Whenever I read a blog or a forum related my topic(marketing, affiliate marketing, money), I often get into a conversation about internet marketing.

In particular, I found many that want to know how do to start a business online from scratch. In general, when I post about that subject I tend to make a summary of what you already find on my book “make money online“.

In general, there are different rules that now I want to show you:

Step 1: Mindshift - That is the harder. Prepare to change your thinking and learn to accept different rules. You do need to break out from your old mindset to work online.

Step 2: Plan your success – First all, you need to know that often nobody is interested to the product you want to sell. Build a strategy. As an affiliate marketer, I prefer to build my audience, then my approach internet marketing is to have product in mind and then try and figure out how to sell it. As an affiliate I suggest you as basic strategy to build a list of target visitors and create an authority blog where you will eventually sell our own products as well.

Step 3: Research - Starting doing some keyword research is an important part of your success online. I usually, use Wordtracker, but the Google keyword tool is good as well.

You need to find search terms that have some traffic, and pick those search terms that give those results of less 60,000 as advertiser competition in ‘quotes’ in the search listing.

Step 4: Join to affiliate networks - The next step is to choose an affiliate program related to your topic. Often I use Clickbank, and Shareasale products for both my sites the3dtechnologies.com and nickdeiana.com.

There are also some cool offers at CJ.com and Pepperjam that I use for my site coupons.the3dtechnologies.com.

Once choosed and joined to an offer, I usually read the sales page I try get into the mind of the buyer.

Note: if you already have a site you can use it to start the campaign and makes money by using this technique to get yourself more traffic and links.

Step 5: Content - Don’t take offense, marketing is not something that comes naturally and most people enter the blogging world as writers or hobbyists, not business. You need to write powerful content in order to attract more visitors and potential customers as possible.

An efficace strategy is to posting video content on Youtube in order to use it as a lead magnet. Your video can be a film yourself  as slideshow made with powerpoint as well.

Step 6 – Traffic - Time to get some traffic. We write ours article and place links in the content that link directly to your affiliate landing page.

First all, get a nice keyword domain and build a wordpress blog on it using the C Panel wizard called Fantastico.

Read my free guide to installing a wordpress blog with fantastico button. Once installed, make sure to use the right SEO permalink structure of /%category%/%postname%/ and use six tags per post with keywords (that you got from Alexa).

Step 7 – Conversion - Once built traffic, the next step is that to get those useful subscribers to build your list, selling affiliate offers and so on.

You should add an email subscription box like mine on my right sidebar of this site, and create a free report, mini guide tutorial that allow you to grab email of new users. Use aweber or other services like that to get the emails and send out your tips.

Once you have got new users send them useful tips on how have siucces on your niche. Your aims is to build a strong target list so that you can make money any time you need it just by sending out targeted valuable offers.

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In these years publishers are looking for new ways to start monetize their content. To understand this issue today I’ve pubblished a video interviews with educational technologies expert George Siemens.

In a nutshell, according to George,  content is no longer a separate entity that you can create, share and sell “as it is”. What really important now is what you sell around your content. It can be a lot of things, but it is this the effective business models.

Here, I’ve put both the video interview with the full text transcription:

[HTML1]

The free time stage is not over, but one thing I am concerned about, and that I will not quite get to the news initiative. I just want to talk a little bit about the software end, because this is something I am concerned about.

There was initially in late 90s, early 2000 a lot of interest in open-source software. I remember individuals would move, for example, when Movable Type announced they were not as open as people had thought they were. Huge groups moved over to WordPress, and there were some publications on people saying that – Mark Pilgrim posted on this – Movable Type was not open enough. It was open, but not open enough.

What ended up happening was people who wanted to write custom code and make those kind of adjustments, they were interested in Movable Type as much because they did not have that control. WordPress, no problem, they could do what they wanted.

We had this flare-up, where people were saying: “Openness is critical.”

What happened last five years though? That openness model has fallen to the background, because we have misplaced – this is an early statement that Stallman mentioned – it was not about open or free as in beer, it was free as in freedom, as in liberty.

What happened now, many people are using a raft of Google sites, whether it is Gmail, Google Docs or whatever else, they are using Zoho, the podcasting service that will host their sites, PodBean and other stuff.

They are happy to use free in a monetary sense – which is OK now – but it will become a significant issue, because free in a monetary sense is not the premise for a suitable sustained future in a content or in a publishing kind of a field.

It has to be free as in access, free as in liberty.

To that regard – and I have been whining about this lately – Google has done a big disservice, because if you want to get your email out of Gmail there are ways to do this, but it is not as simple as doing an export out of WordPress to move your resource into a different blog.

Those are some of things that are frustrating me. A lot of educators now are starting to say: “We want zero cost instead…” – they are not making that choice explicitly, they are doing it by the tools they select, by relying on some of these tools that are not open source, but they do not have to pay to use them.

That is the backdrop that I wanted to get to answering your question, if I was talking to newspaper people.

The way to ensure a healthy society and to ensure a democracy is for critical conversations to be in the open.

If you start having conversations that are only accessible by certain groups of people, or only accessible by certain people, then you start to undermine the notion of a free and an open society to a degree.

It might not be catastrophic when it first starts to happen, but eventually we end up creating, within content, a social-class distinction that we do not have right now in an open Internet – or in a partial-opened Internet.

There is already content being walled-in, which would mean that in order to read the key information in The Wall Street Journal, will has to happen? I have to have a certain level of economic status in order to pay for it.

I fully understand why The Wall Street Journal wants to make money and I am not sure how they will make money in the future, but I am quite confident they will not make it by charging for content.

What you are suggesting is that – and this is the same point I was making about the  people who filter some of the information, who play that middle role – the content is not the value point, but the commentary on the content, THAT could be a value point. That is what some of the people might be willing to pay for.

