Oh sure… great piece of advice right? The master of the obvious here… but don’t run off. If you want to make money online, just about any niche can.

First, there are a whole bunch more people doing searches for baby related items, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make money with stamps because you can. Competition For Making Money Online. The absolute perfect niche would have a lot of interest with very little competition in it.

Now, having said that… if you find one like this keep it to yourself and work like hell to get after it.

But, keep in mind, with competition comes interest. What this means is that if you discover a niche these days that has very little competition then you’ve probably just discovered a niche with very little interest and very little potential to make money online with it. So, a certain level of competition can be a very good sign. The key is to find the sweet spot within a niche that has a high level of interest.

Not only does competition in a niche indicate interest, but it will also give you many working examples of how others are capitalizing on that niche. So, all you have to do is some reverse engineering. Remember the old adage… where there’s smoke there is fire… in this case the opportunity to make some online money. The preference is all yours. I personally try to find that sweet spot between too much competition and too little.

But remember (and this is where many people miss) when you initially look at a niche and you see a whole bunch of competition. This means people are making money online with this niche. Now you might be thinking that the competition is way too stiff for you. But, think of using all this competition (which means interest) to your advantage.

How… simply be looking for those sub niches that fall below the main niche. If a main or top level niche has a lot of competition and interest, I guarantee you that there will be multiple tighter sub-niches below the surface. Another factor to consider is whether the niche you are looking at lends itself to monetization or not… or to what level.

So ask yourself what type of buying profile does the niche present to you. In other words, are the people spending money in the niche. Do you see a lot of products or services being offered or is the niche more tuned to be as frugal as they can. In other words if the niche seems to have trouble parting with a dime or are always looking for the freebies. If they are… you probably need to move on… you get the idea.

So rule number 1… you want to deal with a niche and an audience that has cash potential if you’re going to progress making money online.

Internet marketing (or any marketing for that matter) really is in its simplest form finding a need in a marketplace and then fulfilling that need.

So let’s talk about finding your niche for just a moment.

I think probably the biggest mistake that most everyone makes when they get started in trying to make money online is to go after a niche in a far too broad a sense.

I know I certainly did. With my first website I ever did I was the poster boy for this mistake.

The niche refers to a very distinct portion of a particular market place. The key word there is distinct portion… or narrow portion… or thin slice… are you starting to get the picture?

With my first niche I started way too broad and had no chance to get traffic from these very broad keywords. However, unlike many I was too stupid to quit and just kept promoting and writing content. Over the course of time I began to hit the longer tailed keywords and subsequently spend started to make a little bit of money.

Now fast forwarding a bit the site now makes very good money online, but it took far longer to get there by starting at the broad end of the niche and working my way down… essentially I did it completely backwards and it took far longer to be successful than it should have.

Now, since you are here, you won’t have to worry about making such a egregious mistake.

So what is a niche?

A niche can be anything… any thing at all.

Since you are here and just starting out, I would strongly suggest that your first venture be into an area that is of great interest to you. Everyone… and I mean everyone… has some area in their life that they take an interest in or have a particular level of being a subject matter expert.

Use this to your vantage… let me say that again… use this to your vantage.

Having a strong interest, a passion, or even a background in a particular niche or subject matter is going to shorten your learning curve and make you money online much quicker.

There really is no right or wrong way when it comes to choosing a niche. The key is just choosing one and getting started. And remember you can’t sell everything to everybody so keep your focus tight.

With that in mind, we’ll talk about what some of the strong indicators are that you can look at when it comes to trying to determine if a particular niche has any potential at all. And we’ll also take a look at how to evaluate and eventually pick out a product that you can either create or promote.

So check back soon… and I’ll start working on that.

Advertising dollars is a perfect example. Since just about any and every marketer uses some form of advertising to promote their products and generate traffic to their site; you then can make money at that level–and this is without any sort of product creation or even product purchase taking place by you or on your website.

How… simply by displaying advertising banners on your intranet Web properties will make you money online.

Displaying ads on your website for the purpose of having visitors to your site and then click on those ads is one of the most common ways people earn money online.

