How to Choose the Right Online Business

So far in this series we have assessed your aptitude for making a living online and outlined some of the more common ways of doing it. Namely MLM's, Your own product on your own site, and Survey filling/email admin.

In this concluding part of the series, we are going to look at a further important way in which people are making a lot of money online and summarise with a way you can combine the different methods to create a formula that works best for you.

Adsense Content Sites

Adsense has rocked the Internet world in a very short space of time. Google make billions from it (literally) every year, and if you carry their adsense spots on your sites you can make a good living from it too.

The secret to making big money with adsense is to have tons of different information sites each with as much unique content as possible, and line them with your adsense code.

You may use only 3 adsense panels per page. Its not worth exceeding this, not only because Google will ban you, but also because Internet users have grown savy to advertising and your visitors may just switch away from your site if its too cluttered.

You'll only get good revenue from adsense if you have good traffic to your sites. Getting lots of visitors either costs money or takes time to accumulate. There is no other way, unless you have a huge email list and can drive visitors to it that way.

Some adsense sites begin by using adsense to get their traffic. The gamble they take is that they'll earn more from people clicking the links on their pages than they'll spend attracting the users in the first place. While this strategy is OK in the short term, it will need some careful keyword research and planning to pay off long-term. What you should really aim to do is get your adsense sites ranked high in the search engines so they are listed high in the results for a given search term. This can take time.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a science in itself. If you are committed to making money online with adsense it is worth your while learning and understanding precisely what the levers are to optimizing your site's position with the search engines. It's a knowledge that will pay handsomly in time.

Currently, the search engines grade sites on three important factors: 1. How many other sites link to them; 2. How much content they contain relevant to the searchers search term and 3. How much of their content is unique (not found elsewhere). Each of these factors can, and must, be worked on if your adsense sites are to make more money than they cost.

Because the success of adsense sites are so dependent on the methods of ranking deployed by the search engines, it is quite a risky way of making a living. Rarely would a prudent business person bank so much time, energy and investment on something that was beyond the reach of their control.

For example, if you had devoted months to getting over 1,000 sites linking to your adsense site or blog, and then Google suddenly decided that it was time to change priorities; you might then find your site plunging down the ranking ladder overnight, perhaps below a site with just 50 links. There would be no warning and there would be nothing you could do about this except adapt your tactics again to take account of their new scoring mechanism.

There is little strategy involved in running adsense sites. It is a tactical way of making money. It works now, but there's no telling how long it will continue in its current form.

My advice is this: by all means set up a few adsense sites and blogs but do it in a way that it doesn't bleed your time too much. Concentrate them on high-paying keywords. A few months ago, the adsense spots getting most per click (over $5.00 in some cases) were in the realms of Loan Finance and Body Hair Removal. Its worth doing your research to discover the most productive industries for adwords currently. Then, set them up, spend as little as possible promoting them and leave them on autopilot as much as you can.

Article Directories are a good way of automating adsense sites. Article directories grow their content virally, and are therefore more likely to get good rankings in the search engines. With your adsense ads alongside articles in your own article database, you're well placed to make the most of this form of income. Setting up your own article directory is simple these days. In fact, Gold members of The Freedom List get a fully-working article directory site, complete with a starting selection of articles, free with their membership.

To thousands of Internet Marketers, articles, content and adsense are their bread and butter. When used effectively with each other, these three are all you need to make a living online. But beware of a change in ranking policy at the search engines. If your living is so directly related to how high your sites are ranked then you need a back-up plan. Nobody controls search engine rankings except the search engines. Its their product.

That's why, in conclusion, the most sustainable and powerful way to make money online is with your own product on your own site, as discussed in part 3. You, and only you, will be in control of its destiny. You'll be answerable to no one and it will be as successful as you want to make it.

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