Don't Spend Money To Make Money

I've been running this little special deal for a while now and figured that I would finally get around to posting about it on my blog for any readers.

I previously reviewed the Acme People Search system as a legitimate business model for making money online. The only problem with it, like most business ventures is start-up costs.

Typically, you have to purchase a domain name and web space for your search engine and then pay a $30 a month subscription to the owner for setting everything up for you. Now while any kind of business—online or physical—needs you to invest money to get started, there is easily a suspicious air surrounding online business opportunities. It is easy to feel like it is a scam when they're asking you to pay them and you never know if you'll make anything.

The problem is that people look at it like a job instead of an investment. People say that you shouldn't have to pay someone first before they pay you to work for them. This is true. However, these ventures are equivalent to creating your own business, not working for someone else's. That is the mindset you have to be in when going into something like affiliate marketing.

Despite that, I feel the need to make things easier for people. That's why I wanted to start offering people a risk-free solution. The first month subscription to Acme People Search is already free, but there's still the hosting fee. What if that was free as well?

Well, I am offering new sign-ups this very opportunity. All you need to do is sign-up and set-up your GDI domain through the system. GDI offers a 7-day free trial on .ws domains, but that runs out quickly. Within that 7-day window, I am willing to send you $10 via PayPal to cover the costs of that first month. This allows you a full month paying nothing out of your pocket to get started on the system. In this month, I am also perfectly willing to work with you and help you learn how to make money with the system so that you can pay your own fees in the months to come.

You can't make it easier than that. Interested? See this page for more details and the sign-up link.

GDI Downline Growing System

I know I haven't been making any post in a while, so I'm going to cut the lazy by quickly letting people in on something I recently came across.

I found a system that was developed to help people grow their GDI downlines merely by using free traffic exchanges. Now I've never been to big on the traffic exchanges in the past because anyone surfing one is just trying to wait for the time to get to the next page and get more credits. No one ever really reads the ads, they just want credits for their own site.

However, there are a few types of pages that will catch the eye of a surfer. One is an advertisement for another exchange. More credit earning potential is always appealing to someone using a traffic exchange. The second is something that could potentially be beneficial to them. Whether it's a list builder or a downline creator, if it can help them in their efforts, they will be intrigued.

This system I found can appeal to people on two different levels. Those who want to make money can sign up with GDI, enter their user name, and then receive monthly commission from referrals. Those who just want traffic exchange credits can benefit from the fact that there are a whole slew of exchanges in the system that referrals can sign up with through them. Anyone familiar with the way exchanges work know how referrals can help boost your credit count (and even further make money in many cases).

For those interested in this system, see this GDI Income Team link. Whether your are an existing member of GDI or not, it doesn't matter. Anyone can use the system to credit residual income for themselves.

My Free Advertising Model - Socializing

Social Networks

In my last post, I covered Article Marketing. It is very important to right informative and compelling articles to gain attention.

Now that I have gone through and showed you all of these free methods of marketing, you need to know how to let the world know about your creations. Making all the sites, lenses, blogs, and articles will do you no good if nobody ever hears about them.

It is essential to create some sort of internet presence for yourself when marketing. This is something that holds true for not only Affiliate Marketing, but standard businesses as well. You need a persona and people need to know who you are. One of the best ways to accomplish this is through social networking.

You need to have both a myspace and FaceBook account for your company/campaign. Myspace is starting to die out a little now, but it still won't hurt to capture what audience is left. Make a highly attractive page on myspace, utilizing the freedom the site gives you in regards to page customization. You should have already identified your target audience, so now hunt people in that target down and send friend requests. Get people to see your page and in turn, your product. You should post updates of the things you do and create on your page. Link to blogs, lenses, articles, etc.

Your FaceBook approach will work similarly. FaceBook doesn't allow all of the flashiness of myspace, so you should focus more on being professional here. If possible, create some sort of FaceBook app to give something to your viewers. It's always good to provide people with something that may capture their interests.

