In terms of starting your own online business, while some people come into the game with a lot of money to invest and many people come in broke, they all still have to start from the bottom of the pile and work their way up.

Let me be clear first though, I am not talking about the bottom or the top in the sense of how much money someone earns while marketing online, I am talking about how much they learn and understand the business. How much money someone makes online and how much they know about the business and how it works are two very different things, they do not go hand in hand.

There are many online marketers who are earning A LOT of money online, but yet know very little compared to the average internet marketer. Also, there are some very bright people who know more about marketing than most people, but who aren’t earning millions of dollars. Are any of these people ‘better’ than the others? No, they just chose to or their circumstances guided them in different ways.

But everyone has to learn the basics on internet marketing and how it all works together before any success can really happen.

At one point, every internet marketing ‘guru’ was once a newbie who had no idea what they were getting into. But over time with a lot of learning and figuring it all out, they were able to build a business online.

So to help you become a guru (if that’s the direction you want to go) and to build your online business, I have released a new ebook that will teach you all about the basics of internet marketing and how it all works together.

Go grab your Free copy of

An Introduction To Internet Marketing.

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I remember when I first started out online all of the new shiny tools, tactics, and online marketing ideas being thrown at me, I wanted to jump right in and start doing it and make some money. But this is the exact reason why it can take people so long to start seeing success.

The problem: You have to learn the basics before jumping in.

It doesn’t matter what niche or field you are trying to work in, if you do not understand how the basics work, then it will take you a lot longer to get going. Sure you can buy all the new tools and possibly get something going… but sooner or later it will all catch up and you will have no idea what you are really doing and how it all works together.

I see it happen a lot, when beginner internet marketers hear about a new technique or money making method and they try it out. But they are soon stuck because they are not sure about what each of the pieces of the puzzle do and they can often get very frustrated.

Now some people may say that it’s the product’s fault because it didn’t explain very well about how to use it or set it up. I can understand that this can happen, however what I see is that it’s most always a lack of understanding the basics that cause the problems. I don’t think there can ever be an internet marketing product which covers every single thing there is to learn, simply because of how the internet is constantly changing and every person’s situation is different (different web hosting, different autoresponders, different… etc).

But this is where a basic knowledge of internet marketing can help solve a lot of issues. It’s at this point I would recommend you purchase my new “Introduction To Internet Marketing” ebook which I just released with private label rights… but all of the PLR licenses are sold out, so I can’t do that. However if you want a copy of the ebook for personal use, leave a comment on this post and I will tell you how you can get it.

If you learn the basics of it all, that is where you can really start to boost your online business because you will then be able to see how it all works together and what type of overall strategy you should implement.

*** If all of the above sounds familiar to you, maybe you are currently stuck not knowing where to go next, then you have an amazing opportunity a head of you.

You see, my friend and marketing expert Doug Champigny has re-opened his “Professional Internet Marketing Coaching 4-Week High-Intensity PowerStart Class“  for this coming Monday, May 3rd. In fact, the class starts on Monday but you can get your access pass today.

Over the past few months, Doug has been running this class with some VERY HAPPY students coming out of it. You can watch some of the video testimonials here to see what they have to say, and below is my own video I sent to Doug to thank him for what he’s offering that will help so many internet marketing beginners.

If you are frustrated and need a solid plan to follow, then this is it, Click Here to enroll in the class.

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Note: This blog post is an expanded version of this original blog post I did at the beginning of the year.

How niche marketing works in this sense is that you have to find a good niche to go into, then create a site with content on that topic, find some advertisements that you can promote on the site, then drive targeted traffic to that site. So let’s begin…

Step #1: Research what niche to go into.

There are thousands if not millions of different potentially good niches that you can target with your new site, but deciding which one is best can be a bit tricky, and you won’t truly know if it’s a good one until you have your site online and running. But to help find a niche, one of the best ways is to find keywords that people are searching for in that niche and narrow them down into the amount of competition and traffic there is for that topic.

