You've heard about it. You've read about it. And now you wonder if you can do it: earn a living from home in Internet marketing.
Perhaps you are a mom with young children who wants to work at home. Perhaps you are retired and looking for income to supplement your pension. Or maybe you are the next gangbuster marketer to hit the Internet!
People from all walks of life -- even kids in high school -- are learning to make money from the Internet and having fun doing it.
They are using Internet marketing analysis to create their strategy. Internet marketing analysis is simply the process of evaluating the various ways you can make money on the Internet and then finding the appropriate marketing methods based on your skills, time, and budget.
Top Ways to Make Money on the Internet
1. Your own products - Create your own ebooks, software, or really anything that has a large enough target market and not too much competition.
2. Resale or private label products - Purchase the resale rights to ebooks and software for pennies on the dollar and then sell them for whatever you choose for almost pure profit.
3. Affiliate programs - Sell other people's products. Many product developers have an affiliate program in which they pay you up to 50% of the price of the product as a commission.
4. Affiliate networks - CommissionJunction.com and ShareaSale.com represent many companies for whom you can become an affiliate and earn a commission every time someone purchases something from your affiliate link.
5. eBay - Clean out the garage and find treasures to sell on eBay! You can also work with a distributor who ships products. You do the marketing on eBay, and they do the product shipping.
6. AdSense - This is one of the hottest ways to make money on the Internet right now. Just put Google ads on your website and then when people click on an ad you make money. There are also Yahoo and literally dozens of smaller pay-per-click (PPC) programs.
Top Ways to Market on the Internet
1. Websites - List your products or reviews of products on a website or a mini-site, which is basically a one page sales letter. Be sure to use search engine optimization (SEO) on your website so you can get a good search engine ranking.
2. Affiliate websites - When you join an affiliate program, you may get a link to a duplicated website created by the program with your affiliate ID in it. Provide that link to people, and you will earn a commission from their purchases.
3. Opt-in email marketing - Build a list of people who opt in to receive email from you. You can email them your affiliate links or links to the websites that offer your products.
4. Autoresponders - Related to email list building are systems that automatically email your opt-in list at regular intervals about your products and allow you to broadcast to them all at once.
5. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising - Use Google AdWords to advertise your products. AdWords are those little ads that appear on websites and on the Google search pages.
A good way to perform your Internet marketing analysis is to create a spread sheet. List the top ways to make money along the left, and list the ways to market along the top.
Search for information about the various ways to make money and ways to market. In each cross-section, write your notes on how you can use the particular marketing technique with a particular income source. Be creative and make this fun!
Pretty soon, you'll have more ideas than you handle. Narrow your plan to just one or two ways to make money to start with, and then add others as you go along. Best of luck ... and don't forget to have fun doing your research!
Copyright 2006 Karen Kirby
Karen Kirby has over 25 years' experience in the computer industry and an MS in Computer Science. She has been helping people with Internet marketing since 1995. For expert information on Internet marketing analysis, please visit http://www.belowtheeight.com. Get a free ebook to help your Internet marketing at http://www.aimbright.com.