We have seen before some examples of merchandise that you can sell online in your very own e-commerce website. There are literally thousands of choices of niches that you can take part in. Once you have chosen what kind of items that you want to sell, now it will be time for you to actually acquire the merchandise so that you can sell it to your website‘s customers. The process here is not so difficult in itself, but you will still need to be aware of a few basic principles of how commerce operates. This will be pretty much the same thing as if you owned a physical store and were acquiring inventory. Here are some tips:

• If possible, buy locally

By locally, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your distributor must be located in the same city than you, just in the same country. This has several advantages. First of all, it will save you time. Importing products from overseas may take several weeks for your shipment to arrive in certain cases. Domestic shipments are usually much faster. Also, importing large amounts of commercial merchandise will mean that you will need to be aware of regulations regarding imports, paying the necessary customs duties, etc. Buying from a local supplier is also generally safer, as you are less likely to get ripped off than when buying internationally. Of course, there are scammers everywhere, so you would still need to be on your guard.

One disadvantage in buying from a local supplier rather than importing the goods yourself would be that the prices that you pay may be a little bit higher than when buying internationally. But you still can get very good prices depending on the quantity of merchandise that you will be ordering each month. In order to find suppliers for your merchandise, you can do a Google search or look through some online business directories.

• Choose the right supplier

You will need to be dealing with a supplier that is reliable and honest. Again, the majority of suppliers, whether domestic or foreign, will give you quality merchandise as promised, however you still need to keep your eyes open for the shady ones. Check the supplier’s reputation. If you are buying through a website such as DHGate or Alibaba, these websites have a feedback system similar to eBay, which makes it much easier to check one seller’s reputation.

If you are buying brand name merchandise, make sure that it is actually real and not a replica. This is especially true if you are buying items from a supplier that is located overseas, such as in Asia, where many counterfeit items such as clothing, electronics, etc. are being sold quite openly. Also, it is a good idea to pay with a more secure method of payment such as by credit card or Paypal, which will give you some protection in case you do not receive the items that you have ordered correctly. Avoid sending cash or using services like Western Union whenever possible.

If you are going to be building a website for your small business, then there are certain things that you definitely need to know. The purpose of a business website is to help people who are interested in your business find out more about it and then contact you to purchase a product or service if you have something that interests them. To create your business website, you have a few choices. Either you can build the site yourself, or hire a web developer to do it for you. Many small business owners will prefer to create a website by themselves, primarily due to the availability of good tools that allow a website to be built without coding, and also due to the fact that professional web developers and designers might sometimes charge more than what some people would want to pay.

When you build your site, there are certain things that you need to keep in mind. Here is some information on the whole web building process that will be useful to anyone that is creating a website for their business.

• First, Make a Plan

Before you begin building anything, it is important that you plan the overall look and feel of your website, as well as determine the kind of content that you will be placing on it. Also, you will need to determine what your website will do for your business. Will it be just a website that will present information about your business and encourage your site visitors to contact you, or will it be something a bit more advanced. If you are selling products, you could, for example, build an e-commerce site that would let people buy your stuff online, without needing to call you to place an order or to visit your location. If you offer services, then you can include an ordering system on your website as well. Planning your site is the first step in putting all the pieces together. Of course, you will be able to make changes as you go along, as well as after when your site has been put up.

• Determine What Platform Your Site Will be Based On

A “platform” in web building usually refers to a content management system that will power your site and allow you to make easy changes to it. Of course, you do not have to use one if you don’t want to. If you want to build the simplest kind of website possible, then you can simply create a static HTML website that will need to be updated manually.

But to make things easier, there are several systems that you can use. Some are general, such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, which work well with any kind of website, due to the thousands of free themes, plugins and additions to these systems that can be used. If you are going to run an e-commerce website, then there are special e-commerce platforms like Zen Cart, Magento and OS Commerce that you can use to base your site on instead. It is a good idea to learn more about these systems and what they can do for you.

When it comes to online advertising options for a local business, there are plenty of choices that are open to you. Some of these options are completely free, while others will require you to spend some money and thus create an advertising budget. But one of the advantages of online advertising is that it is not as expensive as other methods, such as television or radio ads. It is also possible to very specifically target the audience that you want to reach, so that only people who have a high chance of being interested in your products end up seeing your ads.

