As economic crisis is worsening, everybody is looking for some part-time jobs to supplement the family income. However, it is not always easy to get an ideal part-time job, because of time constraints and other problems. So, the best solution is to start an online business and earn money from home, without the constraints of the physical part-time jobs. However, though many people are trying to make money online, only a handful of them are successful. Most of them could not make a decent income. There is nothing wrong with the online business models, it must be the incorrect approach that why people failed in online business. I have been involved in online business for more than 10 years and I can tell you that I am able to earn an income that can pay for food and gas for my entire family, and I am still holding on to a full time job and keep most of my salary. Let me share with you my experience on how to make money online, particularly through joining various affiliate programs.
The easiest approach to starting an online business is to join various affiliate programs, because this business model is absolutely FREE. The basic requirement to join an affiliate program is that you must have a website to market the products. You earn a certain commission when any user purchases the product from your website. You do not have to manage payment and delivery of the products; all these are handled by the merchant. Most affiliate programs pay around 5 to 10 percent of the sales, which could generate good income if you can achieve economy of scale. This is particularly true for the pay-per-click programs like Google’s Adsense, if your website can generate hundreds or even thousands of clicks, you could earn four and five figure income per month.
The single most important factor in creating a successful online business with affiliate niche marketing is to have high website traffic, which means your website must have enough visitors to generate economy of scale. With many visitors, your sales with be substantial if you are involving in affiliate programs that sell products, and the number of clicks will be high if you are involving in pay-per-click programs. To be able to attract large of visitors, the key is Findability. You have to create a website that people can find you through the search engines, and your website should rank top in that niche market, preferably the top ten pages, because people do not usually turn to the second searched page. For example, I am running a tutorial site on visual basic, and my website ranks third when anyone search for Visual Basic in Google, and ranks first if they search for Visual Basic Tutorial.
There are many ways to drive traffic to your website. However, the most important way to attract many visitors is to design a good website with rich and good contents. This means that your website must be able to provide rich and useful information pertaining to the particular niche market. Also bear in mind that plagiarism is not a good way to enrich your contents, it is better to have original ideas and write-up, because readers usually prefer original contents. Remember to update your website regularly to attract repeat visitors as people usually get bored with old contents. I update my site weekly with the help of a blog. Another way to drive traffic to your website is to market it through various channels. You can participate in online forums that discuss the topics in the same niche market, leave messages in other websites’ guestbook, and join discussion groups of the same topic and more. However, you have to do it covertly as overt advertising might be banned by some of the forums or discussion groups. There are also some technical ways to drive traffic to your website and improve your page rank, among them is to include important keywords in the meta Tag of your web pages. You must put in the keywords that you think people might use to search for your web site.
One last thing about creating a successful online business with affiliate niche marketing is to be selective about the companies that provide the affiliate programs. The company must be the top leader in the industry and have good reputation. For affiliate program, I chose Amazon.com simply because it is the largest online grocery store and it has very attractive products as well as good commission system. For pay-per-click program, I chose Google because it is the largest online advertising company and it has awesome software to manage the program. Do not choose a company that has bad reputation and relative unknown in the Internet, because people usually do not trust those companies. In a nutshell, you can make money online with affiliate niche marketing by creating a website with good, rich and updated contents make great effort to market it, and join a reputable affiliate programs.
