Guest Post by Thomas Westling

With many services and Web sites available today for consumers to sell products or services online, it can be challenging to figure out which one will work best for you. But regardless of where you decide to sell online, there are basic sales principles you can follow that will make a difference between achieving a profitable sale and having a prospective customer skip right past your product listing. Following these rules will help call attention to your listing and put your offering in the best possible light to prospective buyers.

1. Be honest. If your item is five years old, don’t call it brand new. Describe how long you’ve had it and what wear it has gotten. Otherwise you are wasting the potential buyer’s time and creating distrusting.

2. Do your research. When selling a product or service online, spend some time researching similar items for sale and how they are being advertised. This will help you decide which information to include in your listing, what features to highlight and what price to ask for your item.

3. You’ve gotta see it to believe it. People want a chance to see an item before offering to buy it, so include a high-quality photograph showing the item. If it’s a large object like furniture or a car, use more than one photo with multiple angles in your listing. Research by the advertising industry proves that photos catch more buyers’ eyes and increase sales.

4. Pay atention to speling and grammer. See what we mean? A successful listing is written and proofread carefully. Is all your spelling and grammar correct? Many sites allow you to preview your listing before posting, which could save you from losing a potential buyer.

5. Don’t forget this is a business deal. Respond to all customers promptly and politely. Answer all emails with a greeting and closing, full sentences and your name. Be clear and complete in your descriptions of the product, price and delivery options. If you meet a buyer, be punctual and courteous, no matter how the negotiation goes. If you send your product to the buyer, be sure to package it securely to protect against damage and make sure it arrives to the buyer promptly. You are selling yourself just as much as you are selling your old things, so pay careful attention to how you deal with potential buyers.

Author Bio:
Westling is the founder of AmericanListed.com, a new online classifieds site presenting consumers and businesses with a more effective way to sell and buy products and services within their cities, towns, or even within the ultra-local confines of their neighborhoods. AmericanListed.com is the only free site offering a user and family-friendly online selling arena.

If you enjoy making money online by promoting products or services, then the chances of you being in affiliate marketing are fairly high. You might have signed up as an affiliate with one or more online businesses, who then give you a specific affiliate ID. Many of the online businesses that are involved in affiliate marketing might have provided you with a simple marketing package like banner or text ads and your affiliate sales page link. The only thing you really need to do now is to use these great tools and drive traffic to your affiliate sales page.

This is the strategy almost all affiliate marketers follow, but there is a problem here. Though this is a good strategy, in order for you to make a decent amount of money, you will need to have thousands of people visiting your affiliate sales page before even one product/service is sold. That being the case, you can imagine how hard it can be to actually make a $10 commission. Even if you succeed in doing so, the amount of time and effort you would have spent in earning those $10 would be huge!

Not just this, there is another problem with earning these commissions too. If you look at the terms and conditions of your affiliate marketing program, maybe they don’t pay commissions till you have earned at least $30. That means another thousand or more visitors and then, you might just have a chance at looking at those $30.

But here is something you need to consider without getting discouraged. Internet marketing is an excellent way for you to make extra cash on the side, and it honestly does not need much of an investment.

Four Step Affiliate Marketing Process:

Instead of advertising your affiliate program directly, make use of this four step process.

1. Providing value-add: Before getting down to advertising, provide something valuable to your potential customers. The simplest ‘valuable’ thing that you can provide without much effort is free information. You can provide this free information in the form of a series of email courses, eBooks and so on.

2. Give when you get: Don’t give away your free information till you get the email addresses of your potential customers. It is vital to know the name and email address of all the prospective clients, so that you can move on to the other two steps in the affiliate marketing process.

3. Earn trust: The next step in this four step process is to earn the trust of people, due to the valuable information that you have provided.

Just as you would closely monitor information provided by someone who gives you good advice on managing money, time or effort; others will start trusting you, provided your information is trustworthy. Since you have the name and email addresses of the potential customers, you can send them occasional emails with valuable information. Remember, don’t spam their mailbox. Else, they may block you and you will lose sales.

4. The actual sale: If you have been providing the potential customers valuable information regularly, they will trust you enough to buy a product/service you recommend. The sale is easier, if you can somehow make them realize that what you are recommending is worth the amount they will be spending.

