Making Money Online for Newbies

Making Money Online for Newbies is obviously a contradiction in terms, since newbies don’t make money online until they are no longer newbies. Truth be known, for most newbies, trying to make money online is more like just flushing money down the drain.

So maybe the title of the article should be How Newbies Can Start Making Money Online. In any event, that’s really the subject of this article.

While the theories and concepts involved in internet marketing may be very simple to grasp, actually implementing them is a lot harder than beginners realize.

There are thousands of hype filled websites all over the web, making wild claims of overnight riches. Unfortunately, those wild claims cause many newbies to have some serious misconceptions about how difficult it really is to start a profitable online business.

What I’ll cover in this article are a few of the simpler strategies and concepts involved in online marketing. I’ll outline some basic strategies which can help you launch your own internet marketing campaign.

I’ll also point you to some of the best, proven products that can help you start making money fairly fast. If you are serious about starting your own online business.  You’ll want to invest in some of these products as soon as you can.  Just don’t do like thousands of other would be internet marketers, don’t buy one shiny new object after another. Just pick a proven product and follow it’s instructions and give it some time before you give up and try something else.

Here’s a proven product  for beginners with very little money to invest: Sara Young’s Easy Paycheck Formula, where you’ll learn one of the simplest and fastest ways to get started.

Some of the concepts I’ll be discussing throughout this article are: creating a website, article marketing, video marketing, pay per click advertising, placing banner ads, email marketing, search engine optimization, and the most important strategy of all—link building for search engine rankings.

Let’s start with…

Creating A Website

Getting a functioning website up and running with products that people are not just searching for, but actually looking to buy, is the easy part.

There are a number of simple ways to create a website, most notably is the simplest of them all—WordPress.

If you are familiar with html coding, you could build a website from scratch the hard way, but WordPress makes the job of website creation so much easier. With the push of a few buttons and the addition of a few plugins, you can have a website up in less than 30 minutes.

Most internet marketers are using WordPress because of it’s simplicity, flexibility and speed of use.

If you want to learn how to create your own website using WordPress, here’s a link to the best WordPress Training Video series I’ve found. You can sample the first seven videos in the series for free before purchasing the entire course. It’s top notch training.

The hardest part about making money online is actually getting traffic to your website, not building the website. If people can’t find your website, you have little chance of selling anything. No Visitors = No Sales = No Money!

Getting traffic is even difficult for experienced marketers, but even more so for beginners who may be starting out with next to no money.

There are lots of ways to get traffic to your site, but only a few of them work for new websites. Sadly, few of the free methods will bring over night traffic to your site…no matter what the scam websites trying to cash in on your inexperience tell you. Web 2.0 properties like Facebook, Squidoo, Twitter & Hubpages to name a few, coupled with social bookmarking will lead to fairly rapid traffic.

Making money online takes work, even if you have enough money to start a pay-per-click advertising campaign, or money to invest in outsourcing your business, those tasks will take work as well, and with pay-per-click you run the risk of going broke very fast if you don’t know what you are doing. You’d be well advised to steer clear of PPC until you are making enough money to afford it.

Now let’s take a closer look at the various other aspects of making money online for newbies, starting with the free methods.

E-Mail Marketing

Since most newbies do not have an email list, email marketing isn’t a viable option in the beginning. However, starting an email opt in list is something every new marketer should focus on very soon. You’ll do that by creating what is called a Squeeze Page. There are hundreds of free Squeeze Page Templates available on the web, both text and video squeeze pages can be used.

However, as important as building a list is, in order to build an email list, you have to first have traffic to your squeeze page.

You can find all the information you’ll ever need about how to build an email list squeeze page for free, just by searching Google. So I’m not going to be focusing on the specifics of list building right now, but the link above is a good starting place.

This article is simply an overview of what’s needed to get your online business started.

The three simplest and quickest ways to get traffic to your site in the beginning are article marketing, video marketing, and paid advertising.

Article Marketing

Most internet marketers get their feet wet by writing articles, also called bum marketing, because it doesn’t cost anything other than the time it takes to write your article and submit it to the article directories.

If you have enough money you can even outsource your article writing to ghost writers if you either hate writing, or don’t feel confident in your writing skills. Or better yet, you might just want to learn how easy it is to write your own articles and save your money and sanity.

The benefits of article marketing are threefold, 1) you can gain immediate traffic from readers clicking the links in your articles once they are published, 2) you’ll be creating backlinks coming into your site from your articles, helping you to build your rank in the search engines, and 3) other webmasters may decide your article is worth posting on their sites if your articles are of high enough quality, getting you additional exposure and backlinks.

