Easy yet profitable ways to make money online or start an internet home based business.
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There are many ways to make money online. Here is a glimpse at six popular internet options that online business seekers find the most profitable.
1. Affiliate Marketing
2. Freelance Work From Home
3. Blogging For Profit
4. Wholesale Dropshipping
5. Virtual Assistant
6. Product Creation
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice whereby marketers promote products, goods or services for a commission. Affiliate marketing enables you to promote products and services online and earn a commission or a percentage of the sale when someone purchases through your affiliate link.
A good example of affiliate marketing is ClickBank. This is an online digital goods provider that allows you to promote various products such as e-books and services. Many products on ClickBank sell for close to $100 and commissions can be as high as 60%.
One of the benefits of affiliate marketing is that you don’t need a product of your own, your job as an affiliate is to promote and endorse other people’s products. You do this by encouraging readers to take an interest, once they are interested they will respond by clicking your affiliate link which takes them to a product sales page. As long as you are promoting a quality product and it sells well, you are likely to pull in the sales, and in many cases, lots of sales.
What’s more is a good affiliate program will provide you with all the marketing tools and materials you need to promote it, things like banners, graphics, email promotions, branded materials, ads, e-courses and others, making your job that much easier.
Affiliate marketing can be highly profitable as an affiliate and start up costs are minimal. If you can do some basic market research, build a simple website, invest some time in social marketing or write a few related articles, you can begin making sales within just a few days.
Freelance Work From Home
If you possess a marketable skill that can be done from home, freelancing can be a great solution. Many freelance opportunities include writing, editing, web design, development projects, medical & legal transcription, internet research, email support work, data entry, administration jobs, programming, technical projects, graphic design, illustration and a wide range of telecommuting jobs.
There are plenty of online job posting sites and job bidding services that enable people to take on as little or as much freelance work as they can handle. This is an ideal option for many work-at-home parents, college students, retirees or anyone that wants to earn money but also needs a flexible work schedule.
Professional Blogging
Professional bloggers like Darren Rowse and John Chow are making significant blogging incomes. As a blogger, you can choose create a blog of your own or you can be a ghostblogger for someone else.
Possible ways to earn via blogging include:
• Get paid a salary by blogging for someone else,
• Make salary plus commission or revenue share by blogging for a network,
• Buy your own domain, set up your own blog and monetize it.
Many folks who work from home also blog as a side job. Creating a blog is free, all it requires is the time to set it up. Pick a topic of your choice, write daily posts on your topic, keep it interesting and invite feedback. Additionally you can monetize your blog with various related advertisements and affiliate products.
Wholesale Dropshipping
A dropshipping business enables you to buy wholesale, sell retail and you never have to handle the products or maintain inventory. Simply find a wholesale dropshipper, build a site that displays the products and submit the product orders to your dropshippers whereby they will ship the products to your customers. You pay wholesale for the cost of the items, charge your customers retail and the difference is your profit.
This type of e-commerce business lends itself to selling just about anything. There are a lot of dropship wholesalers and many online programs to support your efforts and you can get started with minimal investment.
Virtual Assistants
Just about any successful online business needs a virtual assistant. A virtual assistant (VA) can do various things like administrative work, accounting, project management, read and respond to email and more. There are many large online companies that hire virtual assistants as well as small private work-at-home entrepreneurs.
You can find VA jobs online and you can advertise your services as well. Like freelancing, this can be a job that offers flexibility. You can take on as much virtual assistant work as you need or cut back as your schedule changes. This is another excellent option for stay at home moms, students or anyone that needs flexible hours.
Product Creation
Most online experts will agree that creating your own product is where the real money is, specifically information products.
If you can find a way to create a product such as an e-book, e-course or informational guide that fulfils a need or solves a specific problem you can make a substantial amount of money. That’s because you do it once and it pays forever.
Once you invest the time and effort to do all the initial work, this type of online business can run itself. Also, once you have successfully created your product you can help ensure consistent sales by creating an affiliate program which recruits affiliates to do most of the selling and promoting for you, this is what creates a nice passive income stream for you.
Creating your own information product may sound like lots of hard work but you may be pleasantly surprised at how simple something like this is to set up. The hardest part will be creating your information product, however there’s no shortage of information to help you get started.
You can even use a merchant such as ClickBank to help promote your products and manage your affiliates. The start up costs for creating your own info products is minimal and the benefits are a consistent stream of income.
