Online Marketing for Small Business

At some stage most small business owners come to the conclusion that they need to investigate online marketing possibilities. For those who have little time to keep up with Internet technology, it’s difficult to know where to begin. When you start to research online you are bombarded with so many marketing options, complete with their promising sales pitches, that it can all seem too confusing. Basically, you have a number of potentially viable options:

• Establish a website
• Run a Blog for your business
• Place ads on other websites
• Online publications or ezines
• Pay Per Click (PPC)
• Social Networks & forums
• Article Marketing
• 
  

Establishing a Website

Having your own website is an excellent way to establish an online presence. It does cost money but if it’s done properly, when it’s up and running it has the potential to provide you with free advertising twenty four hours a day. If you don’t have the skills to build your own website, look for a website designer. Make sure the designer understands SEO (search engine optimization). SEO experts can help you to get your website well positioned in the organic search results. It’s important that when people search for the product you are offering, your website comes up. The higher up in the results, the better. If you have your best friend’s son do your website and he knows nothing about SEO, you’ll find you have a lovely website that only you can see!

When it comes to the written content, your site will need quality and quantity. It will pay to have a professional writer prepare your content. Once your web pages are done, consider having a writing service prepare some additional content for your site. They can create articles on topics related to your products and services. Additional content increases the number of visitors to your website and providing helpful information to website visitors will give them a good impression and increase assist sales.

Running a Business Blog

A blog was originally an online journal however, business have taken to using them effectively as a marketing tool and a means of sharing information with existing and potential clients. If you have a website, you can add a blog to it. If not, there are blog hosting sites like Blogger.com that will host your business blog for free. You can use your business blog to present new services and product lines, write reviews on related products, stories about what’s going on in your trade or industry, and even discuss comical news items that relate to your business or products.

If you are considering creating a blog, remember that you’ll need to add content to it on a regular basis – if you don’t, the result is likely to disappoint you. If you don’t have time to “blog” but can see the tremendous potential, there are many writing services – including Article Writers Australia that will take care of your business blog for you. Again, content is the key. A good volume of quality content will bring traffic to your site.

Advertising on Other Websites

Some websites make an income from placing advertising banners on their website. If you like this option, look for website that will be visited by people who might also have an interest in what you sell. You really need to have your own website up and running to do this so people can click on the banner ad and be taken to your site. When you find some sites you like, ask them for their traffic statistics. There’s no point paying even a measly $50 if they don’t have anyone visiting their website.

Online Publications

There are a huge number of online publications including newsletter and journals that accept advertising. Choose ones that relate to your business or at least match your customer demographic. Ask for the circulation figures of their publication and ask them to give you a breakdown as to how many are local, if they can. No point paying for overseas visitors if you cannot deliver your service to them.

Pay Per Click

If you have a new website and want to get visitors quickly, Pay Per Click advertising can be well worthwhile. PPC ads are the ones displayed to the right of, and sometimes above, the organic search results.

You can open up an account with Google Adwords and set up an advertising campaign yourself. You’ll need to learn about keywords to be successful. Keywords are the phrases or words people place into the search box when they are looking for what you have to offer. Businesses place bids for keywords – with the goal of positioning their ad sufficiently high on the page to get a certain number of “click throughs” to their website. Each time someone clicks through to your website, it costs you money. There is a good volume of “how to” information on the Google Adwords pages and a little research will get you started quite quickly.

Social Networks & Forums

Online social networks and forums like MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter can give your business additional exposure. They’re free and if you have time on your hands, worth a try! Forums are well worth the effort. They are online communities usually based on a particular interest such as marketing, small business, renovation, pets and numerous other topics. You’re bound to find one that either relates to your industry or one on a topic of personal interest to you. Most forum member have their business name and website address in their forum signature – so every time you post or reply to a post, you are placing a little free ad on the Internet. Many forums have a high number of visitors. The best approach to take is to become an active member of an online community – it can bring both business contacts and clients to you.

Article Marketing

Article marketing is the practice of writing articles and submitting them to article directories. The articles should be informative and somehow related to the services or products you offer. They should also contain a link to your website. The articles are distributed online via the directories. This can bring additional traffic to your site. Article writing services are kept busy writing articles for marketers to submit to directories so if you don’t have the writing skills for it, you can have a writing service prepare the articles for you and use a submission service to submit them to directories.

