I know this may sound ridiculous coming from someone who's been on the internet for many years and tried many ideas, but what is the best idea to make money on the net ? And, what is the best book on this subject ? I'm guessing use Google Adwords, build a squeeze page and send people there, give away a free ebook or ecourse and send them a follow up series every couple of days for a long time via Aweber.com and promote your main product or affiliate products which would be on another sales page of your own or on the merchant's site ... of course you could try and get traffic to your main site if you have one via regular search engine traffic over a long period of time ... and create articles and submit them to article directories and build reciprocal links via linkmetro or your own set up ... and maybe add Adsense to your main content site (seperate from your sales page sites) ... I have tried that and other things with no real success, which means ... 1. It takes years to succeed 2. I'm picking the wrong niches 3. I'm picking the wrong affiliate programs 4. Just not enough free traffic 5. Can't figure out how to make Google Adwords work ... why do they keep raising there click prices on keywords you bid on .. my guess is that Adwords is like trying to solve Rubik's Cube ... 6. Not optimizing pages properly, or 7. I need a vacation (working for the Canadian Government during the day is not that easy, believe me). For those that are seeing success, any tips for the rest of us ? What is the best book on starting or building an online business ... that that actually works with enough hard work of course ? It's tough when you have a day job and can't devote that much time, but that's no excuse either. Thank you very much. Have a nice weekend !
I believe you could come from bit different angle, and start thinking: what's the best way to provide value to others in the area where I'm expert and like doing. It will take some time, but not necessarily years to succeed... you might get yourself interviewed in newspapers which might give you lots of coverage in just a short period of time. Perhaps you could check out 43things.com and find some popular niches you are familiar with. You could also try to schedule your time that you'll spend most of your time doing the most important things (like providing value). When you start getting traffic, you can try affiliate product or ads... or write an ebook and sell it or have a forums with 'paid' area. If you lack time, perhaps you could find couple of other people to help you out - and work together?
Couldn't have said it better myself. The only thing I would add to this is that once you find the area you want to target go find some discussion forums, chat rooms, and group mailing lists related to it and join them. Then just sit back and take notes on what they are complaining about, or better yet directly saying "I wish there was something that could do this.." and then provide the solution for them in the form of a product you create. Be patient and enjoy the payoff once you get there.
Again I couldn't have said it better myself. Troy and Game Producer have said what many successful entrepreneurs do to succeed. Again you are asking why some people are successful and why some are not. Change your camera lenses a little. See what you can offer to others and how you can help others succeed. This in turn will make your business a success. No matter what you start, you will always have a group of friends who are willing to help you. Never try to push a mountain up the hill by your self. Internet space is just too big and you can easily get lost. I have recently started a blog to experiment this further. If you don't mind, I would love to hear more about your experiences on my blog post: http://www.startupbooster.com/2007/...reater-than-the-success-for-website-startups/
Do not try to be better than others. Just focus on one task you feel will earn you money in the future and concentrate on that.
What is with your adsense pages? They look as if they would make some money. Now you have 2. Build 18 more, then you have the 10-fold income. Do you have any other projects? Sites with opt-in, affiliate products...?
My input would be focus. Look at the basics. 1. A site, blog, forum, or something of interest in which you have some knowledge of, doesn't take much actually. 2. Do the keyword research and build your idea around that theme. 3. Put together your site and get the bugs out of it. 4. Now start your link campaign, there are really simple methods in which you can submit for up to 45 sites per hour for link exchange. It works and works well and there are thousands of them. Make sure they are quality sites though. Takes about 10 seconds to verify the quality of each partner and about another 30 seconds to submit to them and post the reciprocal link on your site. 5. If you want, buy some one way directory links for 10 to $20 in which they submit to a couple hundred directories for you. 6. Leave adsense off your site while doing this in the beginning. Adsense is site suicide in the link getting process. Just use a php include statement and turn it on when your finished or for your inclusion of other ad based revenue. 7. Continue linking for a few hours each month after that. 8. Monitor aspects of your users through your server logs and ranking. Build on the traffic areas and add content to the site supporting higher traffic areas. It's work, don't get me wrong, but it works. Twas 6. Use the basic SEO principles on the site design.
