We are fortunate to witness history’s most exciting times. And YOU now have the chance to get into this industry where the barriers to entry are exceptionally low and the growth potential is unthinkably high.

One area of Digital Content Publishing is marketing products based on ideas. We have special reports, ebooks, teleconferences, special reports, etc. as examples.

While selling hard and tangible goods such as computers, cameras, flowers and jewelry still dominate the scene, a big factor which contributed to its trade is the information about those products. That is publishing information about those hard goods.

Because it is extremely easy to start businesses based on these, I would say it is THE ultimate vehicle for becoming wealthy in the 21st century.

Think of the business we are in. Selling information. Selling special reports. Signing up as an affiliate. Publishing content and attracting advertisers.

Thinking of making money online?

Have you recently raided your downloads folder and took a second look at those eBooks?

My guess is that heaps of the ebooks in your hard disk could be about affiliate marketing, adsense, membership sites, adwords, blogging and the myriad of other make money from home subjects.

When you are new and clueless in internet marketing, you get distracted to every other eBooks and programs or courses that pop in front of you.

You may have downloaded truckloads of ebooks offered for free and some you paid for.

Have you studied them? I guess not.

But if ever you have studied some of them, have you implemented what was written?

I know. You have not!

There is no indication that the amount of information shoved into our hungry minds would ebb.

Overload? Yes, because we keep on amassing them.

Don’t add another ebook in your downloads folder.

Dust off that good one. Hey, by now you already know which one is good.

Read, understand and implement.

1. Picking a good niche. Choose a bad niche and you’re dead right from the start. In picking a good niche there are essentially 3 things to look for:

a. Demand – Establish if there are enough people looking for your chosen niche. Use a keyword selector tool to determine the number of searches. I personally use this keyword tool. It’s way way better than overture and most of the available tools. It’s Free!

b. Competition – This is a good indicator of a good niche. You want competition but not too many. Also, don’t compete with giants in your chosen area. Instead, go to niches where these guys avoid. Small niches are not profitable to the big guys. You can pick that niche. If you are using the keyword selector tool, then the data under “Google Results” is your competition.

c. Money Potential – One way to quickly check if you can make money from home with a niche is the number of advertisers. Search Google for you chosen keyword and check if there are advertisers (It’s at the right side of the search results). You can also check if there are related products at clickbank.com or at cj.com.

2. Creating content for that niche. You don’t have to do it all. You can get content easily and quickly by having them done by other people. You can go to elance.com, guru.com, rentacoder.com, scriptlance.com and submit your needs.

Another way is going to public domain sites like Gutenberg.com. There you will find information that is freely available to the public. There are thousands of books available where you can get your free content.

A third source for content is PLR or Private Label Rights. With PLR content, you can literally do whatever you like with it. Be sure to check how many of these materials have already been distributed. Revise the materials, repackage, update then put your name on it.

Dozens of PLR sites have already flooded the internet. Name your niche and almost always a PLR content is available. I always go to easyplr and nichecontent for my PLR needs.

3. Technical details. How do I FTP? HTML or PHP? How do I create an affiliate link? Payment processing? How do I ping my blog? What are backlinks? SEO? What is an autoresponder?

These are some of the technical details that instantly stop people from pursuing their internet businesses. If you have a clear business model to follow, this would not be a problem as you can easily hire somebody to do these annoying technical details for you.

You can easily get sidetracked if you do the technicals yourself. Focus on what makes money online. And in your case it is marketing your business.

Making money with forums is one of the most neglected ways to make money at home. But it is extremely effective and could bring in instant cash into your pocket. If you are already a member in one of the forums, then the easier and quicker it is for you to start this money making strategy. Here are the steps:

1. Find your forums. For this, go immediately to http://www.big-boards.com. There you can find high trafficked forums. Bigboards.com has the largest list of the most active forums on the web. Almost all topics your mind can imagine are there.

Another way to find forums is to use Google. Yes, the mighty search engine of choice. Go to google.com and type the your keyword and forum. For example, if you’re looking for forums related to video games, you will type ‘[video games forum”.

2. Contribute in the discussions. If you’re a new member, try to throw in something valuable in the discussions. Give something meaty, something that would be of use to the participants. A free report related to the topic discussed is the best strategy here. Don’t just butt in and shamelessly sell your product or service.

3. Determine the need. As always, start with the need. What’s hot in the discussions? What is it that forum members have always been discussing? Clearly, the more interest there is in the topic the more likely you’ll be able to sell something in that particular topic. Find what problem people are passionate about.