If you are more professional-oriented, you may also consider establishing a presence on a Professional Networking Site, such as LinkedIn. Befriend people within your industry to establish connections and get the word out about what you do or anything you may need.

Another good way to broadcast your creations is through email blasts. Sites like Awebber can provide you with double opt-in lists for you to broadcast whatever you want. These people sign up to receive emails about product and offers, so you won't be spamming them. I won't get into Awebber much, though, as it is not a free service, and thus is out of the scope of what I am covering in this series.

The final free way to broadcast that I wish to discuss is Twitter. It's an increasingly popular service where you can send short messages telling the world what you are doing. Take full advantage of this service. Anytime you create a site, Twitter it. Anytime you update a site, Twitter it. Anytime you publish a blog post, Twitter it. Anytime an article you write gets published, Twitter it. Anytime you publish/update a Squidoo lens, Twitter it (Squidoo makes this easy by linking your accounts). I think you get the idea. Make a tweet for whatever it is you've done so that you can keep promoting your work. Twitter followers are very easy to accumulate, and following other people can increase who you pick up. By amassing a large following and constantly telling people about your marketing creations, you increase the chance of someone seeing that and checking out what you made.

This concludes the explanation of my Free Advertising Model. With this, you should be far more successful in your internet marketing efforts. Good luck and keep checking back for more advice!

My Free Advertising Model - Article Marketing

Article Marketing

In my last post, I covered Blogging, noting the importance and how to get your blog attention. This time, I will discuss Article Marketing. The article-writing strategies discussed here can be used for more than just what you submit to article sites. You can take what you learn here and apply it to your blogging techniques or ad copy.

One of the key ways of attracting people without spending money is through writing articles. Article Marketing is a very powerful and effective marketing strategy if done well. Your articles also give you something else that may come up high in search engine rankings, increasing the chances of someone finding whatever it is that you are trying to promote.

First, let me cover some things to avoid doing with your articles. Some sites are stricter than others, but I think it's best to follow Ezine's guidelines as a general rule of practice. Ezine articles are clean and do not feel like spam or bad advertisements. You don't want your articles to come off that way, no matter where they are.

To get accepted to Ezine, your article has to provide valuable information. This is something you should strive to do at all times. I say this a lot, but nobody likes a salesman. Sound too much like one, and you'll have the metaphorical door slammed in your face. Ezine frowns upon articles that take on the tone of promoting something and will reject promotional articles. Instead of talking about how wonderful something is, try figuring out the problem your product solves. Discuss that problem, providing factual information on it. Then offer a link for them to learn more. This link can take them to a landing page that is designed to actually sell them on the product if you wish. Just don't try to sell them in the article. Ezine also doesn't like self-serving links. They only allow one and it can't be too early into the article. It's best to save that for near the end. You also should utilize your resource box for links instead of the article body. This will make your article more likely to be accepted.

I briefly touched on focusing on a problem for your article. This is the easiest way to write. Every product is designed to do something. Most likely, it is supposed to provide some sort of solution to a problem people may have. If the product is sun block, the problem it solves is sunburn (as well as possibly preventing cancer). If the product is anti-virus software, the problem it solves is computer infections. I think you get the idea, so just ask yourself what problem the product is designed to address. Gather up what is detrimental about this problem. Why would people not want this to happen to them? What makes this solution or prevention important? Throw this information into your article to educate readers of the importance of solving this problem. This will make them want a solution. That solution is what you will lead them to.

With articles, it is bad to directly link to a product's sales page. It is much better to link to a blog or Squidoo lens that will then lead them to the sales page. This will increase the quality of your article. Throwing in a sales link just reduces the integrity.

Another thing to be mindful of is that you can use emotional hooks to draw people in. A compelling article may sympathize with sufferers of a particular problem, but remind them of how bad the problem is. Draw on their negative feelings towards the problem and then be their savior, offering them relief. The more you can show yourself relating to the target audience, the more successful you will be. You may also take a more positive approach, highlighting how wonderful it is to be free of the problem and how grateful you are to the product that enabled it. There are many options and strategies. You just have to find what works best for you.