Donald Trump's answer in an interview: regarding the most important advice to entrepreneurs was: "do what you love to do". I think you might need to re-think your approach on "making money". What are your interests? What hobbies you have? You mentioned 'government' as your work background - is there something inspiring information you could share to others? Do you like to write? Or do you like to build communities? Do you like get into "buying & selling" websites? Think about what you really enjoy doing, and start brainstorming how you could turn that interest into more serious business. The fundamental problem here is... that you are talking about tactics. I don't know if you have a well written strategy for yourself - so I really cannot say for sure - but I believe the first steps could be to ask yourself: "What you want?", "Why you want that?" and "What are you good at?". Start reading about how others are doing it. See how others succeed online (if that is what you really want to do) and see if you can copy their patterns for success (I'm not talking about copying their website theme or genre, but you can copy their philosophies, ways to work and so on). Perhaps you've picked a wrong market? The best spice is hunger: if you start doing something you enjoy, and can offer your knowledge to those who want and need that information, I'm sure all those 1-6 start going well. It won't take years to succeed, and even though it sometimes might feel frustrating - it just might happen that some day you hit the jackpot. I have been written my blog over a year now, and the traffic has been growing steadily. I have received maybe 500-600 daily unique visits this month, and I keep writing the blog. Well guess what? I made a really tiny switch (added "digg this, add to delicious, etc." button links to one more place. Previously I had only shown these in my index page, but now I added these links also to 'comment page') Then the 'miracle' happened: After a week (or so) I got 930 unique visits in just one day, and it happened to be Sunday (when the traffic is usually 100-200 uniques less than in other days). I was really impressed how a small change can affect this much, but guess what: the next day my site got 1845 unique visits (more than ever before). Naturally I had to write content that was valuable, but the lesson is that you really need to provide value, then do the 'necessary marketing' and keep doing what you do. Some people give up just before they are about to hit the jackpot. "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" (and "Rich Dad, Poor Dad 2: cashflow quadrant") books are pretty good I think. There's some good business advice, although it seems that the 'rich dad' is not a real life person. Nevertheless, the lessons and stories are interesting to read and have helped me. I would also recommend reading some marketing books. Seth Godin has some okay books which you might want to check out (Purple Cow is pretty ok), and then Jay Abraham's "Getting everything you can out of all you've got" is one of the most practical marketing books I've read. Really recommended.
Thanks for the information. So, you added a digg button to your blog as per http://www.sourcelabs.com/blogs/ajb/2006/05/digg_this_button_on_your_own_s_1.html I'm just guessing ? I just found that on Google. I'm not familiar with Digg this or Delicious or how it can affect traffic, but I'll read about it. If I'm missing anything, please PM me if possible. Your help is greatly appreciated. Thank you!
You wanna know where your going wrong? Actually where many people are going wrong on the web these days. LEARN TO MAKE AND DEVELOP YOUR OWN PRODUCTS AND SERVICES! Then you need to have the focus to see it through and take it serious.
Find a good solid service or product, believe in it..makes sure you have a niche and great service.....then your gold
Yes, pretty much. In my blog you can see digg/delicious/reddit/etc buttons - not just digg button - after each blog post.
What software do you use to create your site? It looks like a template. If so, that could be part of your problem when it comes to getting free traffic from search engines. It also appears you're tryng to target too wide (no pun intended) of a market. Weight loss is a larger market (again, no pun intended =) ) You should probably think about finding a niche inside that market and create an authorative site on that. For example, weight loss surgery. Remember, aim big, miss big - aim small, miss small. Good Luck, Don
What have you accomplished so far? I doubt you've made $0 online so I'm wondering what you consider "making money" online. Cheers
Hi, With regards to a smaller niche, I tried that for a long time and it didn't work - weight-loss-discovery.com used to be only about Hoodia Gordonii. Maybe I selected the wrong part of the weight loss topic. What have I accomplished so far - not much considering the amount of time I have put into it - good thing I have a day job. I make a small amount from Adsense almost all from http://www.skin-care-reviews.com, however the traffic going there is more. I also have sporatic affiliate income from the same site. That's about it. I have other sites, but no time to build them up, so I have decided to work on www.weight-loss-discovery.com, www.skin-care-reviews.com, www.debt-relief-today.com and possible my article site at http://www.1millionarticles.com - if I can ever get the error messages from Article Marketer to stop - they keep suspending submissions to my site because of some script failure (Article MS script) that I can't figure out (neither can my webhost at hostica.com) - I'll be posing a job and hiring someone from Guru.com to look into it this weekend. I also have a golf site I want to build soon to promote a golf book I have written - that is the subject I have the most knowledge about. To answer another question above - my sites are built with XSitePro, however the headers were purchased - some I may change (skin care reviews is in more than one piece). Any tips appreciated. Thank you.
Maybe look at what big company did and make the site niche, sometimes it works. Or buy 1000 domains make theme all PR 5, sell your links. that might be not a bad money.