One of these options is media buying. Now, many of you who are not familiar with online marketing terms may wonder what media buying consists of. Basically, it means that you will be buying advertising space on another website and paying for these ads according to different business models. Here are the ones that are the most commonly used in the media buying industry:

Fixed fee – You pay a certain fee to have your ad displayed in a permanent position on a certain website. This fee could be for a day, a week, two weeks, a month or even longer. Usually with this option, your ad is not rotated, meaning that it stays in one spot on the website for the entire time that you have paid for it. The costs will vary depending on the ad location as well as the traffic that the site receives. As such, the price for a daily ad on a site with a moderate amount of traffic could be as little as $4, while one on a site receiving tens of thousands of daily visitors (such as a popular news site in your city), a daily ad could cost you $1000 or even more.

CPM (or cost per views) – Here, you will pay a certain amount for every thousand visitors that view your ad. Every view is counted, so you will pay the same amount whether a visitor clicks your ad to go to your site or not. Once again, the amount you pay will vary on the popularity of your site, as well as the location of the site where your ad is put in. Ads which are displayed in prominent parts of the site tend to cost more.

CPC (or Cost Per Click) – This is similar to pay per click (or PPC) ads that you see on Google sponsored results. You will pay an amount for each person that clicks on your ad and is thus redirected to your site. Costs will vary depending on the site where you are advertising. They can be as low as $0.01/click up to $1.00 or more for each click you receive.

Tomorrow, we will explore more details about online media buying, such as which websites you can advertise on and the types of ads that you can create for your business.

If you think you have what it takes to become an online freelance writer and want to get started, then read on. I will give you some advice on how to get started and to build up your income over time.

The first thing that you need to take into consideration when you get started is the amount of money that you will make. There are a few products out there which claim that you can make $150 – $300 or more each day by writing online. This claim is similar to those of websites that claim you can make $500 a day pushing affiliate products on Google Adwords. It is not a lie: yes, you CAN make these amounts. And yes, some people do make several hundreds of dollars each day writing online. However, it would be VERY rare for you to make such amounts from the beginning, unless you already have significant experience in writing (say in journalism or magazines) and have contacts that can get you high paying jobs. So don’t quit your day job just yet.

Much like in many “creative” industries such as cinema and graphic design, those who start out usually get the lower paying jobs. But how do you get some jobs to start your career?

Well, you basically have four choices where to look for work: online writing sites, internet marketing forums, freelancing sites and other sources such as classified ads. Each of them have some unique advantages and drawbacks. Let’s have a look:

Online writing sites.

These are places such as Textbroker, Helium and Constant Content. The way they operate is relatively simple: some allow you to accept orders from customers and start writing, while on others you will write articles about certain topics and wait until a client purchases them. Depending on the site that you work with, you may be required to either submit samples of your previous work or pass a writing test.

Advantages:

• Many of these sites offer a lot of work and writing on various niches.
• In most cases you will be sure that you will be paid as long as the work is done correctly.
• May allow you to get repeat orders from the same client.
• The pay per article is relatively decent when compared to other places to get work. However, bear in mind that this means you must submit articles which are always of the best quality.

Disadvantages:

• Payment is usually not immediate. Certain sites pay you every two weeks, some once a month.
• Could be difficult to get accepted if you do not have previous writing experience, as some places ask you to submit a CV along with a portfolio of your previous work.

Check back tomorrow for more information on where you can find online article writing work, as well as some advice on how you can maximize the amount of your earnings in a short amount of time.

Ever wondered if there was an easy way to make money with CPA email submit offers? Don’t worry, there are some ways that you can make a decent amount of money promoting these types of offers. At first, it may seem quite difficult to earn some cash from an offer that pays $1 to $2 per lead. The key here is to get traffic to the offer which is inexpensive and converts well enough for you to make a decent amount of cash. This is possible to do by making use of pay per click advertising services such as Google Adwords.

Now normally, running these offers and sending traffic straight to the merchant would not be so profitable. You will face rather stiff competition and the price per click would almost guarantee that you lose money. But there is a way to change all of that. It’s called the “poll” method.

The first thing you need to do is to find a topic that is hot in searches and is trending right now. Issues that are in the news right now are very good choices. Google has a service called Google Trends (trends.google.com), which allows you to see the current hot searches. You would then pick some topics and run their related keywords through the Google Adwords keywords tool. This will allow you to find the one with the least expensive keywords.

