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