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“…if the just man is good at keeping money, he is good at stealing it.” Plato, Book I, The Republic

Pretend for a minute that you want to create an online scam that will line your pockets with a significant amount of money. How would you create this scam? Who would you target? Would you involve your friends or keep it to yourself? And perhaps most importantly, when would you end it; i.e., take the money and run?

I’ve Tried That is a site dedicated to spotting and reporting online scams. Since 2007, the scams that have been featured on this site include everything from classic Nigerian “you’ve got cash!” emails to data entry to even colon cleansing (complete with a photo you don’t want to see while eating). As different as all these scams are, however, they all take advantage of one or more of the following six elements to lure you in:

User ignorance: Faecal encephalopathy is a serious medical condition that may be affecting you and your family members, but our associates have the cure.

Voice of authority/experience: Dr. Homer J. Simpson, who studied nuclear engineering at the prestigious Saint Regis University, has worked at a nuclear power plant for 10+ years. He is nationally recognized as a nuclear power plant safety expert.

Emotional appeal: Still stuck in that low-paying job while your boss buys a flashier car every year? What would you do with an extra $1,000 every week? Our system helps you make money while you sleep! “Stick it to the man” and quit your job today!

A hint of truth: Smoking leads to almost all cases of small cell lung cancer (SCLC), a very aggressive form of cancer. Luckily, our retinoic acid products inhibit lung cancer, allowing you to smoke without worry.

Exclusivity: It took years for our senior officers to learn how this revolutionary system operates. However, its secrets can now be yours when you join our VIP members-only club.

Limited time: Act now while supplies last. We have only 30 cases of iron pyrite jewelry on hand. Operators are standing by.

Given the information provided above as well as my constant exposure to all kinds of online scams, I’ve come up with the following five scam ideas and how they could be perpetrated. Keep in mind that this information is only theoretical and is meant to help you learn about and spot scams.

Do not attempt the following ideas at home!

1. The new and improved Nigerian email scam.

Send people emails giving them a sob story about some person who is orphaned and can’t withdraw his/her money- but add a contemporary twist. For example, make a plea for a young girl who is being held against her wishes by the Taliban and can’t withdraw the huge sum of money she has inherited in the U.K.- money that would help free her. Or, decry a dog slaughter operation here in the U.S. that would be instantly shut down if some groups could just gain access to their locked funds.

The possibilities are endless- and someone is bound to bite. Once you accumulate a few interested parties, have them forward you money for bogus expenses like taxes, processing costs, legal fees, etc. At some point, you might even gain access to a bank account or the personal information of your email recipients. Drain those accounts and/or steal identities.

2. Fake services company.

Create and purchase a domain name that resembles a high ranking services site. For example, Seomoz.org is a rather well-established SEO services company. Working off of this site, you could create the domain name Seomoz.org/business. This allows your site to be easily found online and establishes credibility. Then, you start emailing small business websites and offering them a service package for only $499/year. Be sure to have the business click only on a special “discount” link that you provide through your website or email correspondence.

Once you collect a sufficient number of Paypal payments, transfer all assets to a bank account created especially for this purpose (using someone else’s personal information that was hopefully gained from scam #1). Sit on your bogus website for a month, sending out periodic emails to your “clients” asking for specs about their websites (e.g., what keywords they want to be ranked for) and other filler newsletters and company announcements. After that month has passed, close down your website and bank account.

3. Compromised account scam.

Send emails to people notifying them that their Paypal, eBay, Amazon etc. account has been compromised and the company needs to re-verify critical account records like the person’s name, log in information, password, etc. The few emails that come back to you with this pertinent information will be worth their weight in gold.

Alternately, if you have some programming skills, create a spyware link that leads the user to a fake account site resembling what would be seen on Paypal, eBay, Amazon, etc. On this site, the user inputs all his/her personal information and transmits it to you. In such a case, you would gain valuable information and be able to install a spyware program on the user’s computer, enabling you to monitor all his/her future keystrokes.

4. Sell a bogus product.

Create a fake product and sell it online. Some examples include diet patches/wraps, miracle creams and nutritional supplements. Making such products at home is easy and all you need is a merchant account that accepts credit cards. Make the refund time at least 6 months or longer, thus lulling customers into putting aside their purchase receipt and eventually forgetting about it or losing it. Testimonials and referrals can be gathered from your friends.

You could even go all out and schedule a webinar or seminar where you hand-pick audience members for questions or praise about your product- audience members that just happen to be your friends. Making and selling a fake product is perhaps one of the easiest scams to perpetrate because many individuals will actually benefit from the product thanks to the placebo effect (i.e., improvement in health through simple belief that the product is working).

