MarisueWrites.com

In this article, I am going to discuss one of the biggest buzzes on the internet and why it is absolutely essential for your success in the online world.

I have a long-standing background in business and in information technology and have focused much of my efforts on internet software development since the very early days when the internet first went public back in 1994. Since 1994, I have learned the in’s and out’s of website development. I have personally built more than 300 websites during that time. Each of those sites progressively grew more complex and utilised all the latest cutting edge of technologies of their time.

I have built many websites that were designed for e-commerce, but with all the technical knowledge, I was missing one key ingredient to ensure even greater success of those websites: monetization.

Sure, the websites made money from the sales of their own products and services, but normally the conversion rate of vistors to customers is a fairly low percentage. On average, any given site would be elated to convert a mere 3% of their traffic. There are many methods employed to increase the conversion rates, but that still leaves a massive percentage of untapped potential in the traffic that was on the site in the first place–and right now traffic is an extremely precious commodity in the on-line world. We need to leverage existing traffic to generate even more revenue. And if there isn’t enough traffic, generate more (I will discuss traffic generation in a future article, as it is extremely important)!

Monetization, in its simplest form, means to generate revenue from something. When we are talking about websites, this means leveraging your existing traffic to provide income from a revenue stream outside of your primary product or service. Some common examples of monetisation include: direct paid advertising, network advertising and affiliate marketing.

Direct paid advertising – Advertisers pay you directly for placement of their ads on your website.

Network advertising – An aggregator of advertisers allows you to display advertisements from their network of advertisers. Each click on those displayed advertisements makes you money (PPC, or Pay per click), or they may pay per 1000 impressions of advertisements (PPM). Google AdSense is one such program and is very popular.

Affiliate marketing – Agreements with individual companies that pay you commissions for any sales that originated from a link on your website, through the use of tracking codes or referral ids embedded into those links. A few well-known companies who offer aggregated affiliate programs are: Clickbank and  Commission Junction. There are also individual companies who have their own private affiliate programs (who actually service website owners), such as: Traffic Swarm, Article Marketer, AWeber and many others.

Think of these as additional revenue streams generated by your existing website visitors whether or not they choose to buy your products or services. They give you a number of different opportunities to generate revenue from every single website visitor. Obviously not every visitor will take actions that will generate income for you, but it certainly increases the chances that they will.

Anyone can build a website and make money online. A complete novice can setup a complete website, with step by step instructions, in a matter of a few short hours. Companies like Site Sell specialise in turnkey website development solutions and completely remove the complexities. In the old days, when the internet was just getting off the ground, it was a general rule that only technical people could create and manage a website. However, with the newer technologies that have been developed recently, this is no longer a requirement.  The average person now has nothing to prevent them from creating their own website and generating additional streams of passive income.

In today’s economy, a single income stream is not only risky, due to corporate dowsizings, but the cost of living seems to continually creep up without associated increases in earnings from our normal 9 – 5 vocations. Multiple income streams are now viewed as the only real viable answer to current global trends. Obviously there are a myriad of ways of generating these additional income streams (and I will be covering many of these in subsequent posts), but with the power of the internet, there simply has never been any vehicle in the history of the human race that provided such an overwhelming surge of growth and new business. And the great thing is: things have only just begun!

Here’s to your success!

Building a home business can be tough. Building multiple home based businesses may seem like an impossible task to some people but it is not. Everyone really wants to know what it takes to build a successful business. You may not like the answer but it is the truth.

What drives successful business people to excel and succeed? Where millions of others have failed. The answer is desire. The reason why some people succeed where others fail, is because they have a burning desire.

This desire drives them towards the top. Desire is the starting point of all success. If you have no desire you will not get anywhere. Lack of desire is a major cause of failure. You must have that burning passion to succeed. If not you will not get anywhere and you will not succeed building a home based business.
You see your desire will drive you to succeed even when you feel like quitting. It all starts from your level of desire. In order for you to succeed it must become an obsession. Your desire will drive you to succeed in your moments of weakness. This is the key ingredient.

Any person who has succeeded in any undertaking knows full well they were completely consumed by it. The level of your desire will determine the level of your success. Many people take the path of least resistance when it comes to anything. Let’s take losing weight for example. Mostly everyone wants to shed some weight.

But very few take the action to actually lose the weight. Many people say I will wake up an hour earlier to go jogging in the morning. Then when the alarm clock hits they turn it off and go back to bed. The few who actually do get out of bed and go jogging are actually the ones who have a strong desire to succeed.

