How To Use Blogger to Make Money or Can You Really Make Money Online?

I would love to be able to tell you that I am making thousands of dollars every day as an affiliate marketer, but I'd be lying to you, so I'm not going to tell you that.  I'm new in the game, and I'm trying to get it all figured out.  I thought that writing out what I know and what I think I know in a blog might help me really get to the core of the matter, and maybe some of it will help you too.

Nowadays, everybody wants to get into the game and figure out how to make money online.  Unfortunately, most people want to find some magic formula that will allow them to make tons of money doing little or no work.  Does that magic formula exist?  Well, to be perfectly honest with you, I don't know.  Everybody has different opinions on how to make money online.  You can have your own website, but if you go that route, the only way you are going to make money is if you get lots of people to visit your website, and that SOUNDS a lot easier than it really is, especially if you are marketing products in a highly competitive niche.  Plus, if you want to get ranked high in Google Search, you have to make sure that all of your items have a sufficient amount of unique identifiers to meet Google's criteria.  I don't suppose there is anything wrong with that, but if you rely on drop-shippers, such as I was doing, then you also have to worry about whether your drop-shipper is giving you the proper information to meet Google's critera too.  That doesn't always work out.

Then of course, there is E-Bay and Amazon, but in either case you have to pay listing fees and/or seller fees.  There's nothing wrong with that either, as long as your items are profitable enough to make a sufficient margin.  If you have products that are unique enough that everybody on the block isn't going to start selling the same stuff, and start pricing wars with you, then you might make out OK.  There are lots of people that are earnng good incomes on both E-Bay and Amazon, but they have the right stuff, and the right price, at the right time.  I had some success on E-Bay, but not enough to produce the kind of income that would make a differnce in my lifestyle.

So, I started to search around for options that cost ZERO money to earn some money.  I found a few potential ideas that seemed to have some promise, but might take some time to actually see any meaningful returns.  On of those options is called "affiliate marketing."  For those who have never heard of affiliate marketing, this is a case in which a company will pay and "affiliate" a commission for promoting their products, if a sale comes as a result of the affiliates efforts to promote those products.  Almost every large company has an offer for affiliates, but in most cases there first thing a person needs is to have their own website.  That's great if you can find a host that doesn't cost an arm and a leg to host your website.  I was fortunate enough to find one that very cost effective and offers several options for shopping cart platforms.

Of course, you can also promote products through Blogs, such as this.  But, again the key to making any money is to get traffic to your site, and as I said before that is not as easy as it sounds.  So, found this site that says they can help you get enough traffic to earn $4000.00 per week.  "Want to make $4000/wk online.  Click Here for Details!!!"  This site claims, "No Selling, No Blogging,No Article Marketing,  No SEO, No PPC, No WebSite, etc."  Sounds great, but I have to admit, I haven't tried their system.  I would like for someone else to check out here, and maybe if you've used the system you can tell me if it really works or not.

Probably most people who read this would know what these acronyms stand for, but just in case not, SEO means "Search Engine Optimization" and PPC means "Pay Per Click."  PPC is exactly what it sounds like.  Someone clicks on your ad, and you pay, whether they buy or not.  Good for sites that are already making a lot of money.  Bad for sites that aren't.  SEO is important because in order to get a good page ranking from Google Search, a site has to have good keywords.  So, one might ask, "How does one know what are good keywords?"  Good keywords are ones that people are searching for on Google.  The best keywords are ones that A LOT of people are searching for but have low competition. In other words, they are keywords that aren't being heavily used by other sites on Google Search.  To find good keywords, one can use Google AdWords keyword tool.

So, here is an example of the best keywords from the output from Google Adwords for THIS particular Blog.  The term "How to Blog" has a global monthly search of 151,000,000 but it is a low competition keyword and local monthly searches (USA) of 24,900,000.  In order to take advantage of this search term, it should appear within the first 160 words in the Blog or webiste and within the first 70 words of anything close to the title.  But, I'm not really writing about Blogging here (well, maybe just a little bit.)  This is more or less a brief insight into what affiliate marketing is, for those who don't know already.

There are several biggies that offer affiliate deals, among them being Amazon, E-Bay, Wal-Mart, , and Sears, just to name a few.  And their are many other companies that offer affiliate deals from MANY companies, such as Commission Junction, LinkShare, ClickBank, and OfferVault to name a few.  In my other Blogs, you will see products listed for sale from all of these, and I've had success in making a little bit of money from them, along with the AdSense ads that you will see in my blogs.  Not a lot of money, but you have to start somewhere I guess.

One of the other ways that many people have suggested they have found success in earning affiliate commissions is by writing product reviews in the Blogs.  But, again, people have to actually visit the site and read the reviews, and enough people have to visit the site to get some sales from it.  If you pick a Niche that everybody and their brother is promoting products in, your chances of making any money are pretty slim.  And, finding something that is unique, that everyone wants, but no one knows about..........................well, that's no easy task either.  You know, I haven't really found the secret to success yet, but I'm early in the game.  An extra $1000.00/month would make a incredible difference in being able to pay all the bills every month and actually have a little bit left over for a change.  So, I'm still on my quest to find the "Holy Grail" as it were. Anyone who wants to share any "no cost" or "low cost" super secrets that they are using in their affiliate marketing game, I'm ready willing and able to give a listen (or read, I should say.)   Check back here for updates in the future.