How To Begin Making Money Online
Copyright 2002 Herman Drost

Many people give up trying to make money online these days
because they have been duped by all the quick rich schemes. If
it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Choose a business in which you will have sustained interest, so you can whether
any little bumps in the road. Then build a theme-based web site.

Here are the steps you need to take for this idea to germinate:

1. Pick a topic you are passionate about. (I'll choose camping
as an example, since it's what I love to do).

2. Go to the overture suggestion tool
(http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion) or
wordtracker.com and insert camping - well, camping is too
generic so go down and choose something more specific (I chose
camping tip). 1134 people searched on this last month.

3. Go to nameboy.com to select a domain name that has camping
tips in it. OK - I found camping-secrets.com (last time I
checked) is still available and close enough for me.

4.Reserve your domain name at Godaddy.com for $8.95.

5. Go to www.associateprograms.com and do a search for affiliate
programs on camping. The first one I found was www.basspro.com,
which specializes in camping equipment. You earn 5% on each
product you sell (With more research, I am sure you could find a
higher commission rate than this).

6. Find low cost hosting
($30/year at www.isitebuild.com/sitehosting).

7. Build your web site - incorporate appropriate keywords in
your meta tags and text on your site to make it search engine
friendly.

8. Promote your site through pay-per-click search engines to
make some fast money, but also submit to the main search
engines. Find other targeted locations e.g. participate in
forums, newsgroups, and write articles related to your topic.
You must be persistent with this, to be successful.

Conclusion: The key is to build a focused theme for your web
site (in this case, camping tips i.e. what to take, where to go,
what to do, precautions you need to take etc). This will
provide useful information to visitors about camping. While they
are at your site, they click on the link to camping products
(the affiliate program you signed up for), to purchase camping
equipment.

Congratulations, you have now made some money!

Good luck with your new venture!
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Herman Drost is a Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of iSiteBuild.com.
Web Site Design and Low Cost Hosting
(http://www.isitebuild.com)

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