Without question the most notable program for this is Google’s AdSense program. This program is so simple it’s stupid. Advertisers pay Google for their Internet classified ads to show up on relative websites all across Internet. When someone visits one of these websites and happens to click on and advertisers add Google then pays a certain amount to the website owner. As far as making money online goes, this is as simple as it gets.

Simply go over to Google and sign up for their ad sense program and once you have your Google account you can display these ads on your website and start making money.

How much you earn from these clicks is completely determined by Google however the pay rate is generally determined by the popularity of the subject matter and the keywords involved. The more expensive it is for the advertiser to rank for a given keyword, and generally speaking the greater percentage Google will then pay the website owner.

As you might imagine what you make per click is relatively small compared to what you make per sale as a product creator. Most of the people that make good money online with AdSense, do so by the volume of websites they produce.

Although the Google AdSense program is not the only pay per click provider that you can use to make money on clicks, it is certainly the most predominant and popular. There are others and the payment model is essentially the same.

Why is the Google AdSense program so popular?

Easy… it’s simple and easy to implement and start making money online.

It’s just a matter of getting your publisher account the Google and then inserting a small bit of code into your website which is very easy to do and you’re up and running.

It’s also essentially maintenance-free. Once you have the Code in Pl., Google does the rest. Google will track and keep your stats and even has a direct deposit so this online money making model is about as auto pilot as it can be.

This online model is also not contingent upon a sale in order for the website owner to make a bit of money… just a click is all it takes. For many this is an extremely attractive model. Simply because there’s no sales copy to write, there is no product support to be administered, and there is no customer contact. Certainly all great advantages and they do have their place in the world of making money online.

So as you can see for great many people the Google AdSense model is a great fit. And it is certainly one model that we here at API used quite effectively.

Now that we’ve introduced the three most popular ways to make money online as an Internet marketer, coming up, we’ll start digging deeper into each of the individual pieces, so stop back by.

Because this is where those who have great ideas and a bit of talent for market research can really, really make some good money.

It’s not just about being creative though, there’s much more to like about the product creation business model.

First of all… and probably why you’re reading this as we speak, product creation tends to be where the big money can be made online. Yes, it is quite possible for an affiliate marketer to make a small fortune online (it happens all the time), but for the average person just getting started I would say the odds are better for you to break through to a top income level as your own publisher or creator of a product.

The reason being, if you think about it for just a moment, as we discussed with affiliate marketing you are essentially out there working on a website, trying to drive traffic to a website, to sell a product that has been created or is owned by someone else. Even if you get your commission… and granted some of them are a pretty good commission… you are still only getting a smaller percent of the gross sale.

However, when you create your own product, you not only have the advantage of keeping 100% of the gross sales if the sale comes through your website, but you also have the marketing ability to begin recruiting vast numbers of affiliates that will sell your product for a commission.

I mean think about that for a moment… you may be thinking why pay your affiliates such a high percentage commission such as 60%, 70%, or even more!

The answer is easy… and it’s one that is the linchpin of making money online. It’s simply volume… but as you’ll learn further along in the course it’s not just the volume of affiliates that make you a good money online, it’s what you can do once you capture your customer’s name and e-mail and continued to market them on what we call the “back end”.

Let’s use of numbers just to help illustrate the point and do some simple math with the revenue.

Let’s say as the person who has just created a product and has put their website/sales page together that early on you are able to sell 10 copies per month of your e-book that you sell for $50 apiece.

Okay… simple enough… for that month you grossed $500.

Now let’s introduce those affiliate numbers. Let’s say you are able to recruit or sign-up an additional 10 affiliates and let’s say you pay them a 50% commission.

Again keeping it extremely simple, let’s say just like you each of those affiliates sold 10 copies of your e-book the next month. So, 10 affiliates times 10 sales equals 100 sales for the month or a gross revenue from your affiliates of $5000.

Now let’s not forget you have to pay them the 50% commission as promised. So after you pay commission of 50% your take is $2500. Plus, during this month you sold your 10 e-books at $50 apiece for a total of $500. So your gross earnings plus your net affiliate earnings just made you $3000 for the month. $2500 of it came from your affiliate worker bees out there promoting your product.

I think you can see now the advantage of taking the time and putting forth the effort into promoting and taking care of your affiliate sales army.