Two good niche keyword tools are Google’s Keyword Tool and Market Samurai.

Google’s tool is free to use, but it can take a little longer to do all of the research using it. For basic keyword research though it is good. Market Samurai on the other hand is the best tool for all around niche research as it will go into a lot more detail about the niche to allow you to better understand the market before you enter it.

Use either one of those tools to find several keywords that have around 50-100+ searches per day (or 1,500 – 3,000 per month). The reason we are looking for that number of searches is to make sure your site will get a decent amount of traffic. Of course though, all niche markets are different and depending on which one a lower number might be ok.

The other important number to look for is how many competing sites are there for those keywords. If you are using Google’s tool, then take one of those keywords and enter it into Google.com with quotes like this, “example keyword”. With this example I can see that Google shows almost 35,000 other results for this quoted keyword. The reason we use quotes is to target which sites are specifically using that keyphrase on their site, the two words together and not just the two words somewhere on their site separate from each other.

We want to find keywords/keyphrases which have less than about 50,000 results, or even lower than 30,000… the lower the better. But again, sometimes you might want to go higher if the amount of traffic is a lot, and it also depends on the niche as well.

If you are using Market Samurai, then it will automatically give you the Google competition numbers without you having to manually go search and check them all. Just another reason why I like Market Samurai

At the end of this step you should have 5-10 keywords ready to go with ideal traffic volumes of about 3,000+ a month and less than 30,000 competing websites.

Step #2. Create your niche website.

To make this step the easiest we will build a WordPress blog/site. There are so many web hosts these days which can automatically create a WordPress site for you in just a few minutes… it’s almost ridiculous how fast a new site can be built these days. There are two hosting services which I use and strongly recommend that you try out, and both have that auto-install WordPress feature, Ultimate Marketing Center and HostICan.

But first you will need a domain name for your website. Using the best keyword that you found in step 1, go to NameCheap and try to get a domain name using that keyword. The chances are that it will not be available as a .com (try to stick to .com if possible), so either try to add dashes in between some words or add an “s” to the end of a word or include a filler word like “the”, “a”, “blog”. Then when you have found one and have ordered it, make sure to change the nameservers to meet your web host specifications.

If you are new online than I would recommend UMC, as it contains A LOT of added features. HostICan is amazing, but mostly for those that need their own server or more specific hosting features. If you want to learn more about using this quick install feature, my friend Doug Champigny made a great video about it, you can watch it here. Note: This auto-install feature does not always install a very secure version of WordPress. So you might want to install WordPress manually, but that still doesn’t take a lot of time. Check out WordPress.org for all of the install information.

So now that you have a basic site installed, the next part of step 2 is to have content on your site. I guess this could be a separate step, but since it’s a part of creating a site, I included it here.

What you want to do is write an article of at least 400 words about each of your chosen keywords, and make sure to include those specific keywords in 2-3% of the article so that the search engines will be able to tell what the topic is of that article, and therefore hopefully rank you higher in the search engines for those keywords.

There are two ways that you can get this content written, either write it yourself or pay someone else to do it. If you are familiar with the niche topic than you could probably write better content than you could pay for, since you already know the topic and wouldn’t need to research it. But if you don’t know anything about the niche, than outsourcing it might be best way to go, unless you want to spend the time to research and write it.

If you want to outsource it, here are a few freelance sites that you can check out. They are listed in no particular order and each are a bit different from each other.

• Elance
• Freelancer (use to be GetAFreelancer)
• RentACoder
• Guru
• oDesk

With the content you will want to post 3-5 of the articles upfront at the beginning, then over the next week or two upload the others that you have, making sure to always title your articles using your keywords. Over time you should also write more quality content to add to your site using the same and more keywords.

So now that you are finished step 2, you have your new site online with it’s own domain name and hosting, along with some good content, it’s time for the next step.

Step #3. Find products that you can promote.