In affiliate marketing, try to sell products and services that have helped you personally. This way, it becomes easier for people to trust you and you can share your experiences with them too!

Guest Post by Stephen Phillips

You can easily make money using the internet. There are various useful methods which will help you to make reasonable money online. You can take online surveys, turn a blog in to a cash machine or sell other’s products (affiliate marketing) thus making huge commission. There are other methods as well but affiliate marketing is considered as one of the most trusted ways to make money from the internet.

Why Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is all about selling the products online and getting commission on each such sale. If you are good in marketing, you will be able to make a lot of money from the affiliate marketing. You will need to setup a website, although you can use free blogs also. Three best things about Affiliate Marketing are:

1. You don’t need to have a product of your own.
2. You need not to worry about technical support and customer complaints. Product owner is only one responsible for that.
3. You need not to spend money to start. You can start it for free.

3 Steps of Affiliate Marketing

1. Product Selection
In order to succeed in the affiliate marketing and making money online, you will need to select the proper product. A product that suits your marketing style and at the same time is in demand will surely give you a great start. If you want a head start then you should select a product which you know a lot about. This will allow you to market it even more effectively.

2. Landing Page Creation
You will also need a high quality landing page with a good sales letter on display. Remember that the sales letter and the landing page play an important role to increase the number of conversions. You should also make sure that you are building a list from your landing page as well. You can offer things like free eBooks etc in return for subscription. This will help you build a wonderful list for the future prospects.

3. Online Marketing
You should ideally market your products on all the fronts. You should use the paid advertisement and at the same time you should also try out the free methods. Some of the free methods are more beneficial than the paid advertisement. For example, you can create a product page on all the front runners in the social networks. This will help you to market your product directly and without any cost. It will also help you to develop brand recognition among various sectors of online society.

It is easy to make money online especially from the affiliate marketing but for this you will need two things i.e. hard work and smart work. It is a hard truth that most of the affiliate marketer fails because they don’t work in right direction. While hard work plays a role, the smart work enables you to take the lead. Smart work will save you a lot of time and effort and will also make sure that you are getting the maximum from your resources.

About Author:
Stephen Phillips is an experienced affiliate marketer. Read how he turned from a struggling affiliate to making 5 figure monthly income at his blog, Affiliate Marketing Masters. Here you can also read his personal review of Maverick Money Makers.

Guest Post by Soli Katir

The internet is big! There’s no debating that! It started out as the information superhighway. Now it is becoming the place to go to check to for deals. It is also the place to go when you are trying to save money.

So, how can you take advantage of all this business that is conducted on the world wide web? If you set things up properly, you will be rewarded with a passive online income stream for years to come. This is the ideal form of income. Who doesn’t dream of getting paid for sleeping? Or getting paid while you’re on your vacation and you’ve been gone for 3 months? That is the life! Well, for me. I don’t know if you feel the same way. Some people are workaholics and cannot be away from their work. But, to each their own.

Companies are reporting that with each year, their online revenues are increasing. They love it. Online marketplaces cut down on overhead tremendously. There is no need for a big office building with fancy lights and such. All that’s needed for them is a big warehouse, an internet site, and someone to handle the orders as they come in.

Settings Things Up
This is the hardest part. You will need to set time aside to learn how the internet works and you will need to know a little about marketing as well as what people are searching for. This is key for this will determine what will be successful for you.

Once you have the basic information, you can either use free sites or set up your own. Then you build it so that it is attractive and so it offers useful information, the info that the searcher is looking for. Then you add in offers that will suit your audience, offers for which you are an affiliate. Then you work on sending traffic to your site. And that is it!

This is exactly how some people have broken out of the rat race and gained their financial freedom through the world wide web.

Selling Online
They have created their own little storefront and are selling products that other people need at lower prices than the local physical stores. Some people harness the power of eBay to build their online store.

Affiliate
Others don’t want to have to worry about shipping or dealing with customers, so they sign up as affiliates to eBay and other businesses. For these people, every time they send an interested party to eBay or whatever, they get credited the sale and make a commission.

Freelance
Yet others will offer their services through the internet community through sites like Guru.com and Elance.com.

