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Creating a Website for a second income.One of the most important aspects of being in business for yourself is to learn to create residual income for yourself – sort of a retirement account. One of the easiest ways to do this is with an online business –more specifically and information business. What everyone online is looking for is information. You can provide this in the form of Ebooks (online books that are purchased and downloaded directly to peoples computers) or other pay-per-click advertising programs such as Google Adsense. The way to do this is to thinking about something that you are really passionate about – some hobby, interest – some area of information that you are an expert in. It can be anything from growing tomatoes, hosting kids’ parties or whatever it is that you are an expert on – and you are an expert whether you know it or not!
Finding a niche or two seems to be the hard part for most people. We get so caught up in thinking we have nothing to offer, when it usually is sitting right in front of your eyes. To help your brain start brainstorming, I recommend starting with the free 5 day InfoProducts Masters email class from Site build it or the Make your knowledge Sell Ebook from Sitebuildit for $49.95. This is a monster of information on how to create a infoproduct business online. It really helps you figure out a great niche and helps stimulate thinking! There is also a info publishing section at sitesell.com. Creating a website with the idea of providing high quality content on a topic that others may be interested in too can create an additional source of income for you while you start your practice. (It can also lead to a substantial income if you so desire – not riches, but enough.) Remember what I said before about what people are looking for online is information – an answer to their question, problem or issue. How many times a day does someone say lets Google that? (According to Search Engine Watch – about 91 million searches a day with just Google.) What are people looking for? You can start using the Searchit! Tool to find out if people are interested in what you are. And if they are not it doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t have a niche, it just may take you longer to get it out there. But there is more help in deciding on a niche in the SBI forums and action guide. The SBI package also comes with something I mentioned before called “Brainstormer”. It provides more detailed information and help in choosing a niche. So you have this great idea for sharing everything you know about growing tomatoes – how are you going to make money on that? Well one of the first things is to find affiliate programs – that is programs that companies offer that pay you to sell their products to your customers. You don’t have to do a thing, but recommend the company or product and the company gives you a check. One of the first companies to do this was of course amazon.com and they are still doing it. You can sell gardening books, gardening tools, etc through them or other gardening supply companies that have such programs. You can find affiliate programs by using the Searchit! Tool. There is a search selection under monetizing, then click find affiliate programs and you will get a list of some programs. While this is not a complete list, you may be able to find affiliate programs just by contacting your favorite supply store. You can also create an E-book (an electronic book that can be downloaded directly to the computer) that people can purchase for a fee. Or even sell products that you create or design. The other way to make money is one of the best kept secrets on the web – it is called Google Adsense. When I tell people this story they are always amazed… Our friends at Google have created a program called Adsense that allows website owners to place Google ads on their website. All you have to do is sign up for a free account and follow the steps to creating the code and copy and paste it into your website. You can control the ads, the placement, the color – everything. You can track the ads by where you place them and the color to see what ads are doing the best. The ads that show up on your pages are targeted ads – that means that they are related to the topic of the page – of your keywords. Your visitors are highly likely to be interested in such products and services. If and when they are and they click on the ads – here is the really cool part – You get paid! Yes, that is correct. I couldn’t believe it myself. I had been hearing about this for about a year but was skeptical as I never click on ads online and I couldn’t believe that anyone else did either. Then I finally decided to try it out. I put ads on my top 25 pages and hmmm….I made about $100 or so the first month. So my website www.thebodyworker.com has about 500 pages. Well, I’ll let your imagination take it from there. The interesting thing is that I host www.thebodyworker.com with Ez Web Hosting and use Microsoft Front Page and I use the format that I laid out for you here and learned from Sitebuildit! but still my other site www.massagetherapycareers.com which is hosted at SBI! Gets a higher click through rate in the ads – meaning more people are clicking there. I can’t really figure out why – it must be something with the software SBI uses. (I’ll be testing this further.) (I don’t recommend putting Google Adsense on pages that are asking for people to contact you for your services. To me it somehow cheapens the service and will take away from getting your most wanted response – the phone call. ) So, to put
this all together:
Write about what you love, attract others who love this too, give them more than they were expecting and ask them to buy your Ebook or products and/or implement Googles Adsense program! And go outside and play!
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