Finally, I want to suggest to you some article sites I use to submit articles: EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, ArticleAvenue.com, 3stepAds.com and Unique-Article-Database.com.

Next post, I will wrap up this series by discussing how to utilize social networks and other broadcasting methods to draw attention to all of your creations. You can create all the Squidoo lenses, blogs, and articles you want... but if nobody knows about them, it will do you no good.

My Free Advertising Model - Blogging

Using Blogs to Generate Traffic

In my previous article, I discussed How to Optimize a Squidoo Lens. This time I am going to cover blogging.

Blogging is something that has really caught fire and any smart company has a blog on their site to attract extra visitors. People like to read blogs and blog posts often come up in Google search results. These two points suggest that blogging is definitely something that every advertiser should take advantage of. Some popular blog services are Blogger.com (which is hosting this very blog) and WordPress.

Blogs, like anything else, have to be content-optimized. When you pick a subject for your post, you want that post to be highly focused on the topic. This is how search engines pick up your post and tie it to a particular key phrase that a user may type in.

Aside from providing insightful articles, blogs are also a handy way to linking to other resources such as websites that you want to call attention to, or Squidoo lenses. Some people use blog posts as article teasers, introducing the nature of an article and then linking to the full thing. This is a good way to generate extra links to those articles.

Successful blogs are interesting. You have to provide content that people will want to read. Otherwise, why would they waste their time reading? Whether your blog has a personal or professional feel...it still needs to keep the reader entertained and not bore them. Make your content fresh and inviting. A successful blog also has new content added often. You should aim to make 1-5 new blog posts a day as a general rule. The more content you are generating, the more opportunities you give your blog to be caught by a search engine.

Once you have created your blog, you want to get it out there. Absolutely include the feed in your Squidoo lenses. Also bookmark it everywhere that you can. My Yahoo is an option, as are My AOL, My MSN, Google's Bookmark, etc. A couple of other good sites to submit and bookmark a blog are Technorati, Feedage and Feedest. It is also a good idea to have your blog pinged by as many different sites as you can. Ping-O-Matic and AutoPinger are a couple of good sites for submitting pings to multiple services at once for your blog.

It is important to get your blog as much attention as you can, as it can really draw in extra visitors, which will in-turn make your job easier. Also be sure to keep your blog as organized as you can with good tagging. People like to search and look for related posts.

That's about all that I can tell you about blogging. The basic concept is a fairly simple one and everyone probably already knows how to create one. Some people may not have known how to get one noticed, however. Hopefully reading this post has imparted some of that knowledge onto you. Be sure to read the next article which covers Article Writing for Ezine and other sites. It will provide some very useful information that can also be put to use when making content for blogs and Squidoo lenses, so you won't want to miss it.

My Free Advertising Model - Squidoo

Squidoo Optimization

Last time, we discussed the importance of Keyword Research, which is the basis for everything you do. No matter what you are creating, the same general SEO techniques apply. You want to find a low-competition keyword and make that the focus. Make sure the keyword density is high and evenly dispersed throughout the page. This goes for web pages, blog posts, articles, and Squidoo lenses.

Now, we are going to look more closely at what is needed to make a good Squidoo lens. Obviously, like with any URL, you want the URL of your lens to contain your keyword. If your main focus keyword is "how to train a dog", you want your Squidoo lens to end: /how-to-train-a-dog. This should be the main lens title and primary keyword for the lens. You also want this in the title and content of every module.