Once you’ve chosen your online advertising methods, it’s important to keep statistics on website traffic so you know where it is coming from. Google Analytics can assist you to do this.

Content Writers - How Much to Pay

If you're a small business person or a professional, the chances are you have or need to build a website. If you're too busy or don't have the writing skills to create your own content, you'll need to hire a content writer.

Looking around at the cost of content writers can be confusing. The fees range from a few dollars per article to a couple of hundred per 500-600 word article. What's the difference? To put it bluntly, writers who are completing articles for $2 are desperate for money and work. Content writers who are charging $250 for an article have more work than they can handle. That would make you suspect that the writers charging a little more have repeat business and that the cheaper writers perhaps do not...

Don't panic however, you'll find content writing services (like my business!) who have a stable of good content writers and charge around $25-100 per article depending on the complexity of the topic, the word count, and the number of articles you need. If you have just one website, start with 10 fresh articles. You'll soon see an improvement in website traffic and you'll be a content addict in no time at all!

If Article Writers Australia can help you, please feel free to drop by! If you're writing your own content you'll find articles containing content writing tips on our site, so feel free to browse.

Dreamweaver is Easy!

Okay, DreamWeaver has been demystified! If you are a bit phobic when it comes to learning new technology, you'll be pleased to hear that DreamWeaver isn't as difficult as some clever techy minded folk would have you believe. I consider myself a bit of a slow learner when it comes to technology and anything involving images and tables - yet I've had no trouble learning to use DreamWeaver. In just 3 two hour lessons I've learned enough to make a basic website.

If you are middle aged and technologically confused, just get out there and give it a go!

There is one more DreamWeaver lesson to go. My next mission is to learn WordPress!

Learning Dreamweaver!

Today I attended the first session of a short course on Dreamweaver. As I consider myself to be still a little "technology challenged" I was surprised to realise just how much I have learnt about the Internet by research and experiment over the past two years.

There were several people on the course who are in exactly the same position I was in not so long ago - small business owners who understand the potential benefits of having an Internet presence but don't know where to begin. The problem for we middle aged folk is that computers and the Internet are not second nature to us - yet we stand to benefit the most from using them! There is so much information online that it's overwhelming - particularly when you realise that a percentage of that information is either inaccurate or outdated. Once you begin to get a grip on it however, you progress much faster.

I have to admit to being quite pleased with my progress at this point. Perhaps because I chat to affiliate marketers and successful online business people who know so much more that I do, I still feel like an Internet dummy. So today I'm going to pat myself on the back for having learnt stacks about online marketing, Google Adwords, search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, social networking, blogging, Twittering and the importance of website content in general!

And I'm going to completely ignore the fact that there still may be teenages out there who know more than I do!

Learning new skills is exciting. I find it quite incredible that in just a few weeks I'll be able to build my own websites from scratch. I highly recommend putting in the extra time to learn how to do your own online marketing. As a small business owner I have asked the advice of many "experts" over the years and often a little personal research has revealed that those "experts" are trading on very little expertise! Recently an IT chap give me advice about "tricky ways" to optimize my website - and I promptly told him why those techniques didn't work long term and gave him a mini-lecture about "black hat optimization" and the best ways to optimize! He was clearly stunned that a small business owner knew anything at all about search engine optimization.

Learn as much as you can yourself I say! Besides the obvious benefits, it's exciting and challenging.

Article Marketing - Article Czar

• If you are just starting your journey to earn money online - whether you are a writer or aspiring affiliate marketer, I strongly recommend the eBook Article Czar. It's a lengthy eBook that, unlike many, is actually packed to the brim with useful information!
  
  
  It's author - Peter Nisbet from Article Services in the UK - knows the business inside out and has put Article Czar together so that website owners, affiliate marketers and writers can quickly and easily learn exactly how to use written articles to their advantage. If you're just setting out on your online marketing journey, by the time you've finished reading it you'll understand a heck of a lot more. It's likely to be too much to take in at once so I suggest you do what I did - despite it being 137 pages long, I printed it off so I could keep referring to it.
  
  
  
  Don't be misled by the title. You're going to learn about much more than articles - you're going to learn many practical aspects of how people sell online.
  
