How To Make Money At Home

As I run a fairly large blog in the internet marketing niche, I tend to get a lot of questions about what people should promote online. Today I’ll discuss a potential affiliate program you guys can try related to earning money by directing people to a website which they’ll find very useful.

Most of you reading this post will have travelled on an airline and booked a hotel at one point in your life. With online searching being so easy, many of us tend to look online for the best deals. Now, imagine if you could make a commission on referring other people to good hotel deals – saving them money and making you money.

Hotels Combined is one such website which is used by over 80,000,000 people every year. With 200,000 hotels in its database, it’s worth a bookmark just so that you can save yourself some money. However, it also has a travel affiliate program which you should definitely look at.

The way its affiliate program works is that you get paid for every lead you send to the website. I asked the owner for a rough idea of why – here’s what he said:

There is a common misconception that you stand to earn more by selecting a hotel affiliate program that pays on a CPA (per booking) commission model, rather than by choosing HotelsCombined’s CPL (per lead) commission model. I hope to explain here that the overall earning potential is approximately the same, and each method has other pros and cons to consider.

Let’s take an example where you direct 100 clicks to a hotel affiliate program.

Under a CPA program, you may make 1 or 2 hotel bookings out of those 100 clicks, each with a value of around $20. This yields an average revenue of around $30 over the 100 clicks. But since the exact value of each booking tends to vary greatly, and since it is very easy for one of those bookings to cancel, your actual earnings per day can be as erratic as a gambler’s winnings. Also, the commission is only credited to your account once the end-user actually stays at the hotel, which may be as much as 6 months after the original booking was made.

Under the HotelsCombined Affiliate Program, your 100 clicks may convert into around 60 leads, with an average value of around $0.50 each. These leads may still only convert into 1 or 2 hotel bookings, but now your $30 average revenue is much more stable. If a few clicks don’t convert into leads, your overall average remains relatively untouched, and booking cancellations never affect your accumulated earnings. Also, your commissions get paid into
your account as soon as they occur, so there’s no wait to find out how much your traffic earns you.

So at face value it appears that both types of commission model pay an average of around $30 per 100 clicks (in this example), but HotelsCombined offers more stable cash flow on shorter payment terms. Speak to your accountant about your Risk Profile before making a decision between these two models.

Personally, I’d rather get paid per lead for something like this as like the above mentions, you don’t know when people are going to book their hotel for. Also, many people sign up for the website but book after weeks, if not months – you get paid for the lead nevertheless.

I played around with the site looking at it from the eyes of a user that would be interested in booking hotels – I tend to travel a lot, so a website like this definitely helps. Here’s my search for hotels in Hong Kong:

The search found over 240 hotels and above you can see some of them (sorted by Price). For me, this has everything – price, pictures, reviews, a high quality search function so I can specify exactly what I need.

Here are some of the benefits of the affiliate program:

• Payment monthly through Paypal, cheque or bank transfer
• 12 month cookie so you get paid for repeat visits
• Variety of hotels for your visitors – over 200,000
• Multiple affiliate tools – banners, search boxes, private branding
• Real time online reporting

My favourite is the Paypal payment option – I hate waiting around for cheques or dealing with bank transfers.

Basically, you have a website which people that you send to it will find useful – which means it’s easier to make money. If I sent friends to this website, they’d thank me for it – I’ll definitely be using this to book hotels in the future.

Now, how do you promote this and make money with this website?

Niche website. Think about setting up a niche website (use Google Keyword Tool to find keywords) for country specific hotels. For example, “Mexico cheap hotels”. On your niche website you could review the top five hotels in Mexico (or the best value for money ones), redirect your visitors to the website and earn a commission on each booking they make.

Offline flyers. If you hired someone to hand out flyers where people that travel a lot tend to be – around office buildings or airports, for example, you could buy a domain, redirect it to your affiliate link and advertise this domain on flyers.

Pay per click. You can generally get very cheap clicks on travel / tourism websites using Adwords in content model as that niche tends to pay poorly (for whatever reason). So spend a day on Google looking for travel websites using Adsense, buy clicks at $0.1 and send them to your cloaked affiliate link.

You could also try Adwords search for various keywords but you’d have to go more niche as that could get expensive. Lastly, you could also look at buying banners on travel websites, or any that would get a lot of buying US traffic (Facebook, for example) as most people tend to need a hotel at some point in their life.

Good luck with referring people to HotelsCombined, and at the very least you’ve found a high quality website you yourself can use. I’m in contact with the affiliate manager and will ask him to check out this post every so often, so if you have questions feel free to leave them below!

