One of the hottest new trends that many affiliates are using to make some quick money is by building and then selling websites online. Calling Website Flipping it involves you building a website or blog (or even a squidoo lens) and then after it’s built selling it for a profit.

Since other people like to have readymade sites, they often can pay good money if the website in question is well designed and targeted around a keyword that is likely to make money. So if you like writing content or building websites then this may be a quick way for you to make some fast cash.

And since it usually only costs you $10 for the domain name and a small amount for hosting (which you don’t need to keep paying for once you on-sell the site) you can very often make a quick sale and nice profit.

In the Warrior Forum (a forum for internet marketers which I frequently visit) they have just added a section where you can sell your website to other warriors or you can go to major sites like Flippa (previously sitepoint marketplace) which allows you to buy and sell web sites on a variety of niches.

In fact, some websites on Flippa go for thousands of dollars. Usually a brand new site will go for a few hundred though.

My only experience so far with reselling websites was a squidoo lens that I built and then sold for the grand sum of $25. Actually that wasn’t too bad because it really only took me a few hours to build.

That shows you that I’m no expert in making money by buying and selling websites, but Amir Rimer is and has created a course that will teach you how to ‘flip’ websites for profit.

Even if you only built and sold one website a week, and sold it for $100 profit each time (and I’m being conservative, you likely could make much more) you could be looking at an extra $400 a month (or $5,200 a year).

Of course, you could make more than that if you want to as well.

If that sounds like something you’d be interested in then head over and check out his website to find out more about his website flipping course.

As many of my regular blog readers will know, I was a huge Info Product Killer fan last year, and I made quite a healthy profit using their method last Christmas making lots of little Amazon Niche sites. 

Well I’ve just updated my Info Product Killer blog with the results from the last six months and thought you’d like to know what they have done since then.

Not too long ago on this blog, I wrote about how to make money using Hot Trends. And while I still think finding hot trends is an excellent way to make some fast cash, it can be a little difficult to try and pick a subject from Google’s Hot Trends list as it is constantly changing.

Very recently I discovered another one of Google’s great little tools which I think is much better for internet marketer’s to use to find ‘hot’ niches.

It’s the Google Insights for Search tool.

It will tell you which topics are rising in popularity and for an internet marketer this information is extremely valuable. Let’s look at an example. Let’s say that you were thinking about getting into the weight loss market, but because it’s so saturated you weren’t sure where to jump in.

Ok, so let’s go over to the insights for search tool and type in weight loss. I always set the filter for either 30 days or 90 days. In this case let’s look at the hot topics in weight loss and set the filter for 30 days.

 This little tool has given us some incredible information. We know where the bulk of traffic for that term is coming from (in this case it is primarily the United States) and scroll down a bit further and we can see the hottest search terms related to weight loss in the last 30 days. It’s no surprise that diet and weight loss diet top the list of the most searched for terms.

Not only that – but we get to see which terms are gaining in popularity and search volume in the rising searches column. From this search I can see that the raw food diet is up 90%, adios weight loss up 60% and more. These are the niches and keywords I would target if I was to enter this market.

I’m sure you can see how powerful this is. You can jump on trends while they are happening. I think that this is one of the easy ways to make money online right now. Find a hot trending topic and jump all over it. Build blog posts, hubpages, write articles and get them out fast because you’ll be on the trend (hopefully) before everyone else.

I wanted to go into a bit more detail about how to do keyword research because

1. I promised that I would and
2. I think it’s one of those parts of internet marketing that newbie’s tend to skip or not do correctly.

Now I need to say that this is how I do keyword research but many people have other methods that are equally successful. This is just my method and it works for me.

Firstly I do research slightly differently depending on whether I’m promoting products on Amazon, or if I’m promoting ClickBank products.

How To Do Keyword Research to promote Amazon products

For Amazon I target actual product names. I will first choose my product on Amazon by going to their bestseller lists and see what is already selling. They have bestseller lists in nearly all categories they do. I also look at their Movers & Shakers page to see if a product has been gaining sales quite rapidly.

