5 Mistakes People make trying to Earn Money Online.

Of course we all want to know How to work on the internet, and make millions....When starting out writing articles, creating a blog or even working on your own webpage.
You will come across many programmes that claim to make money fast online. They are going to show you how to do it, my advice is run in the opposite direction.
I was so excited to achieve my goal of making money online, and being able to have the choice to continue working at home, or going back to a JOB, I wanted to go and shout it from the rooftops, and tell people how I did it.  To show them how they could do it.
Was it easy, no it was a very rollercoaster journey. And if you ask anyone who works online, is it easy, what do you think their answer will be? Do you know most people who work online will make no money, as they can easily fall into several traps.

Part of the reason I made Moms work at home Blog, is to indeed share with you my tips that I have found helped me go from zero earnings to a steady income online. Including what I have learned to do (= make money )and what not to do, (= make absoloutely no money) working online. 

How I make money online:   I use affiliate marketing, reviewing products, blogging, building unique Free webpages like on my favourite place Squidoo.I now have earnings on a spreadsheet to help me keep track of what is working what is not. (this could be a tip in itself, as if maybe I had kept track of what works and did not work in the beginning, I could have fixed the errors of my ways!)
But there were many mistakes I made in the beginning, probably making my journey a little harder, but hey you learn.
Working online does not come with a job desription, you dont turn up one day and have someone to hold your hand walking you through the steps. No-body to be acountable when the figures or money does not come in but yourself.
I am going to give my 5 top Tips that I learned that did NOT make me any money, before you fall into the

1. Do not buy! I made $1,0000 in 10 minutes or Signing up for the programmes that claim to make you money online. For a FREE

Why? It is never FREE, or that easy, they make money from your buying their products, then the guy who buys the product realises he has been conned, so takes on the same strategy used when he was conned into buying it and sells you it, and so the cycle continues.

Solution: You can get all the information you need for free on the net, it takes a bit of looking, but its all there. Join forums, there are hundreds of great forums that will have the answers tucked away in their threads, pure golden nuggets of information. So use the searh facility for your query, Type in the keywords you are looking for such as "backlinks" I bet you get exactly what you are lookng for, and for FREE. 
If you come accross someone who makes claims that cause you to raise your eyebrow, put their user name through Google, see what does come up. Do they have good articles, where else can you see their work online? What do others say about them on profile pages etc. Look at the comments section, what are others saying about them. (this is my main online Bio)

 2. Do not join all affiliate programmes just because you think it will make you money, it won't. Joining every affiliate programme you can sign up for, promoting it, seeing no return and moving on to the next hot product to hit the market...waste of your time.

 Come on admit it, the first thing you do on a page is look for the affiliate sign up. I lost count how many affiliate programmes I was a member of.  I now have built and established a good working relationship with a core of trusted reliable affiliate programmes that I will use and fully endorse. And that am satisfied will only give exactly what is being promoted and value for money


Solution: Research your niche market, sometimes hidden in the depths of the ebook seas,  there are absoloutes gems, out ranked by the Gurus who have pushed their products with SEO, hype and rubbish to the top of the pile. Choose 1 produt, research it, buy it love it and stick with it, if you dont then your readers won't either. It is so much easier to give your honest testomony of why this is a great product. It is easier to write your artile when you know what you are talking about.

3.  Annoying your Visitors to your web page.
Being sent to a page after reading your review and then realising it is not what you were really looking for and then you try to leave, and some smart alec thought hey lets add  pop up ads that annoy your visitors when you try to leave the page, and then another pop up saying "are you really sure"Of course I am sure!  This will make you lose any visitors and creditbility you already have, and I just want to leave this page, I am not interested in what discount you have to offer me, and I would not return to the page that sent me there. So thoroughly chek out your affiliate programmes, capture pages etc.

4. Flashing Banner adverts.
Do you ever click them? I know I don't. i hate them, and the majority of people online do too, we know it is going to lead to our email addresses being used in all sorts of scam and emails.
So think about it will your visitors. they take up space they look nasty to the eye, slapped in the middle of your text. 
Solution: It has been proven that text links convert, in fact I make more money and get more clickthroughs  using text links than I do with product pictures.