Lens Content

A good lens should have at least four different modules. A good approach to lens-making is to create an outline of the information you wish to provide. For every section of your outline, you can make a new text module. Consider you are making a lens to promote a dieting product (but don't actually do this. Squidoo frowns upon these types of lenses). Your outline may look like:

I. Flatten Your Stomach Without Surgery (lens title and introduction)

II. Why You Want to Flatten Your Stomach (text module explaining health concerns behind obesity)

III. Ways To Flatten Your Stomach (text module detailing treatment options)

IV. In Conclusion – Flatten Your Stomach (text module wrapping up and pitching your product as the best solution)

V. Learn More About How To Flatten Your Stomach (big link module to your product)

VI. More Resources About Flattening Your Stomach (featured lenses module, linking to your other lenses)

VII. Updates on Flattening Your Stomach (RSS module with your blog's feed)

VIII. (Guestbook module)

Another optional thing you may want to add in is a flash video module that talks about the product you wish to promote if applicable. Also, don't forget the power of quotes. If there is a really strong quote that you want to emphasize, throw it in a BlackBox or Talk Bubble module.

One thing you want to keep in mind is that you do not want content to be written in the form of a sales pitch. You want to just provide information to the reader. Give them facts and valuable information. If your lens has no value, it will be marked as a junk lens. You don't need to try to sell people with your lens. Instead, just work your link into every text module. Whether it be a separate line at the end of the module that tells them to click for more information or linking text within the content to the site, you want your link shown as much as possible. You also will obviously be using the big link module to throw in another link.

Another thing to make sure to do is using pictures. People like to see pictures, because they catch attention. Make sure to have pictures relevant to the lens. Funny and eye-catching work, but anything that gives you a breath of fresh air from the text is good. For an example of how a finished lens might like, check here.

Once again, do not forget your keywords. Try to make them appear once every 100 or so words. You will also want to use your tags to throw in more keywords. In addition to this, tags should include any tags used by popular lenses on the same subject. Just do a search and find out what other people are using. This will link your lens to that category and increase potential traffic.

Create multiple lenses on every subject. Remember in step one that I had you gather a list of keywords? Obviously your first lens will be centered on your primary keyword, but you should make another lens for every other one of your top 4 or 5 keywords. You will need to alter each one a bit so it's not a carbon copy of the other. Perhaps change the mood of your writing or angle of approach. This is also a good way to experiment with techniques. You can link all of these lenses together with featured lens modules.

This covers the basics of working with Squidoo. In my next article, I am going to discuss how to incorporate blogging into your marketing efforts. Many sites use blogs as a way to attract more attention to their websites. It is a popular method as there are many ways to get your blog noticed and read. I will not only discuss how to make articles for blogs, but more importantly how to get people to the blogs.

My Free Advertising Model - Keywords

Keyword Research Done Right

Whether you're trying to promote your own business, someone else's product, or otherwise just need people to get to your site, you need to have a solid keyword foundation. To most effectively achieve your results, you need to plan things out properly. Keyword Research is such an important foundation of your marketing efforts, that you actually want your main key phrase determined before you purchase your domain!

So how do you find good keywords? It takes a bit of work and some patience, but the rewards are well worth it. Begin by asking yourself what exactly you are promoting? If you wanted to advertise a digital camera, for example... let's type "digital camera" (in quotes like that) into Google. 102,000,000 results! Ouch. It won't be easy to get listed like that. What brand is the Digital Camera? Let's try "Kodak digital camera". 384,000... better, but still no good. Let's be more specific still. Through on the model number, z1015, and you've narrowed it down to 164 results. Amazing! Better yet, that model gets searched for in Google almost 20 times a day!

Sure, with something that specific, it's easy to narrow down, but what if you don't know how to narrow your phrase down any? Well, that's where Google's Keyword Research Tool comes in handy. Type in the base concept of your product, uncheck the "Use Synonyms" box, and search. Sort by Global Search volume to see some phrases that are most commonly searched. Plug each phrase into Google to see how many results you get. Anything other 5,000 is a keeper. For more keyword suggestions, also try SEO Book. I like this site especially because it gives daily search estimates and not just on Google, but Yahoo and MSN as well. This will really give you an idea of what phrases are likely to be searched. You don't what keywords that nobody types in. It's preferable to get something that will get you a lot of searches, as this will ensure you'll get clicks at the top positions in search engines. As with Google's keyword tool, be sure to run every key phrase you are considering through Google's natural search to make sure results are less than 5,000.