It’s been more than a month since my last post… and that’s because I’ve been busy with my company and other stuff. As today’s a holiday because I’m sick at home, I’ll talk about one of the things I’ve been working on of late – membership sites.

I’ve started membership sites in the past, although mostly one time memberships ($47 up front for example rather than $47/month), some have been reasonably successful, some have bombed.

Whenever I start a business, I believed that there always needed to be an exit strategy – living in Dubai, that wasn’t possible with a membership site. Paypal subscriptions can’t be transferred to another account with breaking them and getting your members to resubscribe (which will naturally mean you lose a few of them) and other things like merchant accounts were hard to get in Dubai.

Considering I didn’t have a credit card (and the one I do have is still used rarely / never), I didn’t want to look at other ways of setting it up so focused on doing simple one time products like eBooks, scripts and so on.

Now that I have actual employees, I can focus on membership sites without needing the exit strategy as they can be taught to maintain them (meaning I will have to do little / no work on them even if I decide to ‘retire’). I’ve been playing around with various scripts and recently launched my first membership site on April 8th.

The membership site can be seen at: PLR Blogs

Basically, the idea is that members get access to four PLR blog packages per month. Having noticed other people selling them individually for $37+ each, I thought that since they were so easy to do why not offer a few for a set price all in one place.

Now, that membership site took about 2 days and around $250 to set up and promote… it’s now making a rough $350-400 a month based on revenue from members.

If the revenue from members continues, that’s quite a decent ROI (it’s paid for itself in the first month, including the script which was $127 and can be reused on multiple sites).

All memberships are paid into Paypal and every month it will take a few hours of my employees working to create the packages for the membership site.

Now, the benefit of having a site like this is that you can also earn a lot from upsells.

Since the site has been live, it’s earned around $400 from upsells, people asking for custom / customized packages and other related things.

People that are in a membership for PLR blogs are probably interested in other blog related services, ex content writing, logo design and so on.

So in the very first month, the site’s made a rough $750 gross and $500 net.

As my employees did probably 90% of the work (including the upsells) it’s pretty much a passive business for me.

I started this as a test for membership sites, my end goal is to do a big launch in the IM niche sometime this year and I’m playing around with different software before I decide how to set it up. So far I’m fairly pleased with this software but there is room for improvement.

Your goal for a membership site is to offer something for unbelievable value and give them a reason to stay subscribed.

For example, here the value is the packages which are very cheap ($17/4) as well as the cap on members (maximum 30). If you unsubscribe, you may never be able to resubscribe if it fills up in that time – a big draw for staying subscribed.

It also shows the ease of launching – it was launched only on the Warrior Forum, the site itself has no real sales page and the whole membership site (not including the blogs) took around 1 hour to setup and customize. It looks clean and does what it needs to do.

The script used is Easy Member Pro (aff link) and costs $127 for an unlimited site license which is great value I believe (having looked at the other options). Another idea I had was a lot of small priced membership sites, with small member bases – something easy to run with employees.

For example, five membership sites charging $10 a month with 10 members each – $500 a month. Supplying something that’s worth $10/month isn’t too difficult – videos, eBooks, plain PLR stuff, services… you get the idea. And getting ten members a month is easy (forums, blogs, email lists etc).

I’ll update more on here as I work on other parts of membership sites but hope this post gives you a few ideas.

This post was written by Will Montanaro, a student of online business from the UK.

In online marketing, everyone wants a formula, a rulebook if you will. People want to be told exactly how they can make money, and how they can do it with as little work as possible. This is a natural human disposition that isn’t necessarily something to be ashamed of, but it’s a mindset you need to move away from.

Sure, there are processes for making money online; building affiliate sites, selling products, contextual ads, etc. These things all work. However, what sets the truly great marketers apart from the rest of the pack? Why are the people selling their $997 online course making more money from their methods than their students?

It’s called creativity.

Creativity is horribly underrated in online marketing. Unfortunately, no one is making this clear. It’s simply not in the interests of most marketers to say – “Well you could buy my course, but it probably won’t make you much money unless you use your creativity”. They’re not going to sell as many products, and you’re probably going to look for a different option that doesn’t require creativity.

You’re probably thinking that you don’t know how to be creative. This mindset has been created by years of marketers selling “The step-by-step system to generate huge passive income streams”.

Instead of thinking in this way, you’ve got to start thinking outside the box, and you’re business is going to be vastly more successful because of it.

Do you know how the most successful marketers get millions of visitors from search engine traffic? They use creativity. They don’t just do what every other chump is doing, because otherwise they’d be in exactly the same situation as them. They don’t necessarily work hard, they just use their brain! They innovate with their link building strategy, they find loopholes to generate buzz and traffic to their website, and they keep doing it.

