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The title says it all… anything above the fold is going to make you the most amount of money because it receives the most hits.  Let me backup here…

Above the fold refers to the space on the website that is visible when you first load the page on your browser.  The bottom of the page is the fold.  It’s obvious but the statistics also back up the fact that the objects above the fold get the most clicks.  Anything below the fold usually gets significantly fewer hits because people are lazy by nature and most are apt not to scroll the browser down.

What does this mean?

Well if it isn’t spelled out for you already, let me help.  Put the most important ads or opt-in forms in a highly visible, highly clickable spot…monetize your website above the fold.

If you don’t believe me try it yourself.  If you haven’t already, put your opt-in form above the fold and you will see a significant change in sign ups. Put your adsense above the fold and you will see more daily clicks.  Put your affiliate ads above the fold and you will get more sales.  Anything you put above the fold will get the most attention, so optimize your site accordingly.

Matt Helphrey

Popularity: 10% [?]

This blog has a wealth of affiliate internet business information + books, links, and free tools that you can use to make money online. It was created to teach others the things that I have learned in order for you to be successful with your internet business as well.

I feel that by providing you with great content and tools that you will continue to come back to this blog to see what else I have to offer. And I hope you do because the best is yet to come.

Some day soon I will be able to leave my day job with the ability to work from wherever and whenever I’d like. When that day comes I will be able to look at the archives of this blog and document just how I got to that point. It is a journal to my internet home business and I invite you to follow along because if you decide to take action and own your own business, you can use this information to your advantage.

In my first year of working with affiliate programs to get to the point where I can make a living earning income from the internet, this is what I have learned…

A lot of people come into the internet marketing world with the misconception that it is easy to make money online and that it happens fast. While there are many people who are making millions of dollars a year from the internet, it is a very few percentage of people who actually get to that point.

The failure rate of people who look to make money online is so high because of this misconception. Once these people find out how hard it is just to make a few dollars, they quit never really learning all that is required.

It is hard work getting enough traffic to your website to make money online but only because it takes time to do so. I would say that most people aren’t patient enough to make a living online. What you have to realize is that getting traffic online is a compound effect.

A few articles to the article directories will get you a few visitors a day. A few hundred after a year of article marketing will get you a steady stream of traffic each day. A very high percentage of people won’t get to that point because it took them an hour to write each article and they never got any return for their efforts. Again… be patient. The writing will get easier to do and the traffic will get there too.

If you want to get to the point where you are making money on a daily basis, you are going to need anywhere from 500-1500 daily visitors. To do that you may need 1000 unique articles on your site and another 1000 in the article directories. Don’t expect anything until you get to that point.

Having realistic expectations will help you set up a daily plan that you can use to reach your goals without the frustrations of no return for your work. It’ll come, don’t quit before it does.

Matt Helphrey

affiliate internet business information + books

Popularity: 6% [?]

Things are going somewhat smoothly this week even though I have a cold that is definitely making me more tired than I normally am. We push on anyways because the work still needs to be done.

This week I am focusing mainly on finding a new niche and I have come across several that I am in the process of testing using the method I provided from the last Follow My Footsteps post. Once I have narrowed it down to two I will move on to document exactly what my next steps will be. I am being very cautious and picky about what niche to select realizing how important this step is. I am making sure I don’t just commit myself to an overall large niche but one that branches off a larger niche.

Today I want to talk about article marketing and how writing effective articles has been a crucial element in receiving traffic to my website. And article marketing works two fold. First, the articles themselves deliver targeted traffic from the article directories. Second, the back links you leave in the authors resource box add up and these back links will get you ranked higher in the search engines for your keywords.

That’s why selecting your keywords carefully when you write your articles is a crucial element of success for gaining organic free traffic to your website. Before you write an article, figure out what keywords you want to use, then incorporate those keywords in your article title and throughout the survey.

One thing to keep in mind though, and this is very important, your article has to be legible and a smooth read. Do not spam your keywords in your article so it doesn’t make sense. Doing so will actually hurt your chances of getting ranked rather than help. A good written article with the right amount of strategically placed keywords is the most effective way to market your articles. It will keep the reader interested and the search engines will not penalize your material.