  
  
  You'll learn:-
  
  
• how affiliate marketers use articles



• to write marketing articles



• to use articles to gain links to your website



• how to make money from blogs



• how to fill your website with content



• to use article directories



• to create resource boxes



• about article submission software



• about submission services



• when and how often to submit articles



• about Google keywords and semantic indexing



• how search engines operate



• the ins and outs of domain names



• building and arranging hosting for websites



• "Bum" marketing

I have read Article Czar from cover to cover and I don't hesitate to recommend it. There are numerous eBooks out there that disappoint - when you receive them you realise you already know as much about the topic as the author. Article Czar is NOT one of those! The book currently sells for $57 and it's worth every penny!

If you're ready to learn more -

Go to Article Czar!

What is a Content Writer?

The term Content Writer is probably one you've come across if you've been researching how to earn money on line. No matter what sort of online venture is being set up, the quantity and quality of the website content can be the most significant factor in determining the success of the online business. There's a saying that's become a cliche with online marketers - Content is King!

Without good content your website can be invisible to the people you are trying to sell your products or services to. If you want a well trodden successful website, one of the first things you should attend to is the written content. You need an ample amount of it and it needs to be written in a particular way so that it brings the right people to your webiste. That's where content writers come in.

Content writers are writers who specialise in web content. Some writers undertake a variety of content work including the page content for websites, marketing articles, blog postings and even eBook content. Other writers specialise in just one of these areas.

A good content writer has an understanding of SEO (search engine optimization) and can write fluent, plain English text on a variety of topics. They are usually excellent researches as they're often asked to write on topics they know nothing about.

If you are setting out on your first online marketing venture one of the best investments you can make is on the written content - it's what brings prospective clients to your website. Being a content writer I am perhaps a little biased but my advice is to begin your venture with success in mind - hire a content writer to help fill your website with quality relevant content!

PLR Articles

If you want to get your website up and running quickly and you've decided that PLR articles are the way you want to go, I recommend Niche Content. They have a wide variety of niche topics available and good quality articles. Of course, if you can afford it, you're always better off with original content. If you prefer unique content, drop me a line through Article Writers Australia. Otherwise, skip over to Niche Content for a look around-

PLR eBooks

Online marketers who are in a hurry to get their own eBook up on their sites can purchase PLR eBooks on their desired topic, often for a few dollars a piece. PLR eBooks are ready made eBooks, already filled with content on particular subjects. As the same PLR eBook is sold to many people, the purchasers need to re-write the content to make it unique.

This suits some marketers as they have reasonable writing skills and can re-write the book quickly. Those without writing skills often need to have a writing service do it for them. Why buy them if you have to re-write? Well, planning an eBook and getting it started can take as much time as writing it! They're helpful for people who simply don't know where to begin. It can give them an outline, a plan to work to. Marketers with writing skills however, are often disappointed with the PLR eBook quality. For skilled writers, re-writing a poorly written eBook can take longer than writing one from scratch. When that's the case, the purchaser considers they've wasted their money.

So should you purchase a PLR eBook? Why not. It will only cost a few bucks to have a look. If PLR eBooks don't suit you, you won't be significantly out of pocket and you'll have learnt something. At the very least, a PLR eBook can give you a map for your own eBook, which is sometimes enough to get you going!

Adwords No Subsitute for Good Content

Adwords is great for a new business website. It can bring immediate traffic and potential clients. Long term though, you're better off generating "organic" (free) traffic. Have your website optimized by an SEO professional then keep adding to your website content, using keywords relevant to your business. Consider adding a business blog. If you put time and effort into your content you'll steadily increase the organic traffic and reduce your reliance on Adwords - and your advertising spend!

If you don't have time to write your own content or make blog postings, you can hire someone to do it for you. It's well worth it. The phrase "content is King" has become an Internet marketing cliche - because it's true.

If I can help, let me know at Article Writers Australia.

Corporate Blogs – Free Online Business Advertising!

