I really love making money by internet marketing and not having to go to a regular 9-5 job. Yes the income can be up and down – and when you are starting out it can be overwhelming, but the sense of achievement when you make your first dollar online just from your own skills is simply amazing.

And that you can make sales at any time of the day or night, just from your own computer (whether you are sitting at it or not) is something I really like. The first thing I do every morning is check my email account, clickbank and amazon to see how much money I’ve made that night.

While many of the traditional forms of marketing also apply to internet marketing, (such as attracting customers, producing a sale), you really can start out with no formal training or skills in that area and learn as you go.

Lately, in my internet marketing adventures, I have been becoming more and more interested in SEO (search engine optimization) and have been fully immersing myself into learning as much as I can about it. SEO enables you to generate lots of traffic to your websites or blogs and all for free (and I like free).

The reason why I particular like SEO right now is that you are bringing targeted traffic to your website who have found your site via a search engine after they typed in a certain phrase. Whether they were looking for information, products or just ’surfing’ around, the fact that they found your site means that you have a targeted potential customer visiting you.

Yes SEO is a lot of work, there’s onpage and offpage optimisation, backlinks, PR and so much more – but learning about it is half the fun and as you learn more and implement the techniques and see results the more you want to find out.

So far I’ve mainly been using SEO to promote clickbank products, my own products and adsense revenue. I know many people also use it for CPA offers (which is really hot right now) but I’ve yet to get involved in CPA so far. Perhaps that will be the next thing I learn about.

Anyway I’m getting sidetracked. The whole point about this post was to let you know that it is possible to make money online. Pick one thing and learn about it. Get good at it. And when you are ready to move on to the next thing then do so.

Don’t just jump from one thing to the next until you are ready otherwise you won’t get anywhere and you’ll end up feeling overwhelmed.

You really can make a little bit or a lot of money online depending on your goals. Whatever you choose I wish you the best of luck.

Last Christmas period (October to December) I made over $10,000 profit from the Amazon Affiliate Program. That was with just 10 small websites and very little work. Which is why I love being an Amazon affiliate it’s very easy to make money with.

A lot of people avoid using Amazon to make money online because of the small commission levels (why promote a $20 book for around $1 commission when you can promote a ClickBank product and make $40 per sale).

Of course I do promote both, Amazon and ClickBank, but I actually feel it’s far easier to make money promoting Amazon products simply because physical products are much more in demand than ebooks.

So let’s go over how I made so much money in such a short period of time. First of all, I used the techniques outlined in Info Product Killer (which is an awesome ebook) so they weren’t entirely my ideas, and at the time I did have an Adwords campaign running as well (although I only had a very small budget).

I only ran the Adwords campaign over Christmas and since then (in the last six months) I’ve still been making a consistent $500 to $800 per month commission from Amazon and I’ve barely touched any of the sites or promoted them in any way since then.

So how can you do the same? How can you make money as an Amazon affiliate?

First you will need an Amazon affiliate account (duh!), so if you haven’t already got one then head over and apply. They usually take up to a week to approve you so sit tight and be patient.

Once they approve you, you’ll be able to start promoting their products.

Some people will tell you to only choose high cost products like TV’s, but to be honest I’ll promote anything that’s hot – one of my best selling items this month was a $15 book. It may only pay me around $1 each time someone buys it, but I’m selling around 10 to 20 of these a day. It all adds up.

And of course, you also get an Amazon affiliate commission with anything else your customer decides to put into their shopping cart, so I often get credit for items I wasn’t even promoting!

Choosing A Product to Promote

The best and easiest way to choose a product to promote is to keep your eyes and ears open to hot trends. Anything that is being advertised on television is a perfect thing to promote online. I like to watch The View or Oprah to see what products or books the guests are flogging and create a website around that.

Or you can think seasonally, people buy coats and scarfs in Winter and pool supplies in Summer.

You can also take the easy option out and go right to Amazon itself and check out the bestselling items in each of their categories.

Once you have a list of potential items to promote then it’s time to do some keyword research. Ideally you are looking for something that has at least 1000 search per month and less than 250,000 competing sites. Keyword research only works if the product has been around for a while though, if it’s brand new (I like to promote new products because no-one else has jumped on them yet and you have virtually no competition) then your keyword research won’t help because there will be no stats available yet.

If you’d like to test a few products before you decide to build a website then start a free hub or blog and see what converts for you.

Next use the product name in your domain name (or hub name if you hubbing) only if the company allows it – some companies don’t care, other’s are very sensitive about it. That will give you the best search engine juice.

Write a review mentioning the product a few times and put a big picture on the page and of course links to buy the product at Amazon.

That’s how easy it is.

You should start to see some sales as soon as your websites / hubs get indexed and traffic.

Of course, if you serious about making money as an Amazon Affiliate I really recommend that you get Info Product Killer as well. It worked great for me.

I’ve been a bit slack about updating my blog lately as I’ve been busy with other projects, and of course I’m also doing the 30 Day Hubpages Challenge.  I’ve been writing one hub a day for the last 25 days (I’ve got 5 more hubs, and 5 more days to go).

