Earning a Second Income from Home

Never before has it been so easy for anyone with a computer and internet connection to start an online business. Remember the days of the ‘dot com’ boom when it took millions to get an online business going? Those days are long gone, the entry level is at street level and it is time to take advantage of this. If you are thinking of how to earn a second income online then this article will give you some ideas to get you going and tell you what to avoid.

At any given moment there are reported to be at least 2 Billion users online using the Internet. Many of them use Google, Yahoo and Bing (the new name for MSN search). They are searching for information, products and services. Very large numbers of others are using Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social networking sites to chat and share photo’s and life information with friends and family.

This means that the search engines and social networking sites are your gateway to customers who have money to spend. The biggest decision you will make is what kind of business can you start and will it be suitable for you? Even more importantly, how can it make money?

Let’s look at the types of business that are available online. These fall into four broad categories as follows:

1. Selling advertising on a web site or blog

2. Selling a product or service on a web site or blog

3. Selling affiliate products on a web site or blog

4. Recruiting others into a network and getting paid on commissions on who they recruit into their network

The Internet is literally teeming with online business opportunities like the above. They are all competing for your money and investment of time and effort. How do you decide which one to go for? First, let’s start with what NOT to go for.

My advice is that when you are searching the internet for a suitable home business you will see Google or other ads in addition to the search results. Click on these and have a look at how their sales process works. Many of them are long sales pitches that offer some great ‘secret’ if you sign up with them and promise massive overnight riches. Study their approach further and you will see that the main thing they want from you is your name and email address. This is so they can bombard you will sales and marketing messages every day hence. The more reputable sites will have an easy opt out at the bottom of these emails but still many don’t make it clear that they will send you an email a day for ever and a day until you tell them stop.

This is bad business practice and whilst people are definitely making money using this approach my feeling is that it is not sustainable and verges on the unethical. If you filter out these companies the options will be reduced drastically. In addition if there is no contact information like an email address, telephone or other method of contact then I would be wary about the opportunity. If an email exists, send them a question about the product or service and see if they respond. This will tell you a lot about the company and their service ethic.

My advice is that you do something related to your interests and passions and work out how to make money form that. For example if you are interested in sport. Start a web site or blog on the subject, but pick a narrow niche area and promote the hell out of it. I will give you some tips on this later.

The first thing to understand about the Internet is that it is driven by keywords and advertising. Every web page on the Internet has a title, description and keywords that are ‘hidden’ within the page. It’s called Meta information. The visible portion of the web page has text, images, video and hyperlinks that take you to other pages. Google, Yahoo, Bing and almost all other search engines use this information to deliver relevant results when you search for something online.

They also use it to deliver adverts on what you searched for. When these ads are clicked on they take you to a company’s web site and Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc, get paid for that ‘click’. This is what drives the Internet. Keywords and page content and links to your content are crucial to get found and they are critical to deliver your promotional adverts to the correct audience.

Once you have established a web site or blog of any kind you are going to want to be ‘found’ on Google, etc. Keywords and links to your pages (called back links) are vital to this.  So what you need to do is get others to link to you. There are a few good and free ways to do this as follows:

1.       Add your web site link to several of the many web directories that are out there, including DMoz, the open directory project. These links will pop up all over the Internet.

2.       Post information to forums and user groups related to your subject – include a link to your web site in your ’signature’

3.       Post articles on subjects related to your business on many of the Ezine article web sites available like this one. Ensure that your web link is in the signature or bio about the author. Put these on your web site as well as the search engines love new content.

4.       Post adverts in the free classified directories. There are thousands of these so pick effective ones by trial and error.

5.       Submit your site to all the main search engines.  Look for the Add URL link on the search engine page.

There are even services out there that will write articles for you and submit various versions of that article to hundreds of article web sites to help you build those back links. Be careful with these as too many links too soon will get you banned from Google, etc for spamming the system.

Take your time and research the various online businesses that are available to you. Search for reviews about them online and see what others experience has been with them. Stick at it and when a promotion method works well drop others that don’t work so well and do more of the activities that work. Good luck.