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Have I convinced you yet that you can make money online? Great! So now you just need to know where to begin. There are literally thousands of opportunities available to you, from affiliate programs, membership sites, selling products, e-books or advertising. I couldn’t begin to list them all, but I can highlight a few of the most common.

1. Advertising – Almost everyone who has a site online, whether it’s a commercial site or family blog displays ads. Adsense is Google’s version and they dominate the PPC (pay per click) market. So if you’re a merchant interested in placing ads on other’s websites or a website owner interested in displaying ads, chances are you’ll use Adsense. To earn money from ads, your visitors must click on a link to be directed to the merchant’s site. You want your visitors to find relevant ads when they visit your site, so they’re more likely to click on a link. If you select a niche market with sufficient traffic you can make a tidy sum from Adsense. Most of my ads pay pennies per click so it takes a ton of traffic to pay for a cup of Starbucks.

2. Affiliates – Amazon is built on the backs of its affiliates and no one does it better. That’s not to say they’re perfect, but they have tons of options and support for their associates. You can set up an entire bookstore on your site with a few lines of code or you can link from individual products. Linkshare and ClickBank offer a wide range of affiliate programs. You sign up at either one (or both) and then pick merchants with your audience in mind. Signing up is free: don’t ever pay to sell someone’s product. Remember: just because you have a link or banner on your site does not mean anyone will click on it or buy anything. You may link to Amazon from your site, but most people will just type in Amazon and fill their cart. The only way to make money from affiliates is to promote the products as though they are your own. It’s not a work-free zone so make sure the commission you get paid is worth the effort you put in.

3. Selling Products, Services or Memberships – You can design a new product, retool an existing one or market your services and make money. The key is to know your Unique Selling Perspective. Why is your product better than your competitor’s? A perfect example of USP is Netflix. I remember when it was just a start up company and I wondered how it would work to rent a movie online and receive DVDs in the mail. Come to find out, it works quite well and Blockbuster never even saw it coming. Netflix didn’t invent movie rentals, but they did market a unique service which carved a nice little niche ($7.03M 3Q07) for them.

No matter what option you select to make money online, you have to generate traffic to your site. Article marketing is the most effective and affordable option to increase your credibility and relevancy with search engines. Your site should be content rich, with plenty of inbound high quality links. You can write supplemental articles with links to your site and place them on sites such as Peoplefuel.com or Wordpress. Either of these sites will host your article or blog for free. The more articles you write, the more traffic you can generate. Sounds like a topic for another article.

In the Internet marketing game there are a few realities that are too hard for some people to face. The first is that an Internet business takes every bit as much work to build as any regular brick and mortar business you can think of. The second is that Internet businesses fail at an even higher rate than offline businesses. Internet businesses fail at such a high rate because of the lack of commitment from their owners. There are some other factors involved also but we will get into those in a few minutes. My belief is that because the entry cost is so low that there is either a lack of commitment or a lack of belief that the business is real for the new owners.

When you don’t spend very much money to start a business it is easy to walk away and say to yourself that you gave it a shot, but it just didn’t work out. Regardless of the reasons why, you are still giving up on your dreams. Why would anyone give up on their dreams of owning their own business? I believe it is because they don’t take the time to really learn how to make their business work. They can’t figure out how to actually capitalize on the work they are doing for their business. Even worse is that they don’t bother to ask the right questions and really try to make it work at all. When all they are looking at losing is a few bucks and a little time it makes it far too easy to just walk away. Don’t be one of the millions of people who walk away from their Internet businesses every year, take the time to learn how to run your business right and then use that knowledge to build your dream.

Other factors that play into Internet businesses failing are scams and schemes. There are so many scams on the Internet that directly play on people’s desires to run their own businesses it can be very discouraging when you are trapped by one of them. Then from fear of being trapped by another people avoid or are leery of real opportunities. If you have ever been trapped by a scam and lost some of your hard earned money, the only way not to lose your dreams to it is to get right back up and keep going. Losing money sucks, but we all do it every day, we throw good money after bad and sometimes lose too much. It happens, so what, don’t let it deter you from achieving success. Find the right opportunity and grab hold of it. After you have been burned once it will be a lot easier to tell what is or isn’t a scam in the future.

Nobody knows everything there is to know about Internet marketing, Technology and people change so fast it would be impossible. But it does help to be a part of a team or organization that is willing to help. That is why we are here to help people succeed who aren’t willing to give up on their dreams. Join us at the forum and be a part of a team that is willing to help you succeed and learn how to market your business. Just don’t give up.

I am going to follow up this article with a few about scams on the internet, just to point out a few obvious things to avoid. But remember that not everything is a scam and any golden nuggets of information you can pick up along the way will help you down the road.