They might be willing to say:

“I want to hear what Robin Good thinks about the fact that Skype might be sold by eBay. What are the implications of that? And if I already have a strategy and place in my own company to use Skype, what should I be thinking about in order to not get blind-sided by Skype?“

That is different now. Now you are asking for someone to invest particular expertise and share a particular structured prospective on a subject, that is different than saying: “Should information about Skype sale be available for free or not?” In my eyes, yes.

Information should be free, but commentary? That is a slightly different slant, and it is something we could spend a long time talking about because… At what point does commentary become information and then ought to be free?

I think for you to say:

“I have spent a decade trying to stay on top of this field – new tools, collaborative technologies – I have invested very heavily in a time prospective on knowing what it is going on.“

For you to then say: “I would continue to share all the information, all the news about who gets sold, what is happening here, what is going on there.” I would continue to make all of that available free, for anyone who wants, because that is the premise of a reasonable healthy society.

And then for you to say: “If you have contextually specific questions that I can answer to tap into my expertise, my wealth of knowledge that I have required over the years of following these trends.“, yes that is a value point and that is the point earlier that I mentioned.

Simply sharing information or content it is not a point in which we can build an economic structure.

There is a distinction here. One is: What generates value for content?

What you are doing is you are generating value, you are adding value by putting physical effort in. You are taking time. You are doing something with this in order to create a product that is more contextualized to the needs of a particular organization, which is different than just simply making your content an information available for free.

The distinction I am making is: If I post something on my site, it has zero cost to be re-posted. Somebody can cut and past that and it is not like a book. A book had an input cost. We had to buy paper, print, your people operating the printing press.

There was a value process created through the publication of a physical book. People were investing dollars in products and cost.

When you do it online, the ability to duplicate content online is virtually zero.

Getting back to the point I was making. For you to then find a value point, it has to be based on something that you are contributing time and effort in, that cannot be duplicated by cut and paste.

What you are suggesting is you are providing specialized commentary, a unique prospective.

You are saying: “This is what is impacting this field. I am picking out the important resources and that are going to be contextually relevant to you as an organization.” Is that a value point? Yes, it is.

Pure information without that kind of commentary, that does not have an economic value point.

Article written by Robin Goode for MasterNewMedia and first published as ‘Online Content Monetization: Critical Viewpoints From George Siemens And Gerd Leonhard‘

About The Author

Robin Good is an independent new media publisher, who has converted his professional skills and interests into a self-publishing career. Robin, whose real name is Luigi Canali De Rossi, is in fact one of the first people in the world to have become fully independent by writing and sharing online about his own interests.

Robin Good’s key project is MasterNewMedia, an online magazine dedicated to news, skills and resources to communicate more effectively with new media technologies.

About George Siemens

George Siemens is a theorist on learning in a digitally-based society. He is the author of the article Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age and the book Knowing Knowledge – an exploration of the impact of the changed context and characteristics of knowledge.

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When I had the crazy idea to run an online business, and leave my engineer profession, I started to learning everything I could about blogging, affiliate marketing and every kind of business online on which I can take inspiration..

I can remember where my passion for business online begun. Is by reading blog like Problogger, and Shoemoney that I received tons of information. However is by reading some ebook left me extracting the information I were needed and discovered what was right or not.

Of course, buy many books at once was enough expensive for me, especially when I was in the beginning and not had enough money in my pocket…..but in the end it was worth it. However, no need to pay for a book. As you can educate yourself by reading an $20 ebook, you can learn from a good free ebook as well.

Get A Free ebook

Image Credit: Go.Bello

Write an book that’s completely free is expensive in time and effort. I can attest it, because recently I’ve launched my free full guide to start a business online and make money. If you do not yet, you can grab your first copy by signing up on the right sidebar.

For a newbie, a free ebook is just like a senior college at the university where you are able to learn more out of a class than his freshman counterpart. Through a guide you can get very efficiently informations and, if you want, extracting the information you need, avoiding those that’s just not worth your time.

Most of people who start an online business from scratch get an education pretty similar to mine. We learn more from our favorite blogs, in my case, Problogger, Johnchow, and Shoemoney. We often pay for some information in an ebook or even a course online, and  cobble together a lot from pure observation.

Get Inspiration And Take Action

In these three years I’ve got a lot of information as bloggers, affiliate marketer, and internet entrepreneur. In general, is important take inspiration from something, in order you can avoid some common mistake most newbie bloggers does.

Pareto Principle, also known as the 80-20 rule, which notes that 80% of the output comes from 20% of the input. Which means that 20% of the time you spend as blogger, affiliate marketer provides 80% of your best work. According to the Pareto Principle, there’s always a “20%” you should be spending your time on.

If you want that 20% of the time provides 80% of your best work, I reccomend to use the energy from all that inspiration and turn just one idea into an action. Remember, learning is important but the most important is taking action.

Now, you could wondering where to find the inspiration? There are people that are feel energized after reading an book. However,  inspiration don’t stop there. Inspiration can also come from something of incredibly small, for instance an email newsletter.

The Next Step: Learn How Does To Share Your Knowledge

Once learned how does to start a business online, the next step is to learn how does to share your knowledge.

When some month ago I started with my first education product, all I wanted to do was to tell my readers how really I did to start my website and make money by it.

Sure, people are attracted to what’s new and different, but in my view are more attracted by real experiences. cases study, real example, real prof.

So, if you are going to share your knowledge through an ebook, keep an eye out for those rare resources that are worth know, but beyond this, remember to sharing the real experience that helped you to have successful.

Also, release it as a free online resource that your readers may want to use because can prove without any cost, whether your business is sustainable or not.

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