To get the optimal results, you’ll want to write 3 or more different versions of the same article. This ensures that the search engines wont penalize you for submitting the spam. If the search bots see that the same article with your back link is in a number of different spots, they will not count all of the back links. The search bots love unique fresh content, so if you change some things up they will see the articles as completely different then one another and you will get more back links listed for that article.

I hope this makes sense. Too many of one thing is not good, variety is the spice of life on the internet as well. Take the time to rewrite each and every article and you will see a big difference in the amount of back links you get.

This process does not have to be hard either. When your article is ready for distribution you have a couple of different options and I have used both. You can manually submit your article versions to a list one by one. This way will take you a good amount of time, usually a full day to do if you are submitting to the places you should be. Submitting manually obviously wont cost you any money, but lets face it, time is money.

In my opinion a cheap distribution service is well worth the money. Not only will it automatically submit your articles to hundreds of different directories at the click of a few buttons, but the one I use allows you to use software to make different versions of your article as well. The service is through SubmitYourArticle and I would highly recommend it to anyone submitting articles. I can’t imagine I would have anywhere near the number of back links I have now if it were not for their services.

In my next post I will talk about and give you examples on how to increase the number of back links to your website. Article marketing is my #1 method but there are easier ways that I’ll be happy to share.

Stay tuned…

Matt Helphrey

Popularity: 8% [?]

Promoting and marketing affiliate programs can prove to be a very lucrative method to make money online. To do this correctly will require a good amount of patience and persistence with your efforts.

To make money online with affiliate programs you will first want to get your own website. This is a real simple process. Choose your own domain name, then find a reputable host to put your website on. There are cheap hosts that offer valuable services but I would not recommend choosing a free website. These websites almost always have ads promoting other products and can shut you down with little or no warning.

Once you have chosen a domain name that represents your site well and have found a reputable host that has a good, clean history, you can then begin the search for affiliate programs. There are many affiliate programs that you can promote. Look for some that offer products or services that you can easily write about and believe in what they are offering. Find likewise programs that promote the same products or services so you can promote them on the same website rather than having to worry about several websites.

Most affiliate programs offer training and tools so you can learn and succeed. Many people come into these programs not knowing the first thing about making money online with affiliate programs and do just fine. Many people go above and beyond and make it their primary source of income. You ultimately choose the amount of income you make by the work and effort you put in.

To make money online with affiliate programs and succeed long term, you will need to set your website up first. This could take months, years perhaps. It all depends on how much time or money you have to put into your home based business. Money will allow you to take shortcuts by purchasing advertising or software to make things easier. Time will allow you to push your back links all over the internet, a very slow and tedious (but free) process.

Having both time and money would be nice, unfortunately that is not the case for most people. Anyone can succeed and make money online with affiliate programs with the right desire and dedication. There are plenty of people who are having success with affiliate programs. Why not you?

Matt Helphrey
Make Money Online With Affiliate Programs

Popularity: 16% [?]

SEO or search engine optimization of your website may be the most important thing you can do for the life of your home based business. Doing this correctly will not only bring you free traffic from the search engines but will bring you the highest quality targeted traffic that you can get.

To correctly SEO your website for free traffic will require a bit of research. You will need to research keywords that are searched on frequently but also ones that do not have a high level of competition. The internet marketing niche is a highly competitive niche but has many keywords that can bring your home based business plenty of free traffic. It is your job to find those keywords.

After you have done your research and found keywords to suit your website, then you can SEO your website properly for free traffic. To do this correctly you will need to know just a small amount of html. You can find help with this an any search engine. Just type “learning html” or “html tutorials” without the quotations.

Properly SEO’ng your website will require you to enter your keywords in the title of your page, meta tags, h1 and h2 headers, and place your keywords here and there between 1 and 3% of all words throughout your website. It sounds like a lot of work but it really isn’t too bad. A few changes in your website can really make a difference on whether or not your home based business will succeed.

Now that you have your keywords and your site optimized correctly, you will need to build back-links to your site. A back-link is simply a link on someone else’s site that is pointing back to your website. The more back-links you have, the higher your website will rank for your keywords. Once you have enough back-links to rank on the first page for your keywords, you should choose another set of keywords that are more competitive and go for those.

You can increase the back-links to your site by writing and submitting articles, posting in various forums that are related to your niche, submitting your website to directories, and by leaving comments on others blogs.