5. Sell a bogus product- and create an MLM around it.

Why make money on a bogus product alone when you can also make money from member recruits? Create your own multi-level marketing scheme by recruiting people to buy and sell your product directly. Use your friends for testimonials about how this product and business changed their lives. Your friends can also be used as downline (customer) decoys so that the MLM recruits start making a little money and keep buying bulk product from you.

Learn How to Make Legitimate Money Online Instead

Sure, the allure of a windfall of cash at no work is enticing, but there are much better ways to spend your time. I’ve developed a free step-by-step plan of action that will help you build a real business online. You’ll learn the ins-and-outs of setting up real streams of income that don’t come from deceiving others. Best of all, our guide is absolutely free.

The Bottom Line

In summary, always remember that scammers rely on your vulnerabilities (e.g., ignorance, lack of time) and vices (e.g., greed, laziness) to make money. Before clicking on a web link or providing any personal information, do your homework or call the company directly. Install a spyware/malware protection program on your computer as well. Limit what you reveal online while at a publicly used computer. In short, being vigilant and aware of what scammers might do online protects you from losing your money, time and personal information.

Oh, and don’t create your own online scam.

Content marketing is huge right now, but does it work for you?

Just writing and writing and writing can work, eventually. However, it’s much better to apply tested and proven methods to your writing.

In other words don’t just write instead write copy!

I was at a conference recently and I attended a talk by Joost de Valk of Yoast SEO fame.

His talk was all about tuning your content with some very easy tips, to make the writing stand out.

Of course, his aim was to make you use his Yoast SEO plugin which now offers a feature that point out your errors.

I want to teach you these ideas today, with little bit more of an in depth explanation to each, as well as some extra tips for taking your writing to the next level.

The basics of copywriting

What Joost was proposing isn’t rocket science, neither is it anything new. That being said, they are easy to implement and will improve your writing.

Have a structure

The absolute first thing you need to do is have a structure in place. Having a basic outline, just a list of subheadings for example can help you focus your article.

You could also use a list of ideas or topics you want to talk about, so you can see how they flow together.

Use clear paragraphs

Paragraphs should be short, 2 or 3 sentences is a great paragraph length. Any longer and they become a wall of text.

As well, each paragraph should start with an idea. The following sentences should expand upon that idea.

Have clear headings

As an internet marketer you should know that clear headings are important. When done correctly just reading the clear headings can tell some the story, if in brief.

Examine your sentence structure

Wordy sentences that go on and on, without really coming to an end that just keep going and don’t really get to the point, all the while going from idea to idea and maybe even changing topic to dogs and how cool they are becomes really annoying to any reader.

See what I did there?

Keep your sentences short and to the point. If you don’t your readers will quickly become tired of your writing and redo their Google search. Ideally sentences should be 20 words or less.

Use simple words

I am terrible at this as I love using a wide vocabulary.

If you’re writing prose, using interesting and underused words is great. Using those sort of words for copywriting is a bad idea.

Keep your words simple, and ideally with a short syllable count: 3-4 max.

I’m not saying you should dumb down content, that’s possible the worst thing you can do. Instead just use words that convey the point clearly and simply.

Remove fluffy and filler content and words. Examine the sentence and think, do I really need this word? Can the sentence work without it?

The Passive Voice is terrible

This is the hardest thing to remove from your writing, as not everyone even understands what it is.

Wikipedia says:

The passive voice is a grammatical construction (specifically, a “voice”). The noun or noun phrase that would be the object of an active sentence (such as Our troops defeated the enemy) appears as the subject of a sentence with passive voice (e.g. The enemy was defeated by our troops).

Still confused? Yes, me too. It’s difficult to understand let alone realize you are writing in that “voice”.

The best way to understand it is if there is an action then the person (organization, etc.) must do the action.

• Passive: the website was created by the web developer
• Active: the web developer created the website.

While Joost’s plugin can identify the passive voice, it can’t fix it for you, so you need to have a good understanding of it and that will take a little time to learn.

More than the basics

Joost’s talk was really just an advertisement for the new feature with some basic advice to help provide value.

That basic advice however is important and a great stepping stone to improving your writing.

There are some more tips you can use to create writing that is effective copywriting.

#1 Write to the reader, not the audience

Forget that thousands of people can be reading your content. Instead remember that people read your content one at a time. Don’t talk to the audience, talk to that person.

This comes across as much more intimate and personal.

#2 Write a story

I started this article with a story about visiting a conference and seeing a talk by Joost. Perhaps it’s not a great story, but it’s still better than nothing.

Humanity has used story telling since we could string words together, and it is integral in our psyche.

Using a story to get a point across helps to tap into this and makes your content more memorable, because when a story is remembered, so is the moral or point of the story.

#3 Don’t use Weasel words

A weasel word is basically a vague word or turn of phrase. Avoiding Weasel words is essential for sales copy, though in content marketing it can be more of a relaxed.