So far it’s going ok, I’ve made over $80 in the last 2 1/2 weeks from Adsense and Amazon sales which I’m assuming will keep ticking over nicely once I finish.  Just another income stream to add to your belt. 

Of course, I’m nowhere in the league of Court Tuttle over at The Keyword Academy who is making far more money with hubpages than I am.  Although to be fair, he writing 100 hubs in 30 days, and has loads more experience with making money with Adsense that I do.

In the last few years online, most of my money has been made promoting affiliate products and writing my own online guides and ebooks, so Adsense is new to me in how you set out your pages and get traffic, but ever since I joined The Keyword Academy my eyes have been opened to new money possibilities.

If you are thinking about making money online, and specifically using adsense and SEO then you really should consider joining The Keyword Academy Course as well – members get some killer resources and the video’s are worth every penny (first month is just $1).

About a month ago I told you that I was undertaking an experiment to see whether I could get duplicate content ranked in google. 

I thought I’d give you an update to let you know how I was doing.

The site in question is not under my control (it is an online store) and all affiliate’s have the exact same store, the only difference being the affiliate id on the end. 

Therefore I can’t change the content nor do any onpage SEO on it.  But was I able to rank it (including my affiliate id at the end so I get credit for any sales) in the search engines?

Before I started this challenge I was nowhere to be found in the SERPS (or at least not in the top 200 – I stopped looking after that).

Around 26th April I finally found myself ranked at No. 192 .. and since then I’ve been slowly climbing the serps.  Today I am at  No. 81 in Google for my main keyword, and have been getting a lot of little hits and long tails as well.

Ok, so I’m still not high enough to get any significant traffic or sales (I have only had one sale in the last month via that site – total commission around $30), but I’m pleased enough with the results that I’ll continue my backlinking campaign and see where I am in another month.

Overall I’m still very confident that I’ll be able to get this online store much higher and my goal is to get it on the front page (if that’s possible).

I’ll keep you posted ..

We have all heard about the duplicate content penalty that Google imposes on websites that contain the same (or very similar) webpage’s than another. Some way it’s a myth and it only applies to your own website, and others swear that it is real and true.

Google itself has denied that there is any penalty for dupe content but what happens in reality? Can you rank duplicate content in the search engines?

For starters, just look how many news stories break with all the same (or very similar) content and all of them seem to do fine in the rankings. Most regional newspapers print online the same story practically word for word – straight off the newswire with no real consequences. Or is there?

From my own experiences this is what I’ve found when I’ve submitted the exact same article to more than one directory. In the first two weeks, practically every article ranks only and I can nearly always find multiple copies (often up to 100) listed in the Serps.

One month later about half of them are still there, and about two to three months later, perhaps only two or three remain.

So what does this tell us? Here is my opinion and findings:

Google wants to show readers the most relevant content that it can and therefore may show the latest news or new stories multiple times but this won’t last for the long term.

Over time G seems to move most of the dupe content to the supplemental index and only display what it considers to be the most relevant or most authoritative version of that content.

So while it won’t actually penalize your site for having duplicate content, it will place your pages that it considers copies in the supplemental index and only display those pages it considers the authority for that content. You duplicate page might rank, but it certainly won’t be in the top 10 pages in Google’s index.

So how do you get YOUR page, even if it is duplicate content, listed high in the search engines?

You’ve got to make Google think that you page is the authority and the others are just copies of yours. Many people assume that Google does this by date, and if you’ve placed the content on your blog first before you submit your article to article directories then you’ll get the ‘authority’ of that article.

That’s not true.

Google will give the highest weight to the page that it deems the most important, the one that has the most authority.

And how do you get this authority?

BACKLINKS

Yes it’s all a big popularity contest. When it all comes down to it, the web page with the most links pointing to it, is usually the one that Google will show in its index.

If you want your page to list high in the Serps rather than another you need to point some links at it.

How many links does it take?

Who knows? That depends on your competition and how many links they have got to their pages. It might take 1 it might take 100.

Don’t believe me?

Currently I make a commission from a website (actually it’s an online store) that displays the exact same content for every member who is part of it. The idea is that we send our customers our ‘store’ link which is really just www.store.com/tracey, www.store.com/jane, www.store.com/debbie and so one.

I have no control over the content of this site, but I believe I can get my ‘store’ ranked high in the SERPS.

There are hundreds of members I believe, and none of them have any idea about SEO (most of them are stay at home mums). This is a great opportunity for me.

I’ve just started this experiment and with only two links I already have 23 pages listed online. They don’t rank very high yet, but I haven’t really started attacked it. I plan to let you know my progress as I go.

I believe that I’ll be able to get my store listed high in the search engines within a month and start making sales (and commissions). I may even be able to knock down the official store – we’ll see.

Anyway I’ll let you know my progress in one month’s time and we’ll see if you really can rank duplicate content in the search engines!