While I am not a zillionaire or IM guru by far, I have done some things in the recent past that worked for me. I guess I could share some advice for struggling newbies here. What follows will be obvious to many, but for others it will be an eye opener. For me, at least it was. An Internet Business is a pretty simple thing. It is also a lot of work. Don't fool yourself Targeted Traffic Traffic is the soul of any business. A shop that gets no customers will close its doors fast. A site without visitors is a ghost town with only tumbling weeds passing through it. But there is a trap. Untargeted, random visitors are almost as bad as no visitors at all. I say 'Almost' because maybe 1 in 10,000 will buy something from you or click an ad. But that's still small change and pretty useless to you. Traffic is not rocket science or quantum tunneling. It is just the amount of people that flows into your site from any source, be it a Google search or a banner ad. But traffic can be costly as hosting companies can charge an extra fee if sites start consuming too much resources in their servers, even more so in the cheaper, most basic accounts. Just imagine how awful would it be if you had to pay extra fees for your hosting but the scores of people visiting your site aren't worth a red cent? So the essence of an internet business is: 1. Having something to sell/people to click/anything you can monetize; 2. Targeted traffic; That's it!!! All you need to start making serious money in the internet is listed above. Simple isn't it? But to reach those two objectives there is work to be made. Lots of work at first, at least. Unless you are one of Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google's founders) relatives and can ask them to put your site at the first position for your keywords, bringing traffic demands work. But the good thing is that once everything falls into their right places like Tetris, results are cumulative and more and more people will be brought to your site. After making your first thousand dollars you can start outsourcing things and just become a manager/SEO of your own internet business. And you will succeed at being a good manager of your outsourcers because you are not the nephew of the owner but because you did with your own hands what they will do now for you. The secret to targeted traffic, and we will see good strategies soon, is to relate with your customer (consider even people who just click Adsense ads your customers; you sold them information for the price of a click). If you buy 30,000 visitors from a shady site your site will be overwhelmed by bots and people from the poorest third world countries trying to make a few cents to better their living standards. It is good to help people in need but they are not exactly the visitors who will make you money (though smart black hatters can monetize even that, but that's a subject for people far more resourceful than me). "Relate to your customer" sounds complicated but it is not. If a girl finds her poodle full of ticks and your content helps her utterly annihilate the damn parasites, you related with her one hundred percent. Then she will be MUCH more open to follow an affiliate link or click a dog collar ad. Instead of an army of thousand of bots, one girl made you money. If she subscribes to your list you can end up selling her an e-book about healthy dog food or she can buy a dog toy from your Amazon link. The work you need to do is making sure that girl, that targeted traffic, will find your content in the crazy maze of the internet. We will see how in a later post.
#2 Stick with it Most IMers start working on their site and after a while if they have no results or only meager gains they will give up and go search for the next shiny thing. If you want to succeed pick a way to make money online and stick with it. If people made it work in the past so will you if you have discipline and will to win. If you have a small stream of visitors to your site, keep working on it. Eventually, and this depends on your own efforts, you will have as many visitors as you need. Once you have a stable source of income its maintenance will be minimal, even more if you outsource it. Now you can start working in your next income source. Have enough of them and you will be financially free and with time, if you really go for it, even rich. #3 Article Writing Oh, I know what you could be thinking right now. "Worthless!", "Panda killed it!", "Are you f****** kidding me!" and some less savory words. It is true that article sites took a beating after the dreaded Panda and Penguin updates. They do not work as well as before for link building now. But they still rank for many lesser used search terms, the so called "Long Tail Keywords" that do not have so much competition as the most searched more obvious ones. Anyone can write an article. This is not literature, you just have to put a solution for a problem in a .txt file in your own words and publish it. Great content is not a beautiful set of words that can win the Nobel Prize of literature, it just has to satisfy the searcher's needs and let them craving to know more. As an example let's use theâ€your dog got a bad case of fleas†again. If you find a short, 450 words article that teaches you how to get rid of fleas and the solution works, that's amazing content from the user’s viewpoint. So just do it. Do your keyword research; See what problems people in your chosen niche have in forums or magazines; Look for solutions for the problems your niche have; Write some simple, useful articles about said solutions; Post your links at your resource box; One article is nothing but tens of them will bring targeted traffic towards your sites. This content can also be posted in forums, Squidoo lens, Yahoo Answers questions and other places; Learn how to do good spinning and start spinning your articles to other article directories. Automated spinning is next to useless if you let the program do the spinning but if you write the spin syntax yourself you can have tens of articles with a uniqueness factor that can reach 90% as you can rewrite sentences without losing the context. A uniqueness of 90% is more than enough for publishing content without any duplication penalty. Yes, it is work but it pays off. And that’s all that matters. Look for a good, well reviewed course on fast article writing and manually spinning articles. If you can stop eating Big Macs for a day or two you can afford it. The best places to publish articles are: www.ezinearticles.com www.goarticles.com www.hubpages.com www.articlesbase.com www.squidoo.com is great for bringing eyeballs to your content.