There are many benefits to working at home regardless of what type of online money making opportunity you choose to pursue. Sage advice would be to take the time to research the available opportunities, decide carefully and then work up a reasonable plan. This will arm you with the knowledge and motivation that you will need to get you started in an exciting new online career.
All you have to do is Google search the word home work jobs to quickly realize you are about to face the most agonizing moments of your life. So what does it all mean? Where are all the work at home jobs?
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All you have to do is search the words home work jobs in your favorite search engine to realize how hard it is to find them. What you end up finding are websites that say avoid scams, earn $200 a day, earn $50-$75 an hour, and so on.
So what does it all mean? Where are all the work at home jobs?
2 websites I have come across that are legitimate are:
1. Tjobs.com
2. Wahm.com/jobs.html
I would venture to say that 90% of the work at home job websites are just websites trying to sell you information. What happens is people in desperate situations will break down and spend their last $50 to buy a book that shows them how to do data entry at home, or type at home.
What you end up with is a book that sends you on a wild goose chase producing very little results that you can actually use to work at home.
Realistically there are all kinds of home work jobs that you can do. Here’s a short list: website design, ghost writer, graphic design, customer service, sales, software design, telemarketing, and so on. It’s not that there are not jobs you can do from home. It is just that finding the employers is difficult.
If you have desired skills, you are better off to email your resume to every company within 25 miles of where you live. Then get on the phone and start calling the ones that appeal to you.
It is becoming more commonplace for companies to ask their employees to work at home. Many times this is on a commission basis. You get to stay at home and work, the companies pay you for the work that you do, and it is a win-win situation.
The real savings to many businesses are that they no longer have to pay for your benefits like vacation days, retirement plan, and so on. Your real benefit is you do not have to commute back and forth to work everyday.
One other home work job you should not discount is starting your own home business combining the Internet with affiliate marketing and blogging. This is a great way for you to control your own time and start your own business.
Although you are not guaranteed any specific income at first, you can develop this into the most desirable and profitable work you will ever do at home.
In summary, do not pay any for a list of employers looking to hirer workers. Contact businesses in your area by picking up the phone and calling them. Or better yet, start your own home business, combining blogging and affiliate marketing online to create more money than you have ever made in your life.
Most of us prefer to place our trusted business affairs, such as strategic outreach through public and media relations, in the hands of experienced practitioners. Whether with our attorney or IT vendor, our airline pilot or our accountant, we value experience when the job is complex and the outcome critical to our success.
This same principle applies to the selection of a public relations and marketing adviser. Effective public relations does not happen by gravitational pull; rather, it is the outcome of incisive strategy skillfully executed, managed and measured. It can be taught in school – but it is learned only through experience.
Public relations is commonly mistaken as the domain of generalists. At many firms, “paint by number” strategy drives “fill in the blank” planning to create “cookie cutter” campaigns. Although cookie cutters can rapidly create dozens of identical cookies, they rarely leave a distinct impression. They certainly cannot convey a firm’s unique value proposition.
Contrary to popular misconception, public relations with an impact is the discipline of depth. In today’s business world, successful practitioners are those who can step outside the box of traditional agency practice, and embrace the communications trends that are working today. Communication is no longer an arena in which businesses dictate their messages to consumers. Consumers, with multiple communications channels available to them, now have the power and the desire to form their own opinions based on a survey of the information available to them.
Indeed, media consumers now have the power to create their own messaging and counteract corporate messaging that they feel is inaccurate. This is a Web 2.0 world, which is being increasingly and consistently defined by consumers. Businesses who are not agile and able to modify their messaging and tactics to utilize and work with this trend will quickly become irrelevant to their markets and unable to expand their reach by targeting new market sectors available through emerging communications channels.
As such, effective public relations practitioners must be knowledgeable not only of their clients’ business models and areas of expertise, but also in target market behaviors with regards to media consumption. Practitioners must be able to utilize innovative, multi channel strategies to deliver messages to consumers with messages they will understand and through their media of choice.
Public relations professionals must develop the ability to integrate and consolidate all communications channels to reach target audiences, and understand the synergies that exist between all communication media. They must combine traditional marketing and communication experience with new technology and market research to create outreach strategies that are effective, relevant and cutting-edge.
