If you are not familiar with the world of internet marketing, then you might even be wondering how it’s even possible to earn money online without selling anything physical.
It’s all a bit daunting and it’s certainly not clear how or where to start. In this article we will take a look at everything you need to know in order to become a master of internet marketing and to start making lots of money online.
So, here are the 5 steps you need to take to start making money online;
Step 1: Choose A Niche
Step 2: Establishing your online presence
Step 3: Get Started With the Most Basic Promotion
Step 4: Start Monetizing Your Blog/Website
Step 5: Scale up
Step 1: Choose A Niche
The first step to creating an online business is to choose what kind of online business you want to create. This starts by choosing a niche – what is the subject matter you will be dealing with?
Every site should have a niche which describes the kind of thing that you will be writing about and the people you will be writing it for. Your site might be a ‘general’ site or a personal blog that doesn’t stick to any particular topic, but even then there will be at least a ‘theme’ or a feel tying it together. You might write about books, coffee and the city, but that’s still a niche in its way and it’s one that will attract a very specific type of person.
And knowing and understanding your niche is incredibly important if you hope to be able to make a success of your site.
Unfortunately, too many site owners or bloggers do not really fully understand their niche and their sites tend to suffer as a result.
The niche you pick should primarily be determined by your own interests. If you’re going to be living and breathing your blog for the next 10 years, then this NEEDS to be something you’re keen to learn and write about.
What’s more is that you won’t be able to deliver really unique and valuable content if you don’t know anything about the topic. And hiring professional writers won’t guarantee that you’ll find someone who has a real passion and interest for the topic.
While that’s true, you also need to consider the viability of the niche choice. How competitive is it? Do you stand a chance against the biggest sites? How profitable and monetizable is it?
We’ll get onto these later in this article, but the subject you choose should be something that people are willing to spend money on and that has lots of opportunities for information products.
Choosing Your Domain Name and Site Name
If you are preparing to launch a new website, then there are several things you will need to do in preparation before you can even begin to think about content writing or SEO. Of course one of the most fundamental starting points is to find a hosting service and to choose a domain name for your site or blog. Hosting will give you somewhere to store the files that make up your site, while domain name will give your visitors a way to access them.
But deciding on a domain name is more than just a practical matter, it’s also going to have a huge impact on the way your visitors view your site, and on the way you’ll go about promoting it. Here we’ll look at how to choose a domain name that will make sense from a business standpoint, and from a creative one too.
Here are 3 things you should consider when choosing a domain name.
- Uniqueness
- Branding
- Memorability
Uniqueness
If your domain name is not at all unique though, then you’ll be buried somewhere around page 100. In this regard then, calling a company ‘Apple’ would be a bad move (fortunately the Apple already had a lot of clout behind them).
Likewise having a more unique company name will help you to be more memorable, and will also help you to avoid using any trademarked names. Of course you may also want to do some research to ensure that the name you want is available and that you are legally entitled to use it.
Branding
Coming up with a name for your website that you can build a brand around makes a lot of sense for several reasons. For one, Google has explicitly stated that it will be trying to give more prominence to brands and to bury ‘exact name domains’ (keyword URLs) in an attempt to show better quality sites. At the same time though, if you can create a brand name this will give you more opportunity for future expansion meaning that you can easily market your site and create awareness while using that same branding in your advertising.
Memorability
Of course if you want people to come to your site often and to spread the word, then it also makes sense to choose a domain name that will be easy to remember. If your website name is too long or nonsensical then this will mean that people struggle to return to your site, or to tell others about it. Avoid complex combinations of dashes and underscores, and try to make the domain name as catchy as possible.
Now you have a name for your website, the next step is to build it.
This means doing a few things:
- Investing in a webhost
- Buying your domain name
- Creating the basic foundation of your website
A webhost is where your site will be stored. To host your website, you will need to purchase it from a webhosting provider. Fortunately, most webhosting companies can also register a domain name for you. Popular options include;
Bluehost
Hostigator
Hostinger
Godaddy
All of these will provide what you need to get started, though our recommendation is to choose BlueHost.
A webhost essentially provides you with space on a huge, always-connected computer called a server. You upload the files that constitute your website to this computer, and then when someone types your domain name into the address bar, they will be shown those files.
That’s why you of course also need to buy the domain name. You can do this separately, but the good news is that most webhosts will also allow you to buy a domain name through their site.
For your domain registration and hosting, Bluehost will offer an excellent service at a budget friendly price.
As you are starting out as an internet marketer, you won’t have a huge amount of traffic to begin with, and nor will you need to deal with lots of very big files – so the most basic options will do.
