A Complete Guide to Profiting Online with an Online Business

Setting up an online business isn't complicated as compare to starting a psychical business and the initial capital for an e-business isn't much either, usually anyway between $50 to $300 to begin. Besides that, online businesses also offer the following advantages:

- You can run and operate an e-business by yourself only. You don't need to employ people unless your e-business has grown too big.

- The business stays open 24 hours every day. You earn money even while you sleep.

- Online businesses normally have high return on investment (ROI).

This article will lay out the steps from creating a website to promoting the website for generating sales & advertising revenue and affiliate commission.

Step 1 - Decide how you are going to make money with a website
Here are your choices:
1) Develop your own product and sell it through a website.
2) Sell affiliate products
3) Become an AdSense publisher and earn AdSense revenue from your website.

Most people don't have their own products, so they usually make money by promoting affiliate products and displaying Google Ads on their websites. You can see many webmasters use a combination of Affiliate programs and AdSense on their sites to maximize their online earning when visiting websites.

Where to find affiliate programs that interest you? Below are some of the Affiliate networks that contain tons of affiliate programs where you can join free:

ClixGalore.com
An affiliate program network with more than 3,000 merchants. Products you can promote including retails goods, travel, software and much more.

Clickbank.com
The largest ebook store. There are about 10,000 affiliate programs for you to select in Clickbank.

How to become an AdSense publisher to display AdSense ads on your website? Here's is the link to sign up.

https://www.google.com/adsense

Step 2 - Decide the Content of Your Website
If you are selling your own products, you may need to write a persuasive sales letter or design a website with content and images that sells. It won't cost you much to hire a freelancer to write a sale letter for you. Here are some of the places to find a freelance writer:

http://www.elance.com
http://www.guru.com

If you are marketing affiliate products, you can write several reviews on the affiliate products with affiliate links to your merchants sites or provide a product recommendation list on your site such as 'Top 5 movie downloads, Top 3 e-business courses and so on. Another way is to write a solution to a problem in your website if your affiliate product is created to solve a problem. There will be some space left unused on your website, so you can place your Google ads on those unused space to make more money.

You may want to create an information website only. In that case, AdSense can be your main source of income. You can read AdSense optimization tips to maximize your AdSense revenue.

Step 3 - Build a Website
You may want to use Dreamweaver or Frontpage to create a website if you are familiar with web design. For people without knowledge of HTML code and web design, they still can create a website by using a site builder. Here is a link to download and install a free site builder.

Bluevoda Website Builder

Bluevoda Site Builder can be used to build many kind of websites with little or without technical and programming knowledge. You don't need to start from scratch. The trick is to pick a free professional website template comes with the site builder and start adding content, links and images.

Here are some tips when using the site builder:

a) Take some time to watch their easy-to-follow video tutorials to learn how to operate the site builder.
b) Some practice are needed before start creating your website.
c) Visit websites in your niche and use them as your reference if you are lacking of ideas when building your site.
d) You can always preview your design but to publish on the Internet you must register a domain name and purchase a hosting package (don't worry, the costs are reasonable).

Step 4 - Promote Your Website
Targeted traffic or visitors are the key to success. The more people visiting your website, the greater your earning will be. There are many ways to drive traffic to your website and below are some of them:

Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising
When you search on Google, have you noticed that there are sponsors ads displaying on the top and right sidebar of your search result page? All those ads are PPC ads. So, how to place an ad there? You first need to create a Google AdWords account with Google and then bid for your targeted keywords for top-listing on Google. Here's an example:

If you are promoting weight loss products, you will want to bid for keywords that are regularly used by searchers and weight loss is one of the regular keyword that you are going to bid. So when someone enters weight loss on Google, your contextual ad will show on the search result page. Your ad position will depend on your bid. The higher your bid, the higher your ad position.

Here are some of the PPC advertising programs:

Google AdWords
Yahoo Search Marketing
7search

Article Marketing
You can write several articles and submit them to article directories for publication. You are allowed to add a few lines to describe about your website and products with a link to your site in the article's resource box. When your articles are read by people, some of them will click your link to visit your website. You can get a lot of free targeted traffic if you write quality articles. Article directories can be found by going to Google and entering the search term 'article directories’.

Forum Posting
When you join a forum that is related to your website, usually you are allowed to add a link pointing to your website in your signature. When a visitor read your message, he or she may click your link in the signature. You can find a lot of community forums on your niche by searching on Google or Yahoo.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO focuses on optimizing your webpages for your targeted keywords and increasing the number of backlinks. Backlinks mean links from other websites to your website. SEO involves a lot of works, energy and time, but when your site reaches top 10 rankings you may get a lot of free targeted traffic for long-term. Click here to learn more about SEO.