Choose around three to four products.

Next go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and put those product names in.

You are looking for product name keywords that have at least 1000 search Exact Match per month. (By default you will be shown broad view, but it’s much more accurate to look at exact match which you can change under the Match Type drop down box). Write down all the keywords that have 1000 or more searches per month. (I usually use an excel spreadsheet for this).

Now it’s time to check out your competition. There are many methods for checking competition, but this is how I do it:

Type in intitle:”your keyword” into Google. This will show you how many other pages online use those exact keywords in their page title. It’s good SEO practice to have your keywords in your page title and it will help you rank better online.

Write down the results next to your product name keywords. If you find any keywords that have less than 1000 competing sites then you have found a great product to try and rank for. It has very low competition so your chances of making sales are very good. That’s pretty much all I do to find products to promote as an Amazon affiliate.

How To Do Keyword Research to promote ClickBank products

I use a very similar method as above, but instead of putting keywords or product names in the Google Adwords Tool I put in the website address of the clickbank product. You can do this by choosing Website Content instead of Descriptive words or phrases.

You will get returned certain keywords that Google thinks are relevant to that page. (It just saves time trying to think of them yourself ).

Sort that list from largest exact match to smallest and save that out (I usually save it as a .csv excel file).

Delete any keywords that have only one or two keywords and any that you don’t think are relevant.

Next go through my intitle method above to find competing pages of less than 1000 that use that phrase.

I’ve found that keywords in the make money online field often have a lot of competition and you’ll end up with rather obscure long tail keywords like business earn money online opportunity. (Yeah I know – you have to be creative to be able to use that in your post title!)

But ClickBank products in other niches are pretty easy to find good keyword phrases in. Even those ones that you think are fairly saturated already.

And that is how I do my keyword research! I hope it has helped.

Since most people who read my blog are looking for some real tips on how to make money at home, I want go over some of the basics again of how you can achieve that.

Research

I know, you are probably rolling your eyes in boredom at doing research, but if you can seriously get this right you’ll be one rich affiliate marketer.

The key to good keyword research is finding phrases and words that have 1. good searches, 2. low competition and 3. are easy to monetize.

You’ll often hear marketers talk about picking the low hanging fruit and when you are just starting out (or even if you are experienced) this is really the quickest way to make money from home because you have hardly any competition.

Which would you rather go after? A term like ‘golfing’ which has tremendous searches but you’d be competing with nearly 10 million pages, or ‘which are the best golf clubs to use if you are a beginner’ where the competition is minimal? Sure not as many people will be searching for that exact phrase, but you are likely to pick up traffic on variations on that phrase and get traffic much easier (and therefore make sales much easier).

So how do you choose the right topic?

There is such an array of different types of products online to promote so how do you choose which one is going to make you any money or not?

One of the things that I take into account when choosing subjects and niches is think about a problem first and then find a solution to that problem.

Most niche’s will have a problem that someone wants to solve: how to make money at home, how to lose weight, how to get rid of acne, how to install a home security system, and so on.

If you can identify a good solution instead of just trying to ’sell’ a product then you are more likely to make a sale and earn yourself a commission.

Take this blog post for example. You are probably reading it to find out how to make money at home (since that is what the post title is called). You either found me by doing a search online, read an article that sent you here or are one of my subscribers. Either way you are looking to solve a problem: making cash from home by affiliate marketing.

Have I solved your problem yet? Well, not exactly yet since I haven’t gone into specifics – however I probably HAVE got you thinking more about what sort of niches and keywords that you can promote on your blogs and websites that can earn you some money (or at least I hope that’s what you are thinking about because that was my goal with this post).

Over the next few weeks I’ll write about more specific ways how you can make some money from home because really I think online marketing is just about the best job there is. Catch you soon. Tracey.