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How NOT to Make Money Online

If you type in “make money online” into the search engines, you are going to get well over 400 million results, the majority of them telling you that you can make money online fast and easy. Yes – there is a lot of money to be made online but you aren’t going to succeed by jumping at the first opportunity you see without doing your homework. Here is what you should NOT do to make money online:

• Quickly build a website: Before you even start building your website, consider your target audience and what they will expect. Take a look at your competition – the ones successful in making money online – and steal their styles. Then hire a professional to build your website.
• Put up lots of ads: Yes, you can make money online by putting ads on your website. But, if you have too many ads, your visitors will discredit your site and not want to click on any of them. Instead, choose a few ads and target them well with text links and strong language.
• SEO writing: It’s a fact that you need to consider SEO writing to make money online. However, if you are providing informative and useful content on your pages, the keywords should be there already. If you must, hire a professional to do the writing for you.
• Sell stuff: If you want to make money online by selling stuff, you are going to have to spend almost the same amount of time and effort as if starting a store business. Instead, focus on affiliate programs and sell someone else’s stuff instead.
• Creating many SEO themed sites: It is better to have one great site than many poor ones. Use a unique theme for each site and make sure that there are enough pages and content so the search engine spiders can read your site.

The Pros and Cons of an Internet Business

If you are thinking of starting an internet business, hopefully it isn’t because you were lured in by dreams of getting rich quick. There is a lot of money to be made from internet businesses – just don’t forget that they are businesses! That means you will need a clear business plan and perspective on what to expect. Here are some of the pros and cons to consider before starting your internet business:

Pros:
• Having an internet business means you can work from home and set your own schedule for when you will and won’t work.
• Internet businesses have a global outreach. You can make your site available in several languages to target multiple audiences. You don’t even need to live in the area where your audiences are located. You could be in the corners of Siberia and, if you’ve got a reliable internet connection, could run an internet business which targets New Yorkers.
• There are almost limitless niches to choose from for an internet business. Even services that were once offered strictly in person, such as secretarial or teaching, can be done online now.
• An internet business is a low cost operation to start. If you are internet savvy and know about search engine optimization (SEO) and web design, then you might not have any costs.

Cons:
• Working from home means a lot of distractions. This is not a good scenario for procrastinators and those who can’t self-manage.
• Many people still don’t trust the internet, especially for making sales. You will lose walk-ins and the advantages that come with a physical location.
• Despite what a lot of people say, starting an internet business isn’t always easy. You have to know a lot about web design and SEO. If not, expect to make an investment to hire someone to do this for you.

How to Market Your Home Business

If you are starting a home business, it is probably going to be based on the internet. After all, without a storefront or office to go to, how will your customers find you? The internet provides much more potential for a home business than an off-line business because of the mass numbers of people it can reach. However, unless you know how to market your home business, you won’t be able to reach your target audience.

The most important aspect of marketing your home business is to make an effective website. It should be simple but provide all basic information about your website in a compelling manner. Avoid getting too detailed on the home page of your business and always make sure there is an easy way to contact you.

Once the website of your home business is up, you will need to learn a few i-marketing techniques. Blogging is a great free way to market your home business, though it can take a lot of time. There is also a lot of free marketing potential for home businesses in Podcasts and on You Tube. You shouldn’t forget about offline marketing for your home business though and consider making flyers, advertising on radio shows, etc.

The way that you can get the most traffic to your internet home business is through searches. In order for that to happen, you will need to be near the top of the search engine result pages (SERPs) when someone does a search for your business niche. In order to succeed in this, you will have to know Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is a complex set of techniques that takes a lot of time. You should consider hiring a professional team for this aspect of marketing your home business.

Off-Site Optimization 101

There is only so much you can do on site to get up to the top of the SERPs. If you really want your website to succeed, you will need to focus on off-site optimization. Off-site optimization involves getting back links to your site. Each time a site links to your site, it improves your presence in the online community and shows the search engines that your site is to be trusted. Webmasters now realize that off-site optimization is just as, if not more, important than everything on site. But off-site optimization isn’t just making a slew of back links to your site.

When working on off-site optimization, it is important that your back links are coming in from reputable sites. Quality is much more important than quantity so, for example, one link coming in from a site like CNN.com will be worth much more than a bunch of no-name sites that don’t get any traffic. Each search engine has its own method of calculating the value of off-site optimization. However, you can be sure that the type of site also factors into your page ranking. You should try to get back links from sites with similarly-themed content. For example, if you have a biking blog, work on off-site optimization with bike maintenance sites.

There are many places where you can get fast, easy and free off-site optimization. These include article submission sites like Ezine, making press releases, forums, directory submissions, social networks, and blog commenting. Keep in mind that the text you use for your back link is also important for off-site optimization. Instead of writing your link text as, “Click here”, instead write “Check out Bikes in New Jersey”, or whatever the subject of your website is. Once you have a strong presence off-site, your site will start moving up in the SERPs.