I’ve talked plenty about all the opportunities there are now to make money from home. Specifically how to make money from home using the internet. Writing sure has a lot to do with the success of an online business, so if you are a decent writer consider yourself one step ahead of the competition. And if you are a fast learner with technical skills you’d be two steps ahead. Even without any computer skill sets you still stand a great chance of making money online with constant and consistent action. It may just cost you more to outsource your weaknesses elsewhere.
Today though I want to speak more in depth about two different ways to make money from home. Flipping websites and conquering niches.
Make Money From Home by Flipping Websites
Creating new websites or buying used domain names, adding content, and then selling the entire package (aka site flipping) is becoming a popular way to make money from home these days. And for good reason too. You can make a lot of money if you do it right. There are plenty of people who are using site flipping as a business model and are making a living doing it.
To get started you are going to need to do a bit of research first. Nothing too time consuming though. Your whole objective here is just to find a popular niche and one where there is plenty of profit potential.
How do you do that? Use the information that’s already out there. If there are magazines on the topic, it’s probably a profitable niche. The magazines wouldn’t be in publication if they weren’t getting a good readership. A good readership means there are plenty of people willing to pay money for the content in the magazine, which means the magazine is making money from advertisers who are willing to pay to for ad spots.
An online business works the same way. And I don’t want to get off subject here, but a good looking website with great content will attract the readership, then the owner of the website can make money by selling ad spots on their pages.
So if you can build this type of website that has the potential to bring a good readership, people will be more interested in buying the website for a much higher price.
Here’s what I suggest if this might be something you want to go into…
After you find a niche and have the website up and running, add killer content to that site on a daily basis for a whole month. Starting up a WordPress blog is the easiest way to do this. You can add and remove content at the click of a button.
You should also write at least one article a day for a month and submit each one to Ezinearticles.com. This will give that website some back links and should start to build up a readership base as well.
The easier you make it to make money from home for the future buyer of the site, the more that person will pay for it. The site will sell for much more and a lot quicker if your website for sale has 20 unique articles on it, 10 videos, 300 back links to it, and is starting to pick up more readers every day.
Keep yourself busy for a month working on that website then sell it to the highest bidder. Make sure you make enough money from that sale to make it worth your while.
Make Money From Home by Conquering a Niche
There are plenty of niches out there that can be relatively profitable and can be found with some research. Here’s what you do…
Find a topic you know in and out and one in which you feel comfortable writing a lot about. Say for example you feel well versed in pets. Pets is most definitely a popular niche but you’d need a small army to be able to conquer that niche. So what you do instead is find a more well defined niche… dogs.
With dogs, the number of competition decreases significantly from the broad category of pets but I think dogs is still a very competitive niche in its own right. So we keep fine tuning our niche selection to find one that is still popular but has even less competition. How about dog food, dog treats, dog health, doggie clothes, dog training, etc.? Any of which will define exactly what we want our website to be about and will be much easier to get traffic to than from pets or dogs.
Much of the same research that you would use for a site flip will go into finding a niche that you can conquer. Once you find a niche that you think you may be able to conquer, find about 5 – 7 keywords that people would type in most to find information about the niche you are shooting for. Then you’ll want to punch those keywords into a keyword tool to see exactly how many searches they are bringing in each day.
You’ll want to find a niche where your keywords get at least 75,000 to 100,000 searches per month or about 2,500 per day. Any less and it may not be worth your while to start that website.
There are many keyword tools you can use to help you with your research. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is the best free tool available. Wordtracker is a good pay per use keyword tool.
After you have found your keywords, you’ll want to enter those same keywords with quotes into Google to see how much competition you will be up against. The number of results you get from that search is the number of competitors you are going to have.
What I do is take the top keyword…i.e. the keyword that gets the most daily or monthly searches and see what I have to do to get my site on page one for those keywords. After I type the keyword or keyword phrase into Google, I take the url from the #1 search spot and then enter that address into Yahoo Explorer to see exactly how many back links it has. That number will tell me what kind of work I’ll have to do to get my site up there.
The great thing about making money from home using the internet is that there is a real science to it and no guessing. Using a bit of research you will be able to know if a niche is easily conquerable or not and if there is any money to be made in that niche. Define your keywords, do a search for those keywords and spy on your competition to see if and how they are making money. The more research you do the easier it will be for you to really find some profitable niches. This is the most important part so don’t blow it and have fun doing it. Happy hunting…
Matt Helphrey