By using the advice listed in this article, you really can succeed and make money online with your home based business. Selecting proper keywords, SEO’ng your website, and building back-links will bring you free traffic and will work no matter what niche you are in. The basis of this information is really all you need to know about how to market and sell anything online.

Set your website up and do a little each day to build up your back-links and before you know it, your website will be getting tons of free traffic from all the search engines.

Matt Helphrey
Internet Based Affiliate Marketing

Popularity: 23% [?]

Many people make the mistake of purchasing guaranteed visitors to their website. It’s not that the traffic does not get delivered because it usually does. The problem is that these visitors are not targeted visitors seeking the information that you have. Most, if not all the visitors were manipulated into visiting by pop ups or pop unders.

The chances of you getting any sign ups or sales are very slim with any guaranteed visitors programs. There are some ways however that you can get FREE targeted traffic to your website. Here’s a few tips to do just that.

The best way to get free traffic is through the search engines. This is the best type of targeted traffic you can get to your home based business. Think about it, they are searching for exactly what you are offering. In order to receive this type of free traffic to your website, you have to research and place your keywords, then work hard at getting back links. The more back links you have, the higher your website will rank for your specific keywords.

The research and words you place strategically throughout your website is called SEO or search engine optimization. Do not underestimate how important this step is to making money online. If you do it correctly, your website will rank on page one of the search engines for your particular keywords and your traffic and sales will show as well.

To get free traffic to your website from the search engines, you want to find keywords that are getting searched on a frequent basis but are no too competitive. Once you have found the words you would like to use, you’ll want to place those words in your page head/title, meta tags, and throughout the web page. A good rule of thumb is to include those words between 1-3% of all the written material on the page.

After you have SEO’d your website properly, you’ll want to start getting back links to your website. Do this by writing and submitting articles, posting in forums, submitting your website to directories and link exchanges, and leaving comments on blog posts.

The search engines will look at the number of back links you have and rank you accordingly. The higher numbered back link sites are considered to be authority sites in that niche and will rank higher for their keywords.

So in order to increase your back links to get the high quality free traffic to your website, you need to work at it every day. Make a “to do list with chores or tasks you should accomplish on a daily basis. This will help keep yourself focused and to stay on track. Doing something every day will ensure your website free traffic rather than your competitors.

Matt Helphrey
Internet Based Affiliate Marketing

Popularity: 25% [?]

Until the advent of the internet, starting your own business meant building capital, taking out large loans, and spending most of your time away from home. Borrowing and spending big money meant you were taking big risks. Today you can start your own home based business for practically nothing at all. Here are a few home based business ideas to get you started.

Home Based Business Idea #1:

Sign up for and promote affiliate programs. These affiliate programs give you all the training and tools you need to succeed and many are free to join. Having your own website helps the conversion rate of your traffic but is not required. Many people just sign up for a free blog and promote the programs right from there.

Affiliate programs are programs where the companies pay out commissions for sales and referrals you bring them. It is difficult to make money from these programs right away but after a couple of months of building traffic it will really start to pick up.

Home Based Business Idea #2:

Sign up to take surveys, read emails, play games, and complete offers. There are some online companies that will pay you to do all of the following. It will be hard to earn a living from the pay you get from these companies but it can definitely help with some of your monthly bills.

It would be best to sign up for two or more of these companies. Most will pay about one dollar per survey and pennies for answering emails. All of this easy work ads up though and can be good for $30 - $100 a month if you do something every day.

Home Based Business Idea #3:

Find a niche that has a good amount of aggressive customers and low competition. By defining yourself and your website as an authority in a specific niche, you can really make a comfortable living with internet marketing.

There are untapped niches that people are just starving for information from the internet. Once you do the research to find these niches, it will be easy for you to provide the information these people are looking for and charge for the information requested.

There are plenty of other home based business ideas that I did not touch on. The best way to really make money online is to combine several different methods. Limiting yourself to just one or two would not tap the full potential of what the internet has to offer.

Find out exactly what you need to do, set goals, and make an effort to push towards those goals every day of your life. Just think how good it will feel to be able to walk away from you boss at your day job knowing you wont ever have to work for anyone ever again. It is possible, you just have to make it happen.

Matt Helphrey
Home Based Business Ideas

Five Dollars just for signing up!!

Popularity: 18% [?]