This principle is demonstrably true in specialized, niche industry practices, including technology public relations, financial public relations and mortgage technology public relations, to name a few. Although clients in these industries retain a deep understanding of current technologies as means to solve specific problems, they often do not have the knowledge to utilize technology in a way that produces effective marketing and clear communications with their target audiences. In realms such as these, savvy communications experts who are independent of traditional agency “cookie-cutter” approaches and organizational restrictions can make a significant impact on behalf of their clients.
The Internet is truly the realm of small businesses and innovative solutions. Big box providers depend on their existing brand recognition and market penetration to do their marketing for them, leaving a huge vacuum of potential for smaller business seeking a competitive advantage. Smart public relations practitioners who understand how to utilize the Internet to support an overall integrated communications and marketing strategy will be poised for rapid success by connecting their clients to relevant messages through emerging media channels.
Public relations is a discipline of depth. All a savvy practitioner needs to succeed is an innovative approach and a depth of mind.
For more information on technology public relations, financial public relations and mortgage technology public relations, visit depthpr.com
It seems difficult to believe at the dawn of the 21st Century, that there exists
a major discipline with so many diverse, partial, incomplete and limited interpretations of its mission. Here, just a sampling of professional opinion
on what public relations is all about:
* talking to the media on behalf of a client.
* selling a product, service or idea.
* reputation management.
* engineering of perception
* doing good and getting credit for it.
* attracting credit to an organization for doing good and limiting the downside when it does bad
While there is an element of truth in such definitions, most zero in on only part of what public relations is capable of doing, kind of a halfway fundamental premise. Worse, they fail to answer the question, to what end do they lead? Few even mention the REAL end-game — behavior modification — the goal against which all public relations activity must be held accountable.
Here’s my opinion about the fundamental premise of public relations: People act on their perception of the facts leading to behaviors about which something can be done. When public relations creates, changes or reinforces that opinion by reaching, persuading and moving-to-desired-action those people whose behaviors affect the organization, the public relations mission is accomplished.
Even when we feel certain about the fundamental premise of public relations, maybe we should take another look? Because if we are wrong, at best we miss out on public relation’s enormous benefits. At worst, we can damage ourselves and our organizations.
The fundamental premise suggests that, to help achieve true competitive advantage, management must insure that its public relations investment is committed directly to influencing the organization’s most important audiences. And THEN insure that the tacticians efficiently prepare and communicate messages that will influence those audience perceptions and, thus, behaviors. For non-profits or public sector entities, the emphasis would be on achieving the organization’s primary objectives.
What is the alternative when we see some public relations people managing to go through their entire careers without a firm grasp of the fundamental premise of public relations? Their responses to crises, or to requests for well thought-out solutions to public relations problems, reveal a serious lack of understanding. They confuse the basic function of public relations with any number of tactical parts that make up the whole, such as publicity, crisis management or employee relations. Understandably, they feel unsure in approaching public relations problems, then uncertain about what counsel to give their clients. Many, relying on career-long misconceptions about public relations, forge ahead anyway advising the client ineffectively sometimes with damaging, if not dangerous counsel.
In seeking a solution to this challenge to understanding, we cannot rely solely on tactics or even emulate the artillery training commander who tells his student gunners “point your guns in any direction and fire when you feel like it!”
Instead, just as that artillery commander teaches his newbie gunners to carefully analyze their target and precisely what they must do to reach it, so it is with public relations.
Our best opportunity resides at the get-go where we really can make certain our public relations students CLEARLY understand the basic premise of public relations at the beginning of their careers. AND that they have an equally clear understanding of the organizational context — business, non-profit or public sector — in which they will be expected to apply what they have learned, and in which they must operate successfully.
Bushy-tailed and bright with promise, the new generation of public relations professionals must learn that their employer/client wants us to apply our special skills in a way that helps achieve his or her business objectives. And that no matter what strategic plan we create to solve a problem, no matter what tactical program we put in place, at the end of the day we must modify somebody’s behavior if we are to earn our money.
The best part is, when the behavioral changes become apparent, and meet the program’s original behavior modification goal, three benefits appear.
One, the public relations program is a success. Two, by achieving the behavioral goal we set at the beginning, we are using a dependable and accurate public relations performance measurement. And three, when our “reach, persuade and move-to-desired-action” efforts produce a visible modification in the behaviors of those people we wish to influence, we are using public relations’ special strengths to their very best advantage.
Budding professionals should learn at the beginning of their careers that most employers and clients are not primarily interested in our ability to fraternize with the media, communicate or paint images. Nor are they especially fascinated with our efforts to identify target audiences, set public relations goals and strategies, write persuasive messages, select communications tactics, et al.
