Bill McRea

Freelancing is one of the quickest ways to start making money online. If you have a particular skill that is marketable and in demand, you can start making money by consulting with other businesses on a freelance basis. You can become a freelancer using many skills including photography, graphic design, programming, writing, web design and more. Another proven way to make money online that is inexpensive to get started with is Affiliate Marketing. Let’s compare and contrast these two money making methods and see which one might work for you.

Freelancing

To get started as a freelancer, all you really need is to be proficient enough at your chosen skill that clients will want you to work for them, and you need a website to market your services. When you set up your website you’ll want to include a portfolio of samples of work that you have done for other clients along with testimonials from satisfied clients.

One of the benefits of freelancing is that you get to choose the clients that you want to work with. You choose your projects, you do them and then you get paid right away.

One of the down sides of freelancing is that you are basically trading dollars for hours. You are only making money when you are doing the work. You complete the work, deliver it and get paid once for it. Then you must find more clients to work for.

Freelancing is appealing because you can do it from anywhere you have an Internet connection, and it’s flexible enough to fit in with the busy lifestyle of people who work from home.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers make money by referring buyers to product vendors. They generate traffic and build relationships with prospective buyers and then pre-sell them on the merits of a particular product. If the visitor clicks on a special affiliate link and purchases the product, the affiliate marketer earns a commission that represents a percentage of the product’s sales price.

Affiliate marketing takes time to set up a blog or a website and to start generating traffic. You can focus on using free methods to generate traffic that take time, or spend money to purchase PPC (pay per click) traffic that kicks in right away.

With affiliate marketing once you get your sites set up and generating traffic it can become a passive income stream, but until you star generating sales, there is no money coming in.

In comparing the two ways of making money online, with freelancing you’ve got a way to get started quickly and a way to make money quickly. With affiliate marketing it takes time to get your sites set up and get the traffic flowing before you will start making money, however, the potential for making more money is greater with affiliate marketing because of the fact that you can keep setting up more and more affiliate sites, which will continue to build on your income streams.

Freelancing and affiliate marketing are just two of the many different business models when it comes to making money online. Visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog to discover more about Internet Marketing today.

Affiliate bloggers know the power of WordPress for creating and managing their blogs, and affiliate marketers know the challenges of dealing with issues such as ad blindness when trying to find ways to capture visitors attention and click where you want them to click. Well, UContext is a contextual advertising program that uses the keywords on your blog and transforms them into text links to ClickBank products.

With other contextual advertising programs you might earn a few cents when visitors click on the ads on your site, so why not set up ucontext and earn $15. and more when your visitors click on your links and make a purchase.

With Ucontext you get to decide how many links are created and what the links will look like on your blog. If your visitors have been suffering from ad blindness and ignoring the banner ads on your site, these in-text links will get clicked because they are a part of the content that the visitor is reading.

If you’ve had your blog for a long time and have lots of old post moldering away in the archives, this is an efficient way to monetize them and have them generate some revenue for you.

Ucontext saves you time because now you no longer have to go digging through the vast selection of ClickBank products to find those that match your blog’s keywords. Now once you have the plugin installed, when you publish a post, the software automatically creates text links that fit right in with your website’s content.

Concerned about links appearing where you don’t want them? Here’s the level of control that you will have with Ucontext:

• Filters: Refine what Clickbank products are shown by gravity, commissions, etc.
• Choose how many links show on a page
• Add your own Tracking ID’s
• Click Reports: Find out what pages and keyword phrases are getting the most clicks and when
• You can exclude specific pages from receiving in-text links

How to set up ucontext

Setting up the ucontext contextual ad links on your site is as simple as downloading and installing a plugin, which is available for WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. There is also a PHP library for those who want to create their own customizations.

While the plugin is free, membership to Ucontext and use of the API is billed on a recurring monthly basis, which can be cancelled at any time. Price points for membership range from an annual membership for either one website, the Pro level with five sites, and the Unlimited option for an unlimited number of websites.

