Ok so today I am going to talk a bit about how I got started in internet marketing.
I think I first started thinking about making money online in 1999 when I clicked on a banner ad for one of those paid-to-surf programs, I think it was called All Advantage or something like that. They would pay you for watching banner ads on your computer. Of course I did not make a cent, but I thought the idea of making money on the internet was very interesting.
Later, as I tried to get referrals for my paid to surf programs I discovered traffic exchanges like www.clickthru.com. These sites allow you to get traffic to your sites by visiting the sites of others. While surfing these sites I discovered online MLM programs. I don´t really remember their names, but I joined some of then and promoted them using traffic exchanges and safelists. I made some money, not a lot though. I soon learned that they were pretty much all scammy pyramid schemes and gave up promoting them. For more info on MLMs visit this page: http://www.vandruff.com/mlm.html
Around this time I also started making my first websites. I actually got started with the online site builder at www.homestead.com. It was free back then, I think you have to pay for their services now. I made a very simple dating website for my country (Belgium) using the free web tools at www.bravenet.com. I submitted it to a couple of local directories and search engines and guess what: I got visitors, quite a few of them actually!
Now that I had these visitors I started thinking about how to make some money from them. At first I placed my paid to surf banners on the site (LOL). Then I found the affiliate program of the dating site One and Only (I think they don´t exist anymore). I placed their banners and links on the site and crossed my fingers… Slowly the affiliate links started generating some sales (about $100 a month). This is where I realized that it really is possible to make money on the internet.
After this I made some more basic dating sites and dating site directories, but I didn´t really focus much. Ah yes, I also remember joining a site that sold a financial ebook. I took one of the emails they provided to their affiliates, pasted it on a site and sumitted it to the search engines (it didn´t have any links at all). I made about $100-$200 per month from them!
Then a couple of years later (around 2002) I read an ad by someone who was promoting an affiliate program using the new Google Adwords program (it wasn´t pay per click back then!). I joined a satellite tv merchant and promoted their link on Google. I got a few sales but nothing spectacular.
One day I got a message from the satellite tv merchant about an affiliate marketing course by a guy who was making tens of thousands of dollars a month building content websites. This guy was called James Martell.
His ebook, called the “Affiliate Marketers Handbook 2002″ offered a great, step-by-step approach to building affiliate sites. I loved it. I started writing lots of articles and and in about a week my first site was ready. After exchanging links, as the book instructed, I slowly began getting traffic. This site made about $50 from affiliate sales in its first month. No much, but it was enough for me to know that the approach worked.
I started building more James Martell type sites and hired ghostwriters to help me with the content. I made OK money from affiliate sales, but when I added Adsense (which was brand new back then) the sites really took off.
I kept building more James Martell sites and also did some PPC affiliate marketing using the strategies from Google Cash.
I also began doing Adsense arbitrage back then. I bought traffic from Adwords and sent it to my Adsense sites. Amazingly I almost always (2 times out of 3) DOUBLED my investment.
Another strategy I discovered was building small sites around brand names. These converted very well and began making me almost as much as my Adsense sites.
Out of all these strategies, I was making the most money with Adsense arbitrage. It was just so easy and quick to set up and the results were instant. Then I got an email from Google telling me that my account was banned because they didn´t like my “business model”… I basically lost two thirds of my income.
After being banned from Adsense I began focusing completely on affiliate marketing and slowly built my income back up. Now I mostly build affiliate sites and promote them using article marketing.
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The Best Spinner Review
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I have been using the Best Spinner for little over a week now and I must say, I really like it.
Article spinners are basically tools that help you produce hundreds of unique versions from one seed article. While I have not really used other spinners in the past, based on comments I have read in internet marketing forums, most of them were not very good. However, the Best Spinner got a lot of great reviews, which made me kind of curious. So, I decided to give it a try.
The software is very easy and intuitive to use, but you HAVE to watch the training videos first or you won´t be able to take advantage of the many powerful features it has. You begin by pasting an original article into the program and clicking “identify synonyms”, which will underline all the words in the article that can be replaced with the tool.
You can then either add synonyms to the words one, by one, or click “replace your favorites/everyones favorites”. Replacing your favorites will automatically change all words you have saved in your favorites list. Replacing everyone´s favorites will replace all words in the favorites list of EVERYONE who uses the program. Of these two, I find that replacing my favorites gives decent results and helps you rewrite the article a little faster. Replacing everyone´s favorites on the other hand is not as useful. The results do not make much sense and you basically have to go trough the entire article to edit it. You might as well just replace the words one by one.
After you have added synonyms for all the words, you are ready to begin spinning. Just by clicking a button, you can create up to 100 different verions of an article at a time. Best of all, the results make sense and it is almost impossible to tell that you are reading spun articles.
You can use these spun articles for lots of different things. You can use them to build Squidoo lenses, Hubpages or even to build blogs. Personaly, I use them for Unique Article Wizard. These two programs really work well together.
Overall, I really like the Best Spinner because it makes rewriting articles a lot easier and a little faster. It has the added bonus of providing lots of unique, good quality articles that can be used in lots of useful ways. I highly recommend you give it a try.
Click here to find out more about the Best Spinner
Popularity: 79% [?]