I don’t know how many of you are a part of a mailing list, but I am on a bunch of them. I join mailing list for the very few free bits of information that may be useful. I have also become a part of mailing list because of items or information I have purchased in the past. Being a part of those mailing list becomes a real nuisance once in a while because I just get plain old sick and tired of people always pimping something. I know you have to let people know about what you have to sell, but do you have to become an affiliate of ever Tom, Dick , and Harry and then pimp all of their crap too?

My problem with all of the pimping is that is makes these people seem like all they care about is the next dollar they can earn off of your back. Real world businesses are bad enough but Internet businesses are getting to the point that they look only at peoples wallets and don’t really care what is good for them. Constantly pimping other people crap through your mail list is not “customer service” as they would like to believe. The argument would be that how do people know they do or don’t need it if they don’t know it exists? My argument would be that if I need it I will look for it. And the people who earn my business are going to be the people with the best search marketing and long term business, not someone who threw together a product and had a bunch of affiliates send out an email about it.

Well that is my grip for today and remember that just because someone you may like or even halfway trust send you an email about a product doesn’t mean that they actually know what the product is or if it is even any good. Usually the emails are written by the person with the product and not the peson who sent the email.

Every once in a while an idea comes along that you believe will make you the next great internet millionaire. You think about it really hard, plan it out and know exactly how you are going to implement your great idea. The next thing you know it’s been a month since you had this great idea, you’ve done nothing with it, and can barley remember how exactly the idea was supposed to work. If I had a nickel for every million dollar idea, then I wouldn’t need million dollar ideas. The good thing is that if everyone acted on their ideas there wouldn’t be any left for the rest of us. So be glad that other people procrastinate and be happy that you are no longer going to procrastinate.

Now is the time to put some of those ideas into action, and we are here to help. We understand the hesitations that you have when you have a great idea but don’t know how to let people know about, or buy, or use your idea. Netrat.com is here to help you make your idea succeed. If you need help with programming, promotion, implementation, or just want to pass an idea by someone, we have many years of experience that could prove very useful to you. Please visit our forum and post your question there. You can also find very helpful information in our many articles about running and maintaining your website.

Nothing here is really ground breaking information, but for new internet marketers it is a valuable step by step introduction to doing things the right way. The best thing about netrat.com is that we are here to help you through every step of the process. We can help you with all of those small questions that come up during the process. We know how important it is to have someone to bounce ideas off of. Keep in mind though that this is real marketing and not some get rich quick scheme. We don’t believe that there is a shortcut to building any real business and we are building real businesses, not trying to make a quick buck.

Now let me tell you what you won’t find on our site. You will not get a bunch of useless information that will not help you promote or finish your website. You also won’t find us ever trying to steer someone in the wrong direction because we are afraid of competition. The World Wide Web is an immense place where everyone should be able to succeed. Just remember us when that million dollar idea turns to gold.

There seems to be a little confusion about placing ads on your weebly.com site. Weebly does not use Adsense they use a company called Adbrite.com to place their ads. Unfortunately at this time it doesn’t look like weebly has a revenue sharing program. I believe this is a major drawback to using weebly and will hurt them long term in the number of users they will attract. I will go over a few things about both programs just as an FYI. Adsense makes it nice and easy, choose the placement of your ads and put up the code and you are pretty much done. Adbite on the other hand takes a little more care to get right. You have to choose which ads you want to show, so that your audience is getting what they want.

Just a quick note about Adsense. If you aren’t getting the result that you think you should try moving your ads around and or placing them in the text of your article and you may find that you get better results. You may find that with the right placement your results can double or even triple. For further help with Adsense you can always check out the official Adsense blog. And you can sign up for Adsense here.

An issue that I have with some of the Adsense ads is the amount you can be paid per click. I have had way too many .01 clicks. You lose your visitor and you make a penny. It’s just not worth it for the long term health of your site. If you have a site that demands a high payout per click then Adsense is one of the best alternatives there is, but is your site has lower payouts per click there are better alternatives.

When you are setting up your site for Adbrite choosing the correct location for ads is just as essential as it is with Adsense. But now you have the added element of accepting advertisers and approving or denying ads. It does take a little more work on your part to run the program but there are some real benefits that make the Adbrite program worth the effort. After you have signed up and placed the code on you site you can set the Adbrite program to either automatically approve ads or manually approve ads. I recommend that you set it to manual and after they send you a list of advertisers go through the list and only approve ads that you feel will suit the audience of your site. Also take a look at the amount that each advertiser pays per click and weed out the lower paying ads. It just isn’t worth the effort in the long run if you can’t make a decent profit per click.

Adbrte also allows advertisers to pay for direct placement on your site within your ad placement. Let’s say that you have the code at the top of every page and you show 3 ads at a time. Advertisers can bid for one or all of those spots and you get paid regardless of how many people click through. You can set the pricing for the spots and be guaranteed advertising revenue from your ads every single month. That is a real benefit that Adsense does not offer, and I have done very well with selling ad spots through Adbrite on specific niche sites. If you have a blog that is niche specific I would highly recommend that you try Adbrite for your ads.

