Highlights

• Know who you’re marketing to…
• Spend time writing good copy…
• Remember that you’re a trust agent!

Future of Publishing is sponsored by VigLink. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to Like Future of Publishing on Facebook!

In this Future of Publishing episode, VigLink CEO, Oliver Roup, interviews a panel of affiliate marketing experts so that you can learn how to monetize your site through affiliate marketing.

Highlights:

1. Affiliate marketing works…
2. If it’s well-aimed…
3. And you’re selling a good product!

Future of Publishing is sponsored by VigLink. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to Like Future of Publishing on Facebook!

What are you going to be doing over the next year or two that has a significant impact on your life?

Would you like to build a business, one that helps you to buy your freedom, such that you no longer have to work at a regular job?

What if you could work on such a business in your spare time, and that business was paying you $1,000/month at the end of two years?

What if you quit your day job, put only 20 hours each week into your business, and then grew it to $2,000/month in income?

What would your life be like if you could earn several thousand dollars per month with only an investment of an hour or two each day?

I can tell you what your life would be like, because I have achieved the legendary four hour work week.

Life is awesome when you own a lean online business. It is almost like being on a permanent vacation, where you only work on something when it gets you excited to do so.

That may sound like a completely impossible fantasy, but it is actually not that complicated to achieve.

While the plan to build passive income is relatively simple, that does not mean it is easy to execute. There is a difference. However, let me show you just how simple it can be to achieve the four hour week and thus buy your freedom back from society.

A simple business plan

Create a single website. Just one.

Oh, I know…. conventional wisdom dictates that everyone needs to diversify, lest they risk losing their online income that they have worked so hard to achieve.

Let me tell you a secret though: Building authority and link juice for a website is tough.

It’s so tough, in fact, that I strongly urge you to only try to do it once. You’ll understand why when we look at the promotional strategy.

I would also urge you to choose a topic for your website in which:

* You have at least some working knowledge or expertise.
* The products or services being advertised around your topic cost over $100.

In other words, choose a profitable topic for your website that you can write about with real authority.

You can determine profitability by looking at existing websites based on your topic. What are they advertising? How much does it cost? If the cost is very low, move on and find another topic.

If you have a team of writers working for you, by all means, start several websites. But if you are going to be the only one publishing content on your website, I would urge you to just start a single site and put all of your energy into it.

A simple content strategy

Create articles for your website that are:

* Detailed, in-depth, and insightful.
* Original, with a depth of knowledge that goes beyond what is already available on the web.
* Useful to the audience in a specific way. Consider including action items that the reader can implement directly.

Thoroughly research the internet regarding your content and identify the absolute best information currently available. Your job is to create a website that is superior to what you find.

Each article you publish should explore slightly different ideas and concepts regarding your topic. Each article should target unique long tail keyword phrases in the post title.

Quality of content must remain extremely high. That said, volume matters as well, and publishing three articles daily is ideal.

Balancing volume and quality is tough. Publishing one quality article per day will result in slow growth. Publishing three per day will result in exciting growth within a year or two.

A simple promotional strategy

Build relationships with other website owners in your niche, with the goal of landing a guest post some day.

That’s it. That is the entire promotional strategy. Very difficult to do in high volume, but take your time and keep plugging away at it. Websites need time to age anyway.

There are dozens of ways to manufacture cheap links and give your website a quick boost in the search engines. All of these “cheap” methods are losing their effectiveness over time because the search engines are always improving at measuring real trust and authority.

The simple way to promote your website is to build real trust and authority. You can do that by building real relationships and creating amazing content.

Your promotional strategy hinges on having premium content. No one wants to link to a poor quality website. No one wants to publish a guest post that is anything less than premium quality. Therefore, an important part of your promotional effort is to focus on creating amazing content–both on and off-site.

Simple but not easy

I built a profitable website and sold it for six figures by:

* Building a single website in a profitable niche.
* Publishing lots of quality content–around 1,500 articles total.
* Promoted the site with real relationship building and guest posting.