The same goes for business, everyone wants to have a successful business but very few actually put in the work or the time to build a successful business. Many people would rather procrastinate and relax than have to put in the extra effort to succeed.

Everyone has 24 hours in day, how you make use of the time is entirely up to. Many people complain that they do not have the time to build a successful business. The truth is they do not have the desire or will power to build a successful business. If you really want to have a successful business and become wealthy there is nothing that should or would get in your way.

If you want to succeed you must burn all your bridges and go after what it is you want. You must go all or nothing. You must be motivated about what you are doing and what it is you are trying to accomplish. This is the only way you can succeed. You cannot go into anything half way you will not make it. Your level of desire will determine the level of success you have with your home based businesses.

It takes discipline to build a home based business or a few home based businesses. Many people lack the self discipline needed to build a successful home business. This is something you cannot get around. You will need discipline in order to build and maintain a successful business. Self discipline is something you cannot teach, it must come from within. If you do not have self discipline it well become very hard to build a business.

This pretty much goes for anything you want to accomplish in life, it takes discipline to achieve your goal. Having discipline is just one of the key elements you will need to build your company. There are others like desire, motivation, and will power.

Why will you need self discipline when building your company? Simple running your own business is not like having a job, it is completely different. With a job you have to get up and go to work or you can get fired. With a business no one will force you to get up and work on your business. It must come from within you have to want to do it. If you decide to sleep or watch TV instead of work on your business, you will not have anyone over your head getting mad at you. At your job you have a supervisor watching over you and making sure you are getting the job done. With a home based business you will not have any supervisor watching over your every move. It will be entirely up to you to get work done.

Building your business will fall entirely up to you. If you oversleep instead of getting some work done for your business there will be no one you have to answer to except yourself. People who lack self discipline will find it extremely difficult to build a business. The question becomes “how bad do you really want to have a successful home business”? If you truly want to have a successful business you will find ways to make your business work and you will find time to make your business work. If you truly do not want it, it will show through your actions.

Many people love the idea of having their own business, but they are not willing to put in the time and effort needed to succeed. No matter what any company promises you it will take work and daily effort to build your business. Many companies promise you such things like, make 10,000 a month working only ten minutes a day. Ads like this are bogus. It is not true, it will take more than 10 minutes a day to build a successful business.

Building a business is not a cake walk. It is not something that happens overnight. It is something that you will have to work on daily. There will be ups and downs but as long as you are willing to put in the work, you can make a very nice living off of building a business.

In the world of Web 2.0 great content can be rewarded, as well as some not-so-great content. Like everything, the 80/20 rule still applies. All content is not rewarded equally. So how can you ensure you have an unfair advantage when it comes to monetizing your content?

Monetizing content comes under two broad category matches. One is using content to bring traffic to your website, and the second is ensuring you attain the best return on investment once your traffic arrives.

How to use content to increase your positions in the SERPs…

Submit articles to article directories and attain hundreds of back-links for your website. Keep in mind that any text or on-site SEO factors on your website are unlikely to bring you traffic until you build links pointing towards pages on your website.

You should also ensure that the anchor text for a link is similar to a term you would like to rank for. This means that you should choose “adsense” as the anchor text if you want to appear highly on in the search engine result pages for “adsense”.

Use quality content to increase your quality score for adwords. In doing this you will attain a higher position in the sponsored results without increasing your cost-per-click. You could also use your copywriting skills to increase CTR and further increase ROI for your PPC media spend.

Write website content that makes other webmasters desperate to link to you. Show authority, be there as and when it happens and make sure you have something to say about it.

Although you should not aim to change your content by filling it with keywords, make sure you at least have the text in your website content that you would like to rank for. SEO copywriting should be discreet, but do not remember never to sacrifice calls-to-action so that you can achieve keyword density success. You will lower conversion rates, and not impress search engines either.

I have the visitors, now what do I do…

Monetization methods should come down to the basic principle of what gives the best return on investment. Maybe one of the below choices is only natural for you to select, for others it may involve rigorous testing, whilst others may implement and incorporate ideas from both.

Drive traffic to your main product offerings, through either placing content on the main landing pages for your products, or through linking to these pages.

Place contextual advertising on your website. You do not need any products, and you have the ability to attain at least 10-fold on top of what traditional print media attains per impression. Why? Adverts are targeted and driven towards the traffic that you have brought to your site.

Place affiliate code on your web site and make money for each sale you refer. With affiliate marketing you are only receiving commissions for sales you induce. If you are providing a true return on investment for buyers, then this will most likely have the strongest results.

