Money Hints

The global economy has been in shambles recently and doesn’t seem to be recovering any time soon. Therefore, a new trend of being dependent on ourselves has come in and taken the world by storm. Self employment is on the rise and will most likely continue that way in the foreseeable future.

The idea of working from home and earning extra money using your own computer is quite appealing to most people. The online money making strategies are all the rage these days and everyone seems to have jumped on the opportunity. This is even more apparent in third world countries where a little extra cash goes a long way for improving the quality of life. But it’s important that you learn how to make money online before just jumping in blindly.

The vast majority of the sites claiming to offer a way to make money fast are either total scams or at the very least they aren’t being honest in some way. However, there are plenty of honest home business opportunities for you to get into. You can earn money on the internet if you do it properly and don’t expect overnight success.

Here are some of the more common methods for making money on the internet…

Foreign exchange trading, usually just called forex. This requires incredible patience and is definitely not an option for seekers of quick money. It needs constant research because the system changes often. This means you need to be on top of your game at all times.

Freelancing is really hot right now. Writers, web designers, graphic designers, SEO specialists, researchers, marketers – Just about anyone can become a successful freelancer. All you need to do is join the top freelancing websites, keep your profile up to date, and bid on the jobs that fit your skills and interests.

Make money blogging. If you have a lot of knowledge or interest about a particular topic you can earn a very good living by blogging about it. You will write informative, entertaining, and useful posts about various subjects within the niche. Then, build up your rankings and readership using various internet marketing techniques. There are many different ways that you can make a great income from a popular blog.

That’s obviously not all of the ways to make money online, far from it actually, but they are a few of the common methods people choose. Do some research to find the online home business idea that fits best for you and go with it. You can even combine several different ideas and methods. There’s no one size fits all solution but there are plenty of opportunities out there to choose from.

It can be done but you need to remember the simple fact that you can’t get anywhere without taking action. You will need to work hard for quite a while before you can expect to earn a lot of money on the internet. It takes time, patience, and consistent effort. There’s no such thing as overnight success when it comes to online business!

Investing in the stock market is one of the best investment plans an individual can decide to partake. Making gains out of your invested stocks depends on so many factors and if they are utilized well then a huge amounts of gains are likely to be realized. Many people generally perceive that for an individual to actively participate in the stock market and obtain noticeable gains then massive amounts of money should be invested and high priced stock bought.

It is factual to note and state that it is indeed possible to actually obtain huge amounts of returns from your stock with just buying and obtaining cheap penny stocks. Indeed it is possible to gain and obtain as much as a million bucks from buying stock whose value can be ascertained to be as low as less then $1. Mostly it is done in such a way where the investor decides to buy these cheap stocks then later on embarks on expanding his or her own stock with every gain being realized from the cheap stock.

To be able to invest in cheap penny stock and report massive profits one is required to have known and become aware of some of the speculative nature of stocks in the market. Most cheap penny stock hold a very volatile character in a way that they are able to rise in pricing within minutes and the same is true with regards to recording massive falls in share prices.

Understanding how the trade market works is very crucial to any investor, where as it is easy to get a quick round up of how business is conducted it is important to gain enough experience through active and lengthy participation in the activities involved at the market. Even with the cheap penny stock there should be caution in the modes of trade undertaken since a simple an informed mistake regarding how market trends are trading can result to huge losses. The developing world however has made things a bit easier with emergence of quality software which assists in determining how market trends are likely to behave during the upcoming weeks or months.

An ideal investment undertaken in the stock market will surely be a profitable undertaking if it is conducted with caution and intelligence. Cheap penny stocks should therefore not be ignored when deciding to engage the stock market for possible investment plans.

For the last financial years of the global economy, stock market investing has incurred some less encouraging results. There has been a general conception by the already familiar investors of the stock market that allowing their statements to be known will generate fear amongst potential stake holders as well as exposing them to the entire public on how much their portfolios have been on a consistent low. These facts and assumptions in most cases will go along way in discouraging many new merchants who desire to embark on joining the stock exchange to rethink their stance of doing so.

