make money online, eBay changes the least, but still requires skills like web design, copywriting, and action driven marketing. You can market digital products or you can use a service like SaleHoo for drop shipping.

Online Real Estate

The Internet is a vast, open field of untapped real estate. Every domain name has value to it, whether the domain itself is highly valuable or the site hosted at that domain holds value. You can use services like SitePoint or Flippa to buy and sell domain names, adding content to those sites to draw interest from other marketers.

Outsourcing and Consulting

If you have expertise in any given field, you can make a significant income by offering that advice to other people online. Skills such as writing, programming, graphic design, legal work, or translation are all valuable skills that can be outsourced online. You can also do work online as a virtual assistant, offering your services for an hourly rate.

There are hundreds of ways to make money online. One thing remains constant among all those things, however. You need to work hard. There is no magic pill to riches online. Just like offline business, it takes effort and time to become rich. Sure, there are people out there making millions with only 5 hours of work a week, but you can bet that those millionaires have invested thousands of hours to get to that point.

• Alen Sultanic
• Steve Iser
• Jonathan Leger
• Simon Leung
• Mike Litman
• Chris Lockwood
• Shelley Lowery
• Jaime Luchuck
• Ben Mack
• Alex Mandossian
• Nick Marks
• Jason Marshall
• Perry Marshall
• James Martell
• Reed Floren
• Michel Fortin
• Sylvie Fortin
• Andrew Fox
• Stephanie Frank
• Rick Frishman
• Van Day
• Terry Dean
• Frank E Deardurff III
• Costa Dedes
• Jim Edwards
• Ray Edwards
• T. Harv Eker
• Michael J Enos
• Jose Espana
• JeremyGislason
• Matthew Glanfield
• Henry Gold
• Marc Goldman
• Michael Green
• Jermaine Griggs
• Todd Gross
• Gary Halbert
• David L Hancock
• Mark Victor Hansen
• Marc Harty
• Jason Henderson
• Mark Hendricks
• Christina Hills
• Michael J Holland
• Eric Holmlund
• Len Thurmond
• Yanik Silver
• Anik Singal
• Dr Mani Sivasubramanian
• Segovia Smith
• Paul Smithson
• Keith Wellman
• Mark Widawer
• Howard Tiano
• Sterling Valentine
• David Vallieres
• Wayne Van Dyck
• Joe Vitale
• Alex Goad
• Gary Ambrose
• Jay Abraham
• Jeff Alderson
• Nathan Anderson
• Tom Antion
• Jon Atwood
• Matt Bacak
• Ladan Lashkari
• Brian Keith Voiles
• Martin Wales
• Anthony Blake
• Justin Blake
• Chris Bloor
• Alexander K Brown
• Jimmy D Brown
• Russell Brunson
• Jeremy Burns
• Rick Butts
• Michael Cheney
• Ewen Chia
• Paul Colligan
• Shawn Collins
• Tom Hua
• Tim Knox
• Tellman Knudson
• Michael Koenigs
• Drew Kossoff
• Tony Laidig
• Dave Lakhani
• Kenneth A McArthur
• Ken McCarthy
• Ryan Deiss
• Glenn Dietzel
• Declan Dunn
• Carl Galletti
• Rosalind Gardner
• Allan Gardyne
• Frank Garon
• Matt Garrett
• Derek Gehl
• Randy Gilbert
• Adam Ginsberg
• Don Crowther
• Jim Daniels
• Brian T Edmondson
• Stu McLaren
• Michael W Merz
• John-Paul Micek
• Jeff Mills
• Jonathan Mizel
• Michael Morgan
• Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero
• Armand Morin
• Jeff Mulligan
• Paul Myers
• Alex Nghiem
• Michael Nicholas
• Daniel Nickerson
• Dr Kevin Nunley
• Eben Pagan
• Charlie Page
• Michael Penland
• Christine Carter Schaap
• Rich Schefren
• Jason James
• Bob Jenkins
• Andy Jenkins
• Jeff Johnson
• Terry Johnson
• Mark Joyner
• Dan Kennedy
• Harlan Kilstein
• Scott Schilling
• Ted Schneck
• Jeremy Schoemaker
• Thor Schrock
• David P Schwartz
• Alice Seba
• Craig Perrine
• Rhea Perry
• Lynn Pierce
• Stephen Pierce
• Brad Callen
• John Carlton
• Shawn Casey
• Jeanette S. Cates, PhD
• Keith Baxter
• Bart Baggett
• Tom Beal
• Larry Benet
• Jody Colvard
• Christine Comaford-Lynch
• Holly Cotter
• Simon Coulson
• Willie Crawford
• Stuart Tan
• Dave Taylor
• Lynn Terry
• Antonio D Thornton
• Jeff Walker
• Neil Waterhouse
• Michael Wong
• Mike Woo Ming
• David Wood
• Ken Evoy
• Brad Fallon
• Harris Fellman
• Mike Filsaime
• Greg Cesar
• Teri & Doug Champigny
• Michelle Alisande Chan
• Randy Charach
• William Charlwood
• Michael Port
• Jason Potash
• Robert Puddy
• Joseph Ratliff
• Rick Raddatz
• John Rees
• Frank J Rumbauskas Jr
• Paulie Sabol
• Marlon Sanders
• Harvey Segal
• Neil Shearing
• Wendy Shepherd
• Liz Sherwood
• Phil Wiley
• Kevin Wilke
• Dr Ralph Wilson
• Bryan Winters
• Socrates Socratous
• Mike Stewart
• Peter Stone
• Dan Lok
• Gary Bencivenga
• Alex Carroll
• Alan Forest Smith
• Kirt Christensen
• Mark Ling
• Steven Clayton
• Matt Carter