Here’re some examples, clearly stolen from WikiPedia:

• “A growing body of evidence…” (Where is the raw data for your review?)
• “People say…” (Which people? How do they know?)
• “It has been claimed that…” (By whom, where, when?)
• “Critics claim…” (Which critics?)
• “Clearly…” (As if the premise is undeniably true)
• “It stands to reason that…” (Again, as if the premise is undeniably true—see “Clearly” above)
• “Questions have been raised…” (Implies a fatal flaw has been discovered)

How well did I score?

You might be wondering how well I’ve done with this article. The answer, not too bad:

This is before editing, and as you can see, my Passive Voice score is a bit high (it’s a curse!) but everything else seems good.

Remember that the scores are a guideline, nothing more. If the article or content reads well and more importantly converts, then having 11% of sentences containing the passive voice is just fine.

The Bottom Line

As a content marketer you might be writing pure sales copy or you might be writing a 5,000 word tutorial. Most likely, you will be somewhere in the middle.

These Joost and myself have provided these copy writing tips to help you make whatever you write that much more readable, enjoyable and actionable.

Most internet marketers get started by marketing products via affiliate networks. One of the first that most newbies come across is Amazon’s Associate program.

This is a huge opportunity for most people, as Amazon is a worldwide powerhouse when it comes to selling, well, pretty much anything and everything.

There are a bunch of reason why people love Amazon’s affiliate network, and sadly a bunch of reasons why some people don’t.

Amazon Associates is awesome because…

It’s a Trusted Brand Worldwide

Amazon operates worldwide and has sites in numerous languages and currencies. Its brand recognition is up there with Google and Coca-Cola, and in general most people are positive about Amazon as a company. This means a heck of a lot of people shop with them, like millions, daily.

It Has a Huge Selection of Products

I’m pretty sure that if you can’t find something on Amazon it isn’t sold anywhere… Well not quite, but Amazon has a vast selection of products, some that it sells direct and others sold by third parties.

The sheer number of products listed is so high, some affiliate training advises you to use it to find niches!

Unless you are trying to promote something obscure, it’s very likely Amazon will sell it.

It’s Easy (and Free) to Sign up to

The ease at which you can sign up to the Amazon affiliate program is astounding. Lots of other networks require you to fill out complex forms or have your site audited prior to acceptance.

Not so with Amazon. You can be signed up and promoting in a matter of minutes.

Another plus, is that unlike some affiliate networks, Amazon doesn’t cancel your account for simply not performing well.

It has Tools and Reports

From banners and widgets that you can add to your site, through to monthly reports on your commissions, Amazon has a lot of built in features that can help you to see how you’re doing and where improvements could be made.

The tools aren’t perfect, but they are quite good and free.

Bonus commissions

Regardless of why the visitor went through your link, whatever they buy while in the cookie time you will get commissions for. This means that even if they decide not to buy that 42” Hi Def TV, but instead opt for buying a toilet, you still get commissions on that sale!

Amazon Associates kinda sucks because…

You live in the wrong area

That’s right, if you live in Arkansas, Missouri, Maine or Rhode Island you’re screwed. Due to various legal wrangling, the Amazon associates program doesn’t allow residents of those states to apply.

If you do just one thing wrong

Being an Amazon associate means you have to agree to their terms and conditions.

If you somehow manage to get on the wrong side of these (easily done as they update them regularly), then you will get your account banned.

That’s right, say good bye to your money and your income in one fell swoop.

Its cookies are bad

Most affiliate networks use 30 day cookies or longer. Amazon’s are 24 hours. This is incredibly short, so if your pre-sell didn’t work, you could lose out on commissions if the person decides to buy a few days later instead of right now.

Its commissions are poor

Amazon’s commission rates aren’t bad, but they aren’t great either.

You start out on a flat 4% commission, and depending on your monthly sales, this could peak at 9%. Certain products like electronics are always at a flat rate (e.g. 4%) regardless of sales volume.

Compare that to most digital based products who offer anywhere from 20% to 100% and you can see that really Amazon’s rates could be better. To be fair they do have higher overheads, but from an affiliate’s point of view, it means you need to sell more, in order to make a decent profit.

Alternatives to Amazon

Her are 8 different sites where you can make affiliate commissions. Some of them are very similar to Amazon itself, and others require a different viewpoint, but are none the less still potentially profitable.

#1 Walmart

While not having the worldwide reach of Amazon, Walmart puts up a pretty good fight. They too sell a wide variety of products from books to boats. Their commissions are a little bit lower than Amazons, but they have a 3 day cookie!

#2 ClickBank

One of the bigger marketplaces for digital goods, Clickbank offers a decent selection of products. Of course, the products on offer won’t suit everyone as they are generally information products or software. Their cookie length is 60 days and commissions range from 10% -100%

#3 ShareASale

This marketplace for affiliates has a large selection of different vendors, from digital products through to physical products, each of whom you can apply with to promote their goods. Cookie lengths and commissions vary from vendor to vendor.

