The sheer size of the Internet can be intimidating… especially for someone who wants to develop an online business, but has limited experience in knowing exactly how to do it.

What if you don’t have a product or service?  How can you create something that has a reasonable chance for success?  And, even if you already have the product or service, how do you know it will sell as an online business?

Achieving long-term success with Internet (online) marketing is not much different than accomplishing the same thing offline.  Notice I said “long-term” success.

Your offering must be believable and clearly presented.

The perceived value of your offering must be greater than your asking price.

You need to develop an ongoing relationship with your client base.

You must guarantee complete satisfaction and maintain a refund policy.

You should over deliver by providing more than is expected.

Here’s a simple way you can begin to develop your own online business and potentially generate some respectable extra income.

Pick some subjects in which you have strong interest.  For example, health and fitness, poker, mountain biking, computer games, etc.  It doesn’t make any difference as long as you really enjoy talking about and participating in the subject.

You can include your regular business activity.  For example, let’s say you’re a stock broker.  Or, you have a carpet cleaning business and really know your stuff about cleaning carpets.  Or, you’re a seamstress for a garment manufacturer and the quality of your work is as good as it comes.

Next, go to: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ and type in the word or phrase to describe your strong interest category.  For example, “carpet cleaning”.

When this article was written the Overture Inventory data for September 2005 was used and it indicated 99,572 searches were performed during that particular month.  In other words, people were searching for information online about carpet cleaning to the tune of over three thousand each day.

Now “carpet cleaning” is pretty generic and not particularly quantifiable.  But look down the long list of other carpet cleaning searches.  For example, dry carpet cleaning or carpet cleaning solutions or carpet cleaning chemical.  And, notice the exceptional number of carpet cleaning “cities” that appear.

If you know a lot about carpet cleaning, you can create a manual (40 – 100 pages) with tons of important information about carpet cleaning.  You could make subtle changes to the information and adapt titles to specifically relate to different cities.

For example, “10 Great Ideas Boston Homeowners Can Use To Get Their Carpets Immaculately Cleaned”.  Then, “10 Great Ideas Los Angeles Homeowners Can Use To Get Their Carpets Immaculately Cleaned”.

The point is that the subject matter “carpet cleaning” appears to draw significant search engine traffic.  Creating a manual (produced in e-book format) should not be difficult provided you have genuine interest and enthusiasm to do so.

Once you know your subject of interest draws traffic it’s easy to begin research and compile your notes into a downloadable e-book.  Then, you create a mini-website composed of your sales letter and thank you page.

The sales letter mini-site explains your offer and provides a clickable link to a third party money collector like PayPal.  Once the money has been collected your reader is taken automatically to your thank you page that provides the download link to get your e-book.

There are free software tools available to help you.  For instance, your e-book can be prepared in PDF format, which is the best for the largest audience.

To help your product look more professional free software is available to create an attractive cover.  Even though your e-book isn’t going to be “hard” printed, nevertheless, you want to make it look like it could be a hardcover.

You don’t need to have your own merchant account to process credit cards. PayPal can handle this for a small transaction fee.

There are numerous aspects to making your online business successful not the least of which is getting your mini-site in front of as many people as possible.

But the first step is to get you off dead center. So, perhaps you now understand it isn’t difficult to take your favorite subject or hobby and turn it into a profit center.

Did you find this article helpful? visit http://www.effiliatecity.info/

Jmac is an online researcher of Affiliate Marketing, for more insight on how people all over the world are earning an income online go to
http://www.effiliatecity.info/articles-marketing-strategies.php

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The Moonlighter Exposed:

Momentum got lost during the six weeks after Hurricane Ike. Galveston Island experienced some of what New Orleans went through after Hurricane Katrina – including the lingering small weeks after waters from Galveston Bay lobbed up to 15 feet of water over some areas. Lucky for us, though, there were no corpses on the streets. Now I realize how silly it was for me to envy my friends who took the time to visit and pay their respects in the Big Easy back in the final months of 2004.