This is where the money comes into play… without advertising nothing on the internet would exist, so don’t feel bad about promoting products, but also don’t promote anything and everything. Only use quality targeted products which your visitors will be benefited by.

Depending on your niche topic there are hundreds of different affiliate sites and marketplaces to find products to promote. One easy way to find them is to search Google for your main keyword along with the word “affiliate”. So for example, widget affiliate (search without using quotes). When you do that it should give you a bunch of sites which sell your product that also have an affiliate program.

Another place to look for physical products is CJ.com, and for digital products, ClickBank.com. Physical products tend to have lower commission amounts, but they can be very expensive, and digital products generally have 50%+ commissions rates. So it’s important to know your niche and which type of products they purchase.

The other source for advertisements is Google Adsense, where Google will pay you a few cents every time a visitor on your site clicks one of the ads on your site. This can be a good alternative if you can not find many good products as an affiliate. The best thing to do is test which advertising stream works best for your site and your niche.

Step #4. Drive traffic your site.

This is probably most important thing you can learn, because without traffic there is no point to having a website.

I can’t go into detail about each different kind of traffic method there is, as that is a huge product in itself. But here are several ways that you can drive traffic to your niche web site;

• Pay Per Click (PPC). This is paid traffic that can result in a lot of targeted visitors to your site, mostly via Google Adwords, but you can also try Yahoo and Microsoft AdCenter. Watch your money and track how much advertising revenue you bring in, as PPC can get expensive quickly.
• Article Marketing. This is when you write and submit articles to article directories so that visitors to those directories will see your article, like it, and click to visit your site. This is best done by also including your keywords in the article to help with search engine optimization (SEO). The biggest article directory is EzineArticles.
• SEO. The reason you needed to pick good keywords and write content around those keywords is so that the search engines will rank your site high (hopefully on the first page) when someone searches for those keywords. You will also want to optimize your site as best as you can for your keywords (not just in your articles). You can check WordPress.com and search Google for more information about SEO.
• Use social media. Sites like Twitter and Facebook can be a great way to drive traffic to your niche site, but make sure to not spam these sites. Always participate and be friendly, with just a few messages about your website. Speaking about Twitter, why don’t you follow me here!
• Forum marketing. There is a forum out there for just about any niche. Everyone likes to find others interested in the same topic as they are, so forums are a great place to hang around and find targeted traffic. Link your forum signature box to your website and give them a good reason to click the link.

Important: Always drive targeted traffic to your website. Targeted traffic are visitors who are interested in your niche topic. There is no point to have visitors who are not interested in your site as they will not stay long and will not purchase anything.

Those traffic ideas should help you to start bringing in some traffic, but over time you will want to search for other ways to bring even more traffic. There are countless traffic methods, in fact Willie Crawford and Doug Champigny recorded a teleseminar about the many ways that they drive traffic to their sites, you can get access to that information here.

Once you have targeted traffic coming to your website, now you just have to sit back and watch what happens. This will be a good time to track the results to see what keywords are getting the most traffic, where you can add new content, what ads are working, and what you can do to make more money!

Step #5. Repeat steps 1-4.

Yes, now that you have this site done you can move onto another website. This is where the real power comes, because one website itself will probably not make you rich, but over time with 10, 50, or 100+ websites your income can really grow!

Of course, it will take time to reach the level where you have 100 websites, but the more you put online the faster you can get to that number. Since your income will grow with each site, that means that you can then afford to spend more money on site creation/outsourcing and on driving traffic, which will all lead to bringing  in more and more money.

Invest the money you make to make more money in the future.

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I hope that the steps shown above will help you to get started on building your niche websites. It will take some time to get started, but once you have built the first one they will only get easier and easier to build.

Feel free to post a comment below, Tweet, or Google Buzz this post to share your thoughts.

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This blog post is a continuation on my Happy 2010 post where I shared 4 ways to make money online this year.