How to Utilize Your Keywords

First of all, you have to determine what your focus keywords are. You can't be listed for everything, so you want to try to narrow down specific phrases to devote your focus on. The more targeted your content is, the higher you will be listed. I recommend you start with one primary keyword. Let this keyword be your central focus. It should likely be the one out of your group that is estimated to generate the most traffic, thus making it the most valuable to you.

That keyword should be in the domain name of your website, your blog's URL, the title of any page, article or lens you create, the title of any lens module you make. Make sure it is everywhere. You also want to evenly distribute it throughout your content so it has a high keyword rate. Try to throw that keyword into content every 100 or so words if possible.

Aside from your primary keyword, I recommend 3-4 secondary keywords. Figure out the order of the next most important keywords to your campaign and make sure they get fair representation as well. Put them in your description meta tags, keyword meta tags, and also distribute these through your content where possible.

Your keywords will be useless if you don't actually put them in your content, so make sure to put them to use. The whole point of your keyword research is to find phrases people will search for to find your pages. They can't do that if there isn't enough connecting your page to the key phrases of your choice, so always keep that in mind. Even images can be a good way to add additional keyword weight if you utilize alt tags.

In my next post, I am going to cover Squidoo. This is an important resource because of its growing popularity and high Google ranking potential. Not many people know how to make Squidoo lenses work for them, however. Don't miss my advice, which could help you create better lenses that gain higher traffic counts.

My Free Advertising Model - Overview

I was recently asked for advice on how to go about advertising for free. I feel that this is a very important question that beginners especially have to know. Chances are, when you just get started with affiliate marketing, you're not going to have a lot of extra cash to burn. Like with any business, you want to minimize startup costs, allowing your profit to pay for future expenses.

Since I feel this information could really be helpful to people, I am going to start a series exploring on the process of promoting a product for free. This initial post will just be a brief overview of my free advertising model, but I will continue this series, explaining each step in-depth.

To start, here is my outline:

1. Keyword Research
2. Squidoo
3. Blog
4. Write Articles
   
5. Socialize/Twitter

The first step is extremely essential. Your goal is to come up first page in Google's search results for something that people will search. The less competition you have for the selected keyword, the better your chances of making that happen. I touched briefly on keyword research in a previous article about Properly Identifying a Niche, but I want tackle it better this time. I'm going to show you step-by-step everything you need to do in order to take a good approach to keyword selection, giving you specifics on what to look for.

Once you have the right keyword, steps 2-4 are a matter of generating content to tie to that keyword. How would you like it if out of Google's top 10 results, 4 of them were yours? Well, if you have a Squidoo lens, a blog, an article, and your own website, that's four of your creations right there. You don't have to be a statistical genius to realize that this greatly increases the chances of people visiting one of your links when they search for that string of text.

Each method works a bit differently, so I want to go into them one at a time to analyze how to effectively use them to your advantage. In general, though, your focus should be providing information to people, not selling them something. You can use a landing page for a sales pitch, but when making Squidoo lens and submitting articles especially, you need to avoid coming off like a salesman in order to have your content approved.

A key thing to keep in mind is that it is not enough to just create all of these things. You can make as many lenses, blog posts, and articles as you want, but people won't just automatically see them. It is essential that you get the word out about your creations. This is where socializing comes in. Whether it's going to related lenses and praising them, while mentioning yours... or being a helpful member of a forum community while sporting links in your signature... or promoting through a social network... you need to make sure people know about you and what you made. Spread the word and get links out there for people to see. The more your pages are visited and the more back links you generate, the higher your search engine ranks will be.

I will, of course, cover more details of this in its respective section, but I wanted to give an idea of the basics of all of these.

In the next post, I cover Keyword Research. As the keyword is the foundation of your compaign, this will be an important thing to read and understand.