Corporate blogs are an outstanding means of online business advertising. Best of all, apart from the cost of hosting your website, they’re free. Whether your business is a small and local or a major corporation, a blog can benefit your business in several ways. A good business blog can:

• Bring numerous visitors to your website
• Give you a platform from which to “announce” new products
• Allow you to interact on a personal level with potential customers
• Provide reviews of your products or services
• Help to build your brand and corporate identity
• Increase your credibility as a leader in your field

Many small business owners and corporate professionals are just too busy to spend time investigating opportunities for online business advertising. The Internet is a minefield of information, much of it not particularly useful. Regardless, most business minded folks now understand that to reach the current and next generation of buyers, online business advertising is an essential tool. And when it comes to advertising online, a corporate blog can provide ongoing free Internet advertising. You can update it daily to promote individual products, announce specials, give “how to” information, or comment on industry news. If you update your corporate blog daily, you will effectively be placing a new advertisement onto the Internet every day – one that will be visible to Internet surfers for a long time. You’d be pushed to find a more cost effective way of advertising!

Once your blog is set up, adding to it regularly might seem like a chore but there are ways around that. Have an Internet savvy junior do it for you, or hire a blog writing service to make regular posts for you.

If you'd like to see an example of a business blog, have a look at this private investigation blog. The business targets a local clientele and the blog began to draw good traffic to the company's website within a week of its creation.

For more information about blog writing, feel free to visit my content writing business site Article Writers Australia. We assist people with corporate blogs and other forms of online business advertising.

Technorati

I'm having the most ridiculous time attempting to list this blog on Technorati. When I attempt to claim the blog through Technorati it tells me I am not an authorised user of this blog - yet here I am, having successfully logged in with the same details via Blogger.com. Technology can be such a pain sometimes!

Technorati Profile

The Benefits of Blogging

The benefits of blogging may not seem obvious to you if you are new to online marketing. A Blog is an amazing tool. If you think blogging is only for those who have nothing better to do, you are very wrong! Here's what a Blog can do for your business:

• Fill your website with relevant content
• Target numerous keywords
• Bring loads of traffic (potential customers) to your site

I'll give you a personal example. I operate a traditional business that has a website. Once I understood the benefits of blogging I set one up for our business and within three weeks the number of visitors to our website had increased by 30%. All of those additional visitors land on our Blog after typing in a variety of search keywords and phrases related to our services. That's a 30% increase in visitors (every week, ongoing) that does not cost me anything but a little of my time! The more relevant content I add to that Blog over time, the more potential clients will land on our Blog. The more I Blog, the more that percentage will increase.

You can post as many items as you can think of, with each one giving your potential customers information they might find useful. Do a little keyword research, pick out a few keyword phrases you'd like to target, and start writing Blog articles around them.

As a writer, I find this very easy. I think of endless ideas for Blog topics. I understand keywords and how to use them, and I can write Blog items very quickly. Not everyone finds it so easy. Affiliate marketers and other website operators often pay writers to post regular blog items for them. Why? Because if each Blog article brings 100 visitors to your website every month, over and over again, what you pay the writer per Blog item will soon seem like chicken feed!

If you'd like a writer to post relevant articles to your Blog regularly, drop by my website Article Writers Australia and we can have a chat about your Blog strategy and the benefits of blogging once a week. For more information about what a blog writer can do for you, read Finding the Ideal Blog Writer

Squidoo

Squidoo if a fabulous site, especially if you are trying to learn about the Internet, Internet marketing, website building and traffic generation. It's free to join and you can set up what they refer to as "lenses" which are essentially individual web pages. It's very user-friendly. Members build web pages on topics they know about or are interested in. You can advertise your own business on lenses and also sell affiliate marketing products. Some do it just for the fun of it.

There is a huge volume of information on Squidoo. If you want to know about something, simply search for it and the chances are you'll find that someone has created a Squidoo lens to tell you all about it. Many of the lensmakers are contactable so it's yet another networking tool.

There are guest books on many of the lenses so you can drop by and leave a comment. This can lead to you chatting to some interesting people and can bring people to your own lenses and through to your business.

I'm an amateur at it but I have several Squidoo lenses. If you'd like to see what Squidoo has to offer - http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/referral/Leo9

Advertising Online - Many Ways

There are many ways of advertising online. Once you've paid for your website and optimization, you have a fabulous amount of free advertising. You can choose to use PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, you can pay other websites to display your advertisements and get affiliate marketer to advertise and sell for you. Still, there are more free ways to advertise.

One of the best ways of advertising online is to find forums related to your product or service. This is basically a networking tool. It might be a forum where home renovators exchange information, or a new mother forum. If you join the forum you are likely to find you can give quality advice to some of the forum members. You may even learn a thing or two yourself! Forums can also be a great networking tool. Many a business relationship has been formed after a forum chat. Where the advertising comes in is that most forums permit you to have a link to your business website in your post signature and some allow you to put a profile on the site.