It is true that people are raking in millions of dollars online with a home based business. These people that make all this money online have the drive and ambition to work hard and do what is required to succeed. Real success comes after you put in the work required to get your website to the top of the search engines.

The first thing you need to do is optimize your website for your selected keywords. Add your keywords throughout the text of your web page, title, alt images, h1 headers, and meta tags. Optimal keyword density is somewhere around 1-3%. Too much and the search engines will penalize you, too little and they won’t pick you up at all.

Next, and the most important aspect to making money online, is building back links. The more links you have pointing back to your web site, the higher you will rank in the search engines. Back links from high authority sites will also help boost your rankings in the search engines. Sites with a page rank of four or higher are considered by the search engines to be high authority sites.

It will take time to build enough back links to get your web site ranked high enough to receive the required traffic to make real money online. You just have to be patient and persistent with your efforts. The best way to build back links is to have a daily, weekly, and monthly agenda. Sticking to the agenda will virtually success and money for your home based business. 97% of the people who get into the home based business niche however fail to stick with it and ultimately quit before any money is made.

To succeed with your home based business and make money online, your daily agenda should include but not be limited to writing articles, blogging, posting in forums, commenting on blogs, and reciprocal linking. Using these methods on a daily basis and doing it over months at a time will lock your home based business in the top of the search engines and guarantee your web page loads of free organic traffic. It is possible to make money online without spending money first.

Once your web site is on page one or two of Google and the like for your selected keywords, you should rinse and repeat the process for more keywords. In fact, you should make a separate page for each of the keywords you choose and repeat the process over and over until you’ve locked a top spot for good number of different keywords. Your web site should be on the top page for hundreds of different keywords after years of using these methods. At that point, your traffic will be through the roof!

BENEFITS

·  Of all the options open today, an online home-based business, carried out on the Internet, is probably the most profitable and practicable. Becoming one’s own boss makes the work both stress-free and flexible.

·  The main thing required for this business is a Personal Computer with an Internet connection. It is an excellent source of subsidiary income, works out a great option for new mothers who would prefer to spend more time at home with their babies and is very favorable for retired people who would like to be gainfully employed.

·  Requiring minimum investment, this is also very easy on the wallet. The domain costs you under $10 a year, while web hosting starts at about $5 per month, which is truly little, considering the huge financial benefits accrued once the business succeeds.

·  Technical knowledge is a big plus, but one can also easily manage with the ready-to-edit free tools provided by many sites. So you do not even have to be a pro to get your business going!

DISADVANTAGES

·  Now the downside. The amount of time and effort the publisher has to take to maintain and update the site is immense. Though editing with readymade tools is easy, one will still have to learn the basics of HTML, creating, editing and uploading images etc. Of course, there are professional web designers to complete the task to perfection, but that can turn out to be pretty expensive – they have to be paid on an hourly basis. Finally hiring these pros is not a very viable option.

·  All the effort taken is in no way any guarantee that the business will succeed. Not all businesses ventures and entrepreneurs succeed. That is the case with Internet firms too. There is sometimes a lack of trust in the buyers or a fear of security as far as financial transactions are concerned. This creates a lack of certainty, making it a lesser desirable option.

·  The professional designer (in case there is one) or the web hosting company chosen for the website can sometimes be responsible for the success or failure of the business. Technical troubles with the web host could cause all work on the website to come to a grinding halt for days on end. This could throw one’s entire schedule off the track.

·  Though one may copyright one’s webpages, plagiarism is rampant. One’s ideas are freely available on the Net for everyone to see, so there’s always the added risk of copying and cheating. Not only that, there is an ever-present threat of hacking or spamming, which one has to constantly steer away from.

·  Competitors are far too many in any field, particularly on the Net. The consumer is truly King – he has unlimited variety to choose from, so he tends to jump from one brand to the other only too often. That means there’s almost nothing called brand loyalty. That further reduces security in the business. Having to invent new ideas to keep the business afloat and having to prove oneself all the time, can get as taxing and nerve-racking as any other trade.

In conclusion, though it takes a lot of initial struggle to get a home-based establishment up and running, it is also relatively easy to maintain once a concrete plan has been developed and a system strictly adhered to. Like everything else, this business too has its pros and cons.

The key is to assess the risks involved, estimate the amount of work required and then concentrate on plugging the minuses. The negatives notwithstanding, a home-based enterprise carried out through the Internet is definitely far easier to start and maintain than any other.