Although this particular example uses nice round numbers just to keep the math easy for yours truly, I think you can get the gist of the big advantage of of making money online when you are the product creator.

So what are the components then of creating your own product?

It’s very basic form there are probably about four areas that come into play when creating your own product. These would be, the preliminary market research, the creation or assembly of your product, the sales funnel or the logistics of selling your product, developing interest in driving traffic to your sales page.

The first step in product creation and making money online for that matter, is all about finding a need in the marketplace, and once you find that need coming up with a product that simply fills that need. I know this sounds overly simplified, but I’m quite serious marketing is all about finding needs and filling them.

Your planning and creation in the actual assembly of your product comes next after you have determined a market need and a product that will fill that need. But also under the creation of a lot of the product you’ll need to think about the physical sales page that you will need to create. This of course involves writing your sales copy. And even other details such as your thank you page and any other necessary website elements that will complete your online presence.

Sales logistics is a pretty broad area to talk about, but let’s at least do a high level overview as we close out this article and certainly we will get into more detail later.

Once your product is completed and all ready to go of course you will need to upload it to your website and have some sort of process or mechanics of actually tracking your sales.

And speaking of sales, don’t forget to put some thought and effort into developing your affiliate program. Which means offering your affiliates auto responder e-mails, graphics, banners, and any other promotional tools to make their job as easy as possible. Just as a quick and popular example of a third-party that handles most all of the aforementioned logistics would be Clickbank.

Once you’ve got the market research done, you’ve created your product, and you’ve got them place all of the logistical pieces of the puzzle, now it’s just a matter of driving traffic to your website. Certainly no small task, but without it you ain’t going to make any sales.

And we’re going to spend a whole bunch of time on driving traffic later on down the road… so stay tuned.

With the product creation model, there is more work associated with this approach, however since the work is all yours and the end result being the product that you are going to Internet market; then the profit margin is going to be much greater and be all yours as well.

Just keep in mind that as a general rule it will take longer to see an ROI on your efforts when it comes to creating your own product and getting it into the Internet market arena as opposed to simply going the affiliate marketing route.

So what is product creation?

In Internet marketing the product creation model simply involves creating your own new product and then marketing it for sale. Technically the product could be a physical product and you sell it via the Internet, but for our purposes and for the vast majority (particularly you knew Internet marketers) will keep our discussion on product creation in the digital format.

First… you come up with a great idea.

I’m not trying to be flip here, but you have to do diligence market research in order to make sure that the idea you have involves a real market. And unless you can get your product to the market very rapidly, you should be looking at markets that are considered evergreen. Evergreen is simply a term used to define the market that has basically an unlimited life span.

Once you determine that you have found market potential to you then of course create and fine tune your product for Internet marketing.

You’ll need to create the necessary online infrastructure to handle the sales process (the sales funnel). You’ll also want to take a look at recruiting actual affiliate marketers who will then he out there promoting and selling your product. Recruiting affiliates to get excited about and sell your product is a course in and of itself… but not to worry we are going to cover that in later discussions on affiliate marketing.

Of course, part of the sales funnel is the handling of the product delivery and your customer service after the sale.

This may sound like quite a lot… and it really is… because I haven’t even touched on many other aspects of the Internet marketing sales funnel and we will cover all of that. But for now keep in mind that even though there is much more work and more difficult logistics, the potential profit can be very well worth your efforts.

To be successful in affiliate marketing you need to get off on the right foot. And getting off on the right foot by and large begins with selecting a good product.

So what is a good product?

The better affiliates look for high quality products that deliver a solution to a need in the marketplace. We talked about this in an earlier discussion on how to go about selecting your niche when it comes to affiliate marketing.

An important factor in the personality of a product as we look a little deeper into this is to best determine what your problem rate of return for your efforts will be if you decide to market this product as an affiliate.

One of the first aspects that I look at is that I go to the advertisers website or the possible product’s sales page. Beyond that of course you want to check out the price of the product, and the percent of commission you will receive by referring sales of that product.

Finally, as your first pass over looking at a possible affiliate product, you’ll want to check out how much support and creative is available for you to effectively market that product. In other words, how good or bountiful are the advertiser’s marketing tools that are available to you.