#4 CJ Affiliate (Commission Junction)

Another well-known and varied affiliate marketplace, CJ has vendors from hosting to 4 Wheel drives and everything in between. Once again, commissions vary from vendor to vendor, as do cookie lengths.

One thing to note about CJ, is that they are harsh towards inactive accounts and will close them.

#5 Rakuten.com (Buy.com)

One of the “new” kids on the block, Rakuten has been around a while but you simply may never have heard of it.

It’s pushing into Amazons space and sells a wide variety of products from books to clothes to electronics.

Its base commissions are better than Amazons at 6% though it’s not that great for electronics as this is only 1%.

#6 Infolinks / Skimlinks / Viglinks

These three sites are not your standard affiliate network. Instead of promoting a specific product, these services add links into your content that show pop up adverts.

They are very similar to Google Adsense in that you earn money per advert clicks, but as the adverts are shown as popups from within the content, banner blindness is reduced.

#7 eBay

Perhaps the Amazon of second-hand stuff, eBay has a huge market share, and sells virtually anything.

Sadly, the cookie length for eBay is only 24 hours, and their commission structure is a little weird. Instead of earning a flat rate, you earn a percentage of what eBay makes on the auction. You can earn anywhere from 50% to 200% (for new buyers) on their own fee.

This does make working out commissions hard, but with the number of people using eBay there’s still a decent chance of making a profit with this affiliate program.

#8 Direct Affiliation

Lastly, there is also direct affiliation, which is my term for joining individual affiliate programs from smaller merchants.

While this has the advantage of spreading the risk around (one banned account and cancelled affiliate program won’t immediately ruin your business), ti does require a lot more work.

Not only do you have to find the affiliate programs, but you need to monitor each one, often from different logins.  And then there’s monitoring links on your site!

While this option is certainly valid, if you do go down this route, I’d recommend using a link manager like Pretty Links Pro.

Bottom Line

It doesn’t matter if you can’t use Amazon due to living in the wrong place, being banned or just wanting to keep your options open, there are plenty of alternatives out there.

From large scale operations like Walmart, to smaller individual sellers, you can find affiliate programs for virtually anything, and they normally match or improve on Amazons commissions and cookie times.

As such, don’t let not being able to use Amazon stop you from earning money as an affiliate!

Most internet marketers hit a certain phase as they are starting out, one which can quickly spiral out of control: domain hoarding.

This is where you end up buying domain after domain, until you end up with more domains than you know what to do with.

If you manage to get a grip on this potential problem, there are things you can do with your surplus of domains. Often people either try to sell the domains, create a basic site and flip them, or simply let the domains expire.

Another option is domain parking.

How does domain parking work?

According to Wikipedia:

“Domain parking refers to the registration of an internet domain name without that domain being associated with any services such as e-mail or a website.”

In essence there should be nothing there, but most if not all domain registrars will add advertisements to a parked domain.

These adverts when clicked earn you a small fee as a reward for allowing your domain to host said advertising.

Your domain is basically turned into an online billboard.

This might not seem like a big of a deal, but with the right setup and investment, it’s possible to turn a reasonable profit from parked domains. Plus they require little to no work once set up – true passive income.

Quantity over quality

If you’re keen to look into domain parking as a revenue source, the first thing you will need to know is that for this method, quantity is just as important, if not more so, than quality.

This is because like with most advertisements on the internet, the more traffic you have the more chance you have of generating the all-important clicks, so the more domains you have parked, the higher the possibility of getting some that have a high traffic flow.

It’s not uncommon for someone involved in domain parking to have hundreds of domains. In fact some services like Sedo’s Domain Parking for Professionals requires you to have a minimum of 500 domains!

Domain selection

The most important thing about choosing a domain is to find those domains that can generate traffic without input from you.

This is because all the domain parking services have rules that prevent you from sending traffic to the sites via SEO, PPC etc.

In fact they can be quite ruthless when it comes to traffic monitoring and if it looks like you’re trying to game the system they will suspend or close your account.

When choosing domains to use for parking, there are 3 broad types: brand new, misspelled, and expired domains.

Brand new domains

This type of domain refers to new domains that are spelled correctly but may offer potential for traffic. In general these should be avoided or at least examined in detail to make sure they are worth the purchase, though at approx. $10 for a domain, it’s sometimes worth the risk.

Misspelled domains

This type of domain is one where you obtain a domain similar to another in the hopes that people will type in the incorrect domain name and end up on your site instead.

The most common way to do this is to look for plurals, e.g. instead of bluewidget.com, register bluewidgets.com.

There are some legal areas that you may struggle with here, especially if you start abusing brand names and copyrights this way, but it does offer the opportunity to catch traffic from popular sites.