While article marketing helps build organic traffic to your site, which helps build long term income, it’s not going to bring huge sums of overnight traffic for most websites.

No matter how good the content of your articles are, until your articles gain traction and show up in the search engines, the amount of traffic you’ll get from them will be small to non-existent in the beginning.

You’ll need to write articles for both your own web pages and articles to publish on article directories too. Always make certain to post your original articles on your web site before submitting to the article directories. Additionally, the first article directory to submit to is Ezinearticles.com, then wait until it has been approved before submitting to other directories.

Informative articles are the content that the search engines desire to see on your pages so they know what your site is about. Good content is really important if you want the search engines to send you traffic.

You’ll hear many online marketers tell you that “content is king,” and it’s true, as I just indicated, websites need content in order for search engines to bother with them, but content isn’t really king, not even “quality content” as the marketing gurus tell you.

What the search engines really see as king is the right kind of Back Links to your site. Google has been known to rank empty pages simply on the strength of backlinks. However, empty pages won’t rank for long, so make sure to have good quality content on your pages…and lot’s of it.

You can have really crappy content and still get ranked highly in the search engines if you have enough quality incoming links to your pages. On the other hand, without a sufficient number of quality backlinks to your site, your site will never see the light of day in the search engines, no matter how good your content is.

Ranking in the search engines is more or less a popularity contest. To become number one, you need lots of votes from the contest judges. Back-links are votes. The more votes you have, the higher you’ll rank, and the more traffic you’ll get.

Of course your articles need to be well written, if you want readers to click your links to learn more about your products or services. But more important than that, is that publishing articles to the major article directories is a great way to start getting credible votes to your site.

Article directories are one type of contest judge you need to impress, and there are lot’s of them to submit your articles to. The search engines are very impressed by these judges so you’ll want to impress lots of them.

The greatest benefit you’ll receive from your published articles is backlinks. Having readers click the links in your article is a plus, but the most important reason to publish articles is to get backlinks to your pages. Just make sure you don’t over optimize the backlinks using the exact same keyword in all your links.

Back-links are the single most important thing the search engines want to see , besides content, in order to rank your site highly. So every marketing effort you do should focus on two things: 1) clicks to your pages, and 2) backlinks for ranking.

There are other popularity contest judges you’ll want to impress as well, which leads us to…

Video Marketing

Video marketing is very similar to article marketing. In fact, video marketing is a lot more powerful in getting traffic to your site than article marketing. And just like articles, videos are a great source for obtaining backlinks to your pages.

If you create videos that are interesting and you learn how to market your videos properly you can get traffic to your site a lot faster than you can with articles. If your videos go viral, they can create a tsunami of traffic to your site.

There are a number of ways you can create videos.

There are both free and paid screen capture programs available as well as one of the easiest video creation programs available—Windows Movie Maker, which is pretty much standard on all windows operating systems.

Or you can create videos with a web cam. How you create them is less important than creating the kind of content that people want to watch and share with others. Just do a Google search for “how to create videos,” and you’ll find all the information you need. You probably already have all the equipment you’ll ever need right on your PC…Windows Movie Maker is an excellent movie creator software. Here’s a WMM how to video.

Paid Advertising: PPC & Banner Ads

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on paid advertising. I just want to make it clear that you can drive a lot of traffic to your site fast, but you can also go very, very, broke in short order if you don’t know what you are doing.

However, if you want to get immediate traffic to your site and have some money to spend on paid advertising, you can generate some quick income using PPC or banner ads, but you need to be very careful.

PPC is short for pay-per-click, which is a method of advertising that only costs you when someone actually clicks on your advertisement.

PPC and Banner ads are both popular options for advertising your business on the Internet, but you may wish to learn a bit more about PPC advertising before you jump in with both feet.

Here’s what I consider to be one of the most valuable courses on PPC advertising available. If you are new to paid advertising, you really need to get this course.

E-Mail Marketing

As I’ve already mentioned, e-mail marketing is really not a viable option for a beginner with no e-mail list. But after you’ve started getting some traffic you’ll want to set up your squeeze page to start building your list.

You’ll need an auto-responder for your opt-in squeeze page, and there are a number of auto-responders that are highly recommended by most experienced internet marketers. Two of them are Aweber and GetResponse, which both get high marks for professionalism.

Auto-responders are among the most powerful internet marketing tools available. They are easy to use, and once they are set up the entire marketing process is automated and instant.