There are loopholes in every market. Each niche has its own intricacies and things that you can exploit to make your business wildly successful. Why is there no step by step guide for you to follow? Because every niche is different! No one can tell you how to completely dominate the “Weight Loss” niche, you need to find that out for yourself. If someone knew, they certainly wouldn’t tell you. There are people who have used their creativity to create massive brands that dominate huge niches without spending millions to do it.

How many marketers do you know that put their success down to reading some SEO manual? How many millionaires tell you that they followed a step-by-step guide to build their business? None, because there aren’t any.

If you don’t use your creativity, you’re not going to fulfil your potential. If you’ve had some success with online marketing, think back to what really made you money. You’ll almost certainly remember a few little innovations and creative touches that you used to set yourself apart from the competition or to generate more revenue.

Creativity is everywhere. You don’t have to be an artist or have a brilliant mind, you just have to use what you’ve got. Grab a piece of paper and start jotting down ideas relating to your latest business venture. I guarantee that you’ll come up with at least one idea that you can put into action straight away. Within an hour you could have dozens of potential ideas that will completely transform your business.

Stop looking for answers in the latest money-making course. You might find a great way to make money, but imagine what you could do if you added your own creativity to that method – you could be wildly successful.

Think about this. When you read a self help manual, it’s not going to tell you everything that will change your own life. It will give you general guidelines for improving your life, for improving anyone’s life. You then have to put those guidelines into action and apply them to your own life.

This is what you have to do in marketing. You can take an idea, but you have to apply it to your own business. You have to mould it to suit your business, otherwise it’s just not going to work as well as it could.

Here are some questions to get you started:

Creative ways to generate revenue – Is Adsense your only option? Have you thought about a premium membership for your website? How about creating a small product related to your site? Are you giving your visitors what they are looking for? Are you building a list? Where is the money coming from in your niche?

Creative link building – What is unique about your niche? How do people interact in your market? Are there lots of blogs, or news sites? Who are the authorities in your niche, and how can you help them? How are the big players in your market getting traction?

Creative content – What are your visitors really looking for? What would cause controversy? What are people afraid to talk about? What different types of content can you create? What creates linkbait in your particular niche?

Creative branding - What sets your site apart from your competition? Do you talk to your customers about your brand? What is exciting about your business? How are you using social media?

Creative marketing – What are people passionate about in your niche? Why not create a hilarious Facebook group related to your niche? Are your banner ads boring and stale? What is your message, and how does it differ from your competition?

You have to start asking yourself these questions. There are potentially thousands of them, and each one could give you a great idea. Most people are stuck in a rut when it comes to online business. Either they start with a basic formula that isn’t working, or they spend their whole time trying to think of a killer idea and never get started. Why not combine the two? Start with a basic formula and then add your own killer ideas to it once you start seeing it take shape. This is a million times easier and far more successful.

Adding creativity to an established business is incredibly powerful, and it’s why some people are so hugely successful, while others are stuck struggling to get by. Don’t overlook the fact that creativity is fun. Doing the same mundane tasks all day will not stimulate your mind. Finding exciting ways to transform your business will give you the motivation and stimulation to make serious money.

This guest post was written by Tom Walker

Selling on the internet is neither automatic nor a guaranteed success. Although thousands of businesses of all sizes have made a success of it, many more have tried and failed. What’s the difference? More often than not, ecommerce sites are most successful when a successful marketing campaign is consistently in place. If people don’t know about you, they’re not going to be able to come and shop – it’s as simple as that. And even if you do have a marketing campaign in place there’s little to stop customers who bought from you in the past from not returning because your competitors’ marketing efforts are getting their attention. Here are 7 essential tips for ecommerce marketing that will help you develop the online business you deserve.

1. Product feeds: One of the best ways to get the word out about your products is through the use of Google Marketplace (formerly Google Base). This free service allows businesses to either upload an XML file or submit a live feed that displays all your products, pricing and images in Google’s search results. This way, every time a Google user looks for something you have, you have a chance to make the sale. Sure, not everyone will click through to your site, but at least you’re getting your products out there to compete for clicks.

2. Customer reviews: Make sure your site has an easy to use interface where customers can create reviews of the products you sell. Their, opinions and experiences can be shared and that can be very helpful information to your future shoppers. Besides providing content that enhances the value of your site to visitors, customer-provided reviews boost your search engine standings since the search engines like to see a steady stream of new content.

3. Be SEO conscious: It’s well known that both the structure and content of a website can affect the way it is viewed by Google and the other search engines. Therefore, SEO is a constant effort of evaluation and correction. Make sure you have relevant keywords and phrases so that people searching for products like yours can find you. Also, simple on-site optimization techniques such as creating internal linking, using header tags and having relevant metadata can make or break an ecommerce site.

