This is the third chapter of the Internet Business Ideas Guide from What Sells Online!.

Placing ads from Google Adsense lets you earn some cash from your blogs or websites. You get paid each time someone clicks on these ads. Google has an algorithm that searches through the text on your site and displays ads that are relevant to your content.

Essentially, people, small businesses or corporations who join the Google Adwords program will have their advertisements featured in websites that are enrolled in the Google Adsense program.

So, what do you need to generate profits from Google Adsense?

1. Traffic, traffic, traffic

The number of clicks on your ad correlates with website traffic. The greater the number of people visiting your website, the higher the chances will be for your ad to be clicked.

Therefore, if you want to make money with Google Adsense, you first need to work on getting your traffic up.

Using the right Search Engine Optimization techniques, Picking the Right Keywords and Finding the Right Niche are all important elements in generating traffic.

2. The Right Keywords

If you are relying on top search engine rankings for traffic, then optimizing the right niche keywords would be essential. Some popular keywords are way too competitive, and therefore you need to pick long tail keywords that isn’t too competitive, but with a substantial demand volume.

Here are some quick steps to pick the right keywords:

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A Review of Affiliate Network sites

In this third installment of Affiliate Marketing with Digital Products, I’ve decided to share my personal experience on affiliate network sites.

1. Affiliate Scout

This is a directory of affiliate networks. Basically, you should start with this if you are new to affiliate marketing, and aren’t sure about your affiliate network options.

With Affiliatescout.com, you can easily obtain lists of affiliate networks according to various categories and product types. This is an easy way to look at all available affiliate networks and explore them from one location.

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In Part 1 of this post, I focused on two major elements – how to find your niche, and how to identify profitable affiliate products to sell. I’ve also recently read a pretty interesting post by Yaro Starak on Using Paypal stores to find hot selling products.

This may be a good place to seek for affiliate product ideas. However, internet marketers also need to bear in mind that these areas may already be competitive, and they need to implement strong traffic generation strategies to obtain the same results.

How to test Affiliate Products?

The best way to know if a product sells is to test it out in the market. The good news is that you can promote it easily, quickly and for free with blogs. Personally, I like to use Blogspot.com as it’s owned by Google, which seems to give it a preference in terms of getting listed on search engines rapidly.

Here are 5 essential steps in setting up your blog for affiliate product testing:

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In this 2-part post of the Internet Business Ideas Guide, I will explore one of the most common ventures that new internet marketers go into - Affiliate Marketing. It is fairly common for new internet marketers to look at affiliates as their first possible business venture. If you have bought those self-help books along the lines of How to Make Money Online, it’s highly likely that affiliate marketing would be an area of focus. There are several reasons for this:

1. As an affiliate, you won’t have to develop your own products. This saves you time and money.
2. With affiliate products, you are able to test out a product, without incurring development costs
3. Affiliates are rewarded with huge commissions (usually between 25% and 75%)
4. Usually in digital form, affiliate products incur no inventory and are downloaded automatically once a purchase is made.
5. You are able to promote several products online at the same time.
6. You have a huge pool of affiliate products to choose from.

How to choose an affiliate product?

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If you have not heard about Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, it’s time you checked out his blog at http://www.longtail.com. In fact, there is even a PDF download from ChangeThis.com or you can purchase the book from Amazon.com.

What is the Long Tail?

The relevance of the Long Tail to selling online is strong and apparent. In a nutshell, the Internet has changed the way we buy and sell things. In essence, the dynamics of supply and demand have also changed.

Products and services that have previously faced strong barriers to entry are now sold online as niche products. Before the advent of the Internet, floor space for product display was limited. Thus, only products with proven significant demand had the opportunity to be distributed and sold.

Today, diverse personal tastes have resulted in the emergence of niche markets. The beauty of this is that demand from these niches is met by smaller online sellers. In addition, improvement in postal and courier services, have made these products available to anyone, anywhere in the world.

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After reading Darren Rowse’s How to Create a Sense of Anticipation on Your Blog , I realized that I needed to create more direction and focus for What Sells Online! Later, Yaro Starak’s How To Write Great Blog Content - The Pillar Article, has also helped in defining blog content quality.

The purpose of this blog has always been to help readers find ideas, methods and products and to sell online. This also encompasses online marketing techniques, such as finding a niche market, search engine marketing, and also promotion techniques. While these are all good, they have never really centered round a specific theme, or a series.

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If you are finding it increasingly difficult to search engine optimize your site, you may want to check out your competitors.

To do this, Google your optimized keyword and see who ranks at top ten. Then, enter their URL into the search field and look at the number of results returned. Use the following format link:website.com, to determine the number of incoming links to your competitor’s website. Substitute your competitor’s URL with yours and check out the difference in the numbers.

Incoming links

Google uses the number of relevant incoming and outgoing links as one of their criteria for search engine results ranking. Therefore, a lower number of incoming links may also be the reason why you are ranked lower. Of course, the Page Rank of these sites where the incoming links originate from also matter in search engine optimization.

What is YOUR link strategy?

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I’ve been following Caroline Middlebrook’s blog since I started What Sells Online, and I must say that she is one of the most inspiring bloggers I’ve seen online. Most importantly, I’ve learnt a lot from her posts, which greatly helped in setting me on the right track with my own online marketing efforts.

With this, I thought it was timely that I conducted an email interview with her, and post it here so that everyone can learn from her. Here’s the transcript:

1. What are your virtues that you think have made your blog successful?

In a word - Honesty. I have always spoken my mind, been open about what I am doing and about my opinons. I know I have been labelled the “honest blogger” quite a few times and I like that.

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How can we combine traditional marketing methods with online marketing strategies?

While running a search on “What to Sell Online”, I came across this post by Ray Edwards. Essentially, it highlights steps on what aspiring online marketers should do to find a product or service to sell online.

Product surveys, personal interests and data analysis are some of the methods advocated by Ray. Granted, these are all traditional marketing research techniques commonly utilized by marketing gurus. They are thoroughly effective for either 1) Large corporations with a huge marketing and distribution budget or, 2) Brick and mortar small businesses with customers within an X-mile radius. Ultimately, these are great if you are answering the “What to sell” question.

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Whilst working on optimizing our website content and incoming links, the importance of outbound links is often overlooked. However, I’ve reason to believe that the quantity and quality outbound links are one of the factors used in search engine ranking algorithm. Let me illustrate this with my own experience.

My own experience with outbound links

Having conquered search engine optimization for several niche keywords (with low traffic volume), I turned to something more challenging. I wanted to search engine optimize one of my blogs for a keyword that had greater competition and a higher traffic volume.

As this blog was initially created out of personal interest, no SEO techniques were used on the existing content. Thus, the first thing I did was to optimize the content using the techniques highlighted in Building a Niche Blog for Top Search Engine rankings, with the exception of incorporating outgoing links.

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