How To Make Money Through Your Ecommerce Website

June 16th, 2010 - 

If you are in the process of setting up an eCommerce website, or of you are interested in increasing the revenue and profits from your eCommerce website, there are some suggestions that you need to keep in mind. There are some helpful tips that will show you how to make money through your eCommerce website both in the short and the long term. This article is designed to provide you with an important overview of tips and pointers that will show you how to make money through your eCommerce website.

Of course, at the heart of understanding how to make money through your eCommerce website is the need for traffic. You absolutely must have high traffic to your eCommerce website if you expect to generate revenue and profit from that venue.

Competition on the Net today is fierce. Therefore, when it comes to learning how to make money through your eCommerce website you need to employ all of the various effective techniques that have been demonstrated successful at increasing traffic to eCommerce website venues. Chief amongst these techniques and practices is search engine optimization or SEO.

In order to master the ability to understand how to make money through your eCommerce website you will want to make sure that the design and development of your eCommerce website results in a venue that is attractive. Consumers from all walks of life naturally are drawn to stores in the brick and mortar world that are nicely decorated and appointed. Similarly, consumers in cyberspace are drawn to those websites that are professional in their appearance, that are in a couple of words “nice looking.”

Another simple and yet vitally important factor that you need to keep in mind when it comes to how to make money through your eCommerce website is ensure that your eCommerce website completely is user friendly. While it is all well and good to draw traffic to your website, if a potential customer or client finds your website difficult to use, other websites are only a mouse click away.

Yet another factor that you must keep at the top of the list when it comes to how to make money through your eCommerce website is to provide excellent customer service. More business is lost due to less than adequate customer service (as well as technical support as applicable) than anything else when it comes to eCommerce website operations.

How To Make Money Online By Someone Who Never Has.

May 13th, 2010 - 

How To Make Money Online By Someone Who Never Has. D’oh!

My brother emailed me the other day and asked whether an infomercial web page, you know the ones that scroll forever, was a valuable purchase. I checked out the page and knew instantly it wasn’t. How did I know?

The “Be an Instant Millionaire” Title

If I see titles containing phrases like these I know it’s probably a con:

Adsense Riches
The reality is that 1% of Internet sites make money with Adsense. 99% of that 1% is Google.

Massive Passive Income Streams
For the seller, maybe, but then why would they be selling their own product? No one sells a money making business to individuals who come across their web pages by chance. If they did they would dilute their own earnings potential; meaning they make more money selling the dud system, product or service, than they do utilizing it themselves.

How To Make Mini Sites
Mini sites never make more than $1 per week. So youll need around 2000 of them to make a good living.

100+ Adsense Ready Web Sites
Google penalizes duplicate content and keyword enhanced sites with little content.

Set-and-forget
Set and forget what? That you paid $97 for a dead site or product? The web is ever evolving and anything set and forgot last year is history.

Massive Amounts Of Laser-Targeted Traffic
Not without massive amounts of organic search engine optimization, which takes massive amounts of time and expertise, or bucket loads of burning cash on pay per click advertising campaigns.

Instant Money Affiliate
There is no such thing as instant money from affiliate programs. Even the most dedicated affiliate marketing companies (let alone individuals) make money from around only twenty top affiliate programs. Most of those are from Commission Junction.

Skyrocket Your Adsense
With duplicate content, phony cloaking and black hat tricks? Even a dedicated SEO cannot manufacture traffic for a cheap site. People need a reason to come to your site and laser targeted ad campaigns do not work without spending money. If they promise you 5000 or 10000 etc visitors a day its probably a lie. They can easily ping your site from a cloaked URL to make it look like you received a visitor.

Cracked The Adsense Code
Yes, Google cracked it! Google owns the code and are the only company that makes 99% of their profits from the Adwords/Adsense Empire. Even the top social bookmarking sites would have no value if it were not for their database of users.

Instantly Build Your Own Google Adsense Empire
There is no such thing as instantly’ in relation to business, let alone online business.

Killer Sales Copy
A good copywriter will earn thousands of dollars. I don’t know of a single way to generate killer sales copy for less. Duplicated killer sales copy is useless.

Instant Commission Collectors
True, 5% of $1 = 5c x 10 000 visitors per month (if you’re good) = $500/month. What they mean is Instantly work every single day from 9am to 10pm to get 10 000 people to visit your web site for $500. What an excellent deal!