What the employer/client invariably DOES want is a change in the behaviors of certain key audiences which leads directly to the achievement of their business objectives. Hence, the emphasis in this article on careful planning for altered key audience perceptions and modified behaviors.
Which explains why quality preparation and the degree of behavioral change it produces, defines success or failure for a public relations program. Done correctly, when public relations results in modified behaviors among groups of people vitally important to any organization, we could be talking about nothing less than its survival.
But why, young people, do we feel so strongly about the fundamental premise of public relations? Because some of us have learned from leaders in the field, from mentors and from long years of experience that there are only three ways a public relations effort can impact behavior: create opinion where it doesn’t exist, reinforce existing opinion or change that opinion. No surprise that the process by which those goals are realized is known as public relations. While behavior is the goal, and a host of communications tactics are the tools, our strategy is the leverage provided by public opinion.
We also learned the hard way that when your employer/client starts looking for a return on his or her public relations investment, it becomes clear in a hurry that the goal MUST be the kind of change in the behaviors of key stakeholders that leads directly to achieving business objectives.
I also believe that we should advise our newcomers that if their employers/clients ever say they’re not getting the behavior changes they paid for, they’re probably wasting the money they’re spending on public relations.
Here’s why I say that. Once again, we know that people act on their perception of the facts, that those perceptions lead to certain behaviors, and that something can be done about those perceptions and behaviors that leads to achieving the employer/client’s business objectives.
Which means s/he really CAN establish the desired behavior change up front, then insist on getting that result before pronouncing the public relations effort a success.
In other words, the way to increase their comfort level about their public relations investment, is to make certain that investment produces the behavior modification they said they wanted at the beginning of the program,
That way, they KNOW they’re getting their money’s worth.
I would be remiss here if I omitted reference to the difficulties those new to the field will encounter in attempting to evaluate public relations performance. Often, they will find themselves using highly-subjective, very limited and only partially applicable performance judgments. Among them, inquiry generation, story content analysis, gross impressions and even advertising value equivalent to the publicity space obtained.
The main reason for this sorry state of affairs is the lack of affordable public opinion survey products that could demonstrate conclusively that the public relations perception and behavioral goal set at the beginning of the program was, in fact, achieved. Usually, opinion surveys adequate to the job of establishing beyond doubt that a behavioral goal was achieved, are cost-prohibitive, often far in excess of the overall cost of the public relations program itself!
However, young people, all is not lost. Obviously, some behavioral changes are immediately visible, such as customers returning to showrooms, environmental activists abandoning plant gate protests or a rapidly improving job retention rate. We follow less obvious behavioral change by monitoring indicators that directly impact behavior such as comments in community meetings and business speeches, local newspaper, radio and TV editorials, emails from target audience members and thought-leaders, and public statements by political figures and local celebrities.
We even shadow our own communications tactics trying to monitor their impact on audience perception — tactics such as face-to-face meetings, Internet ezines and email, hand-placed newspaper and magazine feature articles and broadcast appearances, special consumer briefings, news releases, announcement luncheons, onsite media interviews, facility tours, brochures and even special events like promotional contests, financial road shows, awards ceremonies, trade conventions, celebrity appearances and open houses — each designed to impact individual perception and behavior.
And it does work — we ARE able to demonstrate an impact on perception and behavior for the employer/client. But affordable professional opinion/behavioral surveys would be the best solution. Clearly, solving this problem remains a major challenge for both the public relations and survey disciplines.
One more piece of advice for the soon-to-be public relations professional. As we begin to achieve proficiency in public relations, an action pathway to success also begins to appear:
* identify the problem
* identify target audiences
* set the public relations goal
* set the public relations strategy
* prepare persuasive messages
* select and implement key communications tactics
* monitor progress
* and the end game? Meet the behavior modification goal.
I hope these remarks contribute to a broadened understanding of the fundamental function of public relations in our organizations, especially among our entry-level colleagues. In particular, how it can strengthen relationships with those important groups of people — those target audiences, those “publics” whose perceptions and behaviors can help or hinder the achievement of our employer/client’s business objectives.
A final thought for those entering or planning to enter the field of public relations — you’ll know you’ve arrived at each public relations end game when the changes in behaviors become truly apparent through feedback such as increased numbers of positive media reports, encouraging supplier and thought-leader comment, and increasingly upbeat employee and community chatter.
In other words, sound strategy combined with effective tacti