There was one guy named Kacper Postawski from Poland. He was a member of a self-improvement forum. He saw an opportunity when a thread discussing how to sleep less and still have more energy emerged. What he did was he bought a book on insomnia, absorbed the concepts and wrote his own ebook. He immediately filled the need and the result was a website called powerfulsleep.com where he became an instant millionaire. Wow!

4. Find PLRs and convert it into an ebook. PLR means private label rights. With PLRs you have full-control and sometimes unrestricted rights to do whatever you want to the product or content. I have some sources of PLR where I go if I need content. It’s at easyplr and nichecontent.

Well, if you’ve been with internet marketing for six months, I guess there are tons of PLRs sitting in your hard disk. Dust them off and see which of these you can use. Make sure to read the “fine print” of the PLR ebook or articles that you bought. Look at the limitations.

5. Revise the PLR product. After substantially, modifying the PLR product, you can put your name to it as the author. Repackage them quickly and make them more attractive. If it’s an ebook or software, make an eye-catching cover for it. Hire a Photoshop kid to make this for you.

A few months back, I bought software which could convert plain image into an ebook cover. It was some sort of an action script for Photoshop. Now I have beautiful covers for my ebooks. You know, buyers almost always judge an ebook by its e-cover. So have stunning e-covers.

If you have two or more PLR products for the same topic, you can combine these two to make one large ebook. This would add more value to your product and more unique from the original. One more way to make a PLR ebook unique is to split them up and sell them as small reports. You then can have 4-5 short reports for that specific topic and a totally unique product.

6. Set-up your website. It would be best to register your own specific domain just for this new product of yours. The cost is below $9 anyway. After registering your domain, find a host for your website. This would usually cost $3 per month. I personally use hostgator which charges $9.95 per month for unlimited number of domains.

The fastest way to set up a site is using WordPress blog. You can then set-up your sales letter here. Sign-up for a paypal or 2checkout account, upload your newly minted product, and you’re ready to sell.

7. Promote. A subtle way of promoting your new product in forums is by using the signature. Most forums permit you to set-up a signature which is exhibited below each post you make.

If the forum owners allow html in the signature line then that would be great as you can then describe your product with a link to your website. For example, if I am in a make money online forum , I could use the signature line hard core strategies to make money online with a link to http://www.grandstart.com

If only the domain name is allowed then, a very fitting domain name is unbeatable. Say, http://www.cheapdogfood.com if you’re in a dog forum. It speaks for itself. Right? So, choose domain names intelligently.

Signature tags were extremely successful in drawing users to click and go after your link. Recent studies however, revealed that forum members have become signature blind. They take no notice of it anymore. There are only a few instances where people follow the links like the signature link of a guru or an expert in a specific subject.

In these cases, you have to mention your website in the posts. You may say that a free report is available if they sign-up to your newsletter. Or you can say up front what your site is about.

Another good technique is called Oh Yeah approach. This is when after the last line of your post you say: “P.S. Oh yeah, I almost overlook this, if you like more information about how to do it quickly check out http://www.grandstart.com“.

Tempted with the promise of quick and easy money, no experience required, people wanting to make money online come in droves. And they fail. Without a clear business model, you will, without doubt, fail.

I have gone over to many business models and found that there are basically 4 models that you can pursue. And these are the top ways of making money online:

1. Affiliate marketing – You get a commission from every sale of the product you promote. Sounds easy. But many failed following this route. Why? There is no plan. Who are your buyers? How do you attract them? How is the competition? And many more questions have to be answered. I talked about this extensively in the article 6 steps to money making affiliate marketing. I make money from home thru affiliate marketing.

2. Adsense – Advertising program invented by Google where a website display ads from Google’s advertisers. Very easy to start. Put up a website, write content, say 5-6 articles, then sign-up with Google. A publisher ID will be provided to you. You can then put the code provided by Google in your site.

When a visitor clicks the ads, bingo! you make money. How much? It varies from $0.01 – $87. Your eyes popped? $87. Yes, that’s for the keyword mesothelioma attorney utah. But don’t get fooled. Google’s technology called smart pricing insures that unknown sites don’t get that much per click. You can check the cost per click by using this link :
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The strategy here is not to pick very high paying keywords. Well, those keywords have only a few searches per month and the chances of those visitors landing to your site are next to nothing. Personally, I target keywords within the $5-$10 range. I then put up a website targeted for those keywords then drive traffic. Then repeat. Make as many websites as you can targeting a different set of keywords. The more sites, the better. It would be easier to earn $600 per month for 20 sites (equivalent to $30 per site) than making $600 for one site. Unless you’re a stevpavlina.com site which is earning thousands.