Earn a referral income

Another way to generate revenues with Ucontext is through their affiliate program, which pays you a 20% commission at the first level and 5% at the second level.

With Ucontext you’ve got a cure for ad blindness, a fast and easy way to add highly lucrative contextual advertising links to monetize your website’s content and an easy to use plugin that makes it all very simple.

Alternative contextual advertising such as Ucontext is just one of the many topics that you will learn about when you visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog. Come check out the blog and discover lots of tips and strategies for Internet Marketing success.

Trafficvance describes itself as an advanced display and textlink marketplace for advertisers and marketers. Trafficvance is an example of a CPV, or Cost Per View model of a contextual advertising network. Their traffic comes from displaying ads to users who have downloaded and installed their Game Vance software. This is 100% opt-in traffic that users have chosen and agreed to view when they download the games.

Trafficvance uses display ads (600 x 800), pop-ups, pop-unders, text ads and billboard ads covering a diverse selection of niche markets on a massive scale. Their technology targets and displays your ads only those users who would be interested in your offer.

THE CPV model, or PPV as it’s also commonly called, is similar to media buying as you are purchasing impressions for your ads. You can have the Trafficvance network staff help you set up and manage your campaigns or you can operate in self-service mode and manage your own ads giving you complete control over your budget and statistics so that you can tweak your campaigns in real time.

PPV traffic networks such as Trafficvance have become very popular with affiliate marketers because they can get a ton of traffic at prices more reasonable than the average PPC traffic source.

Trafficvance offers:

Display ads 800 x 600 with keyword or URL targeting

Text links (mouse over ads) initiated by the user

Manage Solutions with in-house media buyers who can manage your campaigns for you

Self Serve optimization tools to give you control of your campaigns in real time.

Here are some tips for  making the most of Trafficvance CPV ads:

• Keep testing the ads to find the ones that convert best
• Try offers that you know convert well and have broad appeal with a wider audience
• Use ad tracking software
• If you are running CPA offers, you might check in with your affiliate manager before you launch your PPV campaign

In a nutshell, Trafficvance serves up your ads to an audience of users that have downloaded their game software and agreed to view ads. The software records the users online habits and tracks the sites they visit and searches they perform in order to determine what kinds of ads to show that particular user. This ensures that your ads are being targeted at users who are already interested in the niche that your product is in.

Why are PPV or CPV networks becoming so popular?

With PPV ad networks, if you are able to set up a campaign using the perfect mix of keywords and URLs that appeal to a broad spectrum of the software user audience, you’ll end up getting a nice flow of expertly targeted traffic to your website at a price that is far less expensive than PPC and far less complicated to set up and operate.

To get started with Trafficvance you simply fill out an application, or you can give their sales team a call or an email to discuss the particulars of your campaign.

CPV advertising networks such as Trafficvance is just one of the many topics that you will learn about when you visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog. Come check out the blog and discover lots of tips and strategies for Internet Marketing success.

As an affiliate marketer, keyword research is a vital activity because through keyword research and analysis, you discover the best keywords to build niche websites that are fairly simple, yet full of the information that will interest those who are searching on your topic.

In this article we will look at some of the various ways that affiliate marketers use keyword research, and some of the tools that can help them to save time and get better results.

How to use keywords on your affiliate blog or website

Keywords are one of the most critical components for your affiliate Marketing website–or any website for that matter. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is made up of about 20-30% on-page factors such as:

• Title tags
• Meta tags
• Meta descriptions
• H1 tags
• Body text/copy
• Domain name
• Page names
• Anchor text

Keywords are the basic element in all of these items. Google ranks websites based on keywords, the density, and relevancy of the keywords on your site relative to other similar websites within your topic. Most importantly, keywords are used in the content of your website in the form of website copy, blog posts, navigation and inbound and outbound links.