Now here’s the main part of the method. In order to promote the offer, we will create a poll. That’s right, a one question survey. For example, if there is an election going on in the United States, the poll could simply be something like “Who will become the next president? Candidate A or Candidate B? Vote now to get a [Insert freebie promoted in email submit offer]” Once the user votes, they are told to enter their email on the next page and redirected to the email submit offer.

Now, how do you design the poll page? You have two options. Either you can get a poll script that is made for this purpose. There are plenty which are floating around for download in some internet marketing forums. They are relatively easy to install if you have some experience with running scripts on your web server.

If not, then simply design a page with the options and two radio buttons (the round options that let the user make a selection) which actually do nothing and a “click here to vote” button which goes to the next page telling the user to enter his email on the offer page, and then automatically redirects him to that offer. There’s nothing really wrong about that, since, after all, you’re not here to collect statistics, but to make money from the email submits. Technically, the poll is only used to draw the user’s attention and nothing more.

Website flipping was very popular a year ago but recently it is not as popular mainly because the market got saturated with simple sites being sold for $50 when a year ago you could sell them for $200.  I still believe you can make money from flipping websites and ive created this plan to help you make a living flipping websites

Step 1 – Find A Niche

I’ve personally found selling clickbank products to be very successful as alot of people like to buy digital products online.  Have a search on clickbank for a product you would like to sell that is popular within the market place.  Look to see their gravity rating, the percentage in refunds they have had, this is a good indicator to see if the product has been successful.  Also check to see how good their sales page is also.

Step 2 Keyword Research

I like to use the free tool from Google – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to look for keywords related to my niche that i want to promote.  Say for example you want to target the keyword ”loose weight fast” put that into the Google keyword tool and see what the competition is like.  You may wish to use another keyword similar that has less competition.

Once you have found the keyword you would like to use, pick 10 -15 long tail keywords and start writing some articles with these keywords you have chosen.

Step 3 – Choosing a domain

When picking your domain its a good idea to have your main keyword within your domain as this will greatly improve your chances of being on page 1 of Google (e.g looseweightfast.com)  if .com is taken the next best choices are either .net or .org anything else is no good.

Step 4 – Create your website

I would highly recommend setting your website using wordpress as these websites rank very very well in Google.  Google seems to love wordpress because of its structure and how well they are optimised for search engines.

Add some keyword rich articles to your website with some reviews on the clickbank product you are promoting.  If you can also make a video and upload it to youtube and embed this into your website.  Google likes websites with videos on and also readers also like videos about the product they are buying so this will also help your conversions.

Also add a contact page, about me page, privacy page as these also improve your rankings, this is something that Google looks for.

Step 5 – Promote your website

Once you have finished your website you now need to start promoting your website.  Submit around 10 articles to article directories like Ezinearticles with rich keyword content articles with anchor text links pointing back to your website.  Submit your website to all the major social networking websites.  You can use socialmarker.com for this.

You can also join forums related to your niche and write a number of posts with your anchor text link in your signature, this is a great way to drive traffic to your website and increases your serps.  Also blog commenting on blogs similar to your niche is another good method.

Create a squido lens, hubpage and wiki page to provide more backlinks for your website.

Step 6 – Site maintenance

For the next few days monitor the site everyday, checking traffic, sales, average time a user stays on your site, which pages they are exiting from.  Then you can make any adjustments changes or additions to improve.  If its still slow after a couple of weeks i would start submitting more articles to ezine, more blog commenting on other blogs and forum posting to build up your backlinks.

Step 7 – Sell your website

After 3 – 6 months you are now ready to sell your website if it has steady traffic going to it, steady flow of sales every month.  Great websites to sell your website are Digital Point or Flippa.  Generally you can sell your website for 6-10 times your monthly income. So for example if your website is making on average $200 a month from clickbank and adsense you could sell for $2,000.  Not bad for a weeks work.  You can create a new site every week and leave it on autopilot just monitoring its stats and making adjustments here and there.

If you keep your website for longer say for over a year and kept working on building up the backlinks and adding content which increased your monthly sales then you will be able to sell it for even more money.  It all depends how quickly you want to flip your website.