Blogging is a growing trend among worldwide internet users. Blogs are a great way to attract attention to whatever you are promoting. Whether you are just blogging about your daily activities, providing information to a certain niche, or promoting a business or product, you can use a blog to make money. Blogging for money is simple, here’s a few steps to get you started.

Blogging for money step 1: Start your own blog. There are many services you can use to start your own blog. The two I recommend are Wordpress and Blogger. Both are free services and the best way to utilize them is to host the blogs directly from your own website.

Blogging for money step 2: Once you have your blog setup you need to work on getting traffic to it. This step should be thought of as the post and ping process. You should post to your blog several times a week and then use a pinging service to ping each individual post. (Wordpress pings automatically every post.)

By posting and pinging on a regular basis, you will really begin to see traffic pick up. Another way to get traffic to your blog is to use social bookmarking. There are hundreds of different bookmark sites you can join and post your blog and get tons of free traffic.

Blogging for money step 3: Once you are getting good traffic to your blog, there are several ways to make money. First, if you haven’t already, you should sign up for a Google Adsense account. These are ads you can place directly on your blog and get paid for everytime someone clicks on their ads.

Another way to make money from your blog is to sign up with affiliate programs and promote their banners on your blog. When people sign up for their programs from your blog, you will get paid a commission.

There are also different companies that will pay you for leads that you provide them. This can be a very good form of income because your blog visitors don’t have to pay for anything. A lead is simply a name and address and these companies will pay anywhere from $1 to $30 for leads you bring them.

As you can see, blogging for money is quite easy. Getting the blog setup is the most difficult part. Once you are over that step, making money is as simple as posting to your blog. The more you post, the more traffic you will get. The more traffic you get to your blog, the more money you will make. Get started today!

Matt Helphrey
Blogging for Money

Popularity: 21% [?]

Traffic Swarm may seem like a useless program to some, but for those who know how to use it, it can be very beneficial. Many people use the program as a place to put ads for their home based business or various affiliate programs. If those people tracked their sales or referrals correctly they would soon find that a very low percentage would come from Traffic Swarm.

Conversion rates for Traffic Swarm are almost non existent for drawn out sales pages. I really feel that the ONLY way you should use Traffic Swarm and the like is to build up your opt-in list by creating a very simple lead capture page and place 10 -15 ads promoting the same page. People clicking the ads brainlessly to receive ad credits will be more likely to sign up for your newsletter than to pay money for some product or service you are promoting.

The lead capture page should be very simple and make the credit surfer want to sign up. Making a good lead capture page is simple and will just require you to know the basics of html. Keep it simple and offer something of value. An e book or e books with information is always good. Let them know what they will be getting when they sign up, quote the vale of the freebies and how they will benefit from signing up. Or point out what they will be missing out on by not signing up.

I’ve had a good number of subscribers come from Traffic Swarm and no sales from the other ads I had previously. Take this advice and try it out. You can be successful getting a good number of subscribers using this method and applying it to other traffic sites as well.

Matt Helphrey
Internet Based Affiliate Marketing

Popularity: 26% [?]

There are many different business forums all over the internet where online marketers go to discuss the many facets of making money online. You can learn to use these forums to your benefit and perhaps even sell some products or make money through affiliate programs.

The first thing you need to do is find some forums that are getting a lot of traffic. Then you have to set up your signature that will be seen by all who read the various posts and topics where you will be discussing. The signature should hyper link to either a high converting sales page, home web page, or a blog post where you are promoting something.

Once you have your sig file set up, all you have to do is chat with other members and people will see your sig and click on the various links you have. The key to make this successful is to post a lot. And make sure that your posts themselves are not selling anything or promoting your own products. Just by being genuine and sincere and helping others out will get them to click on your links. Building a good name and rapport for yourself will make others see you as someone who knows what they are talking about and they will also see your products and links as helpful as you are.

It is optimal to join anywhere from three to five different business forums and post about five times daily. It seems like a lot of work but it really is not. The tedious writing gets more easy to do the more you do it. So just force yourself to make the posts and start making money from these forums.

Matt Helphrey
Internet Based Affiliate Marketing

Everyone has had a financial crisis at some point in their life. Unfortunately some people have no where to turn to. Payday loans can help you get back on your feet by giving you a small loan.

Popularity: 100% [?]