Internet Marketing isn't Blogging

Bloggers don't make money online - Internet Marketers do. It has taken me a while to understand why so many of my readers just don't get it. Bloggers want to make money but they want to do it blogging. They have integrity. They want to be recognized by other bloggers. They want to be famous. They think the A-list makes the most money online.

Internet Marketers only want to make money. They use blogs but they don't blog. You have never heard of them. They make a lot more money than the A-list.

I have been telling bloggers for some time now how to make money online and it isn't working. You can only make money by getting large volumes of traffic and it has to be traffic that will spend money on something they want or will click ads in pursuit of something they want. Bloggers spend all their time trying to get other bloggers to read their blogs. Bloggers don't spend money and even if they did there are not enough of them to make a living on. Internet Marketers spend all their time optimizing pages for the search engines and getting backlinks.

You have heard me say all this before and yet you still chase bloggers.

A little perspective

The blog you are reading now averages about 2000 visitors a day - 3/4 of the traffic comes from Google. The rest are bloggers. Adsense earnings average about $100/day. Affiliate sales are sporadic at best and earn me maybe $500 a month. This is not an affiliate sales site however and could do a lot better if I concentrated my efforts on the search traffic. I also make about $100 a week selling leads (Project Payday).

Most of you would think this is a pretty good income and you will continue to build up your blog in hopes of achieving a similar income. Most of you will never achieve it because you will never get the search traffic. You will try and get more readers. 

The screenshot below is of one of my statcounter accounts. The stats you see are for all the affiliate sites I have built over the past three months. Most are for products on clickbank, CJ and ROI Rocket. Affiliate products have a decent return for about three months and then interest drops off drastically. A few products like SEO Elite and Keyword Elite stand the test of time but they are an exception - they are different from all the rest because they are actually useful. Most products are crap.

I optimize affiliate sales blogs just like my Adsense blogs. I pre-sell the product and direct the visitor to my affiliate link. You will see that I have as many failures as successes. Every site on the list is or was on page 1 of the serp's but some don't generate interest, others get sandboxed and some generate a lot of traffic. This past month I generated about 300,000 page views. 1% clicked through to the sales page. About 3000 visitors. 10% of these actually bought a product - approx 300 sales (289 to be exact). My average commission is $23 for a total of just under $6700. I spent a grand total of nothing on hosting or domains. I spent nothing on PPC. The only expense I have is buying backlinks - about $750 this month but this should be divided equally between all several hundred sites that I manage - about $3.26 per site.

Make Money on Internet at Home

How do you make money on internet at home? You are boy or a girl, teenager or an adult, man or women, everyone can make money on internet at home. There are at least two ways in which sites can make money:

• Advertising Revenue

• Selling Goods and Services

Making Money From Advertisement

If you look at many websites, you will probably notice that there are banner advertisements displayed on most pages. If you are a newcomer to the scene, you might think that you must either be a company or that your site must be famous before you can get advertisers, just as it is the case in hardcopy publications. In reality, anyone with a website can get advertisers. While it is true that if your site is well-known, you may get companies contacting you to offer to advertise on your site, you can get advertising revenue even if you are just starting out and your site is relatively unknown. The way to do this is to join as an "affiliate" of various sites, either directly, or through an affiliate network. An affiliate network is simply an intermediary where you can select from a variety of advertisers.

Payment Methods

Before joining any program, you should probably be aware of the different payment schemes available.

Pay Per Impression

Here, you are paid according to the number of times the advertiser's banner is displayed on your site. The amount you earn is typically calculated based on the number of thousand impressions of the banner (impressions = number of times the banner is displayed), often abbreviated CPM (cost per thousand, with the M being the Latin numeral for thousand). That is, $10 CPM means that you get paid $10 for 1,000 displays of the banner. In general, the amount paid is usually small, but it is easy to earn since every time a visitor loads the page, you earn. This is known as a "high conversion rate". Needless to say, this method will allow you to automatically earn more if your site attracts a lot of visitors.

Pay Per Click

When you are paid per click, you are only paid when visitors click the advertiser's banner on your site. The amount paid is usually higher than the pay per impression scheme. Whether you get a high conversion rate here depends on the banner (whether it attracts people to click it), although in general, it has a higher conversion rate than the pay per sale method. A high traffic site will probably enjoy a higher click rate than a lower traffic site, although you will probably get better results if your banners are carefully selected to suit the target audience of your site.

Pay Per Sale or Lead

While you will probably get the highest payment rates with this method, it has the lowest conversion rate of the three schemes. You will only earn if your visitors click through the banner and either purchase an item from the advertiser or take some other prescribed action (eg, sign up for a service). Like the Pay Per Click method, you get much better results if you carefully select your advertisers to suit the target audience of your site.

To join an affiliate network or program, simply go to the site and complete their online application form. Some programs will give you instant approval while others require a human to check out your application before it is approved. Once it is approved, you'll be given some HTML code which you can cut and paste into your web page. Note that some affiliate networks and programs will not accept you unless you have a domain name.

How To Choose An Affiliate Program?

How should you choose an affiliate program? if you are targeting parents on your site, links to affiliates with educational software, books and the like may generate more revenue than banners that link to web hosting companies. The most important rule of choosing an affiliate program is to know your target audience. Another point to consider is whether you really want to join every single affiliate program that comes your way. Some studies suggest that sites that make the most money from affiliate programs are affiliates of only a small handful of programs. Furthermore, concentrating your advertisements from one network may allow you to be paid faster. If you advertise for hundreds of different affiliate networks on your site, you may wind up earning only (say) a few dollars per month from each network. If your advertiser's minimum payment amount is higher than what you can earn each month, it may take you a long time before you accrue enough to be paid.

On the other hand, that formula does not necessarily hold true for every site (or every page on your site, for that matter). For example, if your site has a particular theme, and an affiliate network only supports one or two suitable advertisers, you might want to sign up for a few affiliate networks so as to get a greater number of relevant advertisers. After all, advertisements that are relevant to your audience are more likely to be taken up than general advertisements. (What's the point of putting banners from only one affiliate if nobody is going to click them?)

We will add in near future some good affiliate programs enabling our viewers to make good money at home from their websites. Simple rule of thumb, only join related affiliate programs, eg if your website is related with beauty only join affiliate programs of beauty websites.