Paid Surveys
If you sit at your PC every single day for a week you can make around $200. Just about enough to cover your electricity, broadband connection, and payments on your Notebook.

Buy/Sell Domain Names
All the really great domains have gone. Big companies specialize in this sort of activity and have long thought of all the obvious domain names. But let’s say you know of a new movie being released titled conmeaffiliates. If you buy the domain name conmeaffiliates.com it will be valueless within a few months. Unless of course the movie is a hit, in which case the people who make money out of it will be the producers, not you.

Make over $3000 per week doing nothing
If there’s nothing to do then no money will be earned. Simple rule of life isn’t it?

Become a Millionaire
I know of no individual, though there may be a handful, who became a millionaire by buying an ebook or signing up to an affiliate marketing program. The people who make money are the ones that show YOU how to make money by conning you into the belief that it’s possible. Of the millions of ebooks created, only a handful has made any significant amount of money and none of them have made millions from a single book. There have been a few successes here and there but it’s the tiniest fraction of people who attempt it. You have to be honest with yourself about this.

Secret Decoded or Why am I revealing my secrets
There are no secrets. You can Google anything.

Instant Niche Web Site
Every single niche worth creating has already been created. Most of the sub-niches have also been created. It’s nearly impossible to compete with the top blogs. And if you wanted to give it a go there would be nothing instant about it. You’re going to be working hard at creating rich content, or your blog will die.

Converting All The Way To The Bank
Please take your bank manager your web traffic statistics and put a dollar sign before each line. You still won’t get a loan.

Never work again
Unless it’s a lotto site, by chance.

Give up your day job
Yes yes yes, so you can work all night, ignore your family, become addicted to getting traffic for your white elephant, and believe believe believe you are going to make it.

Money Machine
You really need to be quite a clever programmer to make a money machine, to a point. If you do not add new features, keep up with competitors, or build links every day, you’re out. If you are considering buying a so called money machine make sure you research who made money with it. Your search could take around 12 seconds.

Prints Non-Stop Profits For You Automatically
My $100 colour printer can print low-quality non-stop counterfeit.

Now With Google/Yahoo Tracking!
Tracking is free. It always has been, and always will be. If an infomercial offers you tracking, dont believe their statistics. Get your own free tracking.

Big Money Maker
No web site of an individual is a big money maker unless the individual is a programmer, has special skill that can be sold as a service, or has something unique to offer, or say in a Blog. Money making programs such as PPC-direct-to-affiliate-landing-pages, require truck loads of cash to make around 8%. And that’s after generating literally hundreds of thousands of long tail keywords. Serious keyword research software will cost you around $20 000. Affiliate programs can change their policies in an instant without notifying you of your impending loss.

The Lazy Way!
There is no such thing as a free lunch.

The Infomercial Web Page as a ’sales tool’ is untrustworthy.
Just look out for the six signs of influence to gauge how much selling is involved in getting you to buy:

1. Reciprocation, the old give and take
2. Commitment and Consistency, the old I’m here to help you
3. Social Proof, the old recommendations by more losers
4. Liking, the old photo and signature and boring rags to riches story
5. Authority, the old doctor said’ so trick
6. Scarcity, there is no such thing in a world of abundance

Staggering Statistics and Earnings Graphic
Whenever an infomercial web page produces a graphic of earnings statistics it’s probably not true. If these people were making money from the thing they are selling to you then there’s no money in the product itself. Otherwise they would be focused on utilizing the widget themselves.

If you ever see the Do You Want Proof? question followed by an earnings graphic, consider the implication of clicking the Back button in your browser. Anyone can use Excel and Photoshop. What kind of proof is a graphic? I would insist the seller send their complete bank statement to me before I buy and see what sort of response I get.

The Time Limited Offer
Date stamped web pages that show today’s date are probably a lie. Come back tomorrow to reveal the truth. Watch out for date stamped pages that appear to be around 3 6 weeks ago. They too can be a con. The developer may have simply adjusted the JavaScript code to display today’s date minus some days or weeks. Anyway, 99% of these products are digital and for obvious reasons there is no time limit.

Quick – Only 193 left before we sell this one out!
The seller will most likely create a new template (which is really no better than the previous one, for they are all always so simplistic) and slap it on their old product. Then they change some landing page design elements, or the domain and product name, and set off again in search of new suckers.

Too Many Recommendations
95% of those recommendations are from Partner affiliates i.e. other Partners selling other junk. The other 5% are usually the hipnotees.

