Make Money Online Talk

My friend, Johnny called me on Saturday afternoon and asked me out for a drink. We were having long chat on making money online. Johnny is very keen to venture into internet business but he does not know what to do online. For the past few months, he has been trying out on affiliate marketing, promoting hotel booking system. He tried to set up a website on free host to promote this business. But he is not getting any clicks on the site. Having said that, he still manages to generate $40 commission by clicking on his own affiliate link!!

Wow! In fact I am not surprise that 90% of the new affiliate marketers are doing the same thing – click on their own affiliate links. Words of caution – You will get BANNED if you keep doing that. I am sure you have heard of Google banning Adsense account because of some foul plays by the account owner himself. The tracking system nowadays is very advance and clever. You can’t beat the Google fraud detection system or else Google will be losing its web of trust. To have your Google Adsense account back after being banned is almost IMPOSSIBLE!

Johnny is a bit lost when come to make money online after his affiliate marketing venture. Of course there are many people out there making good money doing affiliate marketing. A lot of Guru will tell you how to attract traffics to your site via article marketing, social media, forum posting, blog commenting, video marketing etc. And from there you are hoping the visitors to your website will click on your affiliate links or Google ads. This is the ‘standard’ procedure for most affiliate marketers. So what do you think? Isn’t that very tedious and involve a lot of hard works?

I am a very lazy and ‘short cut’ person. I love to do things fast and easy. Therefore I would opt for search engine optimisation to build huge traffics to my sites.  I would rank my site high on Google and keep it there all the time! That really save the hassle of other traffic generation exercises. Studies have shown that 8 out of 10 web session starts at search. People have relied very much on search engine nowadays to look for what they want in their daily life. And we all have spent more times online than ever before.

Johnny is promoting something that is very competitive and also something not very ‘focus’. What do I mean by competitive? Competitive because there are many established hotel booking sites like AsiaRoom.com, hotel.com, lastminute.com, lateroom.com, hostelworld.com, hotelscombined.com, hotelscomparison.com etc already rank well on Google. Why not focus? For a ‘one man show’, you can’t rank your website to target London hotel, NY hotel, Singapore hotel, Kuala Lumpur Hotel etc at the same time. The geography that he is trying to target just being too wide.

I don’t mean to put Johnny off by telling him that he should try out something else online. For any business, one should start with the following (in exact sequence):

1. Keyword research – See if there is anyone searching for that keywords online? If the volume of search is too small, then forget about it. There is no point promoting something that is very rarely searched for.

2. Market and competitiveness research – After choosing the keywords with high search volume, you shall check out how competitive is that keyword. You are hitting jack pot if there are no much competition for that keyword.

3. Choosing Product – You can see that product shall come last. After doing your keyword and competitiveness research, the last thing you should do is to search for the related product to sell. A lot of time people would start with a product first and end up wasting time promoting something either not popular or very competitive.

So if you want to make money online, make sure you follow the correct sequence above.