There’s a wide range of financial opportunities available on the internet. The best home based businesses have several things in common. One common tool prevalent in good home based businesses is the usage of the internet in promoting a product/service.
The internet has dramatically changed the way business is conducted. The internet is a great platform to dispense a message to a wide audience for an extremely low cost. Unlike traditional media like print, radio or television, digital information dispensed on the internet can last indefinitely with little or no loss in quality of information. The high fidelity in information replication allows your message to be amplified effectively.
One of the best home based business ideas is generating income through online advertising. This can be a fun and rewarding way to make money. Websites with a lot of traffic have the potential to be revenue making machines. Advertisers prefer to advertise at high traffic websites.
The more successful your website is, the more interest there will be in advertising on your website. Advertising rates can be set according to the amount of traffic a website receives. The more traffic you receive, the high a premium you can afford to charge.
The type of website can vary greatly. Blogs, informational websites and forums are some popular examples of advertising platforms you can build. It can be fun building a website that you are interested in. It is also very rewarding to witness your site grow in popularity and achieve success.
To build a successful website requires patience and quality content. A constant stream of interesting content is essential in a website’s success. After you’ve taken your first step in attracting visitors, you need the longevity to build on your customer base.
If you don’t have the patience or commitment to build a website, you can consider selling online ebooks. Consumers are willing to pay for information. The concept for paying for information is not new. When printing presses were invented, consumers were willing to pay for printed material like books and newspapers.
When cassette tapes and compact discs were invented, consumers were willing to buy those too. However, the future of content publishing lies in digital distribution. A big step has already been taken, with digital video and music leading the way.
Consumers have become more accustom to the notion of digital products. And as the market evolves, there will be more opportunities to develop online content for a profit. Ebooks allow consumers to make purchases from the convenience of their home. This, bolstered with ease and anonymity of online payment, makes converting interest into sales easy.
To sell an ebook product, you can write one yourself or you can choose to sell someone else’s product as an affiliate. Selling as an affiliate is a quick and simple way to get into the ebook business.
The wide range of opportunities to make money on the internet is daunting. But with the right research at your disposal, you’ll be able to find some of the best home bases businesses for you to emulate.

Establishing your own E-commerce site is notas easy as it used to be. There are thousands of competitors that are trying to get a bigger share of the pie, therefore every scheme and method you can find to augment your sales will be very beneficial.

We have got to admit to ourselves. Most of us are into it for the money. We are not going to waste our time and effort just for the fun of it. Many sites would not wait until hell freezes over just to see their profits. While there are some who take things lightly there are always those who would rather see profit today.

It is common knowledge that without traffic we have no business. Like any business, without any customers you don’t get sales. Traffic represents all the people that gets a chance to see what you have to offer. The more people who see your products the more people there will be to buy them.

Nobody puts up an E-commerce site that doesn’t expect profit. We have startup capital that needs to be regained. With consistent traffic, we at least have a fighting chance to achieve that profitability. Monetizing your traffic would optimize your chances of making the best out of it.

Making Money out of your Traffic

The best and most proven method of making a profit out of your traffic is using advertising. The internet generates hundreds of thousands upon hundred of thousands of traffic everyday. Most of them are searching for something. While some are just looking for information there is also a good percentage that are looking for something that they need.

The internet has proven to be a very reliable source in finding what was deemed to be a very unsearchable product. The internet has made the world a smaller place; you can advertise a product from the depths of Istanbul and still find a buyer from the center of Philadelphia.

Generating traffic is not an easy task. You have to contend with a great number of sites to generate a good amount of traffic flow. But if done successfully this could open up a Pandora’s Box of possibilities. One of the benefits is monetizing your traffic flow.

So, to get to the core of it the more traffic you generate the more likely you are considered as desirable, desirable, in a sense that a good traffic flowing site is easily convertible to profit.

Basically traffic equals profit. Advertising is the name of the game; with a good advertising scheme you can use your traffic flow to your advantage.

When you have good traffic you have a good number of potential customers, customers that are willing to pour money into your coffers. Other than that this is also traffic that can be redirected to sponsored links that are willing to pay you for a sizeable portion of the traffic that you have generated.

This scheme is called “pay-per-click”. With every click a visitor of your site makes on an advertised link, you will be paid. The more traffic you generate and the more clicks that happen, means more profits.

Affiliate Programs

Another method of monetizing your traffic is through affiliate programs. You can link up with other tried and tested sites and online companies and monetize your traffic by having a percentage of sales generated by traffic coming from your site.

The basic idea is, traffic generated from your site will go to another site that can offer a product that you do not carry. Many programs can keep track and make records of transactions that was made possible because of site linkage.

When purchases are made by customers that were led by your site to their site you get a percentage of that sale. Affiliate programs would give you the benefit of monetizing your traffic without the actual need of carrying or promoting a certain product.