Properly Identifying a Niche

One thing I notice about a lot of first-time affiliates is that they don't understand how to effectively find a profitable niche to promote. No matter how good a product might seem to you, it will be useless if no one is interested in it. It is important to find products of high demand. You must do the research to find what people actually want so that you may provide them with their solution. Sometimes this just involves being perceptive to needs.

For example, if you know that a large number of people in the world are overweight, that may suggest that some sort of weight lost solution is worth promoting. You know that children are being born all the time. Surely, there are products for babies that would be useful to many people.

For other product ideas, you may wish to look at a directory such as DMOZ or Yahoo's Directory. These might be able to give you some possibilities if you can't think of any ideas on your own.

Once you have an idea of what you might want to promote, you have to make sure that it's really of interest to people on the internet. One way of doing this is by using Google's Keyword Research Tool.

Just enter in a term related to your potential niche. If you're following my first example, you might enter in "weight loss". Uncheck "Use synonyms" as that's unnecessary here. Now in doing this search, I found the term "weight loss" to have a search volume of 16,600,000 in May. That certainly suggests a lot of people are searching for that term. You can also see other related terms and how many alterations are being commonly searched for as well.

Once you find your general area that has a search volume that is high enough to please you, the next step is to figure out your target audience. What types of people are searching for the term you selected? Why are they searching for it? It's very important to know your audience and understand their needs before you do anything. Once you have an understanding of your target, you can find a product that directly caters to that target. You should be looking to solve a problem that this target audience has.

Lets say you've deducted your target audience wants to lose weight to look good in summer swimsuits. These people are looking for more of a quick solution to help with an immediate problem. This means a product that involves a long-term diet and exercise plan is useless to them. Instead, you need something that focuses on losing some weight quickly. Not only should your product be targeting to this, but obviously whatever promotional material you create must also address this need.

Remember that the goal is to identify a problem and try to help people solve it. The goal is not to sell someone something. If you look like a salesman, you'll make people want to slam a door in your face. If you look like you're trying to help someone, the sales will come naturally.

Avoiding Mistakes While Making Money

I recently wrote a (short) article along a theme that I've gotten onto recently which focuses on helping people avoid common marketing mistakes and make better decisions. I probably should have posted this one earlier, because it makes for a good introduction to the series.

The basic theme of the article is avoiding the traps of making money online. It is a very tempting venture, because honestly, who doesn't like the idea of making money? If you can use the internet as another means to do so, you certainly would like to try. However, it's not something that anyone can just jump into and be successful with.

There are many traps the inexperienced marketer can fall into that would cause you to lose a lot of money. Read the full article here to find out what those traps are and how to avoid them.

Also keep an eye out for future posts as I intend to share lots of ways for beginners to get a foot in the door and get on the right path from the start. There's nothing worse than making a bunch of costly mistakes, and many people start off this way.

Blogging - A Key Affiliate Marketing Strategy

For many people, the first step in the Affiliate Marketing world is a difficult one. You're lost and you don't know exactly what to do. Perhaps you've found a product to promote... one that you think will make you a good amount of money if only you get the sales. The problem is, you don't know how to go about promoting it.

A lot of people run to pay-per-click campaigns such as Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Big mistake. These are no places for novices to be. They will get expensive, wasting a lot of money for you without properly turning a product.

Before you ever venture into any type of paid advertising, you have to make sure that your clicks will convert into sales. This way, those clicks you pay for will actually be paying for themselves. How do you make sure your clicks convert? By first utilizing any free advertising technique you can. Not only will all sales be pure profit, but you get to test your site and various versions of ad copy to see which attracts sales the most.

Now I can go on for a long time about testing your site and all the various free advertising sources to gather your test subjects... but for the purpose of this post, I'm going to stick to discussing blogging.

Blogs, like the very one you are reading, can be a very effective way to get people to your website. No matter what type of product you are selling or what methods you are using to try to sell it, having a blog attached to your website is critical. Search engines love lots of fresh and relevant content, so if you keep a constantly updated blog with lots of nice articles, you'll easily boost your search engine rank.