Expired domains

A safer alternative is to pick up domains that have expired. These types of domains usually have had some traffic in the past that you can leverage.

It’s worth running any domain through a site that can provide more info on the domain such as Alexa for estimated traffic and Majestic for a more detailed report.

Basically you’re just trying to make sure you’re not buying a site that only had 3 visitors per year, as you won’t make a cent that way.

If you’ve ever examined a domain to buy or one for a PBN, then it’s basically the same criteria.

What sort of domains should you buy?

This is the difficult question, but in general they should be .coms or .orgs and should focus on a popular niche.

This would be the one time where you should even consider broader niches than you are perhaps used to with affiliate marketing, though as with anything online testing will be required.

Looking to current or potential fads and trends is definitely a decent angle to take, though these have a tendency to not be evergreen and run out of steam after a while.

Domain parking requires a lot of forethought and examination of a niche, from the keywords used to the general market, as well as potential traffic as everything focuses purely on the domain name itself as you have no other way to market the domain.

Exact Match Domains

Google has penalised exact match domains (EMD), but from a domain parking point of view it isn’t a problem. Parked domains won’t appear in an internet search anyway, so if the EMD looks like a good domain then pick it up!

Services you can use

In order to get adverts to appear on your site, you will need to use a domain parking service.

Most domain registrars such as GoDaddy and Sedo offer domain parking services.

There are also companies that solely focus on domain parking such as NameDrive and Redirect.

Redirect is actually quite an interesting one as instead of serving adverts, it geo-locates the visitor and redirects them to a targeted advertiser.

Problems with parking services

The main issue with parking services from your point of view is the inability of sending traffic to the domain.

It’s understandable why they would do this; after all it’s easy to send a ton of untargeted traffic at a domain which will increase any CPM (Cost Per Thousand) earnings.

As well as that the actual earnings per click for most services is mere cents.

How then can you increase earnings?

One option is to do your homework and choose the right service that provides the best rates.

Other than that you could always create a faux parked domain. This involves sticking up a basic web page with related adverts on it.

Of course this is more work to create and maintain, especially if you have hundreds of domains, but it does allow you to have a lot more control and to choose advertisers (or affiliate schemes) that have fewer rules in force.

Bottom line

Domain parking isn’t for everyone. There’s a level of investment required that most people balk at (easily $1,000 – $5,000 or more per year).

As well as that, finding domains that can generate traffic without SEO and therefore income is an ongoing project; especially as fads and trends change over time (how much traffic would Olympics2012.com get right now?).

That being said, if you are skillful in your selection as well as use a scatter shot method (it’s odd to use both of those at the same time but there you go), then there is a potential to make your costs back and then some.

There are numerous ways to make money with a website, from affiliate marketing to selling your own goods.

One way to make money is with an often overlooked style of website: the directory site.

A directory site in its most basic form is a site that lists and links out to other websites and businesses within one or more niche.

Probably the most famous directory site out there is Dmoz, and it’s huge and covers a wide range of niches.

The thing is, not everyone is going to succeed with a directory site, so I’ve compiled some of my tips and ideas to help you get a head start with your directory website.

A Business Not a Blog

Most people who try their hand at directory sites fail. The simple reason is that they think that they can stick up a site and it will just work.

You absolutely must treat any directory site like a business, otherwise you will fail.

You need to make sure you have a plan in hand for how to generate traffic, how to generate listings and how to capitalize both to generate income.

Not being serious about the venture will end up costing you time and money.

Niche Selection

Let’s be frank, you’re not going to build a site like Dmoz easily, so like most things in internet marketing you need to narrow your niche down.

For example, you could focus on:

• Dentists
• Plumbers
• Private Tutors
• Music Teachers
• Specialist stores
• etc.

You could even narrow this down (initially) to just a single state or city if it’s large enough.

Having a specific niche will help with everything else you need to do such as traffic, SEO and listing selection.

As with any niche selection you need to be sure of two things:

• Is there a market that is interested in finding quality sites?
• Will someone pay you for it?

I once made a directory site that failed. It wasn’t because no one was interested; it was simply because the target market had no money to spare: the ones seeking the websites didn’t want to buy from the advertising, and the websites themselves ran such small margins, they didn’t want to pay to list.

Therefore, make sure you vet your niche before proceeding to make sure there’s at least some potential for earnings.

Traffic is Key

One of the most important things you need to realise is that building a directory site from scratch is a tremendous amount of work.

How do you attract people to list on your site when you have zero traffic and zero other listings?

Do you see the problem – without traffic people aren’t interested and without listings there’s no traffic!

How then can you get past this chicken and egg scenario?