Yet another method of free advertising is online classifieds. Many of these don't have a lot of readers. If you're in Australia, one of the best is Gumtree. I have sourced work and found rental tenants with lightning speed using Gumtree. It's a well known site and one of the best ways of advertising online.

If your product is suitable for it, you can sell on EBay. EBay allows you to have a "shop front". It's yet another way of getting your name out there and bringing people to your business.

You can also hire an article writer to write articles relating to your products or services. Those articles usually contain a link to your website at the bottom and can be submitted to numeorus article directories. Website owners with readers who would be interested in the article can place those articles (with the link to your site) on their website.

Then there is social networking - Facebook, MySpace, Squidoo and Twitter to name just a few. More on social networking in antoher post. This can be time consuming for a small business owner but it's all worth investigating.

As there are so many ways of advertising online, you need to evaluate each of them and decide what is likely to be effective for you, and which ones will fit in with your level of Internet knowledge and your time schedule! (Don't forget - these days, a teenager in the family is a handy thing indeed! Many will be only too happy to help out the 'olds'.)

Advertising Online - Google Adwords

If you have an existing website and are not coming up well in organic searches, you really should be looking at optimizing your website (SEO) however, in the meantime, you can use PPC (pay per click) advertising to bring interested visitors (otherwise known as targeted traffic) to your website.

When people type a phrase or word into a search box, there are the organic listings that come up centre page, and advertisements which come up on the right hand side, and often at the top of the page. These advertsiements are PPC adverts. Website owners are paying to have their advertisement listed when people type certain keywords into the search box. It's a competitive bid based system. How much your advertisement costs you per click and where it is positioned will depend on how much you bid, how many others are bidding for the same keywords, how relevant your advertisement is to the keywords, and how relevant your website content is to the keywords.

If you haven't done so, sign up for an Adwords account and have a look around the site. There is plenty of 'how to' information on there. It is relatively easy to set up and get going. You can monitor your campaign and set daily budget limits.

You need to select keywords that people may search for when looking for your product or service. You write an advertisement using the template they provide. Use your keywords in the heading and try to keep the advertisement as relevant as you can. Choosing the most popular keywords may not be the best idea - these will be the most expensive due to the competition.

Use the Google keyword tool to look at the different keywords relating to what you are selling. Try selecting a few of the less popular ones and targeting those first. Try out the main keywords by all means, but the cost you pay per click will be higher - which is fine, if the results you get from your campaign are worth it.

Once you have a campaign going, monitor the number of enquiries it generates so you can work out what your advertising is costing you per enquiry it generates, and per sale.

There are numerous companies out there that will offer to run your Google Adwords campaign for a couple of hundred dollars a month. If you don't know anything about Adwords and you don't want to, then you probably should use one of these services. However, if you are prepared to do the research and establish which keywords are likely to be the best for you to use, you will probably be happier and often better off doing it yourself. I'm basing that on my own experience. I recently signed a six month contract with a major service provider to run a campaign I had been running for months. I quickly regretted it. Despite the low cost per click they offered, and their agreement to use my carefully selected keywords, about 75% of the visitors they generate don't stay on the site at all. Whilst running the campaign myself, only 25% of visitors clicked off the site immediately. This service generates far less visitors than I was able to and because so few of those are staying on the site, the real cost per click is several times more than what I was paying before. And, as has been typical of this company's customer service approach with other services over the decades, they really don't care how poor their service is.

I hope I've convinced you to have a go at Adwords yourself. Experiment. It may take you a few months of tweaking to get it right but you'll learn a lot along the way.

While you are running your campaign, don't forget to consider having your website properly optimized by an SEO expert - so your website comes up well in the organic listings. Once that occurs you won't need to spend money advertising.

Advertising Online for Small Business

For a small business owner advertising online can be confusing and frustrating. Having a website built is easy - having a successful website that will allow you to advertise effectively online, is another matter.

Once you have a website there are two ways to advertise online. One will provide you with almost unlimited free advertising and the other will cost you money.

1. The best advertising you can get is to have your website come up in the "organic" search results when people search for the product or service you are selling. This form of advertising is also FREE.

