Time

The most important factor is time. Internet marketing business allows us control our own time and schedule. We are the one who is responsible to fix our working hours. Be it day time or night time all up to us. As long as we can meet our business requirement then it should be acceptable. The most important part is to fixed our business hours and stick to the schedule. Fixed schedule allows us focus on our objective and works. It will have direct impact to our productivity. We just need some discipline here.

Small investment

Setting up an internet based business will only cost a small amount of investment, far cheaper than having a brick and mortar business. Our monthly overhead is also minimal. In most cases we don’t really need to make a big loan to finance our new business. In some business model the initial start up cost can be considered zero, except for our own time. If we really tight on the budget, we can start our business on a small scale. More like testing the water. During this “training” period we can gain the business skills based on actual experience.  Not just a theory from websites or ebooks. Once we gain these valuable skills, the risk for going into a larger scale business will be very small. Success will almost be certain.

Direct impact to the bottom line

Since this is our own business, what we do will have direct impact to the bottom-line, our income. The more effort you put in, the bigger the potential return. It is such a great feeling to see how our very own effort turns to money. Nothing is more rewarding than that. Nobody can claim to be responsible for the achievement. We have 100% control of the business future.

Internet marketing is real.  We can make money from the comfort of our home, with all the flexibility. We won’t find such flexibility in the offline business. So what are you waiting for? Make your move now.  Share with me if you have any difficulty in taking the first step.

“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.” – Michelangelo

You see,  I’ve never teach my kids about internet marketing,  at least not right now. They are too young to be spoilt with the making money from the internet idea. I want them to have good education background first,  before I can teach them about the internet marketing.

I don’t know how it happen,  somehow my 11 years old son actually found a way of making money from the internet on his own. I’ve never teach him anything about internet marketing. Of course he is aware about my online venture,  and did ask me what I’m doing from time to time.

He actually discovered how to make money from URL shortening service. What he did is to find interesting URL, shorten the URL and share the links with his friends.  That all he did. The shortening service website will give a small commission for every user using their service. So when his friends open the url,  he will get his small commission. Currently he is only using facebook as his marketing platform. I don’t think it qualify to be called “marketing”.  More toward sharing I would say.

After few days he managed to accumulate few cents and he is very excited with the achievement. Sure we are not referring to big money here, but this is a good starting point.  I can still recall my first 13 cents from CJ.  That 13 cents proved that money can be made from internet marketing while we are sleeping.  That 13 cents also push me to learn more about internet marketing.

What I’m trying to say here,  we all can make money from the internet.  There are thousand of possibilities and ways. We need to persistence, and never give up when facing difficulties.  

Share with me your first experience.  Love to hear it from your.

Till the next sharing.

British teen, named Christian Owens, made his first 1 million dollar at the age of 16. Isn’t that interesting? He reached that 1 million mark through two of his online company, Mac Bundle Box and Branchr. Mac Bundle Box offers bundle Mac softwares at discounted prices. His second company is a pay per click company. Branchr currently serves over 300 million ads a month.

Interestingly enough his principals are hardwork, determination and drive. Nothing new I guess.

Enjoy the short video

So in this short article I’ll share 3 proven methods. I’ve used all of them in selecting my niche. All 3 methods can be carried out in a few minutes. A very simple methods.

Here there are:

Hobbies

We have hobbies.   We know and understand our hobbies in and out. We know the subject very well. So the possibility of making wrong statement or blog entries is very minimal. We also dont need to learn a new subject. But the most important part of it,  we enjoy doing it.  This is very important when we just starting  up.

Why?

Simply we are still new in the internet marketing.  In most cases we wont be making money right away. We need to spend lot of time and money in tweaking the system and campaigns. Since we are working in something that we love,  we can still enjoy the work even though we still struggling with the money part. We dont feel the struggle as much. The chances of success is lot much higher.

I’m sharing based on my personal experience. I’ve one website that is based on my hobby. It is one of the best performing site. Till this day I still enjoy working and updating the site. Isn’t that wonderful?