When it comes to the world’s best Internet marketers, you can bet that they are all on this list. If you find yourself in a bind, in need of some assistance with your next big project, or just a little down on yourself, a quick Google search of any one of these marketers will help you get back on track in no time.

Internet Marketing Tips 101

Internet marketing starts and ends with your audience and how you approach them. So, before you can do anything, you need to do some research and learn about your niche and your audience.

• Niche Research – Niche research involves getting to know who your potential customers will be. Use sites like Clickbank and Amazon to review both good products and demand. On Amazon, you can find products and niches based on how many reviews a product has. More than 20 reviews means that thousands of copies have been purchased. Additionally, visit forums and blogs where industry experts gather to share with interested readers. Learn the terms and the needs of your target audience.
• Keyword Research – Keyword research is probably the most ignored aspect of online money making. One of the best Internet marketing tips I can give you is to spend as much time as possible learning about keywords from tools like Traffic Travis and running through them in AdWords or competition searches. Know the phrases you should target well.

Internet Marketing Tips for Your Website

Once you’ve gotten a good idea of what you’re product, niche, and audience will be, it’s time to start generating websites to market those products. There are many different sites you can build – from blogs to forums to squeeze pages or full blown sales letters.

• Learn the Basics of Sales Writing – Whether you’re writing 150 word squeeze page or a 10,000 word sales letter, learn the basics of effective sales writing to influence and entice your readers to follow your calls to action. There are dozens of methods you can use to generate interest in your product – from powerful headlines to benefits laden product descriptions to carefully worded guarantees and pitches.
• Email Marketing – One of the most important Internet Marketing tips you’ll ever receive is to setup an account with an autoresponder service like AWeber of GetResponse and start gathering email addresses from within your niche. Do this by inserting a newsletter subscription form into your squeeze page or your website and offering some for free to entice readership. A 6 day free mini-course or a free report are both good ways to gather readers that you can contact later to make sales.

Getting Traffic

The most important part of any marketing campaign is to get traffic to your site. You do this with sound back linking and SEO.

• Viral and Social Marketing – To generate interest, you must saturate the Internet with content that points back to you. Use social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and YouTube to place interesting content that your readers will follow. You can also use a blog to create an authority destination and set yourself up as an expert.
• Back Link Generation – Most Internet marketing tips will tell you to submit articles to directories for back links and post on forums or blogs with comments. However, you should also use tools like SEO Quake to find high PR sites with “follow” links where you can post. Use a trusted site tool to find government sites or directories that you can get listed on as well.

Ultimately, your goal as an Internet marketer is to know your audience, reach your audience, and then funnel as much of that audience as possible back to your site where they can buy your products. Once you master those basics, you’ll be well on your way to becoming the next big marketing success.

Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)

If you want a guaranteed source of instant traffic, it doesn’t get any easier than PPC advertising. However, PPC is also the most expensive traffic source on this list and you’ll always have to pay for it. If you opt for PPC advertising, be sure to spend time learning how to generate keyword lists, pinpoint effective long tails and split test your campaigns to minimize wasted ad spend.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you want to know how to increase traffic to your website, master SEO. Whereas PPC is a short term tactic that can cost as much as you make if you’re not careful, SEO is a long term strategy that translates to real profits over time. Search engine optimization consists primarily of getting quality back links from trusted sites through article marketing, link baiting, blogging, commenting on forums, and link swapping.