2. The second method is by using PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. Advertising this way will cost you anything from a few cents to a few dollars every time someone clicks on the advertisement.

In this article I'll explain how organic search results work. The following article will explain PPC advertising.

Organic Search Results - How They Work

When you type a phrase into the search box you'll see two types of results come up. There is a list of pages taking up most of the screen - these are called "organic" results. To the left and sometimes above are PPC advertisements. Most people look at the organic listings that come up before resorting to the advertisements. If you can ensure your website is amongst the first few listings that come up, you'll bring plenty of visitors to your website for free.

Unless you understand SEO (search engine optimization) you are unlikely to be able to get your listing high up in the organic search results without professional assistance. It may seem expensive when you get quotes but it will be money very well spent if the job is done properly.

Getting to the Top of the Organic Listings

There are two important aspects to improving the place of your wesbite in the organic listings.

1. The content of your website
2. Backlinks

The Content

Search engines monitor websites and match the content on those websites to what people are searching for. Search engines are clever but they are not people - if you sell wooden flooring, but your website content goes on and on about your business procedures, environmental policy and quality control, without mentioning the term "wooden flooring" more than once or twice, the search engines won't understand that your business is about wooden flooring. If you mention the words "quality control" six times and "wooden flooring" only once, the search engines may think your site is about quality control.

This is where the term "keywords" comes in. Keywords are the most likely terms and phrases people would enter in the search box when looking for something. Therefore, you need to identify the keywords that relate to what you are selling. You are likely to identify quite a few relevant keywords and knowing which ones to use and exactly where to place them is also a little tricky. You would think that using the most popular keyword as often as you can is the way to go but this is not the case - the competition from other businesses selling the same item is likely to be high and you still may not get a good position in the organic listings. The placement of the keywords is of more importance than the amount of times you use them.

You need to have a good amount of content on your website. Once you have all the website pages a business normally has, you can still add content. You want people to be interested in your website, have a good look around, and feel that you really are an expert in your field. Clever business owners add articles about their industry or trade to the website. For example, a wooden flooring business website could contain articles about maintaining wooden floors; how to choose the type of wood for your home; different types of wood and their advantages and disadvantages; doing it yourself; or skirting boards.

The other method of increasing your content is to have a "blog". This however, should only be done if you have time to regularly add articles to the blog, or you are prepared to pay an article writer or blog writer to do it for you.

Having a large amount of content gives the added advantage that you can use many less popular keywords in the articles and hence bring more visitors (called "traffic") to your website.

Backlinks

A backlink is when another wesbite places a link to your website on theirs. If you have several backlinks it gives the search engines the impression that your website is important, which in turn, helps you wesbite to move up in the organic listings.

There are two main ways to get backlinks. You can contact relevant website owners and ask for one, or you can submit articles about your product and trade to article directories. The articles contain a link to your website. Not only does this give you a backlink, but your article is distributed across the Internet and brings visitors to your site.

As you can see, if you know little about SEO, article writing and Internet marketing in general, you are better off passing these jobs to professionals. Another reason you might prefer to do this is to save time. If you are like most small business owners, you are busy enough attending to matters for which you do have the expertise.

Hire an SEO firm to optimize your website. The SEO firm will probably recommend having articles written by professional content writers as well as having the existing content re-written and optimized.

Here's a tip for finding the right SEO company - type "Search Engine Optimization" or "SEO" into the search box. Given what these companies specialize in, you'd have to suspect that the ones who come up first know best what they are talking about. The proof as they say, is in the pudding.

Once you have your website optimized and have filled it with great content, you're likely to find that advertising online is a tremendously successful tool for your small business.

Selling Online - Different Ways to Do It

Here are the basic methods people use to make money online:-

1. They use the Internet and a website as a tool for selling the products and services of their traditional business. Almost any business can generate sales or enquiries this way. There are two basic requirements - the first is that you have a website, the second that you must get people to visit the website. You do that by either using paid advertising such as Google Adwords, or by ensuring your website comes up when people search for your product or service. More on how to do both of those things in upcoming posts.

2. They sell a product online only. It might be a product they must pack and post, but it could also be something downloadable like eBooks or software. They too, generally require a website. If they have a website, they need to get people to visit the site - this by the way is called "generating traffic".

