Marketing Schemes

There are many ways to make money through an online business. But like any other business, the money you make is proportional to the amount of effort you are prepared to expend.

This article describes some of the methods to make money.

An Online Store

Seems like a simple idea: install one of the free e-commerce packages like oscommerce or zen-cart, buy into a distributor's database and wait for the money to start rolling in. Except this isn't going to happen because everybody else is doing exactly the same as you. Unless you can find a niche market or can write blinding product descriptions you are not going to have enough unique materiel for the search engines to even put you in the main index. And if you are hiding away in the supplemental results, nobody will ever find you.

But if you are prepared to do a lot of research and spend a time developing your store then there is no reason in 12 months time you could begin to see some results. I repeat: in 12 months you could be seeing a 1% conversion rate and if you keep plugging away in another 12 months you could get to a 2% conversion rate.

As with any business, these things take time. Just have to be patient.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a system of advertising in which one site agrees to feature buttons from another site in return for which the first site gets a percentage of any sales generated for the second site. In other words, I can host an link to an online store and if you click on my link and buy something I get a cut on the deal. Because of this simple system, affiliate marketing is popular among startups with very small marketing budgets.

The main problem is that it is easy to do. Amazon was the first company to promote affiliate marketing with the result that anybody can partake of the affiliate service. And if everybody can do it then the slice of the cake becomes very thin. But if you can find a niche market that generates a high volume of visitors then your chances of a good ROI will improve.

Plug-in Profit Site

Essentially a site in a box that you can customize. The only fixed components are the links to affiliate sites. It means that you do all the hard work to attract visitors, hope they click on the affiliate links and earn you a penny or two. They do work, like every other scheme, but you are going to have to get thousands of visitors if you want to make a living out of the scheme.

Example: pluginprofitsite.com

Multi Level Marketing

Multilevel Marketing (MLM) is a system of selling products or services by using independent distributors and allowing these distributors to build and manage their own sales force by recruiting, motivating, supplying, and training others to sell products. The distributors make money through their own sales and a percentage of the profits of their sales force. MLM is also described as any business where payouts occur at two or more levels, that is: if you make a sale, both you and the person above you will get a portion of the proceeds.

A quick search of the Internet reveals more articles about the pitfalls of MLM than the positives. But you can make money this way, just don't expect it to come easy.

Note: MLM is not a Pyramid scheme. Pyramid schemes are illegal and rarely have a product to sell.

Get Rich Quick Sites

Get Rich Quick Sites are (in my opinion) the numerous sites which virtually guarantee that if you buy their product you cannot possibly fail to become a millionaire by doing no more than a couple of minutes a day on the PC, and then playing golf for the rest of the day. Popular examples of such sites are: Rich Jerk or DayJobKiller.

These sites do contain a lot of sound information, the problem is that they overhype the promise of financial freedom and prey on people's desire to get something for nothing.

The Solution

The problem with all these schemes is that they are each based around a standard business model. You can change the words, colours, fonts etc but at the end of the day all you are delivering is a site that contains exactly the same as everybody else doing the same thing.

And because all the sites contain the same information the search engines will walk right on by. For example, on one site the top promotion has the opening sentence 'Fast-Track Your Journey To Online Success' A google search for this phrase returns 253000 results. In other words you are competing against 253000 other sites all running the same promotion.

There is no simple solution to the problem. Like any other business you are going to need to do some work. Start by researching all the guides you can find on how to build websites, search engine optimization, copy writing, linking strategies, affiliate marketing and so on. Once you have an understanding of the business then you can start to modify the site to improve your ROI or CTR.

You also need to consider your target market. If your target is "people looking for work at home" then expect to get lost in the flood of copycat sites. But if you narrow down your target and find a smaller niche: retired people, students, single parents etc, you can target your advertising campaigns. For example, the search phrase: 'Make Money At Home' is too broad. But 'Supplement my pension by affiliate marketing' is a (very) long tail keyword and if your site does well for this search then you will get much better conversion rates.

Reproduced with permission by wealthyaffiliate.co.uk/

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