5. Copying someone elses work
I spend a lot of time online, and I can spot a copycat straight away. And anybody else who works online starts to work out the authentic from the re-gurgetated sraped material. In fact I could direct you to around 10-20 pages off the top of my head that "scrapes" ideas and even layouts, and then I would direct you to the original page. Don't do it, its cheap and its nasty, and once people start to work it out. You are finished.

Solution: Be Unique, provide Useful Content, and be honest. If you are that impressed by someones work, say that, link to themm  let them know you are a fan. Heck you can still make your page, but let them know and credit their idea within your work. Send a quick mail to the original author saying thanks you inspired me. Its amazing the power of that.
But do not steal their content.

If you have not started a blog, then I really suggest you do, many free places, to start with ( I have always taken the Free options)
See why having a blog is a great way to compliment your online work. I made a page about how to make money Blogging  which I share ideas, stats and traffic insights, how I used hot Topics, and hard to find items,  and why you should consider selling more expensive items too. Check out the huge sale I made.  these are still live, and although I do not spend as much time as I should they all serve a purpose, in my online adventures.

Did these mistakes ring true for you? Or do you have your own list of what does not work, when working online. Would you like to know about something specific, Drop me a comment.

How to cash in on Hot Topics - Creating a great "sales" page

I did indeed tell you I am going to share secrets with you, but I dont think I can share secrets with you, unless I explain how these "secrets" work. It does wind me up those wonderful tutorials that say do this this and this, and you will be sucessful, But maybe they only give you how to find keywords, okay so once you have your keywords what then do you do.

I love writing and especially creative writing, however as yourselves and I know, these do not make big sales, So I try to have a balance, my more serious pages, and then there are my product review pages "sales pages" and I dont mind having them mixed in with my work, as I believe it helps build a good solid reputable foundation, and readers like that. i only ever do product reviews about things that I can or have used, and have indeed found useful, or suggest products that help me. I have found these more successful when I put in a personal recommendation . 

So you make product review pages, and still cant sell a thing. Sometimes we can even over complicate things....and make it more difficult than we should.

So I am going to take you through the full process, from starting with an idea. To publishing, and to maximising publicity.
Many of people online want to know how to make sales, what is the secret? We all strive to make that sale. We get so worked up about keyword research and where to post our pages for marketing so the search engines find us that sometimes we just look past eactly what people are looking for and end up makeing it "too technical" that our page focus disappears. We end up with no sales, and wonder why our customer who is looking for that item get bored and clicks to another page.
What about the "I will not bother doing that as there are already pages out there" ....how many timesw have you thought, "wish I had done that" and moved onto find your next topic? Well the page I am going to share with you today, is indeed one that I was actually reluctant to make, due to the amount of other related pages out there, however a chance day out made me change my mind as I spotted something, stopped to take a picture, and then I spoke to the owner, who had come out to ask why I was taking a picture? and they told me how hard a job they had "finding" the Decorations.

So I am going to reveal a page, that made sales in 2weeks, and actually still makes the odd sale today, even though the event is over.

So what hot topic did I jump on? The Royal Wedding of Course.
Now this was a local pub of ours, and when we passed it I could not resist stopping and taking a photo. It was so over the Top for a little country pub, we thought it hysterical. I knew the owner who came out to chat with me, and told me how hard it had been to eventually find the decorations online.

 As I went on my way home I saw many signs out for Royal Wedding Garden parties. I went onto Amazon who I am an affiliate from. And yes there indeed after a bit of searching I found the most outragous banners flags, party masks.
So
I created a page, now these were indeed ofr the UK market, however I also knew Amazon.com US had these items, so I also put a "text" link onto this page, for my US customers. (this is very important to note, as you will find out why later!)

I knew this was going to be a hot topic, and all the available URLS were already snapped up, and I decided NOT to look at my competition, as this can put pressure on your sometimes, (this is okay to do this for a hot Topic, but not recommended for a longer term page that you will work on and tweak)
So I grabbed the best URL, which was Garden Party Decorations....

This was more for fun. I wrote my introduction, with no keyword investigation, no traffic analysis, nothing....I was just writing a page about my mum having a Garden Party for the Royal wedding and I was in charge of finding the Garden decoration. This was indeed true.

I included silly Face Masks of the Royal couple,  Cake toppers, flags, banners....totally over the top.
i published this, posted in the SquidU forum to give the community a laugh, and left it.

