Making Money Online Blueprint
Imagine waking up in the morning and logging onto your computer to have a look and see how much money you have made overnight? That is the power of the Internet, you can literally set up online ‘real estate’ that will work 24/7 for you selling goods and services that you find and promote. This is the way of making money online that is going to create you an ongoing revenue stream that will allow you to earn money quite literally while you sleep!
How do I do it then?
I can hear you all shouting in unison!!
In order to start making money online you need a few things;
- A product or offer
This doesn’t need to be an actual product, but more often than not is a ‘virtual’ product, information, an eBook, How to Guide etc
- A platform to sell it from
This is where a blog will come into it’s own. Through a cheap & easy to set up WordPress blog you can promote the offer you find, earning commissions on every sale.
- Some basic online marketing knowledge
This Million Pixel Driver blog contains all the information you need to promote your blog and drive traffic to it.
That is all there is to it, find a product, build a blog and drive traffic to it… three steps to making money while you sleep. You do the work once, put in a few weeks work to drive traffic to the blog and then sit back and watch the money roll into your bank account.
Let’s Get Started
The first thing you need to do is to find the right product. You can’t just pick something you like the sound of and expect it to sell in large volume for you.
There is an easy process to go through in order to find a winning product and a winning niche.
Your product needs to have a few things going for it;
- It needs existing traffic searching for it
- It needs to be in a growing niche that is gaining popularity
- You need to find a great URL that is keyword rich for one of the high traffic terms
Let’s take an example
First we need to find an offer to promote. One of the best starting points is http://www.clickbank.com which has affiliate offer for a massive range of different niches and topics. It is free to sign up so if you don’t have an account, sign up now so you can follow this guide for yourself.
Clickbank
Clickbank rates all of its offers with a “Gravity” rating. For the best results, you should stick with offers that have a gravity score above 50. This means that the products already have a proven sales structure, low returns and that the offer is a good one.
In Clickbank, click on ‘Marketplace’ at the top of the page and then on the left hand side type 50 in the minimum gravity box.
Below that you will then see the categories of offers that are currently available.
To follow this example we have picked Home & Garden : Crafts and Hobbies.
The only offer with a gravity above 50 is www.tedswoodworking.com which is looking quite healthy with a gravity of 130 and an average sale of $38. It also states a conversion rate of 23% and in our experience, Clickbank tend to not allow people to state untruths on their listings, so if you drive targeted people to the Teds Wood Working sales page, almost 1 in 4 of them will turn into $38 for you.
The next task is to find available traffic that will convert into sales for you. To do this go to https://adwords.google.com and use the keyword tool to search fro traffic. If you have read our other posts then you will remember that there are a few important points to note when doing keyword traffic research……
- Sign into a Google account so you see a full list of keywords
- Select ‘exact match’ only as the option for results
- Download results and sort by volume
You will have a list in front of you of woodworking related keywords and their traffic. In our list, ‘woodworking plans’ has 18,000 monthly searches, ‘woodworking’ 33,000 and ‘shed plans’ 18,000, ‘pergola plans’ 12,000, ‘bird house plans’ 6,600, ‘bunk bed plans’ 5,400, ‘playhouse plans’ 3,300 etc
In other words, there is a lot of quality traffic on a monthly basis for the plans that this site offers. The above exact match terms alone add up to 90,000 monthly searches. Add in all the longer tail terms that people tend to use as well as the traffic will climb even further.
The next task is to create a blog that will be fit and capable of getting in front of all of that traffic so that you can earn money from it.
As a rule of thumb, if you rank first in the organics listings in Google you can expect to receive one third of the exact match traffic stated. So in this example, if you ranked in the top three for the keywords above you could expect to get 30,000 hits a month to your site.
Those 30,000 visitors need to flow through your site and onto the sales page for the product. In the real world , unless you are prepared to put in a lot of effort to get your blog ranking for all those terms you are going to rank for one or two of them. Lets say just one.