The MASSIVE CENTERED UPPER CASE TITLE WITH HIGHLIGHTED BLACK AND RED WITH EQUALY HORRIBLE YELLOW BACKGROUND is a dead giveaway.

The Email Address Request
If you have to give your email address away to a stranger to get to page two you already know it’s a con. They’re using the web page as email bait. They don’t care about the product. They want your email so they can send you offers using their Autoresponder system. Their Autoresponders are laden with scheduled email offers. It gets worse. If you opt out of their email subscription they have confirmed your email address is real and you are using it.

The Phony Free Giveaways Valued at Hundreds of Dollars
None of these so called giveaways are worth anything. Affiliate marketers can easily acquire White Label Rights (the right to use their own branding) on junk ebooks. There are literally thousands available. Also, affiliate marketers will partner together and share digital products on each other’s web sites.

Pictures of the site owners Ferrari, mansion, jet, boat, and the cartoon of a man with US$ in hand, are all a lie.

The Adsense Con
The only people who make money out of Adsense are those that work tirelessly every single day to add value to the web through meaningful and in-depth web pages and sites. These potentially profitable sites are high profile blogs, some top article directories, and industry specific, niche, or vertical forums.

Sites that make worthwhile money from Adsense will probably:

be rated in the top 25 000 on http://Alexa.com
receive over 10 000 unique visitors per day > 30 000 page views
be social media hubs or portals with massive databases of users
have quality SEO with extensive quality inbound link networks
add value to a product or service greatly in demand
be MP3, software download, or other digital media hubs
be Google

Brother, please apply my points above to every web-infomercial landing page you come across. Alternatively, if you’re feeling charitable, just send me the $97. You know I’ll never pay you back but you will feel a lot better than being ripped off by a stranger.

Lots of love,
Your brother

How Alan’s Website Could Easily Make More Money

November 24th, 2009 - 

My Australian friend, Alan, recently got in touch for advice on how to make more money from his recently set up website. Alan is into natural health treatments, so his simplehealthmaintenance.com website is one that offers natural solutions to health problems.

Alan asked for my advice as to how to monetize this new site, knowing that I have had success with Google Adsense.

First off, Alan needs to consider whether sales are his primary objective. If so, the addition of Adsense to the site, whilst bringing in extra income, might reduce potential sales.

Adding Adsense to his site would be a quick & easy way to make money. I suggested a horizontal Adsense link, just below the main navigation bar which runs across his index or home page. This would look natural and looks like part of the website navigation.

Also, the addition of a Google skyscraper unit on the right of his page would add value to the site, and also increase his income, but without detracting from his primary objective of sales.

Now, Alan is an expert on health, but not so good at search engine optimization. His heading for the page of Simple health treatments by non-invasive electronic acupuncture may explain what the page is about, but it isn’t going to get him hordes of traffic from the search engines – no-one is looking for either simple health treatments or non-invasive electronic acupuncture! Zoom along to Overture and check out their keyword selector tool in the resource centre if you want to see just what it is that people are searching for.

I suggested to Alan that he look at which words which people were searching for. Although he is happy to buy traffic for the site, using the pay per click engines (e.g. Adwords & Overture). This makes it easy to get a top search engine ranking for particular words or phrases (known as keywords) but can prove an expensive way of getting traffic.

Improving his natural search engine rankings, so that people found his site when typing in the keywords, would reduce Alan’s costs and increase his profit margins considerably.

This is relatively easy to do, and in fact I ran this for Alan myself using Wordtracker. This is a handy piece of software which allows you to look at the supply and demand of particular keywords and spot gaps in the market, also known as niches.

In this case, just one of the keywords which came up as in high demand but low supply was pain management with acupuncture. Alan would do well to either use these keywords as part of his homepage or to create a new page with this title and heading, together with suitable webcopy.

By putting these keywords at the beginning and end of a new page of copy, very soon this will start to get ranked well by the search engines and receive visitors who arrive for free!

One other easy suggestion for Alan to implement, since he is also a writer, is to write a couple of articles on the subject of natural healing and acupuncture and to submit them to a few of the Article Directories, such as Ezine Articles and iSnare. This is a effective and natural way to get traffic to your site with minimum effort.

Watch out for your profit margins Alan – they’ll be going way up – just as you implement these few simple changes!

For our free course on making money with your own home based internet business,
visit How to set up your own online business.

This article was submitted by Jen Carter, the creator of the How to Earn a Million Dollars website.