The key to higher Adsense earnings is tons of traffic. You can tweak and tweak your adsense ads position, colors and whatever, to your heart’s content but it won’t matter much if you only have a handful of visitors. I have one site which has a 40% CTR, but because of the very low traffic, that site won’t make me rich. I have sites doing well with only 1-5% CTR but the traffic is enormous.

How do you drive traffic to your site? I have identified 4 sources of traffic namely:

a) Search Engines

b) Pay-Per-Click

c) Joint-Ventures

d) Social Sites

In my experience the best adsense converting traffic is that which came from the search engines. The chance that visitors click the ads is high if they come from Google, Yahoo or whatever search engine.

Those coming from the social bookmarking sites like digg, stumbleupon, reddit and a bunch of web 2.0 sites have an extremely low CTR. You’ll have to employ a different monetization strategy to profit from web 2.0 traffic.

3. Making your own digital product. An ebook or a downloadable audio. I figure this would a big strategy considering the hundreds of possibilities for the type of product that you can make. I haven’t personally tried this money making route.

This is the strategy followed by the big guns in internet marketing. They who make millions a month. Armand Morin gets $300K a week. Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon earned $12M? or even higher when they launched StomperNet. Shawn Casey sold 100,000 copies of his $47 ebook “Mining Gold on the Internet” Mike Filsaime made $1M in less than a week with his Butterfly Marketing.

There are literally hundreds of niche markets that you can write about. Don’t just look at the make money online market. This field is full of smart, shrewd and experienced marketers. It’s extremely hard to compete with them.

Ha you tried the personal development niche? or the health market? These two areas alone would bring you a sizable amount of monthly income. There are still hundreds of niche topics which have not been explored or discovered by internet marketers. Why not start with your area of expertise? You can try the keyword tool to search for these.

4. Advertising/Sponsorship – Another easier way to make money at home. Set-up a website. Put contents. Drive Traffic. When you have consistently attracted hundreds of visitors per day, advertisers start to come in.

Engadget, Boingboing, Gizmodo, Techcrunch, Lifehacker are technorati’s top blogs drawing in hundreds of thousands of visitors daily. Engadget has more than a million pageviews daily.The main business model of these high traffic sites is selling advertising space and sponsorship. Some high trafficked sites have CPM as their monetization model. With CPM you get a few dollars per thousand impressions. It could range from $0.85-$3.5 per thousand views. Errand Services

With the mushrooming of social bookmarking sites, I think your traffic should not be limited to less than a hundred per day. You can try experimenting with some of the social bookmarking sites and see the sudden surge of visitors to your website.

There are still dozens of ways to make money online, there’s the Amazon. Chitika, Kontera (ditch this one!-very low paying), there’s the Reviewme,Textlinks, Payperpost, but what I am zeroing in on here are the most popular make money makers.

Today on history:

1. 2011:  How To Rank High On Google’s Latest Update(1)

You are frustrated. The promise of an internet lifestyle did not come. The hope of becoming an internet millionaire is vanishing.

Don’t be miserable. I have been there. 98% of internet marketers have all been there before.

You might want to print out the following list and check where your website failed. Once you have identified the problem, go troubleshoot it right away.

I divided them into 2 categories to keep you in perspective of our formula: “Traffic + Conversion = Money”

A. Traffic

1. Is there a market for your product or service? Are there enough people who are the prospective buyers of your product or service? Do they have the buying power? The quickest way to determine the volume of potential buyers is by using a keyword tool and check whether people are searching for the solution your product or service is dealing with.

My favorite resource for this job is the keyword tool. Some marketers determined that in order to be profitable, a keyword should have at least 30,000 searches per month. Others experienced profitability even at 8,000 searches per month. Sub-niche marketers even have lower numbers, 3,000-5,000 searches per month.

2. Is there enough traffic coming to your site? While there may be thousands of people searching for that keyword or phrase you have chosen, were they able to see your site in the search engines? What marketing efforts have you implemented to pull people to your website?

If you are getting only 100 visitors you will not make money from your site. Sad, but it’s the truth. Be patient though and continue to drive traffic to your website. Don’t start to revise or tweak your site yet at this stage. You can begin evaluating the effectiveness of your site once the number of unique visitors reaches at least 800-1000.

3. Are the visitors coming to your site targeted? You should check where the visitors are coming from. Google analytics, statcounter.com, 103bees.com are among the tools that will help you analyze the quality of your visitors. Are they coming from search engines, referral sites or pay-per-click (PPC)?