Well, there are a few ways:

• Start by hand selecting some sites/businesses and simply list them with basic details. It’s a good idea to contact them and let them know, both for marketing and so they can de-list if they wish.
• Offer free listings. Everybody on the internet loves freebies, and free listings can help build up the site content quite quickly.
• Promote the said free listings via social media and any sites that cater to your target location (remember, start small).

SEO

As well as starting to list sites yourself and reaching out to communities, you should be making sure your SEO is top notch.

A directory site rarely has much in the way of content, so SEO can be a pain to put it mildly, but there are ways to counter this.

Categories & Tags

Using a solid category structure helps both search engine bots and users find what they need quickly and easily.

It’s worth spending time in the early stages planning out your category structure to make sure that it will be efficient, easy to understand and just as importantly, scalable.

The last thing you want to do is to have to change your category structure later down the line as this can cause numerous 404 errors.

Tags also need to be considered as well, more from a user point than anything.

Meta tags

Sometimes called schema, meta tags allow search engines to understand your website content in semantic terms. This means that they should know that a listing for one of your sites, is regarding a particular niche.

If you’re a WordPress user, WordPress doesn’t come with the ability to use meta tags, but some smarts minds out there have created some great plugins such as the All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets, which can enable schema for you.

I’ll be honest, these things are a pain in the ass to get setup and running correctly, but they offer so much potential SEO benefits it would be stupid to set up a directory site without schema.

Content Marketing

Even though directory listing sites have very little content on a per listing basis, it doesn’t stop your from having a side-blog that can have more detailed content and help internally link your directory categories.

For example, you could write a monthly showcase featuring a particular site, talking about the website or business in detail and perhaps interviewing the owner or staff. This can then be linked back to both the website listing and the listing category. It’s a win-win for both the site/business as they get a spotlight, and you get the much needed content.

PPC

Another method of generating traffic is to use PPC or Pay Per Click advertising.

There are two potential routes you can go with this: advertising to get people to list and advertising to get traffic.

To begin with you want to get the traffic, as you can manually add listings. Later on down the line you may want to advertise to promote your money generating listings.

PPC is a risk as it costs money, but if done right you can get some targeted traffic to your site.

Quality Aggregation

Every directory site runs one major risk: having too many BS sites listed. This is why it’s important for your or a your hired help to manually check each listing and to review them every so often.

The manual check weeds out any undesirable listings from the outset (even paid for listings).

Sometimes websites fail, and sometimes their domains are re-purposed for spam, or porn or maybe just another website. This is why regular reviews are worthwhile, because the last thing you need to have are links that send your traffic to malware ridden sites, or even just to the wrong site.

I’d also recommend having strict terms and conditions for both free and paid for listings that gives you enough leverage to reject and remove listings and covers your back legally speaking.

Earning Money

The all-important question every marketer wants to know: how the heck do I make money from a directory site?

Luckily, there are a few ways.

Paid Listings

The most obvious one is for promoted listings. These are just like promoted posts in your Facebook feed: highlighted listings to grab people’s attention.

You can charge anywhere from $50 to $1,000 per promoted listing depending on your niche, and the listing placement and length of stay.

Ultimately it will be down to you and your niche knowledge to figure out the best pricing model, but if you have enough traffic and an affluent niche, higher prices are quite viable.

Adverts

There are two types of adverts in my mind: Networks like Google Adsense, and Private adverts.

Networks

I’m loathe to recommend using network advertisements. This is because they are so poorly paid, that people end up getting carried away in the effort of trying to earn something and plastering the site with ads.

This can become a very negative thing, because it not only looks tacky to your visitors, but you can’t guarantee what adverts will show up.

Private Ads

A better option, though not always easy to implement especially in the beginning, are private adverts. This is where you sell advertising space to sites that list on your directory. These can be pitched differently to the promoted listings as they allow the sites to use visual imagery or even video to promote their sites.

There are several WordPress plugins that can assist with controlling adverts, whatever type you decide on, such as the excellent AdRotate.

The Bottom Line

Directory sites can make money, of that there is no doubt. They do however take some planning and determination to succeed with.

Finding the right niche is only the beginning of your journey and traffic generation is paramount. If you can achieve that, then a directory site can be an excellent way to make money online.

Being an internet marketer isn’t just about promoting other people’s products. Sure, there’s money to be made doing that, but there’s even more money to be made selling your own products.

Of course, selling physical products has a lot of issues, such as production, storage, shipping, staffing and more.

The overheads and risks for physical products can be quite high, so why bother with all that when you can go digital!

There are plenty of reasons why you should consider this option, but if you’re not sure here are my top 10 reasons to sell your own digital products.

1. Startup Costs & Overhead Are Minimal

Seriously, the cost of setting up a digital business, can be incredibly low, pretty much all you need is a computer, an internet connection and some time.