So lets re-cap, No keyword research, No promotion, No backlinks apart from SquidU. Google traffic started within 12 hours, and never stopped, over 2 weeks you can see nearly 1,000 visitors.

 
This is a screen shot of my monthly traffic for April/May, this is what i would accept as fantastic results for a "hot topic" considering it was a page that just is made to cover a significant event.

  So how did I get traffic, what "marketing did i do to get traffic to my lens. To see this

Google Traffic 1st week 456

Now I did not post the lens on FB, or twitter, what I did was posted the picture of my local pub, as my friends all socialise there, and just said "have you seen what they have done to the local pub?" and put a link to my lens on the end, and just said, check out the cardboard cutouts of Wills and Kate,  this caught like wild fire, and even ended up being printed out by my brothers friend in australia for their office picture board!

but what was even more exciting to see was what happened over at amazon, I had used a "TEXT" link only for US customers.  And this is what I saw from April 1 to May

 Here is Amazon US Affiliates which I set up tracking individual tracking IDs useful for seeing what on page does sell and what does not, so I could monitor, I did not expect this at all considering everything on the page was for UK. Bearing in mind I only included a TET link to the US I sold $528.41 making $31.07, and I dont particularly like boasting and I do not see the point in it, or i would have included the stats for UK...I am sure you can imagine yourself that this was indeed a very worthwhile, hour, and the promotion side of it was fun, or so which I took out of my day to put this page together in. ...lol...because we were talking about a picture, not a "sales" page. My friend did indeed Buy her garden decorations from my page, but I never knew that until after the event, when she uploaded her garden picture onto FB too, saying it was my fault, I made her do it.    With no research, just a photo of something that was funny, and thought it would make a good page, but this photo I took, was what brought in my traffic, I posted on several sites that you could upload funny pictures, like redgage and included my link. (by the way sign up to redgage, and post interesting photos and links and you can make some extra money, may not be a lot but just let it mount up!

This picture is what got shared, not my page.

So what have we learned, sometimes capatilizing on a "Hot Topic" is very worth while. I hear so many times, "oh I didn't do that as someone else has", well do it differently, 

Sometimes taking an alternative route to promotion, finding a funny photo and sharing it, works better than "promoting" yourlink, I must admit I hate promoting my links or my work via FB or twitter to my friends and family, but this was different and fun. 

I do recommend keywords research, and never normally make a page without it, but sometimes just writing about it can work too.

Don't be held back, if you have an idea write about it, I was going to write about the Royal Wedding but put it off as I saw so many wonderful pages dedicated to it already, wonder how much I would have made if I had just made the page when I first thought about it. 

Hot Topics is a great way to cash in on the here and now, and I do like these pages, usually easy to put together, and okay won't last long but work alongside your other pages as you build them up. And you are Making money online. This is the disheartning part of working online, you are making Quality pages, but people who are going to "buy" want to find what they are specifically looking for there and then, and have their credit card in their hands, waiting to "find" their product. We just need to Show them where it is and how they can buy it. 

Do you know how to find hot topics?

The best way for keeping your finger on the pulse is Google Hot Trends

Some I would not touch with a barge pole, however you can watch and see how things start to appear, especially films, realitly TV shows, (you will get a few weekes out of them!) and up and coming pop stars/actors....who will have a continuing career. 

If you read this and found it interesting I would appreciate your feedback, Did this post help you through some frustrations of not making sales, or is there anything else I can explain to you about making sales with  "Hot Topics"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I do belive there is always someone to thank for my knowledge, and have played a part in my success, now...a lot of to and fro about PotpieGirl but I did indeed buy her One Week Marketing, and this is where I got a "foundation" to niche marketing, I am a learner, I need to learn all the ins and out, yes there was information that I found useless, and there was information I found priceless. I belive in learning the knowledge, and in fact I still to this day recieve her emails, so people find it irritating, I don't I read every one of them, this lady is a successful online marketer doing eactly what you and I want to  do too, so Of course I read them , I may not click on her links, but if it interests me then I will. There may just be something that clicks for me, like jumping on the "Hot Topic Trends" Yes these guys make money from selling their secrets, but sometimes, they give you that little nugget of information that makes it click.