Once you’ve decided upon a good product in a good niche the only thing left for you to do as an affiliate (assuming that you’ve already got a website) is to devise effective ways to drive traffic to your site and ultimately refer that traffic to your affiliate product.

In its most basic form that’s really all there is to affiliate marketing.

As an affiliate marketer as you begin to advance your techniques you will probably operate on a slightly more complex level. You may decide to supplement your marketing strategy with variations of different models. For instance, you may choose to direct your traffic to some type of intervening page that would offer a sign-up for a free report based on the product or niche that you are trying to penetrate.

This type of model enables the affiliate to have the chance to capture a potential customer’s name and will also give the affiliate marketer a chance to do a more effective job of pre-selling and even leveraging their growing list for revenue to be made on the back end.

But with all of that said… and will certainly get into more detail as we progress… here it is in a nutshell about affiliate marketing… choose a product… then drive traffic.

Coming up in just a bit we’ll take a look at actual product creation and what that’s all about in affiliate marketing.

But, beyond that, as we learn affiliate marketing, let’s look at some other factors that have brought affiliate marketing to the forefront.

First off, affiliates don’t have to go about long labor intensive process of actually creating a tangible product or service. As you might imagine, this takes a bit of time to either created the product yourself or the expense of having outsourced. And if you’re just starting out, then outsourcing probably isn’t even an option for you at this point.

Even on a good day, product creation takes time and energy… time and energy that you could spend on marketing an affiliate product.

Technically… as an affiliate you don’t have to go niche hunting. Now you may say… wait… you have to pick out a niche with an available affiliate marketing program. And yes, this is true… but the advertiser has already done the niche research and have presented a product for the niche… you need merely explore the possibilities as to how this niche fits you.

As you learn affiliate marketing it doesn’t take long to appreciate the fact that with affiliate marketing, you don’t have to worry about the product delivery and support pipeline. For those just starting out in the business this is a big advantage. Affiliate marketing gives you the chance to learn about the business of Internet marketing and various niches without the personal risk of time, energy, and money that creating a product would.

And since you aren’t involved in the delivery of the product, you aren’t involved with customer support or customer satisfaction issues. This alone is the reason that many of us gravitate toward the affiliate marketing model with a least a portion of our business.

As you learn affiliate marketing you can see that structurally speaking the affiliate marketing model is very easy to implement and that’s why it is so attractive to many Internet marketers… both new and experienced.

Let’s talk more about how it all works next time.

Oh sure, as we talked about earlier and there are some fundamental principles that everyone must keep in mind but by and large one of the best ways to make money online is by allowing yourself to think creatively and making tweaks to the original processes.

There really is no one way to get the job done.

This however can be both a blessing and a curse. Because of the fact that creativity play such a role in one’s success, it gives us all such great freedom to get at the same time can overload us with thoughts of so many things to do and get done that we eventually can achieve “paralysis by analysis.”

But with all of this in mind that’s take a look at a few of the more common elements used in Internet marketing strategies. Again keeping in mind this isn’t an all-encompassing list and that there is room for flexibility and combinations of any of the elements of Internet marketing.

Affiliate Marketing

Without question affiliate marketing is indeed one of the most popular ways to make money online. So let’s covering it at a high level for right now and give you a little taste of affiliate marketing for beginners.

Affiliate marketing is great for beginners because it has such a relatively low bar of entry. I would say that the vast majority of Internet marketers use affiliate marketing in one form or another or in one project or another.

So what is affiliate marketing?

Essentially in the brick-and-mortar equivalent and affiliate marketer is simply a commission salesperson that acts as an independent contractor. They simply sell a product that someone else produces and gets paid a percent based on those sales.

For beginning affiliate marketing it works the same way. The affiliate learns how to drive traffic to a sales page or a website and when one of those visitors indeed purchases a product, the affiliate marketer earns a commission payment… it’s really just that simple.

The payment calculation and the processing is generally automated. And many times is handled by a middleman between the affiliate marketer and the advertiser. An example of a middleman type of business that handles all of the transactional data for the advertisers would be a company such as Commission Junction.

That’s kind of the short and sweet version of affiliate marketing for beginners. Up next are get into more detail as to why it’s so popular and why people love it so much, and how it actually works.