Pay Per View Advertising (PPV)

If you’ve ever installed shareware or freeware on your computer and read the terms of instalment, you know that there are all sorts of advertising tools going in with the program. These programs track your browsing habits, site visits and search preferences, then place ads in context on the sites you visit. As an advertiser, this allows you to pay for CPM ads that are highly targeted to your audience. Top networks include TrafficVance.com, MediaTraffic.com and LeadImpact.com.

Email Marketing

When it comes to learning how to increase traffic to your website, email marketing is an old staple of the industry and a vital tool for any site owner. As a marketer, every site you own should have an email opt-in list attached to it. When you gather those email addresses, you can send valuable information along with promotions and links to your site to readers who are already primed to visit.

Joint Venture and Email Swap

Joint ventures come in many forms, but a popular method is to trade email lists with a fellow marketer. If you have 5,000 subscribers and they have 6,000, you could both trade emails to the other’s site, gaining an instant exposure to thousands of primed niche-watchers. Joint ventures can also involve giving away free products on someone else’s site in exchange for links or guest posting on their site for a link.

Affiliate Marketing

If you have created your own product, the easiest way to get links is to use affiliate marketing. Affiliates will generally be rather picky about what they market, however, so you need to be ready to entice them. For those seeking how to get more traffic through affiliates, offer free articles, newsletters and banners, bonuses for those that sell a lot of products and active 24/7 support for affiliates. The easier you make it for them to make money, the more money you’ll make.

Viral and Social Media Marketing

Of the many ways how to increase traffic to your website, viral and social media are the most fun, but also the hardest to quantify. If you opt for this route, make sure to use a wide array of tools, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg, and more. Your goal here is to create value that will entice people to come looking for you. Free tips, articles, updates, news, and videos all do this, but don’t forget that those freebies must also be entertaining and informational.

As you can see there is no single secret in how to increase traffic to your website. You need to utilize a wide array of tools that will all help develop a stream of visitors to your websites. Build yourself up as an expert in your field, research your target audience carefully, and get them to come to your site bit by bit. By combining them all, you can guarantee steady, never ending traffic that can’t help but lead to profits.

• Forget Everything You Know – If you think you know something about AdWords forget it. Be willing to adjust your tactics at any time using the strategies that better trained marketers have developed. Pay per Click tips are a dime a dozen. Keep an open mind and learn constantly.
• Check Current Statistics – If your products have a small profit margin or you have a low conversion rate on your website as is, you need to address those concerns first. Paying $0.50 a click for a $10 commission on a site with a 2% conversion rate will lose you money. You’ll be paying $25 for $10 in sales. To go with these Pay Per Click tips, remember that a good campaign will boost those low conversions.
• Budgeting – Mistake number one in PPC is not having a set, well defined budget. This is important for a few reasons. First, you don’t want to spend too much before you improve your numbers. Second, it’s hard to compare data if you don’t spend the same amount of money on a daily basis. Only change your budget once you have regular, improved results.
• Targeted Landing Pages – If you have multiple pages on your site, most Pay per Click Tips will tell you to send your readers to the page that be represents the keyword. This means having multiple ad groups and URL targets from those ad groups. You want the visitor to find exactly what the ad has promised immediately without any future clicks required.
• Change Your Ads – Along the same lines, make sure to target your ads effectively. If you sell a series of 10 eBooks on how to make money in the stock market, target each ad to the particular book you’re trying to sell and give the ad its own set of keywords that have been researched and targeted to the product and its buyers.
• Use Long Tail Keywords – A long tail keyword is the focal point of all Pay per click tips. Take dog training. If you bid on “dog training” alone, you’d get thousands of impressions from people who may not yet own a dog, or who are interested in writing about it or who are looking for obedience classes. However, if you use the keyword “golden retriever food aggression”, you’ll target a specific problem that will only be searched for when someone is seeking a solution. Find ways to target questions a buyer will have just before they make a purchase. Product names, author names, and words like “review” or “buy” are great for targeting prepped buyers.
• Negative Keywords – Along the same lines, make sure to research the keywords you DON’T want included in any inquiries for your ad. Common negative keywords include: research, training, free, download, discount, and wholesale.

