Making money in any way is a business. Just like any business making money online is based on good research.
Marketing will not work for your site if you are not using the right tools and techniques.
If you are selling t-shirts it won’t help you to market to a nudist community on the Internet.
You have to find out where the people are that are the type of person who buys your type of product or service.
Not all types of businesses work well online
Many look for a need and fill it. More power to them if they are successful. Internet marketing is a little different. If you see a need your only care from that point on is finding out if those who need are also the type of person who buys online. Many great businesses fail because they market to groups who can only be reached by full blown expensive marketing campaigns that include things like TV commercials.
Find people who already want what you sell
Your time is better spent of finding where the online communities are that talk and chat about things related to your products or services. For example we would likely not get much search engine optimization business from a flower lovers blog. Not to mention that flowers are a predominantly local type of market. You have to find where the big schools of fish are before you will have an easier time catching fish. Great fisherman have great tools that help them locate fish and that is what you need to do online to make money.
Make sure there is enough traffic searching per day for what you offer
The first concern you should have is whether your idea has enough people searching for it to make it a viable online money making machine. We will use us as an example again. We have plenty of information on Social Media Optimization which is connecting your site with many of the social networks and building up a following on social sites. If our site was dedicated to that specific keyword only, then we would be in trouble because there are less than 50 people searching for that keyword per day. Not enough to sustain a business especially for a site like ours that gives away almost all its content for free. We need thousands of visitors per day to make money.
Work smarter not harder with internet marketing tools
Researching tools is important. Our fist recommendation is to use certain sites to run tests on your site. http://websitegrader.com is a great tool put out by Hubspot. This tool examines your site, your content, your code, your links and your social presence and gives you a grade of 1-100. There are tips for improving on all the metrics they use to rate your site. The tool is design to help websites know where they can improve the overall effectiveness of their online marketing effectiveness.
Marketing Samurai is a great research and marketing tool
Another great tool is http://marketingsamurai.com. This tool is a keyword research and competition analysis tool. There are many great features like knowing which keywords have the highest probability of bringing a buying customer to your site. It will show you how fierce your competition is and what you need to do to compete. It shows you where to find places to blog and post comments that will bring back links with SEO juice to your site. It knows if the site allows ping backs, if it has nofollow linking in comments or not, and it also checks their Google Page Rank, back link count, etc. Extremely useful for anyone trying to make money online.
Keep up on which tools are available and use them often
Advanced Website Marketing
There are many other SEO tools online that will be helpful. We usually Google “SEO Tools” and check out what is new and find stuff that is helpful. Every tool is different and non of them work 100% accurately everytime. You have to become familiar with all the tools and then you will be able to stay up with what your site needs in order to continue to progress in your market.
Optimize well for your market and you can almost quite marketing
There are zillions of ways to market and make money. We are not the kind of people who believe that making money requires sales calls, mass mailings, TV commercials and all the other expensive forms of traditional marketing. No one has to trick people into buying their product or service unless they are marketing in a pond with fish that are not hungry or simply don’t like the bait. Research is key to finding a viable online market.
Search engines send you pre-sold customers if your site optimizes
We are of the mind set that optimizing your site to be in the top 5 spots in search engine results is the easiest way to make money. If there are people searching to buy your product then you do not have to talk them into buying it. If you are like us then that relieves a lot of unwanted negative feelings because we do not have to deal with or use traditional marketing. In short “Optimization is Marketing.”