If you want to work as a freelancer to get paid for doing something for someone else, here are a few jobs which people will pay you for;

• Writing articles or ebooks,
• Market research for niche keywords,
• Creating graphics for web sites,
• Link building,
• Social/Web2.0 marketing,
• Copywriting,
• Programming,
• Web site creation.

Here 6 steps to help you start your freelance carrier;

Step #1: What are you good at?

It doesn’t matter how good you think you are (or how bad), all that matters is if there is someone out there willing to pay for your work. So your first step would be to go look through some of the freelance sites to see the types of jobs being offered and the requirements needed.

For simple article writing jobs, a grade 10 level of writing is all that many people require. But if you know some programming to create software, than there can be some big requirements in order to get the job done.

Take a look at what you are able to do online and compare them with what people are paying for. Then move on to the next step.

Step #2: Sign up with the popular freelance sites.

In the first step you should have taken a look at some of the freelance job offers, so this step might need to be done at that point, but not all sites require you to join just to look around.

Below are some of the more popular freelance sites, but there are many more out there. When first starting out it is important to be regularly checking them all for possible jobs.

• Elance
• Freelancer (use to be GetAFreelancer)
• RentACoder
• Guru
• oDesk

The sites listed above are in no particular order. They each have their own way of doing things and different types of buyers and sellers go to each site. So it is important to sign up with many of them and keep a watch to see the kinds of jobs and work being posted.

You can also check out forums and marketplaces within your niche for other spots where you can advertise your freelance work.

Step #3: Get some samples ready.

This step may depend upon what you are good at doing, as it might be possible that a sample can’t really be made ahead of time. For the most part, if you write articles or make software, graphics, or do SEO, then it is very important to have some previous work or at least some samples ready to share with potential buyers.

When you first start out as a freelancer, you will not have any previous user rating at the freelance sites which means that the buyers do not know if you will do a good job or if you will scam them. Make it as easy as possible for them to say “Yes” to you.

Step #4: Start posting your bids!

On the freelance sites they usually work on a bidding process, where the sellers/freelancers bid for the jobs posted by the buyers. This means that all of the other freelancers who are good at writing articles will also see and bid on an article job. This is where samples, user rating, and your bid price become very important.

You should already have some samples or previous work ready to show, but you won’t have any user rating yet (but you will get some over time). So now your bid has to be good to grab the attention of the buyer.

Your bid shouldn’t be too high or too low. You might think that the lowest bid will be a good way to go, but in most cases that is not true. Too cheap and the buyers will think that the job won’t get done well and that the freelancer might just run off with the money. Too high and the buyers will ignore you.

Since you are new your bid should be on the low side, but make sure to state in your bid why it’s low (because you are knew and want to gain their trust). It really does depend what other bids are there and what type of work it is. But a lower bid without being the lowest and a good bid description with links to samples should help you get noticed.

Step #5: Get to work.

Once one of your bids has been accepted, it is now time to work. The great thing about being a freelancer is that you know you will get paid for the work you do, instead of just hoping you will if you write an ebook to put up for sale on some web site.

Make a good first impression by getting started on the job as soon as you can and keep in regular contact with the buyer. If the job is going to take weeks to complete, then make sure the buyer knows that and tell them how it’s going several times throughout the job.

Buyers want to know that they made a good decision to hire you, so make sure that they know that.

Once you have completed the job and have sent the files to the buyer and have been paid, make sure to rate the buyer and ask them to do the same for you. Most freelance sites have some sort of user rating.

Step #6: Repeat the process.

If you want to keep doing freelance work, then make sure to keep posting your bids. You will not get accepted to all of the jobs you bid for, probably not even half of them. There are a lot of freelancers out there. But keep at it and keep doing a good job so that you will become a highly rated user with a lot of previous work to show.

As you can see, just about anyone can start making money online as a freelancer. It doesn’t require any website of your own (although that might help) and you don’t have to go looking for traffic. You just have to go tell others what you are good at and hope they accept your bid!

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