Most digital products that you will sell you can either create yourself or use ready made products like PLR content. Creating the products yourself is definitely the way to get started, and the cost is simply time and effort.

Even selling the products can be free by using marketplaces, free websites and e-commerce sites.

The cost of setting up your own e-commerce site can also be really cheap: some basic hosting and a domain, WordPress and Easy Digital Downloads and you’re good to go!

Of course you will likely run into some costs as the business grows, but it’s easy to get started for under $10 a month – try that with a brick and mortar shop!

2. The Risks Are Few

Alongside a limited if any investment cost, the risks associated with selling digital products are quite few. At worst you would need to refund some people and cover the cost of your website. There’s no actual inventory to be concerned about or shipping costs to incur. In fact the only major issue you need to worry about is the law, especially regarding taxes.

3. Full Control

The absolute best thing about selling digital products online is that you have full control! You can decide what to sell and where, and you get to shape the products to be the best they can be.

It’s also the scariest aspect, but that comes with the territory!

4. Make Once, Sell a Thousand (Or More!)

If you had told people 60 years ago that you could make a product once and sell it a thousand or even a million times, they’d cart you off as a scam artist.

Nowadays though, all you need to do is create a product once and you can sell it as is numerous times.

You may need to do some tweaks and changes, depending on the product, software for example needs regular updates, and even e-books need to be tweaked occasionally to cater for changing information, but these will likely be smaller things that don’t impact too much on your time.

5. Passive Income

Earn money while you sleep! The great thing about digital sales is that they are automated, so you don’t need to actually be there to process the sales.

Passive income is a bit of a skewed term though, because you have to remember that even though the sales happen passively, you still need to actively promote and market your goods, even if you are using a third party marketplace.

6. Excellent Mark-up

Have you ever heard that most meals in a restaurant have anywhere between a 200% and 1000% mark-up?

Digital sales are the same. The cost to produce the content is usually very low, so the actual sales price has a very high profit margin. This is why you see so many internet marketing products with large affiliate commissions; they can afford to do it while physical product sales simply don’t have the room for it.

7. Helps You to Become A Brand

You may have heard it in the past where experts in the internet marketing field suggest that you become your brand. Well selling digital products allows you to do that.

You may have heard of the very successful WordPress plugin “WordPress SEO”. It’s made by a guy call Joost de Valk, more commonly known by his online pseudonym Yoast. He is so well known that the WordPress SEO plugin was eventually renamed Yoast SEO and everything he does has his pseudonym in it.

This is the power of branding yourself, and you can use your products to make your name in your niche.

8. Opportunities for Partnerships & Joint Ventures

OK, so having a digital product doesn’t automatically mean that you’re in a better position to find partnerships, but it makes it a damn sight easier.

You can easily add your product as a download bonus for others with little work, and no infrastructure needed (because they will just add it into their own e-commerce system).

9. A Powerful Affiliate Program

Mentioned briefly above, because you have a higher profit margin, you can afford to provide better affiliate commissions. This is turn leads to more people willing to promote your product (people are inherently greedy) and thus increase the number of sales you get.

Sure you get less per sale, but increase the overall number of sales and widen your market at the same time. It’s a winning situation.

10. Leverage Other Platforms

Even though setting up your own e-commerce site really isn’t that hard or expensive, sometimes you want to take advantage of existing traffic.

Digital products allow you to easily add the product to multiple online marketplaces, such as:

• Amazon.com for ebooks
• Themeforest for website templates
• Google Play and Apple App Store for apps
• Creative Market for design elements
• and many more

These marketplaces have pros and cons. The biggest pro being you get a lot of free targeted traffic that should be interested in the type of product you’re selling.

The major con is that they will take a chunk of your sale amount, and it’s usually quite hefty – 35 -50% or more is not unheard of.

What Sort of Digital Products Can You Sell?

The other great thing about selling digital products is that there is a wide variety of things you can produce and sell:

• Ebooks
• Videos
• Photos
• Music and sounds
• Software
• Design elements
• Memberships
• Online events
• Online tools

The Bottom Line

However you look at it, selling digital products is relatively easy, and has the potential to be very profitable.

If you are just promoting other people’s work, you really should consider starting to promote your own as well, as it is an excellent alternative revenue stream.

Even if you suck at producing content, you can always hire a freelancer to do it for you and release it under your own name (make sure you agree that with the freelancer though!).

Have you ever released your own products? How did it go? Let me know in the comments.

Often, internet marketers tend to look at their traffic numbers and focus solely on one metric: how many people are visiting the site.

Sure, some people are analytics demons and monitor their stats in fine detail, but I’m pretty sure a lot of people out there don’t.

One juicy bit of information that you may miss is the New vs. Returning visitor metric.

This statistic tells you how many of your visitors in the current time segment have been on your site before.

While it’s not a 100% accurate figure due to people clearing cookies etc, it does give you a decent idea on your returning visitor figures.

