If you want to Earn on line money it is a Dream worth chasing!

Whether you build a website to advertise your business, as a means of setting up your own business or even as a way to generate income for a local community group or charity your website (and most like it) is designed to earn on line money.

So let’s take a quick look at how you can earn on line money:

• If you have your own business selling a product or a service then the products and services your website will promote will likely be your own.
• If you wish to generate income for a local community group (e.g. school, church or sporting club) then you will likely try to sell the benefits of advertising space, group activities such as fetes and sponsorship to a targeted group.
• If you wish to start your own business and want to earn money on line then you need to find products to promote (not as hard as you may think).

Believe it or not once you start to earn on line money all three groups can benefit from promoting and selling different products via their website and not just those products or services they may be directly associated with. For example, whilst a sporting club may need sponsors for new uniforms it could easily promote products that promote healthy activities. For example you may include:

1. A new way to lose weight quickly and safely. Which is in keeping with your sporting club’s overall philosophy of living a healthy lifestyle.
2. New techniques to get fit fast! Which again is what a sporting club is all about (i.e. healthy activity) without the need for dangerous drug use.

Not only can advertising both these products help the ‘sporting club’ earn on line money they also firmly establish the sporting club’s ethical position in regards to both healthy activity and safe, non-drug methods for things like muscle building. And these are only two very simple examples of how you can use associated products to make money on line and promote the overall message your website is trying to deliver. There is almost no limit to the number of products out there that you can sell and you don’t even need a website if you have something as simple as a Facebook fan page.

Whether you are a charity, a business or an individual starting out trying to earn on line money all three groups will often tend ask the same three questions:

1. How do we build a website?
2. How do we get a website found in the trillions that are out there on the Internet?
3. How do we monetize our website?

How to build a website?

Despite how hard this seems this part of the puzzle is no longer as difficult or costly as it was say 10 years ago. Programs such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are all free and depending on the style of the website you want any one of the three will get you started on your way to earn on line money. In most cases if you pay someone to simply set up a website for you using a program like WordPress it will cost you less than $400 and you can learn how to use it in just a few hours. A bit like buying a car. You could of course buy all the pieces and try to build one from scratch or alternately you could just buy a car and use the key to start it up. Providing you know where to put the petrol and have it serviced regularly you usually don’t have many problems. Websites are much the same.

If you really feel you have to learn how to build your WordPress website from scratch then do yourself a real favour and spend about $50 on a good ‘DIY Help Package’ that tells you, step-by-step, how to use WordPress. The hours a package like this will save you will more than pay for the cost of the videos. It also helps to have a simple to understand set of videos on hand so you can train your staff or other people how to use your new website. You never want to be the only one on the team that ‘knows’ what they are doing.

I realise this will sound like a unadulterated plug for my company but paying someone like us to set you up will save you in the long run. It has taken us over FOUR YEARS to get to a point where we can now realistically expect to earn on line money. What our company can set up in a few days (including things like web hosting) will save you a fortune going forward. It will also mean you always have a friend to call when you get stuck and believe me that happens!

Getting Found by Google!

You cannot hope to earn on line money if your website does not get found. By far and away getting found by the dearch engines is a 1000 times harder than building your website. Think about it for a moment, there are over 1 Trillion websites out there and you want Google to recommend yours! Fortunately much of the hard work is done if you start with a solid platform:

1. WordPress (sorry to keep harping on about this free program but it is important) is a platform used by companies such as Ebay, Play Station and many, many others. In short thousands of people donate their time to keep the software behind the program fully functional and up to date with all the things Google, Yahoo and Bing want to change. If you build your own site from scratch you will have to pay someone to do this for you. If not withing 6 months your website will most probably be delisted or at least poorly listed by the search engines.
2. Your URL (website’s name): is vital. Think of it this way. Imagine you had a crowd of 1000 people and you called out for all the ‘Toms’ in the crowd to come forward. Depending on the country some or none of the crowd would come forward. If you called out the name ‘Fred’ by mistake how many ‘Toms’ would you expect to come forward? If your business is called: Nike and you sell track pants having a site called www.nike.com.au is not going to be as easy to find for the search engines as www.trackpants.com.au. That is the fundamental mistake most people make when they start. The use a URL (website name) that most closely matches their company name or activity and not the product or service they wish to sell. Think of it another way whilst the company name ‘Nike’ could one day change to ‘Niky’, track pants will always be called ‘track pants’.
3. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) verses Pay Per Click (PPC): it is an unwinnable argument to say one is better than the other. In terms of SEO there are really great tools about to assist in making your site easier for search engines to find your site but in the end there is a lot of time and effort involved. PPC is instantaneous when you use things like Google AdSense. All you need to do is sign up for an account and pay some money to Google. Each time your keywords are typed in your ‘add’ appears in the paid sections at the top of the page and to the right hand side. Because of the perception that it is easy many people simply opt to have a company rund an ‘add’ campaign and think little more about it. There are a lot of people out there who specialize in getting to number 1,2 or 3 even in the paid section. The one thing you must learn to calculate is your Return on Investment (RIO). Put simply if for every 1000 clicks you get how many sales do you make? Does that number of sales cover the cost (an hopefully make you a profit) of the 1000 clicks?

When it comes to how to earn on line money we still have not discussed how to drive traffic. Compared to the first two parts of the equation (Building a website and Getting found) driving traffic is still the greatest challenge of all for most people and one we will discuss in a great deal more depth.

But one thing is for sure, using technology it is now very simple to list your website with over 500 search engines automatically. What’s more the cost for a single website is less than the cost of a pair of shoes. The time savings are simply too great to contemplate ever taking on this task manually. What’s more just listing your site with that many search engines will rocket your site above the millions of website owners who don’t know about this little secret!

To earn on line money you will have to learn how to find and retain customers just like any business.