For new investors who have made up their minds on stock market investing, and getting to know and be familiar with how operations are carried out on the stock market, can form a huge understanding problem to many. All the market data and constant speculation on the possible trading of particular shares can leave many new investors feeling exhausted and confused.

Being familiar with how the stock markets operates is the first major step to be undertaken by any merchant seeking to make absolute gains from the investing market platform. There are many people who have been players of the investment scheme but up to date they are not familiar to some of these vital points necessary for a consistent profitable time at the stock market. Stock market can be defined to as a place of trade where a company or listed organization decides to part ways with some of its shares in order to allow the public or other independent entities to buy and in return generating money to the company.

Reasons that are set aside for the decision of major companies to sell shares differ depending on their financial needs and requirements. The common reasons are usually to raise money for the expansion of the company or to settle a particular debt which is due for payment. Generally the concept of selling shares by a company is to gain money and allow the public to have a say in the running and operations of the various activities carried out by the company. Share holding is an investment activity one can seek to partake to gain money since with every financial profit reported by the company you purchased shares from a small portion is awarded per share.

Welcome back to another riveting post on the whys and wherefores that you can learn how to make money online. In this post, I’m going to mention one way in particular that you can make money by avoiding something. That something is the scourge of newbie Internet marketers known as the paid monthly subscription sites.

There are plenty of them around and they all promise to make you rich if you follow their teachings month by month, while they relieve your credit card of their fee. This subscription fee varies from scam to scam, er, I mean from scheme to scheme but you’ll be out of pocket to a greater or lesser degree either way. Some charge as little as $30 a month while others like to go for the ubiquitous $97 a month and some charge way more than that.

So what do you get for your money?

Very little that you can actually use in 99% of them. A quick backpedal here – there is the 1% that actually will teach you something useful (I’m thinking Court’s Keyword Academy and Vic’s mentoring program here) but you still have to take that knowledge and apply it. Most don’t, then moan that the scheme doesn’t work.

The rest of them are 95% hype and 5% recycled same old same old and you might make a little cash from them but for most of them you will not cover your subscription fee.

Of course, there is one person that these paid subscription sites make a ton of money for. The owner. Looking at them from the opposite direction anyone with two eyes in their head cab see the obvious staring back at them. The person who sets one of these things up and markets it to all the newbie wannabes out there who are looking to buy into the make money online dream, that’s the person who will make money online in spades from their paid subscription site. So, in all honesty, paid subscription sites do make huge amounts of money for at least one person!

For the rest of the people sucked in by the hype and promises of easy money, the reality is far different. They will spend a lot of time reading up on the method, then when they go and try to put it into practice they find that the promised riches do not drop out of the sky into their laps. The opposite, in fact in that they make absolutely zilch.

So what goes wrong when all the mentoring, teaching, information and guidance should result in an Aladdin’s cave of treasure? And why am I not even bothering to single out any particular scheme to compare and contrast will the multitude of others?

Second question first – they are pretty much all of a muchness. The basic model is the same:

1. Buy domain, build website
2. FIll it with all the free PLR articles they give away
3. Fill it with PLR products to sell as your own
4. Get traffic, build your list to pimp your stuff to
5. Sit back and watch the gravy train roll in

That’s pretty much how it works for most of them and that model fails 95% of all new Internet marketers. Why? Because it rarely works unless you are so determined and pig headed that you’ll stick at it for years and build up a huge list of thousands of people. Do that and you will sell stuff by the law of averages. It’s a numbers game, and if this is your first time to hear this, you need to understand that to sell anything you have to fail to sell stuff to a number of people before you get a sale. Basic salesman stuff, but it’s oh, so true whether your flogging stuff online or knocking on peoples’ doors.