Now that the place that I used to work my 9-5 gig has gone through yet another round of layoffs, I am a StealthMoonlighter with no place to moonlight from. And being as some of the sound and musical equipment my band used “went underwater” during the storm surge, my band director/leader has been turning down gigs… at least until some time in February 2009.

If I intended to live up to my definition, I had to find something to “moonlight” from. So I spent eight weeks studying for the CompTIA A+ certification exam.  (Oh, and, YES, I did pass the exam to become Comptia A+ certified, I might add!) It was sort of job-like, at least it seemed so to me. I even set myself up with a rigid study and review schedule to make it seem like a regular job. This really helped me work on my project management skills as well.

But studying is like being in school. School kids (including adults in the midst of career retooling) do not bring in money, per se, while getting smart. It’s a delayed gratification thing – do the time with the potential of getting a pay off. The rent and utilities still have to be paid, though. Plus, you’ve got to have a coffee budget!

Internet marketing to the rescue! Here’s how it happened…

Remember Niche Rockets, a membership site I dissed some time ago? Well, things have changed and now it’s more affordable. You only pay for basic membership, which gives you access to the helpful people in their forum and loads of useful downloads.  They still offer a monthly “business-in-a-box” but leave it up to you whether or not you want to buy it. Essentially, you only pay for what you want to promote.

Well, one thing led to another and suddenly I’m back in the Internet Marketing Game again with the help of an ebook by Soren Jordansen: The Internet Marketing Success Formula. Lucky for me it’s a free book. Check it out here.

It’s been four months since Hurricane Ike hit my little Galveston Island community. On top of that, we turned over a new year! But I’ve been busy getting busy since then. The internet marketing idea wheels have been turning. Now it’s time to get busy big time.

Well, let’s just say I’ve been guardedly busy. No one here is naïve enough to think that something like that – or worse – could just as easily happen again in Hurricane Season 2009. Meanwhile, I set up a blog with pictures, for those of you harboring a prurient interest in nature’s fury.

http://WindowOnHurricaneIke.weebly.com

If you’re in Internet Marketing, you can forget the myth of getting something for nothing. Remember these sayings?

• Nothing in life is _______.
• You get what you _______ for.
• There’s no such thing as a _______ lunch.

I know you can fill in the blanks. But here’s the dilema:

As an affiliate marketer, you want to keep your expenses as low as possible when it comes to selling other people’s products, programs, and services. After all, you’ve already lost money buying a hard drive full of “How To” information from first one guru then another.

Which of these phrases describes you right now?

1. you work every day but you’re still broke
2. you’re hanging onto your steady job by a thread; layoffs are emenent
3. you just got laid off
4. you’re chronically unemployed

Bottom line, you want your very own legitimate method for making money from home, but you can’t afford to loose anymore time, effort, or money chasing another guru’s dream scheme.

The price of admission to making a steady dependable income in any business – off or on-line – is still just that: a Price.

Think about this: if you want to make money for without taking on some sort of financial responsibility to get it, then I’ve got just the thing. It’s called a job. Go get one NOW if you’re desperate for money. But look out! Unless you go into commissioned or direct sales you’ll NEVER be adequately paid for the work you put in.

But wait… isn’t online marketing just that? A sales gig? Commissioned sales, no less?

Yes. Absolutely. But there’s none of the “face to face”, flesh pumping, fancy (and expensive) wining and dining, trappings involved here. More about that later, but first…

Let’s be sensible. All you need to “make it” in online sales is

1. a product to sell
2. a place to “hang your shingle”
3. a way to draw a crowd of customers
4. a method of receiving payment and making delivery
5. a way to deliver instructions about promoting and selling the product

The first and second of these four things can be found free in the world of the affiliate marketer.

The last three? We’ll get into that tomorrow when we discuss, “Paying to play to turn a profit”.