Depending upon the marketer, the success of the tool may vary as well when it comes to making money online for them.

This is an important concept to keep in mind. In that there are literally thousands of ways to make money in Internet marketing. There really is no best way or right way… the best way and the right way is what works for you.

Always… always remember that. Internet marketing success is not a one-size-fits-all formula.

It isn’t.

Now, having said that there are certain elements and principles that run through the bane of all Internet marketing projects. For now we’ll just refer to these as the fundamental principles of Internet marketing. However becoming familiar with these fundamental principles of making money online will help you and greatly increase your chances of developing successful habits.

Let’s start with something that if you haven’t heard by now you probably will over and over again when it comes to making money online and how to market online. This mantra can take several different forms but basically the tenet of the philosophy is find a hungry market, create what the market is looking for, and then give it to them.

That’s really as simple as it gets when it comes down to the core of Internet marketing… find something that the market wants and then give it to them… brilliant eh?

Don’t roll your eyes or laugh or even click off the page at that piece of brilliant advice… if you learn nothing else keep that in mind.

Maintaining our as simple as it gets for making money online discussion, just in case you are mathematically minded here is the simple formula:

Traffic x Rate of Conversion x $ Per Conversion = $ Earned

Please take a moment to study and think about the formula just above. This formula applies to your business model regardless of what that model may be. And by the way it’s in the order of importance. By that I mean first you get traffic, then you work on converting that traffic, then you work on ways to maximize your dollars per conversion. But make no mistake about it… TRAFFIC is the brass ring.

So, whether you have a simple site that primarily uses Google AdSense as its source of income, whether you have a simple landing page or sales page that you send traffic to be a pay per click, or if you have some type of squeeze or opt in page that ultimately funnels people to a membership model; the formula just above is the formula for your success.

Once you firmly understand this basic formula and how the pieces of the Internet marketing puzzle fit together in order to make you money online, everything you must do will be related to or tied to one of the above mentioned variables and that formula.

Understanding these core concepts of Internet marketing and making money online makes it dramatically easier and creates a shorter path to success as you get a handle on specific strategies and methodologies related to this formula.

From here on out on this website this is exactly what were going to cover. We’re going to look at common Internet marketing models and will explain how each of them works. Along with that will also discuss other Internet marketing components and how they too fit directly into our formula for success.

There are quite a few pieces that come into play when it comes to the Internet marketing puzzle. And certainly ending it all assembled in a fashion that produces income for you is the ultimate goal.

So let’s take a moment right here to discuss why Internet marketing is perhaps one of the single greatest financial opportunities of its time.

For a beginning entrepreneur, Internet marketing opportunities afford this type of person a great way to begin their own online business with very little overhead. Simply put it’s one of the best ways if not the best way to start a business while at the same time putting very little personal resources at risk.

Essentially, if you got a computer, and an Internet connection… well certainly you do your reading this… then you have the very basic tools.

Now having said that it’s not quite that simple to make money online. I mean come on… a computer… and an Internet connection… if you think that’s all it is then you’re completely misguided.

You do have to have some basic computer skills and some is this acumen. And most of all you’ll need a willingness to learn, not to fear failure, persistence and patience.

Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar type of sales the Internet offers a tremendous opportunity to put your business and your ideas in front of literally millions of people who connect to the Internet every day.

This is extremely exciting from a marketing perspective and how it gives you the potential to make money online.

Even now this type of industry is still in its infancy and all indications are Internet marketing and making money online is poised for even more tremendous growth in the future.

So, they’ll be worried about getting in on the “ground floor” of things when it comes to Internet marketing today.

In addition to the low start up costs of Internet marketing another great aspect of this business is how scalable it is… and not only scalable but rapidly scalable. So, in other words, if you come across an idea, a passion that really works or begins to work; ramping it up into meaningful income online can be done very quickly.

But make no mistake about it Internet marketing and your ability to make money online must be treated seriously, professionally, and diligently as you’re alone business. Don’t make the mistake that just because you work from relative anonymity from your home that you are not involved in the business… a competitive business.

The income potential with Internet marketing covers a vast scope of successes. There’s people who are very rich, there are people who are enjoying a “good living”, and there are even a group who are simply augmenting their current income.

But in other words, at any level this stuff really works.