Most people don’t have the patience to wait that long and so give up and become one of the statistics aka one of the 95% of failures. Along the way, they may have spent many hundreds of dollars to find out. They feel ripped off, scammed, let down. Understandably so, because they got a crap shot and crapped out. If you are even thinking about buying into a paid membership site, think twice. Read Lis’ article on Teaching Sells to get a real hard hitting review on one of the new scams, er, I mean schemes that are hyping their way to a computer near you as we speak. Or read.

Are there alternatives?

Hell yes! But you have to shut out all that hype and all the promises of easy money, because the reality is that there is no easy money. Its a lie. What is not a lie is that there is a huge amount of money to be made from the Internet. You just have to be in possession of the right knowledge. This is information you can get for free in several places online from real people who are making real money for themselves without taking a penny from anyone else. You have already been introduced to several of them in previous posts in this very blog, so I won’t go over it all again here.

I am one one them too.

Although I’m not so foolish as to go publicizing how much I personally make online. Suffice it to say, I make my living from the Internet and it doesn’t cost anyone else a penny. I don’t run subscription sites and I don’t sell crap to people.

I do post a few ads here and there on my many websites and make money from commissions but if people buy from the advertisers, they are spending their money elsewhere. But those people come from the search engines looking for answers and I give them some and the ads may give them more. That’s how it works. I’m not going to hark on about how to get the right kind of traffic to your site. I’ve already done that in previous posts right here and at my sister make money online sites.

Lastly, if you are going to heed this advice and avoid paid subscription sites like the plague, you need to know how you can make money online legitimately without ripping anyone else off and by putting in a lot of hard work yourself, because that how you’re going to do it. Read this blog, go read Griz or Vic, or Court. Check google – the top site for the term “make money online” is Griz’s site and its a wealth of legit information. Its the top site because he knows what he’s doing and he shows you how to do it.

I’ve echoed his teachings in this very blog. Its a model that works and you can do it for free. Then at least if you don’t have the balls to work hard at this, you have lost nothing except some time. And if you do have the balls to work hard, you can make a good living from the Internet too.

Never give up!

How To Make Money Online SEO Hints

While I’m on the theme of how to make money online here at How To Make Money Online SEO Hints, its all well and good getting your site onto page one of Google’s index for your main keywords using some sleek SEO techniques, but what will you do with the site once its there? Well, there are several methods of monetisation that all work extremely well depending upon the niche you are working. But in this post, I’m going to look at how to make money online with Adsense.

Adsense, for those of you who do not know, is Google’s published ads that are paid for by their advertisers and placed in search results as well as on individual websites and blogs and work by earning the publisher a set amount for each time one of the ads is clicked. That is paid for by the advertiser depending upon their niche and keywords and several other factors too, which I won’t go into here as this is a post about Adsense, not the advertisers side of it, Adwords.

So, its simple enough to apply for an Adsense account with Google as long as you have a decent looking website or blog that has been around for a few months at least and has plenty of relevant content on it. There are tutorials on the Adsense site which show you how to put the ads on your website or blog, so I won’t go into those details here.

I’ll assume you now have a working website or blog and you have the ads displaying on the front page.

The general idea is to attract visitors to your site and hope that they’ll click one of the Adsense ads and you can sit back and watch the good time roll… except its ain’t gonna happen like that man! You’ll probably sit around a few days, then a few weeks and wonder why your stats show a big fat zero.

Well, you need something for the clicks to happen and that something is traffic. But not just any old traffic, it really needs to be that good old organic search traffic I’ve been talking about in previous posts. It has to be targeted for your keywords too, so that means that not only must you rank highly (read first page) in Google’s index for your keywords, your on site content must also be perfectly optimised for those keywords so that Google serves the right ads – those being the ones relevant to your keywords, of course.

Now for the basic explanation:

The way Adsense works best is when targeted search traffic turns up at your site looking for something specific, either the answer to a question or to buy something. A good Adsense site is one that they land on and see that it looks crap, and it’s immediately viewable text doesn’t answer their question. They see a block of text links in a prominent place (usually just above the title of the article) that promise to answer their question, so they click one of them. Voila, you get paid what the click was worth (anything from 3c to a dollar or so) and the surfer goes on their merry way. Incidentally, Google decides which ads to display on your site and what they’ll be worth.