Author Bio:
Soli Katir, Internet Marketing Expert
Download My Free Report at http://www.starlitt.com/MySecret.html

Guest Post by Jason Mathews

Many people are skeptical when it comes to make money online. They think that there should a huge investment to make money. But in case of online money making that’s not true. You can make a lot of money without spending a dime and I will give you the step by step instruction on how to do that.

Step 1
Picking Up The Product

Join an affiliate program. If you are a beginner clickbank will be a good option. Pick a product to promote that gives you more than $20 per sale with a gravity 30-150. Go to google keyword tool and search the product name. It must have some search volume or if the products are new the niche should have a good search volume.

Step 2
Keyword Research

Keyword research is the most important step here. If you fail here, your entire strategy will fail. Don’t panic, I will show you exactly how to pick winning keywords every time. Here’s what all you should look for a keyword

1. The keyword should have more than 1000 searches on exact match types in Google keyword tool

2. The competing pages for the keyword should be below 30,000. To find the competition go to google and type your keyword in quotes. For example if your keyword is strength training system, search it with quotes, “strength training system” and if the result google gives is less than 30,000 it is not much competitive.

3. Next we have to look at the strength of the top 10 pages on google for the keyword without quotes. This is a crucial step that most newbie internet marketers ignore. If the top ten pages are with authority sites and wikipedia or about.com and if they have optimized for the keyword, ignore it and search for another keyword. If the top ten pages contain ezine articles, web 2.0’s like hubpages and squidoo, then go on to the next step.

4. The final step is to analyze the baclinks of the top ten pages. For that go to Yahoo Site Explorer and enter the url of the top pages. As a general guide line average backlinks should be about 100 and there should be pages ranking in top ten with less than 50 backlinks.

If your keywords meet all these four requirements, then you have picked up a winning keyword that can be ranked in the first page of google without much difficulty.

Step 3
Creating The Content

1. Next you have to write a 300-500 words article with the keyword in the title. Also include the keyword in the first sentence, middle and towards the end of the article. Also do not forget to include the url to the products you are promoting in the article!

2. Three places I highly recommend to submit the articles are hubpages, squidoo and articlebase. Google loves these sites and they have a great authority in the eyes of google. So it is very easy to achieve rankings fast. And most importantly for a beginner, these are absolutely free! So submit the article to any one of these sites linking back to your product.

Step 4
Building Backlinks

Building backlinks are the key to top rankings and also the most difficult task. Even some of the articles you created using the above methods can rank highly without any backlinks but some needs quality backlinks to boost the rankings. So here are the methods that I used to build backlinks without much difficulty.

1. Forum Posts – Finding a forum with high pagerank in your niche will be a difficult task at first, but after finding things become easy. All you need is to put the article url in the forum signature with anchor text as your keyword. After that participate in the forum giving relevant posts. Also read the forum rules. Some forums need you to make 10 or 15 posts before including links.

2. Blog Commenting – Search google for “do follow blogs” or “do follow blog directories” and you will end up with a lot of blogs which allows do follow comments, which means that you will get the link juice. Post comment on these blogs with the keyword in the place of name and the article url in the place of website. After the comment approval you will get a valuable backlink

3. Answers – Post relevant answers to the below sites with a link back to your article. Some of my favorites are -

* Yahoo Answers (no follow, but high authority in the eyes of google)
* Yedda.com
* Blurtit.com
* Unasked.com
* Answerbag.com

Do not spam these sites. Contribute to the community or else they will make the links do follow and you will lose your valuable backlinks.

4. Articles Submission – These are my least favourite (I’m lazy to write 400 word articles for backlinks) and I will only use them if the sites are not getting top rankings. Some sites I submit the articles are -

* Ezine Articles (You can also use this for your main article, but the disadvantage is that it tooks a long time to approve the articles, about 5-7 days and ezines will only allows one link in the article body, but articlebase allows 3 links in article body and approves within 48 hours)

* Buzzle
* Go Articles

If you complete all these steps, you can achieve a top google ranking and will get lots of traffic and sales without spending a dime on advertising.

Author Bio:
Jason Mathews is a full time internet marketer and loves to make money online with a variety of free traffic strategies like SEO, Article Marketing, Video Marketing etc. He learned most of the techniques from Steve and Tim’s Mining Money Online Course.