You can get hundreds of visitors from referral sites but most of the time this traffic is not targeted. Visitors coming from search engines are semi-targeted. While those coming from pay-per-click are the most targeted.

PPC is the most effective way to drive targeted traffic but it would cost you an arm to implement. If you are already driving a thousand visitors to your site thru PPC and still not making money, then most likely the problem is your website. Which brings us to examine your site…

B. Conversion

Is your sales letter effective? I may not be a copywriter but I have seen, read and studied hundreds of sales letters on the web. And I know when I see a compelling copy.

Study the following successful sales letters: Michel Fortin wrote the sales letter for Traffic Secrets of John Reese in which John made $1M in less than 24 hours. Butterfly Marketing letter was written by Mike Filsaime himself with some contribution from Michel Fortin. Paul Myers wrote Mark Joyner’s Farewell Package.

Frank Kern hired Harlan Kilstein to write the sales letter of the Serializer seminar. Harlan also wrote the letter for Rich Schefren’s coaching program which made $3.5M in a week. Jeff Walker did Product Launch Formula letter. Mike Morgan wrote Joint Venture Formula copy.

1. Does your headline grab people’s eyeballs? Remember that the headline is an ad of the sub-headline. If you can’t get them to read the headline then, there is no way they will read the rest of the letter.

Study the font size and color of the successful headlines. Some marketers say that the times new roman font is a loser and georgia is a winner.

For longer headlines the first 3 words are the real attention-grabbers. If the first words capture the readers, they would likely read on.

2. Do you have testimonials? This is one of the most powerful selling tools. A recommendation from a respected person in the industry brings in tons of sales. Well, you may be wondering who would provide testimonials if your site or product is new.

Why not ask testimonials from your friends after giving away your product to them for free? They could provide a few words to say on how good the product worked for them.

3. Do you provide a guarantee? You should remove the buying risk and let the buyer feel comfortable by giving a guarantee. Assure them that if they’re not satisfied they can send the product back and get a refund.

In the studies conducted, the longer guarantee resulted in more sales and less refunds. That is, a 90-day guarantee brings in more sales than a 30-day guarantee.

4. What about the price? Is it too high that your target market can’t afford? Or is it too low that they might be suspicious that your product is just plain crap? Feel the pulse of what the market would pay for a comparable item.

Check the websites of 4 or 5 competitors and see how much they are charging for a similar offer. That way you could get a feel of the right pricing strategy for your product or service.

5. Is your sales letter clean and tight? Remove anything that disrupts your reader’s attention other than the offer. Remove links to other sites, banners, ads, articles and adsense. Keep the reader focused on buying the product or service.

When writing your sales letter consider this revelation from the Eyetrack III researchers: “Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior while larger type promotes lighter scanning.” What this means is that people would only scan a page if it has a larger type and would focus more reading if it has a smaller type.

6. What about the ordering and payment process? Is it easy to navigate? If you use a third party processor then that would not be much of a problem. I personally use 2checkout.com. The Paypal order and payment process is also fast. I haven’t tried 1shoppingcart but I guess it’s also a good one. A lot of Internet Marketers are using it.

Successful internet marketers have a system running. Without a system, you will simply be jumping from ebook to ebook, opportunity to opportunity without truly getting real success.

So get these things in place first before driving traffic:

1. Autoresponders
   
2. Special Reports
   
3. Affiliate Programs
   
4. MiniSites or Blogs

These are the guts of the system. If you want to make money from home (some say working with your pajamas!), put up the system first.

The reason behind the system is that majority of the targeted first time visitors going to you website will not buy. They went to your site to look for information. And that is what you are going to give them. Information. So you have the free special reports ready.

In exchange for the free ebook or special report you will give to the targeted first time visitors, they provide you their contact information or email address. They will sign up for your newsletter and get the special report. In doing so, they become your subscriber.

And when he is in your subscribers list, you now have the gazillion opportunities to pre-sell, sell, refer dozens of affiliate products you think they might be interested with. That is where the money comes in.

This is how the gurus are doing it.

That is why the mantra is: “the money is in the list”

The late Corey Rudl once said that if any of his employees would run away bringing his “list” he would sue them for $25 million. Corey has thousands of subscribers in his list.

So, I’ll have to repeat this here: Never ever send visitors to your site without the email catcher form ready!

Consider the statistics: Only 2-5% of the targeted first-time website visitors buy. On the other hand 20-30% of the targeted first-time website visitors subscribe to your newsletter and get the free report.

If you start sending traffic to your website without this system in place you will fail. Quite hard, but it’s the truth.