Using Keyword Research tools to find ‘buyer keywords’

When someone is still in the initial discovery phase of making a purchase, they will use more general keywords such as, “sporting goods,” and then maybe, “bicycles.” As they learn more about exactly what they want, the keywords they use will become more specific or targeted such as, “Huffy,” or “Schwinn bicycles,” or “bicycle shop in <insert zip code>.”

Plugging your list of primary keywords into a keyword research tool will help you to find more, related keywords, long tail keywords, and those crucial buyer keywords.

If you are really serious about affiliate marketing, you should invest in a premium keyword research tool. The free, Google keyword tool is fine for when you are first getting started, but as your skills develop and you get more serious about affiliate marketing, you’ll want to investigate the most popular keyword research and analysis tools such as WordTracker, Market Samurai, MicroNiche Finder, and the new NicheFinder software by Brad Callan.

Keyword research is one of those critical tasks that online businesses people must do in order to keep their websites at the top of the search engines. It can be a confusing, challenging, time-consuming task if you don’t have access to the right tools for the job. The right premium keyword research tools will  make online keyword research faster, easier and more effective.

Your goal with affiliate marketing is to provide value added information on the topic of the products that you are pre-selling.  The right keywords will help you attract that targeted traffic that you need to keep your website at the top of the search engine results.

Now it’s time to discover how to do keyword research quickly and effectively with the world’s most powerful, new niche finding software. Visit, http://mcreasite.com/NicheFinder, to start uncovering those hidden niches with niche finder today.

Every business needs leads—qualified leads in order to stay in business. As an online business and information product publisher, you are looking for business opportunity or ‘biz-op’ leads, which are people who have expressed an interest in finding a business opportunity.

Lead generation is a very competitive space on the Internet right now. You know that this is true if you have ever been in the position of buying leads. In this article we are going to explore a strategy that you can use to generate your own biz-op leads using affiliate networks. This is a method that requires a few steps, but if you are willing to put in the effort you will reap the rewards.

What is an affiliate network?

An affiliate network is simply the matchmaker of sorts between affiliate marketers and merchants who offer affiliate programs. They help affiliate marketers find the best programs to promote to their audience, and they help the merchants find the best audience for their programs.

In an affiliate arrangement, the affiliate earns a specified percentage of the sales price of the product that the affiliate’s leads purchase using their link. CPA networks offer CPA, CPM and CPC-based Marketing programs.

CPA works by affiliates generating leads. The affiliate attracts visitors to their website who are already searching for what they have to offer. The affiliate makes money when the visitor clicks on an offer that appeals to them and takes the desired action (the “A” in CPA). This action can be anything from putting in their name and email address, to signing up for a free trial membership.

Creating the offer

The first step is to create an offer for, “how to make money online,” and then pay your affiliates $1.50- $2.50 for each lead they send to you. You can market this offer using an affiliate network.

Here are some examples of affiliate networks:

• Clickbank
• Click2Sell
• Commission Junction
• Share a Sale
• ClickBooth

Creating a sales funnel

The next step is to create a sales funnel that will generate the income needed so you do not lose money on the incoming leads. This is called a “Self Liquidating” lead source. Self liquidating leads simply means that you generate leads that cost you some amount of money, but then you quickly turn around and turn an immediate profit from those leads.

Inside Tip:

Be aware that as with any other business model, there is the problem of fraud. There are less than scrupulous affiliates who try to cheat the networks by generating fake leads. There is a platform called Direct Track, which is an affiliate marketing and tracking platform that has a focus on affiliate fraud prevention.

In the end, your goal is to generate a sizzling hot list of people who are already searching for what you have to offer—information about how they can make money online—and keep them on your list so that you can create a community of biz-op seekers and present them with offers that provide them with what they are searching for and make you money.

Are you ready to learn more about generating biz-op leads and other online marketing topics? Visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog, where you will find tons of tips and resources for making money online and having some fun in the process.