There are hundreds of other Pay per click tips out there that are designed to help you master your AdWords campaign – from split testing to geographical testing to landing page optimization for quality scoring. If you follow these basics, however, targeting your ideal buyer, reducing bad clicks, and always focusing on results and profits, your PPC campaign will be a big success nearly every time.

On Page Optimization

No search engine optimization strategy is as old and well tested as on-page optimization. It also happens to be one of the least useful listed here. Once upon a time, these methods would make all the difference. Today, it makes up maybe 15% of your total search engine ranking and Page Rank. However, if you do not use these methods, it can hurt your site significantly.

On page optimization includes keyword optimization, alt tags on your images, deep navigation, SEO friendly links, title tags, and SEO friendly code.

Article Marketing

Article marketing is another search engine optimization strategy that has been around for some time and is highly successful. Essentially, you will write articles with a single keyword focus and a link back to your website. You then upload those articles to article directories that post them for free in exchange for the link to your site.

Once an article is posted, it provides a back link to your site that the search engines pick up. Article marketing is not a one-time process, however. You will need to continuously post new articles over time to maintain the SEO value of those links.

Trusted Site Back Linking

Article marketing generates back links, but if you want truly valuable back links, you need to find trusted sites. Trusted sites are those that Google holds in high regard. Anything that ends in .GOV or .EDU is a trusted site. Additionally, high level directories like DMOZ or Yahoo! are trusted sites, along with major forums or information resources.

Link Baiting

Link baiting is a search engine optimization strategy where you produce high quality content that will attract attention on its own. For example, if you had a dog training site, you could produce an article on the Top 101 dog behaviour problems. The article would be massive and take hours to write, but it would also be a powerful authority resource in the niche, drawing attention from many other websites.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is a common tool today, though many marketers misuse it. The goal is to use sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to set yourself and your business up as an authority as well as a recognizable personality and brand that can be trusted for niche information. You need to provide constant, daily value that your readers can take away from it.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing, like social media and link baiting, focused on drawing people to you. As a search engine optimization strategy, viral marketing is the least measurable, but can be the most effective. Examples of viral marketing include video productions for YouTube, sending out free reports, building squeeze pages, and giving away free software.

No single tactic is going to make the difference between a no-name site and the number one page in your niche. However, if you’re not using the strategies above in tandem, you’re missing a fantastic opportunity to get free traffic for your site. Search engine optimization strategy starts with a long term, detailed plan on how to get your site to the top. Use multiple strategies, test constantly, and adjust when necessary – only then will you find the free traffic you’ve been looking for.

What You’ll Need

When learning how to make a banner ad, you’ll need to download at least one simple software program. You could go out and spend hundreds of dollars on Photoshop, but why? Unless you plan on becoming a full time designer or have the extra cash laying around, Photoshop is a bit overpowered for our needs.

Instead, head over to www.getpaint.net and download the free photo and graphic editor Paint.NET. The software has been around for a few years and provides all the basic tools you would get with a $500 copy of Photoshop, though without some of the bells and whistles. For our needs, however, it gets the job done very nicely.

How to Make a Banner Ad with Paint.NET

When making your banner ad, first start by setting the canvas size. You can start with a set size such as 468×60, which is a fairly standard horizontal banner. However, there are any number of other sized ads that you can use, including block ads at 250,250 or long form ads at 60×960. Alternately, you can set the size at double or triple the dimensions so you have a higher resolution to start with. This will ensure that any high quality images scale down properly when uploaded to your site.

Once you’ve set up your canvas, you need to lay down a graphical base. A background can be simple, and monochrome or much more complex with a series of images. However, whatever you end up doing, make sure it is singular, doesn’t flash and doesn’t do anything else too fancy.

Most banner ads are almost entirely text. This is for good reason. You need potential visitors to get some information out of your ad. Unless you’re trying to setup a viral campaign or build a brand, image only banner ads will only confuse your readers and send them elsewhere. Images should be used to augment your text, not replace it.

Make sure to use complementary colors as well. Any program that shows you how to make a banner ad will outline how these colors catch the eye. Red is a fantastic color and can be powerful when paired with red or yellow. Blue and orange work very well together, as do yellow and purple. Avoid color combinations that are hard on the eyes like red and blue or green.