Good blogs have lots of fresh, quality content. Google's bot is pretty smart, so you can't just throw any crap you copied from somewhere and expect it to work well. Original content works best. The more Google sees the same exact article, the less it ranks that article. Make your blog posts creative and informative.

If anything else, a good blog can at least get the word out about whatever you are trying to advertise. It's another source on the internet that someone might come across, and upon reading it, may discover what you wish to sell. Don't rule it out. However, to really make blogging work, you need to be serious and dedicated. Typically, the people who are most successful aim for 5 new posts a day. I know that can be a lot, but try the best you can. It might not be a bad idea to hire some blog writers for you if you can afford it.

Also, don't forget to check out my recently renovated website about making money online for more tips on how to get started with the affiliate marketing process.

Review of Wealthy Affiliate

Well, here's the second Affiliate Marketing Program I'm reviewing in this series: Wealthy Affiliate.

Wealthy Affiliate is more than a simple Affiliate Marketing Program; it is a whole community. In addition to providing members with information and resources, they also have a message board community where people can talk to others to get help and advice. I think the biggest wealth of this program is the wealth of knowledge contained within. There is a lot of reading material and instructions on just how to run a successful campaign. The forums are loaded with information that can prove helpful to anyone in the business.

If you are a beginning who doesn't know what you are doing, this is probably the best place for you. There is no limit to what can be learned here and how many techniques there are to share. You are certain to learn something that can drastically improve the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Pros:

• Lots of information and training courses contained within
• A community of helpful people who are trying to do the same thing as you are
• Free web space provided to members
• Lots of niche market ideas to explore
• Free "Beating AdWords" e-book provided to members on sign-up
• Nice referral program that continues to pay you so long as your referrals keep their subscriptions
  

Cons:

• You have to maintain your subscription in order to continue to use the benefits

There isn't really much bad I can think to say about Wealthy Affiliate. They will definitely help you reach your potential so long as you really want to make it work. I would recommend to anyone to at least try it out. If you don't want to keep paying for it, just start a one month subscription, soak up all the information you can in that time, and then cancel it. If you're a good study, you can probably still be very successful.

If you want to make money online, it is vital to know how to make money. Wealthy Affiliate is designed to teach you how. So if you're serious about making money through affiliate marketing, it is a program that should not be overlooked.

I don't want this to sound like a sales pitch, but I was just greatly impressed with how useful their site was and how much they had to offer. If you are interested in joining the program yourself, this link should allow you to sign up.

More information: Squidoo | Ezine

Review of Acme People Search

Being pressed for cash in this recession, I did what a lot of internet users probably do: looked into online money-making programs. They sound too good to be true, but sometimes it's best to look, for you never know if you don't try. However, I want to put the word out there on my personal experiences so that other people can use the research I've already done to help in their own research.

That is why I am going to put together a series of blog posts that makes full reviews on programs as I come across them. Today's target: Acme People Search

Acme People Search is a program put together by Tissa Godavitarne, a name that is probably infamous among affiliate marketers. Tissa figured out that 30% of all searches done on major search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN) are related to looking for other people. Think for a minute if you ever searched for someone online or thought about looking for someone. Maybe you got out of touch with a friend, maybe wondering about people you used to go to school with, or maybe even relatives who live in other states. He has a point if you think about it. It's a common thing to look for other people.

So what Tissa did was develop a search engine that will deliver free information on whoever you search. So how do you make money off of that? This is the genius part: he sought out affiliate links that would fit the theme well and integrated those into his search engine. Such links are for background checks and finding people by their social security numbers. When people click these links and sign up for the products, he profits.

But it doesn't stop there. Tissa has found a way to make 2nd tier commissions for getting people to help him in his referral efforts. So because of this, he offers to create a duplicate of his search engine for you to use to try to repeat his success. In addition to that, he can make commission the inevitable process of signing up for a web host on which to hold your search engine (don't worry, he lets you do that part too).