The other way to sell a product online is to have affiliate marketers do it for you. This involves paying other people a commission to sell your product. People who get affiliate marketers to sell for them are usually referred to as Merchants.

3. They sell a product online that is not actually theirs. This is called affiliate marketing. An affiliate marketer goes to websites such as Clixgalore, Commission Junction, Clickbank or Commission Monster, and chooses products they would like to sell. These sites list the affiliate products available and how much commission each one pays. It's worth having a look at those sites - you'll be surprised how many traditional and well known companies use affiliate marketers!

A good affiliate marketer will establish a website targeting people who would be most interested in the product they are selling. An example would be a website that gives visitors information about places they can travel to for camping holidays. On the website they would have a good amount of information about road trips and camping along with advertisements for the affiliate product - which might in this case be a hire car company or a camping store. The content of the website is important - that's what brings the traffic to the website. This is for some a great way to make a living because once they have set up the website and generated a certain amount of traffic to it, they don't actually need to do much. People click on the advertisement and it takes them to the business who owns the product. Any sales are registered as having been generated by the affiliate marketer's website and they receive the commissions! Passive income once you know what you're doing.

4. They freelance a skill - it may be writing, language translation, graphic design or any number of computer related services. There are numerous freelance websites (for example Elance and Freelancer) that have a tremendous number of jobs for people to bid on. The rates are not always great but if you have a marketable skill, these sites a worth investigating even if only for information about what is going on in the Internet world!

5. They set up websites or blogs and allow Google to place advertisements on the website. You'll notice the advertisements on this blog - as the traffic to this blog builds up, the number of people who click on the advertisements will increase. Each time someone clicks on an advertisement Google will pay me a small (very small) amount of money. We're talking cents - but some people have numerous websites containing advertisements and like anything if you multiply it, the amount is larger. This too, is a passive income once you have set up the sites. You may earn only $10 dollars a month from each one (although some people do much better) but if you have 100 sites - well, you can do the math.

6. They set up websites, build up content and traffic, then sell the website - such a website might be bought by an affiliate marketer who has products to sell related to the website content, or by someone who thinks they can earn money from the site.

7. Last but not least, are the scammers.

So as you can see, there are numerous ways to make legitimate money online! It does require work to set up anthing you do so don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise.

Sort the Scams from the Real Thing

When you are first looking for opportunities make money online, you'll come across numerous "opportunites". They'll come with promises of making huge amounts of money for just an hour or two of work per day. These are generally scams.

You can indeed make money online - in numerous ways - but those that make excellent money online generally work quite hard to do so.

If you want to sell online, the first thing you need to understand is that you need to approach it like a normal business. That means you need to decide what type of business it will be, make a business plan, establish what you'll need to do to set it up, and how you will need to market it.

If you already have a small business and you want to generate more sales online, you need to develop an online marketing plan. You may not yet have a wesbite but if you do, you may have considered Google Adwords, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and article marketing. It all gets a bit confusing after a while and not everybody you speak to knows what they're talking about. If you want to be successful, you'll need to understand for yourself what all of these things can do for your business.

Over the next few weeks I'll be posting items about all of these subjects and explaining how you can use these tools to sell online or boost traffic to your existing website.

Learning to Sell Online

A big welcome to my new blog! If you are over 40 and feeling that you've missed something important by not keeping up with the way the Internet is used, you are by no means alone. I've had an exceptional journey over the past few months as I've researched Internet and affiliate marketing, online small business marketing and online article writing.

I've discovered a world of opportunity for those of us who want to work from home and set up passive streams of income for our retirement! If you are looking to do that too I hope you'll find my upcoming blog postings useful. I'll be explaining in simple terms the things I've learnt about selling online and marketing businesses on the Internet. I certainly don't profess to be an expert. I'm still learning - but I plan to keep learning at a cracking pace and share it with my over 40 friends!

Recently I caught myself saying to a visiting contractor "Just one moment, I have to twitter my blog". The look on his face was priceless. I realised that if someone had uttered those unintelligible words to me just a few months ago, I'd have assumed they were drunk and had meant to say something entirely different. I wouldn't have been able to guess what. I chuckled on the inside, chuffed at the thought that I had succeeded in catching up with the speeding Internet train.

If you have a small business and are having trouble getting traffic to your website, or you want to move to an online business but are having trouble grasping how it all works, this is the blog for you to watch.