Of course that depends on a number of factors, like what kind of website you own. If you are selling tangible products and you control your markup then you can make as much as is feasible from your set of constraints. If you drop ship items directly from the manufacturer or distributor then you are not constrained by inventory and employees. Your only constraint may be your ability to attract new customers. If your website is an affiliate website attracting customers to your site and sending them to another site for purchase or signup then you are dealing with a whole different set of problems. If your website is an informative website that attracts large numbers of people because of your content and you make your money from advertising, then you are dealing with other issues. Look for articles dealing with specific issues those types of websites face on this site. This article will deal with just how much money it is possible to make from advertising on a small niche site.

Small niche websites usually depend on advertising for revenue. Google.com has a terrific program called Adsense that targets the ads specifically to the content of your`website. This program works well because if the person came to your website to gather information then they are most likely interested in the ads that will be displayed by Google.com. This type of advertising works because you will only get paid when someone clicks on one of the ads on your site. A word of caution is in order here, never click on one of the ads displayed by google.com on your website this would violate the terms of your agreement and possibly cause your advertising contract to be terminated. When advertising is your source of revenue then you can understand why you wouldn’t want the contract terminated.

Alright finally to the answer to how much you can expect to make from your website. Let’s say that you have a website about Aruba and you attract 20,000 unique visitors per month and you have a good conversion rate of people who click on your ads. 2% is a pretty good conversion rate, so that would mean 400 people per month clicked on your ads. Take that 400 and multiply it by the amount you get paid per click. Some keywords like travel pay fairly decent per click but there is a lot of competition in that arena. So let’s say you get paid an average of .50 per click, 400 x .50 = 200.00 per month, not bad but it sure doesn’t pay enough to quit your job. What if you had 20 websites doing about the same amount of money as the first? 20 websites would do a number of things for you, first they would balance the load if one did poorly one month or was cut off by your advertiser for some reason you would have 19 more to fall back on. Having multiple sites is also a lot of work. You have to build content for 20 different sites every month tweak them and do redesigns every so often. Yes it’s just like having a full time job, and the truth is that any single website making 200.00 or more per month from Adsense has been around for a while and has great content that search engines that consumers are looking for. Having that type of great content takes time to build for just one website, let alone 20 or more websites.

My advice is don’t quit your day job just yet, maybe later but don’t get into this business thinking that you are going to make a living right away. Niche marketing takes specialized talents and tools. Successful marketers know how to attract visitors by using the correct keywords, and catering to the information surfers are looking for. You can become a very successful marketer yourself by following the step by step guide on this website.

Advertising works well but most niche sites make money by selling some sort of informational product to the people who are interested in that specific niche. Once you are selling a product to your niche that is when you will truly understand the power of Internet marketing. Learning how to build and market those products is the reason that netrat exists. Take a look at the front page and find out how to join how to make a website.

Google announced today, Microsoft said they are going to, big shakeup today at Ask.com. I am sure you see the headlines everywhere just like I do, and I have to admit I am a tech junkie and have to go read the stories, but one of the things I have learned in my multitude of years on this planet include: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Big tech companies feel the ever increasing pressure to evolve and make announcements about that evolution, but more often than not that is all they are announcements. This first post for the new netrat.com is to give everyone an idea of how I feel about Internet marketing exactly.

You read all the time that it is better to bow out gracefully and end a dead product or project before you get dragged under. Which is absolutely correct if you have a real stinker on your hands, and everyone is telling you that it is a stinker. But it is absolutely not true when you really believe in something and know it has potential for greatness. In my experience it is the people who stick with projects and put the extra effort that it takes to push a product past mediocrity who are the true successes. Don’t make the mistake that is so common with Internet projects and give up on them right before the tide is about to turn. 9 times out of 10 that overnight success that you hear about has years of back end development and hard work to make it the overnight success.

So here it is, this is exactly how I feel about Internet marketing. Internet marketing is hard work; there aren’t any get rich quick schemes that won’t end with jail time for somebody. But that doesn’t mean that the hard work has to last forever and it doesn’t mean that you can’t make a very good living on the Internet, or maybe if you work hard enough or have that GREAT idea that you may even become extremely wealthy. Yes it really can happen even for you, if you are willing to put in the effort that is required. It takes more than luck and more than effort though. You have to know what you are doing. And that is where this blog comes in. This blog is for people who are serious about Internet Marketing and making money on the Internet. With the articles and directions you will find here you should be able to strike out on your own with the confidence that you know what the outcome will be even before you start the first project.

I hope that explains a little about this blog and this site, and I hope that you will find it worth you time to return and learn often.