Monday, June 9, 2008

Starting an Online Business without Any Money

There are many steps to take when starting an online affiliate marketing business. Several involve no money. These include setting up a free blog (like this one), writing and submitting articles to link back to your blog or affiliate landing page, and commenting in blogs and forums. To be quite honest with you, I am getting tired of commenting on blogs and I hate forums. But, this is one of the best ways to get links back to your site. In addition, you get to converse with some pretty neat people.

What if you are like I was an don't have hours to spend building links everyday? Either you spend some of your hard earned money from your regular job to use pay per click ads, build a nice website with an autoresponder, or you eventually give up. I've quit this venture several times. I always find a way to motivate myself and get back to work online.

One way that I've found to make money consistently every month to "pay my way" in affiliate marketing is to use a website called eHow. When I first stumbled upon eHow this year, I was impressed with their concept:

  • Write how-to articles in the required format.
  • Submit the articles for immediate publication.
  • Receive income from the ads displayed on the page showing your article.

With some of the failures I've had in the past, I was skeptical of the amount I might earn.

Currently, I have close to 50 articles live on the site. Some are duds in terms of making any revenue while some are great earners. My daily average is $2.60. Not great but not bad either. The best part is the income is residual. Once an article is published, you're done. There's nothing more to do. In fact, I think I only wrote one or two articles during the month of May and still earned $81!

eHow pays you during the first half of the month for the amount you earned the previous month. The minimum payout is $10.

You can check out my profile and articles at: http://www.ehow.com/members/tomsmith2e.html.

There is no affiliate program associated with eHow. I simply want to share an easy way to earn money with you.

Thomas Smith has spent several years studying affiliate marketing. You can read his reviews of online programs at Making-An-Income-Online.com.

Sunday, June 8, 2008

Using Video To Increase Website Traffic

I found a tip in a recent ebook by Ewen Chia. He stated using video to enhance your website as well as bring more traffic. The additional traffic, of course, comes from posting your video at other websites especially YouTube.

Ewen points out that you do not need any high tech knowledge to create a simple video. In fact, you probably have Windows Movie Maker on your computer now. If not, it is available as a free download.

I decided to give this a try. I did not use any photos or actual videos. I simply created a few title and credit pages in the Movie Maker software. I pieced them together, set the timing, and included a bit of music for kicks.

Here is my final product.



There's certainly nothing fancy there. However, it did help me realize that a video, even if it looks like a PowerPoint presentation, is easy to create.

I'll be using this technique more and more in the future. Using video to increase website traffic is a viable aspect of targeting visitors. Who knows, maybe a video you create will become popular and viral!

One final thing to mention: If you are creating videos, be sure to end with a screen showing your domain name. This will leave viewers with your site name fresh in their minds.

-Thomas


Thomas Smith has spent several years studying affiliate marketing. You can read his reviews of online programs at Making-An-Income-Online.com.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Build Your Mailing List with a Free Gift

We all know that one of the keys to affiliate marketing is building a list of email subscribers. They come from your squeeze pages, website signup boxes, and RSS feed readers.

There is a way to get even more people to sign up. That way is to offer a free gift for joining. I know, this is not a novel idea. I simply want to bring it to your attention. The gift doesn’t have to be expensive it just has to have some perceived value to your target market. Ebooks are wonderful for this purpose. Another aspect is you don’t have to create it yourself or even spend much to acquire the product. There is a website called Resale Enterprises. Here you can buy ebooks and videos on a number of niches. All come with some flavor of rights. Most have master resale rights attached. The best part….all of the products cost from $0.99 and up with most being under $10. You can have an ebook or video to give away over and over to eager subscribers.

Offering a free gift to encourage list building is easy and cheap. If you aren’t using this tool, you should start today.

-Thomas

Welcome to Finding Success with Affiliate Marketing


Hello, my name is Thomas Smith. I’m very glad you have landed here.

I am very excited to bring you the Finding Success with Affiliate Marketing blog. I’ll be sharing my experiences and tips learned in my venture into affiliate marketing online.

Please leave comments and your suggestions as well.

Thanks for visiting.

-Thomas