Now one of two things will happen.

1. The surfer lands on the sales page of the advertiser and buys the product or service.

2. The surfer doesn’t like the look of the site they just landed on and head off somewhere else.

In the first case, that’s good for you because it means your click converted and Google will send more high paying ads to your site – which is when you start seeing $1, $2 or higher clicks. My best so far has been a $3.59 click I got the other day (yes, you can track them)

In the second case, that’s bad for you because your click did not convert. If you get too many of them, Google will only send you low paying ads in the 3c region.

From this you can see that it is of major importance that you not only attract targeted traffic, but that you show them ads specific to what they’re targeted to. You also need them to show up in reasonable numbers, because your own conversion rate will probably be around the 3%-5% mark depending upon several factors such as site layout, ad placement etc. So that mans for every 100 unique visitors, you should get between 3-5 clicks on average. So that tells you that you need at least 30 unique visitors a day to get even one click. Of course, the more the better!

Another factor in ad conversion is site layout and this can make a huge difference in converting those visitors into clicks.

Imagine yourself as a surfer looking for some information on where to find the best local plumber, because your kitchen is filling up with water and you need it fixed. You go to Google and type in Plumbers in Mytown, Mystate and you get a list of several hundred thousand pages. You look at the sites listed on the first page and select the first one (like 90% of all other surfers will do). You land of the site and it has some brilliant graphics, flash animation, a video of the site owner squawking about how his company is so great that, incidentally you can’t find the “stop” or “mute” button for, a page so long it takes you ages to scroll down past hundreds of 125×125 flashing ads and banners and a site navigation bar with drop downs on its drop downs and you spend an hour just searching around for damn telephone number… Meanwhile your kitchen flood is now encroaching on the dining room…

Well, does your website remotely resemble that nightmare scenario? If it does, guess how well you’ll do with Adsense. Mmm, no chance!

On the other hand, you click on the next site in Google and what opens is a fairly plain white page, basic header telling you the name of the site with some article on plumbing below it and a block of 3 or 4 links above it that say something like “24 hour emergency plumber in Mytown, Mystate”… Oh boy, you click it like your life depended upon it!

Hope that graphical representation of what a surfer is likely to do when faced with two very different styles of website. The rule of thumb is that if you make it too fancy with too many distractions, your visitors will be unlikely to click your Adsense ads. On the other hand, if your site layout is clean, clear and the ads are prominent with no other distracting ads (such as affiliate banners, or navigation links to articles that might answer the visitor’s question) then you will likely get a much higher click through rate (CTC). Meaning more money for you.

So the concise lesson here for Adsense to work for you is:

1. Make sure that your site is sitting high in the SERPs for not just its main keywords, but for many closely related keywords and it is attracting sufficient traffic

2. Make sure your on site content is very highly optimised for those keywords

3. Choose a simple, clear and clean site layout with as few distracting links as possible

4. Only place one keyword optimised article on your front page to prevent dilution of keywords and risk confusing the Google Adsense bots

5. Experiment with ad placement by all means but make sure your main ad block is high on the page, preferably above the title of the article or post.

End of short adsense lesson!

There’s lots more to it, but the idea that you just put the code on your site and Google will serve up a block of ads that will convert into $$$ is only true when you know exactly what you’re doing. As for the keyword side of things, you could always check out Court’s Keyword Academy which will also help you to learn how to make money using keywords in creative ways. But learn you must, because if you don’t know what you’re doing, you will end up getting rock bottom priced clicks and not very many of them either. Then you will say, “Adsense doesn’t work!” and you’ll go off looking for something else to monetise your site with. Guess what? There isn’t much else that is as easy to work and converts as well as Adsense when you do know what you’re doing.

So like any methods to make money online, you need to put a good deal of thought, research and hard work into it in the first place before you’ll start seeing the results that you want.

Terry Didcott
How To Make Money Online SEO Hints