Why do I need to know this?

It’s simple: it’s easier to sell to people who know and trust you and your website.

If the vast majority of your traffic is a first time visitors, then you are not doing everything you can to retain your audience.

This should be a revelation and if you metrics are like the ones below, it should be a cause for concern too.

These stats are not from I’ve Tried That!

In fact, websites with a low number of repeat visitors, that actually turn a profit, are rare. It’s also likely that your bounce rate may also be fairly high as a result of having such a high volume of new visitors.

A lack of repeat visitors means a lack of a community.

Sometimes we forget that the stats in our analytics system are in fact people: living and breathing, with wants and desires (OK there’s some bots too!).

Actual people are looking at your site and saying to themselves “Nope. Nope, nope, nope!” and clicking the back button.

That is, if they even give the site a second thought before delving elsewhere to find their answers and spend their money.

Causes

There can be multiple reasons why your returning visitor count is low:

Poor Quality Content

If your content does not meet the needs of those visiting, then they will abandon your site, and find somewhere else to frequent.

Inconsistent Posting

You may have the best content in the world, but if you rarely post anything your site will begin to die a slow but quiet death, with new visitors failing to see the value in a repeat visit.

Incorrect Targeting/SEO

If you’re targeting the wrong keywords or market, you could be bringing in a bunch of visitors to your site that have no interest in the content, thus inflating your new visitor count dramatically.

Poor UX/UI

If people cannot find the information they need because the User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) of the site are poor, then they simply won’t return.

You Ignore Your Audience

If your audience talks to you, reply! Ignoring them is a great way to bleed away your fledgling or existing community.

7 Ways to Build a Community

Building a community around your website often brings to mind things like forums, and while they can be used, you need to think of community in a broader sense, covering several areas.

Forums

Well, since I mentioned it! Barring IRC (Internet Relay Chat) forums are one of the oldest community structures on the internet.

They can be used for many business types, especially for things like support and discussion. However, unless your site is built around a forum, I don’t think these are a great addition to a normal blog style website.

Comments

With WordPress and other CMS style websites, having the ability to comment has greatly increased engagement.

Default WordPress comments though are a bit sucky, and you should definitely consider “upgrading” your comments system by using something like Disqus. This type of commenting system not only makes it easier for people to comment, but facilitates the conversation as well.

Engagement

No matter what form you want your discussions to take place, you, yes YOU, must be involved.

Actively monitoring the discussions is key, and you should not only be replying to comments and ideas, but provide even more value where you can.

Sure, on a busy discussion you can’t answer everyone or even every post, but you should keep abreast of them and answer the interesting and valuable ones.

As a bonus for this, you also get to see into the mind-set of your visitors, allowing you to modify your Content Marketing Plan to better target your repeat visitors.

Social Media

For me, there are only three social media networks you should consider using for community building: Facebook, via a Facebook page, Medium and Google+.

These three networks make it easy to share content and discuss it.

You should of course, follow your audience. If you know that your audience shares to Facebook more than Google+ or Medium, then use Facebook.

Networks like Twitter don’t really facilitate a conversation; though it can be useful for sharing links to content and discussion son other networks.

Content Quality & Consistency

Mentioned earlier as possible causes of low return visitors, these two aspects can and should be reviewed and worked on.

Review your analytics to see what pages people are landing on and viewing. Is this content up to date? Is it the highest quality it could be?

Compare it to similar content across the web, and check out their social metrics too (if someone is not interested in your site enough to never return, why would they bother sharing your content?).

If your content seems thin in comparison, you know you need meatier, more informative articles.

Make sure you start building a Content Marketing Plan, and be consistent with your posting, as people will be more likely to return to your site if they know there’s a good chance of new, and informative e content.

Go Forth & Communicate

You can do this both online and in the real world, but head out there and join in the conversations with other communities, via website comments, forums, events and conferences.

Get to know the people in your niche, the movers, the shakers and just the people in general.

Reach out to other bloggers and websites, not necessarily in your niche, whose audience you think might be a good fit, and offer guest posts etc.

This is more to try and grow your audience, by bringing in visitors who potentially might find your content awesome enough to grace with repeat visits.

Offer Value

Your content, your business, must offer value. This could be in the form of intelligent and information articles regarding your niche.

It could be bringing news to people. Perhaps you have the best product in your niche that would greatly benefit people.

All that is great, but guess what? You need to keep providing value, week in, week out.

You need to come across, through the various parts of your site, that your site is worthy of peoples time.

The Bottom Line

A site without engagement is dead in the water, or dying. A lack or low percentage of repeat visitors is a good indication of this.

The way to combat it is by slowly but surely building a community around you, your site and your brand.

Only by having a core, solid group of “regulars” who trust you and the content your produce, can your business and site grow.