The ultimate design decisions for your banner ad are up to you. Many banners will have some form of simple animation which can work well to draw the eye. I recommend you minimize how much animation you use, however. Lots of moving images and flashing can actually send someone off the site completely.

Faster Design

If you’re not fond of building your own banner ads from scratch, there are alternatives. For example, you can use XHeader or XHeader Pro. This software will allow you to choose from dozens of templates, add shapes and text and put animations to work for a website header. Technically, the software is designed for headers, but some quick dimension adjustments will allow you to make a banner easily enough. And if you’re not interested in learning how to make a banner ad, don’t forget the option to outsource.

There are services like 20DollarBanners.com which will flip around a very simple, $20 banner ad in less than a day or two. Just remember that a banner ad, whether made by you or a pro needs to be high quality and eye catching. When you learn how to make a banner ad, remember that you want to make sales, not drive people to another site.

Promoting Your Site

YouTube for marketers started as a promotional tool. You would post a video on YouTube and then put a link in your bio or signature that would shoot directly back to your site. These videos would be designed to provide information about your niche and develop brand awareness that you can cash in on later. When learning how to make money on YouTube, this is the most common method, but is little more than a traffic generation tool.

If you decide to promote your site through YouTube, you’ll need to find a niche need that you can fill with a seminar or lecture series. You will also need to obtain recording devices to ensure higher quality sound and video.

Becoming a YouTube Partner

Since Google bought YouTube, advertising has become a major part of the site, allowing you to place ads in your videos and get paid for clicks, similar to the AdSense program. To become a YouTube partner, you’ll need to submit an application and have your site approved.

After approval, however, making money is as simple as posting videos to YouTube and opting them into the partner network. When it comes to how to make money on YouTube, it doesn’t get any easier.

Gathering Email Addresses

Email marketing is one of the fundamentals of all online money making and YouTube can be a tremendously useful tool for it. While it may not be possible to place an opt-in capture form on YouTube itself, you can place a watermark on your video or a link in your bio that points to a squeeze page. When it comes down to how to make money on YouTube, this is another bridge. You won’t actually make money with your videos. However, those email addresses you gather are equally, if not more, valuable than any cash you’d make from your video as they can lead to future income.

Affiliate Marketing

If you’re learning how to make money on YouTube, affiliate marketing is a great place to start. For this method, you’ll need a simple video editing tool that will allow you to add a watermark to the videos you upload. You can create your own productions with tips and strategies in them and then pitch someone to visit a site to buy a more complete product, or you can simply take a video and re-upload it with your watermark included on it. This is the simplest method, although you should beware of any copyright violations and avoid any broadcast material.

YouTube’s New Rental Options

It hasn’t been put into place yet, but Google recently announced the new rental system they will be implementing soon. If you are a seminar giver or someone who produces multiple viral videos, prepare to be able to charge a rental fee for your viewers to see each video in your series. With production values and content volume increasing constantly, this is a fantastic money maker for anyone that has the content to sell.

YouTube has been the centrepiece of the social and viral web for most of the last five years, allowing marketers around the globe to start trying out more interactive money making strategies. It’s no longer an experimental tool, however. It’s time to learn how to make money on YouTube and use the service as a viable arm of your online business. You’ll find the profit potential unbelievably large.

Choosing Your Niche and Products

The first thing to do when learning how to make money on eBay is to decide which niche you will market your products in. Do some basic research on eBay to see what sells well and what you are interested in. You can also visit sites like Amazon or Clickbank and review hot niche products. Once you’ve chosen a niche, get to know your audience better. Read their reviews, visit forums and blogs and check their buying habits in eBay’s feedback forums.

This first step is vital because only then can you choose the products you will sell. Too many eBay sellers will simply sell whatever they can get their hands on. They may make a profit, but by not specializing at all, they spread themselves too thin and never quite master any one category.

As for which products to sell, you have many options. One of the most popular options is dropshipping. With dropshipping, you use a service that will take the address and payment from your buyer and send them the product directly. You can enter whatever markup you want and then keep the difference. For many marketers, learning how to make money on eBay starts and ends with dropshipping, and services like SaleHoo.

There are other options as well, including digital products from sites like Clickbank or software from Avangate. You can also buy lots and wholesale from other sellers and then break them up to resell for a profit. In this case, however, you will need to maintain an inventory which requires more work.

How to Make Money on eBay through Auctions

While there is something to be said for classifieds, the big money on eBay comes through carefully worded, well researched auction listings. Many marketers unfortunately look at their auction listings as a simple store front, but you need to learn how to really sell people.

