How To Make Money Online

Hi and welcome! As this is the first time you've visited, I hope you find these posts helpful. If there's any help you need for your own online business drop me an email and I'll do my best to assist. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I quickly realized the potential of internet marketing. Not least because I could see people around me making a lot of money, or at least making more than enough to quit work and go full-time.

The initial excitement I felt has never left me. I vividly remember working late into the night creating my first ebook, then once that was finished the REAL work began – learning how to build a simple website, use a hosting account, register for Paypal and Clickbank, ftp my files to my hosting account, put a payment button (that actually worked) in the right place on my website and struggle to write a half decent sales page.

Once it was ALL done, my website went live and I waited to get rich.

…… and waited.

When I realized I needed traffic I got a BIG shock. The cost of paying for any sort of advertising was way out of my tiny budget’s reach, and I didn’t make a SINGLE sale from my first attempt at product selling. I had neglected one of the most important parts of the whole process. Getting people to look at my website – TRAFFIC!

Traditional methods of traffic generation would have meant I had to quit my job to have time to do it!

So I had to find my own way. I had to find what worked for me.

What I found was free traffic from writing articles.

And while not everything you’re about to read is groundbreaking or new, I CAN tell you that it works for me, and best of all it’s FREE.

When newcomers to Internet Marketing first get involved in the entire process of creating their own products, designing sales or landing pages and trying to stimulate enough traffic to make sales, they often get lost.

Losing your way in the Internet wasteland is not a failing on your part, but a by-product of information overload and a lack of the specific steps you need to take to accomplish your goal. We’ve all been there.

This post is designed with you in mind, the newcomer to the most critical part of Internet Marketing…driving traffic to your sites. If you do not understand the powerful options available to you for generating a traffic flow of interested visitors, you will not make many, if any, sales.

The entire focus of this poste is how to generate FREE traffic….

The worst kept secret – article marketing.

Writing articles and submitting them to article directories is a simple, but very powerful and effective way to create interest and generate traffic to your site. Best of all, it’s free.

For years, most successful online marketers and many marketing offline too, have used article submission as a way to draw attention to their products and send interested traffic their way.

Basically how it works is that you write interesting (hopefully) articles. You submit them to article directories for other people to use freely on their sites, blogs and in their written works. The condition is that they have to use the article as it is – they’re not allowed to change it – and at the bottom you have included a link
back to your own website, product or blog (often referred ro as a resource box or sig).

When people read the article, and like it, they’ll possibly click on the link and you’ll get free traffic to your website.

Here’s some steps to follow if you fancy giving this a try:

If you want to have your articles accepted by the directory admin and published for everyone to find, you have to have fresh, new content.

It’s fine to use PLR (Private Label Rights) material that you’ve bought or gotten hold of for free but make sure you rewrite it slightly or add to it. Don’t be tempted to use it as it comes because it’s highly likely that other people have bought the same PLR and have submitted it to the same directory.

Unfortunately, there are hundreds, or even thousands, of other people using the same PLR articles you have. Your goal is to be different than the rest of the pack, not a clone of the multitudes. If you have a specific niche you want to promote, pick a topic related to that particular niche that would interest your readers and write 300-700 words on that particular subject.

For example: If gardening is your passion, your topics could be:

• Growing vegetables
• Raising roses
• Herb gardens
• 100 things to do with zucchini (make up your own jokes!)
• 100 Garlic secrets
• How to send your garden pests to your neighbor’s yard (my favorite)

You get the idea…list everything you know about your passion and you have the topics for your articles. Don’t be afraid to have a little fun with article topics. Write as if you are talking to your neighbor or a friend and denying that you sent the snail army his way.

If you’re into Internet Marketing, think about what you are selling online…ebooks, software, memberships…and the benefits of buying your products. Each benefit could be turned into an article to send you directed traffic, which is what you want.

Another example: If you are selling ebooks on how to solve a problem, your articles could have just enough information about that problem and its solution to make your interested readers want to know more, in this case the link (resource box) at the bottom of your article would lead to a ‘full size’ book on the subject.

Do not make your articles one long, fancy ad for your products - these won’t get published.

Newsletter and blog publishers are hungry for new content to present to their readers. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but you do have to rewrite it some to make it interesting and useful to the publisher’s readers.

Provide fresh looks at old ideas.

Not much new exists today that cannot be restated or reordered to make it a new article with great possibilities for traffic generation.

The browsing public is starving for information on any topic imaginable. You can find out what they are looking for in your niche by using any keyword generator. You will know how many people looked for your specific keywords last month.

If you plan on using articles to drive traffic to your products, wouldn’t that be handy information to have BEFORE you start writing articles?

Offer new solutions to old problems we all share.

There’s more than one way to fix a stuck drawer, make your car shine like a jewel, remove the mystery stain on your kid’s new shirt or get better phone service.

Problems are everywhere. We all have more than we need and the reading public is no different. A list that promises a new way to overcome everyday hassles is usually warmly welcomed by newsletter publishers because anyone can relate to the information.

Be creative and your articles will be appearing all over the Internet. If you have a humorous story about how you discovered the solution or had to create it, add it to the article.

Do not write in a technical, stilted manner. Just make sure your solutions work. If you have enough solutions to the same problem to make several articles, write them seperately (more articles=more links back to your site=more traffic).

Create an article with a new list of steps to get something done.

People everywhere love hand-holding and step-by-step lists of techniques or processes to make their life easier, especially when they are dealing with some of the new, popular technical aspects of the Web 2.0 social media.

These articles are in every article directory and people flock to them. Most want to know how to master these vague processes that do so much “wizardry” on web pages.

If you know how to master one of the processes that baffle so many people, you have just struck article gold. Write a step-by-step tutorial that starts at the beginning and finishes with a completed process.

You see examples in your email box all day long with titles like “5 Secrets To Unlock _______,” “Easy PHP Scripts to ______” or “How to _____.”

Read some articles in any directory on your niche topic and get ideas for new articles on the same subject. Ideas are not copyrightable and any that pop into your head while you’re reading the competition are yours to use as you wish.

Every Article Directory has submission guidelines that have to be followed.

Do not assume that every article directory has the same guidelines. If you do not follow those posted guidelines, you will not get published. New article acceptance is not done by robots, but by human beings looking for violations of their policies.

Articles submission services will, for a fee, submit your articles to hundreds of directories, but they will not check for submission guidelines for each directory. That is your responsibility.

Here’s a few popular article directories where you can submit your articles:

• Ezine Articles

• Article Dashboard

• Go Articles

• Articles Base

So there you have it - with a little effort on your part and at NO COST, with every article you’ll be generating more links back to your site (great for search engines!). Now watch your traffic grow….

Related: More free traffic ideas, improve your Google rankings for free, more traffic sources

Related articles by Zemanta

• How to Use Magazines as a Market Research Tool For Your Sites