Looking back, it was dead simple. I published helpful articles every day and did a bit of promotional work. The promotional work was probably only five percent of the effort, while creating the website itself was ninety five percent.

Anyone can do this with almost zero overhead and only a consistent time investment on their part. The question is, who will do it, given that it is so difficult?

What about you? Are you motivated to purchase your freedom by building a simple internet business?

If you walk into a physical insurance office located down the corner from your house or in your town or city’s main business district (some insurance offices in rural areas are located on rural roads) then you will not have many options. Usually the office will be run by one company or it will be run through a broker who will not necessarily give you a good rate or have very many plans available for you to pick from. With all insurance you will have to get a credit report first, but a lot of physical offices do not have plans for people with bad credit.

However, there are still ways you can make money online and use the money to buy insurance even with bad credit:

* Become a paid SEO blogger

Blogging isn’t easy but it’s not too complicated either, and a lot of companies will pay pretty good money for people to write articles for them and get them published online. They do this primarily because the articles have backlinks to the company’s site, which helps the company show up high on search engine results and gives them targeted traffic. And since so many people use search engines today for almost all of their business research needs but ignore the ads on the top (I bet even more so lately since Google recently has been putting so many ads at the top that over half the page space is ads on small screens and mobile devices). This means that it is really valuable for companies to show up high on Google’s organic results because more people will click on those than will click on the Adwords ads that are shaded a different color.

* Start your own blogging company

The real way to make money in almost any field is to build connections and start your own company. This is especially true in the search engine optimization (SEO) world where companies will pay a premium for good SEO work. If you hire other people who are good writers, those writers benefit because they may not have the connections themselves to make money. You benefit because you profit from their work. Even if you only profit $20/hour/worker, if you hire 20 employees then you make $400/hour, and that’s excluding work you do on your own with your own two hands.

* Get paid to write PR articles

You can get paid to post articles for public relations purposes. These articles will be read by actual humans and, while still containing links to your product, will not be there for the primary purpose of bumping you up on Google. Instead, the articles will be read by actual people who will be interested in them and you will make money this way.

* Build an Adsense website/blog

Google Adsense provides an easy way for marketing people who want to make money online. What you need to do is first create a niche site. These sites should be geared toward something that is commonly advertised online, such as health, fitness, and financial services products like Forex. Then, you need to write articles that should be at least 500 words for these websites and write lots of them.

Make sure the article is good for ads:

In order to make money off Google Adsense, your site needs to produce ads that are relevant to things people search for. There are complex professional ways that you can figure out what keywords work, but the basic ways involve using the Google Adsense keyword tool and also using common sense. For example, consider two articles: One about “making money blogging” and one about “monetizing your blog.” The one about monetization will draw professional bloggers because they use the word “monetize” while the one about making money will draw people who do not yet blog but are looking to get into blogging.

How to write the articles:

The articles should use keywords for terms for which people have bought a lot of ads and one term should be in the title. That term should also be used in the first paragraph, especially the first 200 words, one or two times (it’s okay to break up the term as long as the words are close to each other). The keywords need to be for terms for which there are ads, so make sure to do a Google search and see that there are at least 10 or so ads for the term you’re using a lot in your article.

Those are some great ways you can use the internet to make money blogging and writing. It’s not rocket science but it’s not super easy either. You will need to do a lot of writing every day and be creative. If you can do that then you can definitely earn money online!

This is a guest post written by Murray Newlands, the CEO and Founder of Influence People.

* Grizzly Brears – His newest one that contains all the old posts from his highly popular “Make Money Online for Beginners” blog that was recently deleted. There’s a ton of great information here already and I am sure more will be added over time.

* Internet Marketing Lessons – Another new one that I know will grow to become an incredible resource.

* Make Money Online with Griz – This is one of his older blogs but he has finally started updating it again.

I know a lot about internet business and SEO but he puts me to shame. I’ve learned more about internet marketing, blogging, search engine optimization, and making money online from him than I have from everyone else combined in the almost 8 years I have been an online marketer.

He has been truly missed by me and many others. Let’s hope he sticks around this time!

Dedicated to your success,
Trent Brownrigg