However using this approach, we need to determine the “profitability” of the niche before we can proceed further. There are many interesting niche that has no or less profitability.  Regardless of your efforts, the possibility of success in such niche is almost non-existance.

EBay  pulse

Most of us know eBay  very well.  We buy or sell almost anything at eBay. Surprisingly not many are aware that eBay  can also be used as a good research tool.  eBay  can tell us right away is “hot items” in the market.

Simply go to pulse.eBay .com.  At this site eBay  share with us what are the hottest selling items.  This is the current trend. With millions of users, data from eBay  definitely can be used as an accurate measurement.

Here is the snap shot from eBay  pulse.  Click on the categories menu if you want to dig further.  eBay will show us the top 10 items in the categories. There is no detail statistic. But that will be good enough for our purposes.

Finding HOT items from ebay

Niche from eBay  pulse will definitely be very useful if we intend to sell or promote (affiliate) physical items. Like selling at auction sites or promoting Amazon’s affiliate. However it can also be used as a measuring gauge for relevant digital products.

cbengine

Majority of marketers love working with clickbank.  Mainly due to its big profit margin and wide range of available products.

Specifically for clickbank,  we can use cbengine.com.  On the right hand side of the website,  there is a menu where we can find top selling products at clickbank.  Just select the correct category and cbengine will list out all the top selling products.  For our purposes there is no need to purchase the pro membership.  The basic data shown by cbengine is more than sufficient.

Find your niche through cbengine

There you have it.  3 simple yet proven methods. I really hope this posting help you select your niche.

1. Internet marketing is easy

Undoubtedly this the biggest mistake majority of newbies make. People always think doing internet marketing is simple. You only need to spend just few minutes a day. And tons of money will roll in day and night non stop. Really hope that is true, but the reality can be harsh. We do need to spend our time, money and effort before we can reap the profit.

Fortunately internet marketing have many advantages. Making it very attractive if you interested in generating income from home. Lot of major advantages that is. I’ve addressed it here.

There are good reason why majority of newbies having this wrong preconception. One of the major contributor is no other than “get rich quick” scheme. There are tons of this ads around. Without realizing it people start thinking that doing online business is so easy. All you need to do is have one of the “magic” system and you are ready to go. No knowledge needed and easy to maintain (if not maintenance free).

As human being we always wanted to have an easy system. It just our human nature and nothing wrong with that.

2. Don’t bother to purchase own domain and hosting

Seriously lot of beginners pay the price for this mistake. People are too afraid putting some investment for their online. Obviously they are not serious about their business. Some simply are not confident with the effort. More like trial and error sort of approach.

As an alternative they use the free blog or free hosting. If you are using free blog your chances of loosing your valuable assets (you website ) is very high. A slight mistake your privilege will be revoked and you will be out of business in an instance. Just consider how much time you spend on the site. Consider your time and money for the website development plus your marketing effort. Is it really worth it?

Having your own domain in the long run will give you the credibility. Your valuable visitors feel more confident when visiting your site. This definitely will have impact to your conversion rate.

The cost of ownership for your own domain and hosting is very minimal. Cost for a domain currently is less than $10 for a year. They are not that expensive. Hosting cost also is very minimal. You can purchase shared hosting for less than $10 a month. Hostgator for example offer various packages that can meet our requirement and needs. In most of the packages we can host more than one domain. We can host various domains in a single hosting. Different domain for different purposes.
3. Wrong business model

There are two major business models: service and product based. Product based model can be further divided into 2 major subcategories ; physical and non physical items.

We wont go into the details of the business model. But what I want to highlight is that we need to start with a business model that we are good at. Or at least we are familiar with. If we are good in graphic design, obviously offering our services is the most logical. You don’t need to spend time learning graphic softwares. You can focus your energy and attention on marketing. By doing that you already win half of the battle.

There are lot of uncertainties when we start our business. Starting with a business model that we are good at allow us to pay more attention on improving the business rather learning the rope at the same time. Our changes of survival will definitely be higher.

Hopefully by highlighting these mistake we can make the most important step : take action.