Everyone goes on and on about how to make money online so I’m changing it up and will be going over the 5 top ways to lose money online!

1) Pay Per Click Advertising and Google Adwords – If you don’t know what your doing, this thing will bring you and your house down. You can effectively blow $50 in 5 minutes with absolutely no result. Most newbies don’t enable their tracking, group their keywords or optimize their site or ads and climb a blind and uphill battle the whole time. When a sale comes in they get excited but have no idea what actually resulted in conversions so they just pump more money into it until they run out.

2) Niche sites – Many marketers like to try a whole bunch of niche sites to test which ones work. Factor in the cost of domains, hosting, programming and design and you got yourself a nice little intravenous drip hanging from your wallet. Drip. Drip. Nice.

3) Not understanding your business systems – Most relevant to entrepreneurs selling physical products. You’ll see this when you sell at a small(ish) mark-up yet forget to factor in taxes, various fees (Paypal) and advertising. I got stung with this when I didn’t correctly factor in GST while I was selling a range of products. For example if I bought a $100 product and sold for $130, I still had to pay my Paypal fees as well as tax (10% for Australian sales) which meant I made about $6 for selling a $130 item! A simple mistake anyone can do when you start smelling profit, no matter how small it is. Next time, make sure its really profit!

4) Information overload – Many a new marketer signs up to multiple training courses in different micro-niches (PPC, Affiliate, Launch, Membership Sites, Copy Writing etc) and ends up being confused out of recognition. Too much information is never a good thing. Stick to a couple of basic systems, test, measure, rinse and repeat the good. Don’t do everything at once. Alternatively get a completely comprehensive course which you can follow step by step covering all the factors. The best complete course going around is the Bootstrapedia course… you like that? A little self serving I know! But get your Free report, you may find it useful.

5) Giving up – If you fall you get up. Don’t crawl a little further then play dead, you’ll get no where. Expect to fail. Know you will. Once you embrace this and understand that there is a real possibility of failure, you won’t fear it and you’ll be more equipped to get up and get back into it. Everyone fails at some point, your no different so just take it in your stride and try again. Why is this expensive? Well you’ve wasted money and time putting things into action but decided to drop it when the going got tough. Little do you know that this effort could possibly turn into a success just around the corner, but you gave up didn’t you?

These are my top 5 tips for losing money online. If you want to try them out feel free, they really work! Guaranteed!

When I started this blog it was purely a personal thing, a place I could put my thoughts and rants in writing however its grown a little from then. I enjoy writing in it and from writing alone I am able to learn a whole heap which is great. I’ve also steadily moved towards an Internet Marketing / Internet Entrepreneur theme as opposed to the much broader approach I have previously. This wasn’t something I intended but rather a natural progression.

There is a problem however. My SEO sucks. Seriously, your probably here because you searched “how to suck an egg” or something random like that and are wondering what the hell have you stumbled upon. If so, my apologies, feel free to move on.. here is a site .

So over the next few weeks I’ll be working on fixing my SEO a bit. I had never bothered about it before because I wasn’t particularly concerned about whether the search engines picked up my blog as it was something I did purely out of interest and even to this day I don’t run any advertisements so my intention to profit from it is still minimal.

But after a fair bit of interest and the soon to be launch of my new product, I figured I better sort out my SEO and start generating some really targeted traffic.

Three things I will be focusing on include my Title Tags, my H1 headings, bolded text (been doing this randomly but without much substance) and keyword density. I can’t really do much with my url’s as I have a fair few incoming links and don’t want them to be broken so I guess that’s something I will pay attention to from now on. Also my in-coming links will be phrased rather than under my url, www.williambakhos.com.

Now don’t think this is something your really going to notice as I still write for the people who are interested in reading this blog, but my aim is to drive more like minded people to join this community and benefit from the information provided.

Wow I’m really excited about this. I have been looking for affiliate software for a while and was considering using one offered with my email transponder software (salesautomator.com). However this costs about $100 a month and includes shopping cart stuff which I didn’t want yet was part of the package if you wanted the affiliate software. Kinda like getting health insurance and they cover you for hip replacements and nursing care when your still under 30. But again, I digress.

So I found this cool (and Free!) affiliate software called hasoffers. I’m not an affiliate for that site or anything so don’t be scared to click that link .

Anyway I’m in the process of setting my affiliate program up and I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into it and its features.

I’ll keep you updated and give my review shortly.

Will

There seems to be a definite pattern with people who want to get into an online business of some sort in that they start with the same questions: where do I start and what should I sell? Well I think these two questions actually fall under the one action, because before you do anything, you should probably decide on what niche you wish to get into. So I’m going to outline a few points that will nail the initial questions so you can get started on the meaty stuff.

Before you do anything, think of a field that you know a lot about or think of yourself as an expert in. Try to find something you are really passionate about as this helps, but it not necessarily an essential. Now once who have a few ideas, put them to the following tests:

1. Is there competition?

People often associate an industry that has plenty of competition as being an industry you should stay away from. I think that’s quite a silly approach because why else would there be plenty of competition other than the fact that it’s a profitable market? If there are plenty of people advertising to this market then that’s a good sign. If the market wasn’t profitable then why would people keep advertising? Use you competitors as your market research.

How do you do this? Let’s use “weight loss” as an example. The first step is to do a Google search for, you guessed it, weight loss! Now once you do a search have a look at the right hand side of the page at the sponsored listings. Its full. Check out the more sponsored links tab the the bottom. 54 pages of weight loss ads! 54 pages! I feel sorry for the guys on like page 32.. Who’s ever visiting these guys? Now go back to the original search and visit the top sites in the organic search. Do they contain a lot of advertising? Banners? Adsense? You get the picture.

2. Clickbank it – Is it popular lately?

No not Google it. Clickbank it. Clickbank is the largest affiliate network for digital products online. I’ll go into a little more detail of Clickbank later in this report but for now quickly visit Clickbank (www.clickbank.com), go to their marketplace (small link top-right of screen) and do a search for your niche to see what comes up.
Now you need to take note of how many products are for available for promotion and the more the better. Its for the same reason we did the Google search earlier. More advertisers = more people buying.
But most importantly you need to have a look at the “gravity” of the product. You can find this under the product description in a faded grey text with other info such as $/sale, %/sale and so on.
I’m not going to explain gravity because that would take me forever and I’ll end up getting confusing myself. Just take my word for it. You want a higher gravity. The higher the gravity the more that item has been promoted and sold recently. Gravity places emphasis on recent interest and sales of that product but in short, the higher the better.

3. Google Keyword Tool

This is different to simply doing a search in Google. Google’s Keyword Tool (do a search for Google Keyword Tool) allows you to see the volume of searches for particular keywords. So back to the weight loss example, the search term “weight loss” has a global search volume of 5 million searches. To put that into perspective “learning guitar” is at about 350,000 searches and “cheap flights” is almost 24 million.

4. Ebay Pulse

A great final test especially relevant for physical products is using Ebay Pulse. Visit pulse.ebay.com. Ebay pulse tells you what’s hot on Ebay right now, a great indicator of what is selling well on the internet. Great to use especially if you want to sell physical products.
The conclusions? You want to sell something that is high in demand, being sold recently and is a proven profitable market. If your product gets a tick for all these tests then your product is sellable and most likely profitable. Don’t be afraid of big markets just because there is plenty of competition. Where there is plenty of competition there is even a bigger market and getting a small piece of the cake is much easier than trying to take the whole thing!

(This is straight out of my ebook, Bootstrapedia. If you want to get a copy, first grab your version of Think and Grow Rich and I’ll also send you my book!)