To start with, it’s important to sign up for an eBay store. The basic plan costs as little as $15 a month and will provide you with a URL, searchable index, and reduced listing fees. Once you’ve been on eBay for a while, consider the $299 premium plan that will severely reduce listing fees and provide advanced analytics to review your visitors.

When someone asks how to make money on eBay, they often skip the next step – copywriting. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of listings that are two hundred word blobs of text with poor grammar. Who buys those? You need to be more persuasive and much more professional.

To do this, integrate HTML into your listings to provide images of the product, bright headlines with key benefits and bulleted lists to lay out the details of the auction. Don’t just tell someone you’re selling a “new iPod”. Tell them why they need that iPod and how it will affect their life.

Mastering eBay

When you learn how to make money on eBay, remember that this is not a garage sale. It’s a real business with real customers that have plenty of options to choose from. Price is not always the determining factor in selling your products. Maintain high feedback ratings, keep customer service at the top of you priority list and start studying the intricacies of copywriting immediately – together, these strategies will guarantee a stronger, more successful eBay business.

Adsense vs Adbrite – The Basics

To start with, let’s look at what each ad network provides its users. Adsense has been around the longest and definitely has the largest network of publishers and advertisers as an offshoot of AdWords, the world’s largest advertising platform. A quick search through blogs, forums, and IM sites will show you that it still remains a strong favourite.

It is considered extremely easy to use and trustworthy as it is backed by Google – a publicly traded company with relatively transparency. There are downsides to AdSense, however. You can only place three ad blocks per page, severely limiting your overall impressions for any one page. You can also only get your checked mailed out in $100 or higher increments, a real killjoy for smaller site owners.

Additionally, impressions are meaningless as all ads are based on CPC impressions. That means they won’t generate any revenue if ads are not clicked.

On the other side of the Adbrite vs Adsense argument lays Adbrite, the slightly smaller company that has just as trustworthy of a reputation. Many marketers have been using Adbrite for some time now and will swear by their product. Their advertising options come in a number of different formats, including CPM and CPC. You can use in-text ads as well as full page ads to show between content pages (similar to newspaper sites). You can also choose to have checks mailed out at smaller, $5 increments, so you won’t need to wait for months when you start a new account and are building traffic.

Adsense vs Adbrite – Income Breakdown

To date, there is no single resource that will show you how much each site will make you, and for the most part, the context analysis for each of the services is pretty solid. Neither will fail to place ads that relate directly to your content, thus giving your readers something they actually want to click on. AdSense does have comparably stringent guidelines for site approval and integration, however, going along with their limitation of how many ads you can post.

Google is originally an experience service. They like their advertising revenue just fine, but they also want to provide readers with the information they’re looking for, so they tend to dislike excess advertising. On the other side of the Adsense vs Adbrite argument, Adbrite is a strictly advertising platform with lots of major clients and companies signing on to post their ads.

That means that you have full control of how much advertising appears on your site. Furthermore, you can choose to opt for strictly impression based advertising on an AdBrite account, allowing you to get paid just for the visitors that reach your site. For some niches, this form of advertising can be much more profitable.

In the end, the issue of Adsense vs Adbrite comes down to which site works best for your needs. In terms of raw options and ease of use, AdBrite comes out on top, but just barely. AdSense is fantastic as well for a number of reasons, but expect to be slightly more limited and have to deal with more oversight than if you opted for the other, more independent company.

Elance for Buyers

As a buyer, Elance is your oyster. The site has been built around the user experience of the buyer. This means you’ll never spend a dime on the site, other than to the providers you hire. Signing up is also very simple, taking only a few minutes and culminating in the posting of your first project. As most Elance review writers will point out, the site is eager to get you on there as quickly as possible.

Setting up a project requires minimal work, though I recommend you do take a few moments to review the options available for any project. You want to be thorough in outlining your needs so you don’t get inundated with bids from low quality contractors. This is unfortunately the one weakness of a site like Elance (if not Elance in particular). Anyone can be an Elance member if they pay their monthly service fee, and they can then bid on your project.

It then becomes up to you to winnow down the field. You’ll need to read samples, ask for interviews, and setup milestones that ensure you get the quality you’re seeking.