What you have now is a circle of profit as you get people to click on your affiliate links, and more importantly sign up for his program under you.

You can read more about his story and search engine here.

Pros:

• Tissa is a real person with a real identity and makes himself readily available to you. He doesn't hide behind the anonymity of the internet, like most, and instead invites you to meet him in person at his VA office.
• There's no real work involved in the actual setup of his program. Most of it is automated, you just have to sign up for various things.
• The program offers seven different ways to make money.
  
• Tissa offers free training sessions via online webinars on an almost-daily basis. He is pleased to answer your questions and give you the assurance that he is supporting you.
• Tissa will start you off with a little bit of free advertising on Google, Yahoo, and MSN to get your search engine some initial hits.
• Tissa promises that you will make at least $125 within 24 hours of completing all three of his steps, or he will give you $125 himself. He even has a "proof board" to show that people are being paid.
  

Cons:

• If you do not complete all three of Tissa's steps, he won't make your search engine display YOUR affiliate links all of the time. One of those steps includes paying him $30 a month, and failure to maintain that subscription could result in 35% of the links on your page being replaced with his own links that make him money instead.
• Your search engine can't make more than chump change unless you are a skilled internet marketer.
• While Tissa provides some free tips, he will not teach you how to make a successful PPC advertising campaign. Instead, he refers you to another site with a $40 a month membership.
• Tissa will not allow you to make commissions off the Lunar Pages or StartLogic sign-ups that people make from YOUR referrals unless you are both subscribing to him AND paying Wealthy Affiliate $360 a year (though Tissa WILL allow you to make commission from GDI hosting for free and also allow you to force referrals to sign up under GDI so you get commission and not him).

In conclusion, Tissa doesn't really run a bad program. It's just not an easy program, and will get costly at first. You need to know exactly what you are doing to be successful with his methods. That requires either already knowing, or spending the money to be told how to do it right. It is possible to make back all the money you spend and then continue to profit from there, but it can be difficult now with so many people in his program attempting to do the same exact thing.

Tissa's program takes effort and determination to work, but since it can work, I certainly will have to give it my vote of approval. You can sign-up for his program here or visit TalkToTissa.com to schedule a webinar in which you can talk with him directly and find out if his program is right for you.

More information: Ezine | Squidoo

Review of No Monkey Business Program

In looking at the many money making opportunities there are out there, I came across a program called "No Monkey Business". I was curious about what type of program this was, so I decided to check it out.

At first glance, it seemed like just another Affiliate Marketing program, helping you run some ClickBank campaign of some sort. I saw ClickBank income screenshots and AdWord campaign models to copy. However, as I looked into the program further, I found there was a lot more to it.

No Monkey Business aims to deliver you as many options to make money online as possible. Not just through Affiliate Marketing, but various other means as well. New ideas are constantly being devised. One example is a way to profit from buying and re-selling used gift cards. An idea that may seem crazy until you see their guide on doing it. It is actually an interesting and creatively ingenious method of earning extra cash. The idea is thoroughly researched to find out how to get the best possible ROI. These ideas are no jokes.

One of the best things about having so many different ways of making money available to you is that you can find your style. If one solution doesn't work for you, you can simply try others. There is sure to be at least one method that you will be able to succeed with. If you string together multiple types of campaigns at once, who knows how much you could make?

Pros:

• Easy-to-follow campaign structures with video instructions
• Lots of flexibility with many different types of money making ideas
• New methods of making money constantly being added

Cons:

• Not ideal for those who only seek an Affiliate Marketing program
• The program is too dependent upon doing everything exactly as instructed and doesn't leave room for you to expand upon methods or learn how to do anything for yourself

All-in-all it can be a program worth giving a shot. This is especially true if you want to make money online but aren't sure that you are cut out for Affiliate Marketing or PPC advertising. A lot of people tend to have trouble advertising online and end up spending more money than they can make. This program provides you with a lot of alternative solutions that may make life easier for you.

If you are interested in the program, simply sign up here.

Learn more at Squidoo