If you ranked in the top three for ‘Woodworking plans’ with 18,000 searches, you would expect to see 6,000 visitors a month from that keyword.
Let’s say that you have set up a reasonable blog, and that as a result 10% of your visitors (600 people) click through to the affiliate offer page. Teds Woodworking Plans is claiming a 23% conversion rate, but let’s assume it is actually 10%, so in a month you make 60 sales at $38 each earning you $2,280 in a month.
All you need to do now is to build a blog that will rank for one of those keywords without you having to SEO the life out of it for months.
The thing that will help you to rank will be your URL (Domain Name).
Choosing a keyword rich domain name is the key to your success at this point, so choose wisely.
You want a dot com in preference to anything else as they are the most powerful, however, most of the best ones have already been take so you need to put a little thought into how you are going to get a great domain name that will work for you.
In this example we would go for www.woodworking-plans-101.com which is available.
Where possible you want to have the main keywords at the beginning of the URL and as little as possible after it. In an ideal world you would have www.woodworkingplans.com so you need to work back from their to see what’s available. You can check availability on any domain name website which all have a search function.
Advanced Domain Name Selection
There is a second method for choosing a domain name, which is to buy an old, expired domain name. The advantage of this is that Google really likes old domains, especially 5 years or older, and if you can find one with some Google PR then so much the better.
The downside is that it is much harder to find a keyword rich domain, so it really depends on what you are selling as to whether you will find an old domain that suits your needs.
Once you have chossen a domain name you are ready to set up your blog.
This is a quite straight forward process, and is much easier than people think.
Firstly you need some blog hosting. We recommend Hostgator as it is ideal for blogging, is cheap and has a really easy installation process for your blog files. The Hatchling Plan for one blog starts at just $3.96 per month and the Baby Plan at $6.36 per month if you are going to set up multiple blogs for different offers, BUT we have negotiated an additional 25% off if you use the coupon code ‘MILLIONPIXELDRIVER’ when you sign up…… that’s the cheapest hosting online and from one of the most trusted companies too. Click on the banner to set up your hosting.
Installing your WordPress blog files on your hosting server is really straightforward, and we have covered it in this post here… Installing WordPress on your server
Blogs have several advantages over standard websites and are ideal for our purposes promoting specific affiliate products. You don’t need and programming skills to set up a WordPress blog, or to make it look good and edit it. The whole blog is managed through a WYSIWHG (What you see is what you get) editor so you can just drag and drop, paste or type what you want to say into each page and publish it instantly. This makes it really cheap for you to set up and run which is why making money online with a blog is so easy.
By now you should have a raw looking blog live on your server, with your domain name pointing to it. Follow the instructions in our installation post if you haven’t completed this stage yet.
The next part of the process is to make your blog look nice and you do this by adding a theme in order to customise the design.
You will also want to add some additional functionality to your blog so that it works as well as it possibly can do for you. To add functionality, you install WordPress plugins that carry out different functions for you. One of the most important to add is SEO by Yoast as this will optimize your posts so that they rank well in search. You should also get Pop Up Domination as it will maximise the amount of people who sign up to your mailing list…. and your mailing list will increase your sales massively once you have some contacts.
Once you have customised your blog to look great, you can start adding content to it. The purpose of your content is to gather interested people, draw them into your blog and then to steer them to your affiliate offers.
Your affiliate offer should be in the form of a call to action at the bottom of your blog post…. it is what you want your readers to do next once they have finished reading your content.
When you add content, you want to include images where possible, link to related content in other posts that you have written and if you can you should add a video.
It is also well worth while linking out to a powerful site related to your content. This is because it will make your blog post look like an informative resource that is recommending the best content online rather than just being a sales page to sell your particular product.
The next part of the process once your blog is up and running is to make sure that you promote your blog to drive traffic to it…… you can read all about promoting your blog here
If you haven’t set up your hosting yet, click the banner below and get started today….. and don’t forget to claim an extra 25% discount by using MILLIONPIXELDRIVER as your coupon code