When you use auto-responders, your internet business runs itself 24 hours a day. Launching an effective auto-responder campaign can mean the difference between a struggling business and a wildly successful one.

As I mentioned earlier, e-mail marketing is a very profitable method of marketing, but it isn’t going to drive a lot of traffic to your websites or earn you a lot of money, until and unless you have a really large list. And not just a large list, but a large, responsive, targeted, list of buyers.

It is really a waste of time to develop a list of thousands of followers if they aren’t interested in your products. So the more targeted your list is, the more money you’ll eventually be able to earn from your list.

Email marketing essentially involves sending out emails to a group of individuals who may be interested in your products and services.

Extreme care should be taken when sending out emails, especially when sending emails that are either unsolicited or that might be viewed as spam. One way to do this is to only send out the emails to users who have requested inclusion on an email mailing list, that’s where your opt-in squeeze page comes into play.

Equally important, you don’t want to spam your list with daily sales pitches either. You’ll have better results if you try to develop a relationship with your list by offering lots of tips and free information, with only an occasional sales pitch. And your sales pitches should be pretty low key, rather than blatant-in-your-face ads. Send too many straight out sales pitches too often and your list will dry up very fast.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Finally, optimizing your website for search engines is an important aspect of internet marketing.

Search engines rank websites according to quality and relevance for particular keyword search terms. To be more precise, search engines rank web pages, not websites. You’ll want to have as many pages on your site rank in the engines as you can, in order to bring as much traffic and sales to your site as possible.

Since many visitors will find their way to your web pages via keyword searches, you’re going to want to rank your pages on the first page of the search engine results using highly researched keywords that will attract as many buyers as possible. The higher you rank on page one for your chosen keywords, the more traffic you’ll receive.

The gurus like to throw out the number 42% when they try to tell you how many visitors you’ll get if you can rank number one. In fact, a lot of the top keyword tools available use that very number as a benchmark.  Unfortunately, that number is absolutely incorrect. The real number of average clicks is much, much lower than that, in fact, it’s only about half that much. Click here to learn more about what kind of click results you can expect if you actually rank number one for your target keyword.

Read the above mentioned article and you’ll know what the true number of visitors will be for any web page you can gain #1 ranking for, and why you’ll never make the kind of money the gurus tell you that you will using the keyword criteria they teach you to use.

As I mentioned early on in this article, backlinks are the single most important element of getting ranked in the search engines. However, many gurus still think the search engines are just as impressed with what they call on page optimization. With recent algorithm changes like Panda and Penquin, the value and types of backlinks are now even more important than what the gurus have been teaching.

While On Page Optimization used to be a very big part of Google’s ranking algorithm, it plays an even smaller part of the formula these days. Moreover, Google is now penalizing sites that use the wrong kind of backlinks as well as over optimizing pages. Here’s an excellent article on the most recent Google algorithm change known as Penquin.

So, what is Search Engine Optimization anyway?

SEO is based on optimizing each of your pages for a specific search keyword, starting with as close to an exact match keyword phrase in your URL as possible.

SEO gurus used to teach you to include your exact keyword phrase in your meta page title, as well as use it in your H1, H2 & H3 tags, and sprinkle it into your page content a few times in bold, and underlined. It’s best not to do that anymore. Having it in your Url, Title & H1 tag as well as once or twice more in the body is enough.

You don’t need to worry about keyword density as much as the gurus tend to mistakenly believe. In fact, it’s even more important now to forget keyword density completely. Just put your keywords into a couple of paragraphs, but make them sound natural to your human readers.

Last but not least, you’ll want to make your page’s meta description keyword rich as well, and craft it in such a way that it will entice searchers to click through to your page.

That’s pretty much all there is to on page optimization for the search engines. Which brings us to the most important element in gaining rankings and traffic to your site.

Link Building For Search Engine Rankings

Like I’ve said several times throughout this article, the heart of your efforts to build an online business needs to be centered on building quality back links to your pages. Lots of quality links…but, they should be from related niche websites and preferably in text links, with a variety of anchor texts. Using the same keyword anchor text in more than about 50% of your incoming links is likely to get your site penalized by Google. Google is seriously cranking down on spam links and spam content.

I’m not going to delve too deeply into the subject in this article since I’ve posted some extensive information on the subject in an article titled: How To Rank In Google And Get Free Traffic which will explain the subject in greater detail. But I do encourage you to learn as much as you can about article marketing, video marketing, email marketing and backlinking as you can. So check out some of the links above if you can’t find enough information on any of those subjects to get going.

Anyway, I hope you’ve found my article on making money online for newbies useful.