Step 2: Establish your online presence
Finally, you need to set up the basics of your website. To do this, I highly recommend using WordPress.
WordPress is a completely free tool that is readily available on most hosting plans and can be installed from the dashboard via a single click. This then gives you a skeleton website, and lets you easily add new posts, change a host of settings, and even install entirely new themes and plugins.
WordPress powers over a quarter of all websites on the net and it is used by many of the best-known brands in the world, and it is completely open-source and fully customizable. There is a huge community of support (just do a quick search for “how to set up a WordPress website” to get started), and it works with the largest proportion of third-party apps and plugins. In short, there is no reason not to use WordPress.
Step 3: Get Started With the Most Basic Promotions
To make your site known and be visited by your target audience, you need to promote it. Your starting point is content marketing and social media.
Your job, is to find the blog section of your website and to add a new post that directly relates to your niche once every week to once every day (the more, the better). Simply adding more content to your site gives visitors a reason to keep checking back, to share your content, and to consider buying anything you’re selling. Also adding content will help to give Google something to use to identify the topic of your site, thereby helping it to present your page when people search for relevant terms.
Keep in mind that you can do this a lot more effectively if you also use basic SEO. That means integrating search terms. This is a more advanced form of marketing, but one that you can look into as you progress.
Step 4: Start Monetizing Your Blog/Website
If you got into this with the aim of making money from your website… then what are you waiting for? If you have people actively visiting your website and reading your content, then there are many ways that you can generate great profit from them without having to compromise in any major way and without even affecting the experience for them.
The only slight obstacle between you and your happy future of passive income is deciding upon which monetization method to use, and deciding how precisely you are going to turn your site into a cash cow. Here we will look at some of the options available to you and their strengths and weaknesses.
And for the rest of you who are already running successful money-making websites this still applies to you – as it may just be that you aren’t making the most of your site in that regard and you could stand to learn a thing or two.
Monetization Methods for Your Website
The following are some of the most powerful monetization methods for any website. Just keep in mind that you don’t necessarily need to pick between these. Often the best strategy is to use them together!
Advertisement
As you consistently populate your site with contents that is relevant to your audience, google will continue to bring visitors to your site, and for those that have visited, they will see more reason to continue visiting your site.
At this junction, you can sign up with an ad network to start placing ads that is relevant to your audience in your site. The idea here is simply that you sign up as a publisher, and then you place a little snippet of code on your pages. That code then autogenerates adverts from participating advertisers based on the content on your pages, and that in turn ensures that you get the most relevant adverts showing up on your sites and that you don’t need to worry about chasing down the advertisers yourself. You will then be paid in most cases per click every time someone clicks on one of your ads.
You can even accept direct advertisement and sponsorships from business owners. All these if well implemented can generate a sizable passive income for you.
The most obvious ad network that most people use is Google AdSense which is known for relatively high pay outs and being a reliable and easy to implement system. Some webmasters and bloggers makes their entire living from AdSense.
However, AdSense is not the only ad network on the block, and there are some out there with slightly less stringent requirements. You can simply research on google to get to know more of them.
Affiliate Products
Affiliate products are products you sell for the owner and earn a commission whenever someone makes a purchase or take some action.
Selling affiliate products is known as affiliate marketing. It is one of the easiest and profitable way to start making money online. It is the ideal starting point for a beginner.
There are many affiliate marketing network you can register with. Below is list of the notable affiliate network;
Amazon associate
Clickbank
Digitalstore24
Partner network
Impact
Shareasale
Sell Your Own Products and Services
Another great way to monetize your website is to sell your own product or service.
The ideal product to start with is to sell your expertise. This can be in form of digital product like ebooks, online courses etc or offer a web based service like article writing, graphic design, etc if you have the skill. Likewise, you can sell subscriptions to your site, copywriting and web services, or even a ‘course’ which might consist of some regular e-mails, a book and subscription in one package. And people will be willing to pay a lot for that if you market it well.
There are many other ways you can monetize your website, but in my opinion the above listed monetizatiom methods are good starting point.
Step 5: Scale up
One good thing about online business is that the sky is your limit. Therefore, having chosen a niche, established your online presence, promoting your website and monetizing it as well, it is now time for you to take your online business to the next level.
With online business scalability is easier than with brick and mortar business.
You can start scaling by;
- Increase your website storage and bandwidth
- Introduce other promotion methods to attract more visitors to your site. Options you can use include guest blogging, social media and paid promotion.
- Add more monetization methods and also add more products and services in your portfolio of products
Making money online is not what you can learn and master in a day. There are some steps you need to take as well some resources you need to be successful. If at first you are not successful, do not be discouraged, keep on learning and be consistent because what you will gain far outweighs the trouble.
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