Man there are so many ways to make money online these days I’m surprised anybody works a regular job…NOTHING beats being able to work from anywhere, anytime and still have time to enjoy the ones you love or do things you like to do.
With the invention of affiliate marketing, blogs, and social media sharing sites like Twitter the possibilities to earn income online or limitless.
Affiliate Marketing
I started off earning money online with my own personal blog that turned into a slew of affiliate blogs on fashion and other tangible products. Affiliate marketing in the simplest form is something like commissions you get in a store for helping them sell a product, but its online…its 24/7 a day…and the profits can reach in 6-7 figures per year and in many cases monthly. So who’s interested? Thought so.
What I found was that its easier to turn a profit on new/hot products and to focus on a chosen niche.The newer the product (if its popular) the more searches for its key term and if you rank well you have daily traffic from Google and other search engines, but everybody knows Google is a beast in the search engine game. That has worked best for me when dealing with fashion, because brands are more popular in their earlier days and consumers are more willing to shop on a new site.
When dealing with bigger more established brands its harder to rank for any key terms, consumers are more willing to shop with the store directly, and they usually have built some type of loyalty with shopping with certain sites that sell the brand. So in short I try and stay away from established products unless I can find a good key term domain. You also have to be careful not to infringe on any trademarks when purchasing the domain and selecting key terms that you might want it to include.
Examples of affiliate marketing at its best: www.nextpimp.com, www.sojones.com. Both have products that they earn commission off of when users purchase from the sites they were referred to by either of the above domains.
Niche Blogs
Hmm….Where to start? Well I started a little site in 2006 named Dobizo on How to start a clothing line and it became the top site on the subject. I suggest if you go this route you start a blog on something your very passionate about. I love fashion and clothing and at that point was actually running a clothing line named Scout Union Apparel. So it made perfect sense to run that type of blog. I would write down what I did daily with my clothing line and daily task turned into insightful articles and those articles turned into $$$$. After reaching around 5,000 visitors per day of targeted visitors all looking to start a clothing line I was able to reach out to manufacturers, t-shirt suppliers and more looking to reach the people who read my blog.
Yeah it was that simple in theory, but the hardwork starts with finding a subject to write on and sticking with it to you reach a sizable audience for your market. This doesn’t mean you need 5,000 visitors a day to make money, but that don’t expect 5,000 visitors a day if your writing about a rare cat/dog that only 1% of the population knows about :/ . The good thing about niches is that advertisers are willing to pay BIG money for a very targeted audience especially if its directly related to the product they’re selling..;).
Well the indirect way that I’ve been able to make a (little) money from Twitter is from my Twitter apps Doctor Twitter and Cal Tweet which at the moment both are FREE and will continue to be free. Besides some small Adsense ads that are badly placed (On Purpose) we don’t have it directly monetized. More concerned with building a solid audience and good products for now and let my affiliate sites feed me and pay the bills.
There are Twitter advertising networks that are paying good money to people with influence and a large amount of Followers such as Shoemoney and John Chow, but some people are frowning upon advertising within your Twitter stream and users being confused between real tweets and sponsored tweets. Ad.ly is one network and the other is Sponsored Tweets. We will dive deeper into the above ways of making money in my next article. For now stay tuned.
Have any of you used Twitter advertising networks or experience with any of the ways of making money online that I mentioned?
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Well, better late than never; just ran across your blog and appreciate the info…now all I have to do is appy it. I love music – and I’m consumed with trying to market my CD (I’m an unsigned indie artist) and trying to figure out which approach to take on as far as getting the blog started without taking the time away from the actal marketing …mmmm, if you have any ideas about the approach – please, run it pass me.
Would like to hear it. Thanks