The Providers

When it comes to finding quality providers, most Elance review writers note that Elance has long been in the middle ground due to the sheer volume of providers here. But, the old maxim of “you get what you pay for” almost always come into play. If you want low cost, high quality work, it will be hard to find quality providers. However, if you are interested in paying a bit more, the top level providers in any category are scored to help you track them down. They have ratings for each project, total earnings, repeat clients, and an overall aggregated score that shows how well regarded they are by other buyers.

Workroom Tools

Early Elance review writers raved about it as Elance was one of the first services to provide escrow services and they work wonderfully. Providers pay the escrow fees out of their earnings and in most cases, it is instant (once your payment source is verified). The workroom has undergone recent upgrades to provide the same hour tracking and screenshot tools as Odesk, though they still lag behind without mobile apps and desktop tracking offered by Odesk.

Most Elance review writers will also mention the fact that Elance’s backend can be a bit confusing with a slew of seemingly overlapping options for payment and invoicing. This is the result of their rampant upgrading and feature testing. Every month or two you can expect a change to the way Elance operates, sometimes in small ways and sometimes with a full overhaul which leaves you confused and grasping for options. Documentation is limited and customer service is sometimes hard to reach in a pinch.

The Bottom Line

As any good Elance review will tell you, there are both good and bad points to make for the use of Elance as your outsourcing tool of choice. On one side, Elance has more providers and a greater network of projects than any other site in its class. As a buyer, you pay no fees and can access providers almost instantly from around the globe. However, the platform itself can be dizzying at times and the quality of the providers is often hard to verify, and there is no way to guarantee where the bids are coming from, a major problem in certain categories, like Writing and Translation.

Overall, Elance is a useful tool that can help you reduce your work load significantly. Don’t expect it to do all the heavy lifting for you, however. Interview your prospects, edit their work, and liberally use the feedback tools to land solid contractors that you can count on for future projects.

What to Look for in Your Autoresponder

An Autoresponder review will point out many things, but there are some features that need to top your list. First, delivery rate is vital. Those emails need to get through to your prospects and they need to be read. That means not only should the service provide top notch technology to reach the prospects, but they should help you reduce spam in the process.

Additionally, the service needs to make list management and analysis as easy as possible. You want to be able to review subscribers, read messages, link clicks and historical open rates so you can adjust and tweak your messages over time.

Most autoresponder review writers will focus on one service and try to sell you on its benefits over the others, but I want to take a look at the industry’s top three services

Aweber

The first autoresponder review is Aweber. Aweber is very easy to use when it comes to setting up a new campaign, inserting video or audio, and managing your subscribers across multiple lists. The scheduling and sequencing is very simple and straightforward and allows for any number of custom options, including easy broadcasting. The tracking is also very useful. Most autoresponder review sites will cite the tracking and monitoring of your lists as one of the premiere reasons to consider Aweber. On any given day you can analyse impressions, subscriptions, verifications, and click thrus on links you’ve sent out. The two places where Aweber stumbles are in its importing of other mailing lists and its pricing scheme, both of which pale compared to the next two sites.

Autoresponse Plus

Both Aweber and Get Response are remotely hosted autoresponder services. You pay a monthly subscription fee to use them. Autoresponse Plus on the other hand is a software program that you will install on your own server. As such, you’ll need to pay an upfront cost for the license ($99 for one and $167 for five), but you can then use it forever without paying anything. The value of this software is that you get to customize pretty much everything. You have full access, which makes importing and using your own external email services very easy. Unfortunately, if you’re not tech savvy, it can also be much more complicated, requiring the assistance of someone with extensive tech knowledge. Each license can be installed on one domain, but allows you to have unlimited autoresponders for that domain without paying again.

Get Response

The third autoresponder review I want to touch on is Get Response, the current industry leader and a very comparable service to Aweber. Get Response allows the same easy level of customization as Aweber, allowing you to attach documents, audio, or video, copy in messages from any format without extra formatting needed, and ensure delivery on any day of the week, through any email filters. The tracking system is often compared to Google Analytics, which is a good thing, providing a wide array of details about message open rates, subscriptions and more. It can get a bit complicated, but the tutorials are designed to help there. The pricing is slightly better than Aweber, though it does require a monthly payment of $17.95 to start (it can be lower with quarterly or annual payments).

Autoreponders are one of the three services every business owner needs – right after hosting and right before outsourcing. If you’re not yet signed up for one of the three autoresponders above, reread this autoresponder review carefully and choose one that fits your business’s needs.