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The No-Bull Guide To Making Money Online

by Stuart Reid

It's not rocket science making money on the Internet. Once and for all I'm going to give you a basic plan you can use to work from. I'm not taking you by the hand, but this is basically the advice you'll get in countless high-price course distilled into one e-mail :)

The secret: You just give people what they want!

You can charge people for this privilege, or you can give it to them, and earn from it in other ways. You can create this 'thing' that people want, or you can get someone else to make it for you, or you can take a ready-made solution and provide that to potential customers.

But first, you need to find out exactly *what* they want!

There's no secret really. You can write your own cheque if you find or make a product that solves a common problem, as long as there is enough people with this problem.

Make sure the people with a problem are aware of your product and you're laughing all the way to the bank!

1. Discover a common problem and provide the solution.

There are many ways to find out. If you have an e-mail list, simply ask your subscribers if there's anything they need help with, or if there's anything they have problems with.

You can also look in web forums, to see the kinds of problems people are facing.

Finally look to current trends. Use a site like Google News to see if current affairs present an opportunity, or look at Google Zeitgeist and Yahoo Buzz for ideas; they list the top searches in various categories for their respective sites.

Sometimes you can even skip this stage since other people have already researched what sells. For example, eBay offers a list of their top-selling items.

Examples: A common modern problem is the worry about terrorism. Old established problems include health, money, career, and relationship problems.

2. Provide a Solution.

Basically *information* is the solution. You can of course find a physical answer to certain problems but the cost and complexity of developing these can be out of reach of most home business people.

Information is easy to create, easy to sell, and easy to transport. Over the Internet it can be as simple as downloading a file, usually an e-book or report.

You can create this solution yourself. Research the problem and find answers and procedures that will help it. The Internet is a great source of answers, yet people are willing to pay for the convenience of having these answers presented to them in an easily digestible format.

If you don't think you can write/create this product yourself you can get someone else to do it for you. It's an open secret that there are many people who can create graphics, sites, books and software for you at a price much lower than you'd think. Just look to sites such as eLance, ScriptLance etc. Prices can be cheap because the solutions often come from countries such as Russia or third-world areas where wages are much lower. Listen to Mike Filsaime's Outsourcing Secrets.

Examples: write a guide about saving for retirement, dealing with health issues, keeping your family safe, or any one of a number of other topics. It doesn't matter if these subjects have been covered before - you can always put a new spin on it.

3. Make sure the people with the problem can find your solution.

In essence this involves promotion. This is THE single most important part to running a successful website.

The best kind of visitors are people who already know what to expect, they are known as "qualified visitors". They may come to your site from an article, a link on another site, or a link or paid ad at a search engine. With luck these visitors may even be so hungry for a solution to their problem they will be "pre-sold" and order immediately.

To get qualified visitors to a website you need to ensure that anyone who would be interested in your product would be able to find it. The first port of call is the main Search Engines, which nowadays can be boiled down to Google and Yahoo. You need to ensure your page(s) are "machine readable", i.e. contain text content, so the Search Engines can make sense of them. You should also use services like Google's Traffic Estimator Sandbox and WordTracker to find relevant keywords that people would use when searching for a site like yours. When you have your keywords liberally use them in the main page content of your website.

Another good way to get traffic is to ensure your link is displayed wherever your potential customers would congregate. This could mean swapping links with similar sites, paying for ads on similar sites, or posting messages (with your link) in forums and message boards. You can also advertise offline by placing ads in local businesses or in newspapers/magazines were appropriate.

Finally, e-mail advertising still works well. You can purchase ads from e-zines that cover your topic, as well as build your own list by offering something of value (like a report) at your sales site in exchange for the visitors e-mail address.

A great method of getting your site "out there" is to write articles, based on your product, that include your link. You then submit these articles to the various article directories across the web. This makes you seem more of an expert in your subject as well as providing links back to your site.

As well as traffic that comes direct from your link, these links back to your site also increase your position in the Search Engine listings, so it's an important and ongoing step while promoting.

And don't forget word-of-mouth promotion. Happy customers will be happy to recommend you, and freebies such as e-postcards or free e-books (perhaps a subset of your main product) will often find their away around the web rapidly.

That plan above really IS the secret to profiting online. Of course, I haven't gone into great detail on each step; I'm leaving the nuts-and-bolts stuff up to you. If I covered every little step I'd expand this report into a 300 page book, and, of course, charge for it :-)

Stuart Reid is the webmaster for Netpreneur Now.

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