How to Make Money Online (Part 1 of 10)

What exactly is online marketing? And why is everyone trying to get involved?

 Online  marketing is a broad, general term that implies  making   money  through  online  promotion. Products can range from digital books, to brand new cars, to custom built homes, to health insurance and everything in between.

A person engaged in  online  marketing can  make   money  whenever a transaction occurs. They can also  make   money  when information is passed from one person to another. But exactly how does one  make   money  from these goods and services?

There are four primary ways to  make   money   online . I’ve listed them in order of least difficult to most difficult:

Method #1: Selling your own product or service. As long as you are willing to join an affiliate network, selling your own product or service is probably the easiest way to  make   money   online . You don’t have to understand marketing or website promotion. All you need to do is create a worthwhile product (or provide a service), create what is called a “pitch page”, and then join an affiliate network.

When you join the affiliate network, your product becomes available to hundreds of thousands of online marketers. In exchange for a percentage of the sales price, these online marketers will then promote your product. Joining an affiliate network is similar to hiring potentially thousands of salesmen all at once. And the best part is you don’t pay any fees until a transaction occurs!

Method #2: Generating legitimate, targeted leads for other companies. In order to survive, a company must have a continuous stream of potential customers or “leads”. Without leads, there can be no sales, and any company without sales will inevitably close its doors. Because online marketing is so complex, it is easier for a company to focus on running its business while online marketers generate leads in exchange for a referral fee.

For a marketer wanting to generate  online  revenue, I believe this is an easy method because you are not asking for  money  from the customer; only their contact information. For my lead generation sites, I typically average a 30% conversion rate.

Method #3: Promoting (and selling) products and services owned by other people. If you would rather not create your own product or service, you can join any number of affiliate networks and then choose from hundreds of thousands of products to promote. When you engage in this type of online marketing, you become an Affiliate Marketer.

Personally, I think this a difficult way to earn  money   online  because you need internet traffic in order to  make  sales. And unless you have a well designed website or marketing strategies, this path can be a very difficult for a new marketer to  make   money   online .

Method #4: Advertising. This is pretty straight forward: develop a website and drive traffic to it and then sell advertising space on the website. You can charge per impression, which is called “CPM”, or you can charge per click, which is called “CPC”.

To get started in this type of marketing, you can sign up with either Google AdWords or a company called Adbrite. These two are by no means the only advertising networks you can join (there are hundreds of networks available). In my opinion, this is the toughest form of  online  marketing for a beginner because it requires highly targeted traffic (and lots of it!) to  make  this type of revenue method work.