4. Make your policies easy to find: One of the biggest reasons for customers abandoning their shopping is the unavailability of vital information. Customers want to know about shipping costs, processing times, payment methods, return policies, contact information and privacy. In sort, everything that you’d like to see when shopping should be part of your Web site. You can even make the transparency and accessibility of your store’s information one of your marketing points.

5. Encourage repeat customers: As with regular businesses, the majority of the marketing dollars are spent attracting new customers. Once someone becomes a customer, it’s a lot cheaper and more effective to get them to come back than it is to get another new customer. That’s why you should send out regular newsletters that have company and product news and special offers for returning customers. This helps you establish a customer base rather than trying to rely on one time customers for your livelihood.

6. Use social media sites: You might be weary of hearing about Facebook and Twitter, but if that’s where your customers are, that’s where you need to be. Social media presents great opportunities for people to learn about your products and follow your store inside the Web site where they spend much of their time. Some stores have even made it easy to buy their products directly from their Facebook presence, so customers don’t even have to leave Facebook to shop.

7. Get others on board: Every store should have money budgeted for marketing, so why not use some of that money to get other people marketing for you? By setting up an affiliate program, you pay other people for delivering clicks to your site and sales from your store. Some Internet users make their living but doing nothing else than directing traffic to their affiliates. This is a great way to boost sales and get constant, high quality traffic to your site.

This guest post was written by Tom Walker, a blogger who works with an online supplier of HP 300 inks and refills as well as other supplies. He is a regular contributor to their blog where he writes about advertising and design.

In this niche, if you ask most people which blogs you should follow they’ll tell you to follow the “A-List”… generally the big few in this niche with thousands of subscribers.

Some tell you this because they believe you’ll get value from those sites, but I reckon most people read blogs simply because others are, and even though certain ‘big’ blogs may not have any value to them people read them because of this reason.

Here’s my personal “A-list”… where A stands for awesome. These blogs are differing sizes, some have ten subscribers while others go to a few thousand. However, I believe that more often than not the posts on these blogs have value, which is why I read them.

By value, I mean that every single blog on this list has something I’ve learned from them, and I believe that reading them could help make you a better internet marketer. Here’s the list, in no particular order…

Blogger Illustrated – a blog Grizz recommended once and although I only got around to checking it a few days ago, its posts definitely have value to them. Read a few of them and you’ll agree.

The Infopreneur – run by James Richmond. He usually posts about twice a day, and the posts will help you think differently if you read and understand them. Probably one of the most interactive (in terms of comment discussion) websites I’ve seen in this niche too.

Make Money For Beginners – doesn’t really need any introduction on this blog, and although he doesn’t post much there’s still a tonne of valuable information there (skim through the archives, which are much better organized than this site’s ).

ViperChill – did a review about this blog a couple days ago as I stumbled across it and liked it, but again, killer content from someone successful. Check it out.

Int Mktr – Trent Brownrigg’s site. Read the interview to find out more about why should should take heed of the stuff he says.

Lis Sowerbutts – if you do nothing else on her website, go and read the last post. It’ll help you a tonne if you had problems with niches etc.

Hot Blog Tips – blog run by Keith Bloemendaal – some of the posts will help change the way you think about certain things. Anything that causes you to think is awesome in my book (or feed reader, shall we say ).

Michel Fortin – is one of the top marketing copywriters in the world, and his blog has a lot of good information that he’s gotten from experience. Another site that will tweak the way you think about certain things.

Leo Dimilo – internet marketing blog with information derived from online experience (the best kind of information). Again, if you read this site you’ll start to see a few things differently.

Site Sketch 101 – a blog run by Nicholas Cardot, who is a full time infantryman in the US Army. Read a few posts on the site, liked that they were different from posts on most other sites, so I’m recommending him.

Nathan Hangen – a blog with internet marketing views, experiences and so on. Fairly solid content and a decent amount of interaction.

The University Kid – lastly… if you look past a lot of the unimportant dross on this site, there are a few posts that have made me & a few others and will make you money.

I didn’t want to go into too much detail for each blog above as I’m lazy as hell and there are 12 blogs above. A paragraph on each and that’s me all tired out. Nevertheless, I recommend all of them from what I’ve seen so far – some a few days worth, some a couple years worth, and I think that reading them will affect you positively. Visit them all, select a few you like and read them in your feed reader every so often.

I may have forgotten or not even know about other blogs that help people make money / boost their online marketing efforts, so if you know any feel free to mention them in the comments and I/others will check them out.