There are so many ways and methods to make the most of your traffic. All it takes is a bit of hard work and the desire to successfully launch a profit-earning site.

The internet is a veritable source of information, many tips and guides are offered everywhere in how to monetize your traffic and make your site a good profit earner.

We disagree with Thomas Jefferson, who said “All men are created equal.” For one thing there’s women in this bunch too, ya know, and for another . . . it’s just not true. (Plus we don’t much like that grammar.) People are as different as night and day. (And we wonder why they can’t agree on religion and politics?!) We prefer “Know thyself.” Plato.

Now there’s a guy who knew what he was talking about. And what does all this have to do with working at home anyway?If you’re going to make a success of your home based business, and you’re working in the midst of your own dust mites, clutter, and kids, then believe us, you’d better know thyself! Here are some basic, rather unconventional but holy laws.

BIG STUFF — Here’s where knowing thyself comes in. Figure out what really makes you tick, helps you be productive and creative, or absolutely destroys your ability to get anything done. If you can’t stand to enter your home office until you’ve had a shower, then by all means be sure you make time for that shower! If your house has to be neat as a pin and clean as a whistle in order for you to think straight, then set aside blocks of hours on certain days to make it so.

If you work best under deadlines, then create deadlines for yourself. If you need to stand on your head for 30 minutes to decompress after getting five children off to school before you can go to work, then be sure you make space and time for this as a daily activity.

Helpful tools are endless (planning calendars, time-saving technology, timers, regular breaks, etc.), but it’s how you use them in your home based business that makes them work, and you have to use them in accordance with your “big stuff” issues. Some people’s big stuff is other people’s little stuff, so be sure you figure out what your big stuff is.

LITTLE STUFF — This is the “tools” section. Use that timer, plan your week, consolidate those errands, beat that drum! Keep having fun and who you are in mind, and your energy will reflect it. As will the success of your home based business.

RULES . . . were made to be broken. If you set too many up for yourself you’re going to experience self-induced failure. Because you’re only human, and you will break your own rules. Too many rules backfires. Don’t back your home based business into a corner by creating so many rules that all you spend your time doing is enforcing them!

HAVE A PLAN B — There will be days you wake up and just know that you will not be able to fulfill that day’s scheduled tasks. You have writer’s block, or PMS, or a migraine, or it’s the first day of sunshine in six weeks! Give yourself a friggin’ break! Take the day off!Be realistic. Work in sync with your cycles, your headaches, your children, your strengths and weaknesses. We were not all created equal, and neither were our schedules, so just can the idea of fitting your home based business into any particular formula! No matter what the experts say . . . or Thomas Jefferson.

And if you’d like to take a peek at one of the resources that works best for us in terms of getting the job done, be sure and click on the link below.

Even if you already know how to monetize your website with ads and affiliate programs, monetizing a blog is a bit different. A blog will have even more options to choose from for streams of revenue than a traditional website would.Banner Ad Blocks

Banner ads, like those from Google’s AdSense, are the most common way to monetize a website online, and blogs are no exception here. The same choice apply as with other websites, but with blogs ad placement is even more important. You can have your ads in a sidebar, but that will not give a very high click through rate. Banners at the top of the blog, above content can have a higher CTR, but you will get the highest rate when ads are within posts, inside your content.Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs work quite well with blogs, because it is easy to write a post on a focused topic, which in turn increases click through rate for affiliate links. Readers of blogs are often quite ready to click links in posts, because blogs are naturally heavily interlinked. The drawback is that many blog readers tend to be bloggers themselves, and may be more conscious than an average internet user would about the fact that it is an affiliate link you are promoting.Text Link Ads

Correctly placed sidebar links can generate quite much high quality traffic from a high traffic blog. Blogs are also indexed more often than other websites, which makes text links in blogs very valuable from search engine marketing perspective. Both these reasons help to explain why Text Link Ads, and other similar services are used to a great effect in many blogs. These ads are usually paid monthly, so they can be seen as a more passive source of revenue, since a short term fall in traffic will not have a very significant effect on revenue.Sponsored Posts

This is where blogs most differ from more traditional websites, and arguably the most important point in this guide. Paid to post services such as Pay Per Post offer opportunities to promote advertisers’ products with a blog post for a pay. The posts will usually pay anything from $10 up, and often make an important share of a given blog’s advertisement revenue. Pay Per Post has a minimum site age of 90 days, but there are alternative service providers you can choose from, if you have a very new blog. Sponsored Reviews accepts even new sites, and they have a long list of available opportunities to choose from.