Business blog

posted by lkcheng on May 20

Owing a home based business is a dream of a lot of people. The home entrepreneurs enjoy the benefits of working at their own hours without a boss and high income potential. But, many people aren’t dared to start a business at home. They afraid that they don’t have the available fund to start and launch their business or they worry that if their business doesn’t work as expected, no income will come in to support their living.

There is a good solution for this situation, which is affiliate marketing. It is a type of Internet home business requiring minimal capital to begin. You only need a computer, broadband Internet access and one to two hundreds dollars to get started. There is no stock and inventory investment needed. You don’t keep any stock, so no products storage space is necessary.

Affiliate marketing works pretty simple. You first join an affiliate program, then market the products or services of the program on the Internet, when an Internet users purchase a product through your affiliate or referral link, you’ll earn an affiliate commission.

As an affiliate, you main task is to promote and market the affiliate products or services of the merchant that you are affiliated with. You will put in effort in marketing your affiliate products on the Internet and hope to refer as many cash buyers as possible to your merchant so that you can make the most from affiliate marketing.

To get in to affiliate marketing business, the first thing you have to do is find a profitable niche market you want to focus on. Think about your interest, experience and area of expertise, these things can help you choose which niche market is right for you. You should pick a niche that you are passionate about. For example, if you are passionate about online games, then you may choose online game as the niche for your affiliate marketing.

After you make up your mind on what niche to focus on, you may proceed to conduct market research to determine whether there is any money can be made in your selected niche. There is a free advanced software called Hexatrack that can help you a lot in finding a profitable niche market. By just typing in a few keywords related to your niche into Hexatrack, you will know whether it is profitable.

Once you have finished researching your niche and found out it is profitable niche you can focus on, it is time to look for the affiliate programs of your niche market. If your niche is online game, then you should search for affiliate programs that sell online games. One of the best ways to find affiliate programs is search through an affiliate network. Here are a few of the well known affiliate networks:

Commission Junction
Clickbank.com
Shareasale.com

Join one or two programs at the beginning. You will not know which one works for you until you test and experiment these programs.

There is really not much risk involved in affiliate marketing as the startup cost needed is little. If you have been wanted to start a home based business, give affiliate marketing a try.

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Interested to learn more home based business? Check out Alan Liew’s home based business blog for useful information and tips.

posted by lkcheng on May 20

Google AdSense is a simple method for webmaster and bloggers to make money online. There are so many webmasters and bloggers want to use AdSense for their website and blogs simply because it works. If you have a new site or blog, AdSense is the first money making program you should test it out.

Getting started with AdSense involves a few simple steps. When you have your first site launched on the Internet, you are ready to apply to become an AdSense publisher. Google will review your site and approve it within few days. If Google reject your application, they will give you the reason. Once your edit your site accordingly, you can re-apply again for an AdSense account.

Once your account approved, you can start signing in and generating your AdSense code that you can copy and past it into your website. After you have done that, you can review your site and you’ll see new AdSense ads appear on your site. Whenever a visitor clicks one of your AdSense ads, you’ll make between $0.10 to $0.50 depend on the subjects and keywords of your site.

You may think that $0.10 to $0.50 per click is just too little for you to continue using AdSense. But, don’t underestimate it. If can generate a great amount of visitors for your site, then you can generate a lot of AdSense clicks. When you add up all these click revenue, you’ll see a nice figure.

Optimization is important to make money with AdSense. You got to know what are the locations in your website are good for generating AdSense ad revenue. Your AdSense ads shouldn’t be placed at the footer of your site as no one will notice and click them. Content area is proven to be a good location for producing high click-through rate. So you should place your AdSense ads within your content area using the 368 x 268 ad Large Rectangle format.

You can add an AdSense ad unit in the sidebar of your website also. Sidebars generally don’t generate high CTR, but since you are allowed to place three AdSense ad units in every page, so add one unit on the sidebar could increase your AdSense revenue.

You are going to need to spend some time to test different locations for your AdSense ads. Keep on testing, you will find out which areas of your website are best for generating AdSense income for you.

The forums and blogs are sharing AdSense optimization techniques frequently, so you may check out these community websites to read and gain more tips and information about AdSense.

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AdSense is just one of the ways to make money online. If you want to know more methods of profiting online, check out Alan Liew’s blog.