Surviving the Recession with Making Money Online

Despite many industries laying off thousands of workers or even outright shutting their doors in today's tough economic climate, there is one industry that is thriving and helping thousands of regular people make money. Some hard workers are even replacing the income they earned at their regular jobs, allowing them to walk away from the 9-5 work day for good and work from home on a full-time basis.

What is this industry? Affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing programs are simple by nature: They work by rewarding

marketers for promoting products online. The affiliates are then compensated on a commission basis. Basically, affiliates get paid each time they refer new customers to the website of the company they are promoting.

Becoming an affiliate is one of the most lucrative online money-making opportunities out there, and the breadth of products that can be promoted as an affiliate is staggering. Affiliate marketing creates a cost-effective option for big and small companies alike to reach out and expose their products to a much larger audience of potential buyers. Instead of being limited to just one large webiste, companies of any size can now offer an affiliate program and have their products promoted on hundreds or even thousands of individual sites, at no upfront cost to them.

Likewise, the affiliate marketing industry also provides a virtually unlimited source for income for those who aggressively promote offers. Affiliates have been continually reaping the rewards of larger profits as the affiliate marketing industry continues to grow in popularity. Affiliates can easily earn anywhere from 30-90% of the profits from each sale that comes from customers they refer, and with some affiliate programs offering recurring monthly payouts for their products, the earning potential becomes even higher.

CPA marketing, in which affiliates can earn money just for referring traffic and having visitors do as little as fill out a short form, without even making a purchase, is the latest hot trend in affiliate marketing, and promises to keep the industry highly profitable and exciting for many years to come.

Unlike other businesses, there are no specific criteria for becoming an affiliate, other than a commitment to work hard and some knowledge of Internet marketing and how to go about researching and promoting the best offers for maximum profitability.

Learn how you can start earning a legitimate online income.

Why Should You Ping Your Sites?

Pinging your sites from time to time especially after you've just published s fresh content is advisable and SEO-friendly approach as you will be assisting the search engine spiders and content crawlers to index your page faster. It's like raising a red flag to Google spiders saying, "Hey, I got something new on my site, come take a look". Sounds like something worth doing? Great!

Here's how and what you need to do for a successful pinging.

1. Get ready with set of keywords, brief description of your site, URL, title of your site, RSS feed on a Notepad. For easier copy pasting to all pinging sites.

Here's what you're gonna write.

Site Name:

Site URL: (ex. http://yoursite.com)

Site RSS Feed URL: (http://yoursite.com/feeds)

Where Should You Ping Your Sites?

Two of the most commonly used pinging sites are Ping-O-Matic and Ping.in. Here's a comprehensive list of other pinging sites that you should check out:

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://1470.net/api/ping

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://bitacoras.net/ping

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/

http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.weblogs.se/

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

Go help the search engine spiders find your fresh contents now for faster indexing, exposure, traffic and start making money online!

Promoting Your Site

Alright so you have a good looking, content rich website now. Now sit down, relax and take a sip on your mango juice. Wait till the traffics will come on its own. People will know. A lot of bloggers thought that once they've published a well-written post, they could just relax and watch the traffic flood when the truth is they need to promote their websites in every possible way they can.

There plenty of proven methods to help drive traffic to one's website and establish credibility. One of these methods is the social networking. It's one way of communicating and linking with people of similar interest and eventually get to have these people trust you, visit your sites and listen to every recommendation you do and say. Another is through social bookmarking. Bookmarking has become a famous and the most easy option of promotion as many sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Identi.ca allow their users to bookmark or to remember their favorite pages and even vote on the best site, comment on its contents and share these bookmarks with anyone anywhere in the world for FREE!

Promotion

Take the word literally and figuratively. Promotion is probably the easiest and in the most cases, the cheapest way to increase your exposure to the vast internet world. Your content would be useful if others are finding them. Go promote them. Connect or network with bloggers of similar interest, react, interact with their posts. Offer suggestions and share ideas. These blogger might find your posts worth sharing and share it with their readers. As you continue participating in forums, chats, discussions, share links, ideas and the lines, you will gradually establish your presence online as well as incoming links to your site. Social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter are wonderful ways in helping you collaborate with your readers in real time and share ideas and links to your contents. Make use of them--they're free and the potentials of boosting your traffic through them is unlimited.

Contests on Promos

Run a contents or offer freebies for your readers like giving the "nth" visitor, the frequent visitor, the user with the most comments or those who RT your tweets the most, etc. Determine through Demographics the location of your users and see what offer that they might delight into participating. Through this, you will be encouraging them to write posts about your contents, tweet about your posts, tell their friends about it and simply promote your site--isn't it cool to see them promote your promos too?

If you're not using any of the suggested approaches then what are you waiting for?! Perhaps you're still keeping your fingers crossed that visitors will miraculously stumble upon your sites with little or no effort to promote on your part. Think again! Go start blogging, promoting, networking and earn those dollars!

So You Wanna Be a Successful Blogger

Are you passionate in writing or ideas simply flow inside your brain like a rocket ship about to blast in the outer space? Well, a lot of people might find your expertise helpful and beneficial so why not blog? Blogging is the new generation career for people who loves to write and opens an opportunity for passive income. It can become a sure source of income once you've established your credibility and presence online. Think of the possibilities of becoming the new Perez Hilton, Seth Godin or Guy Kawasaki. Just like you, they've been through a lot of challenges trying to prove themselves and their value in the huge internet world.

You might ask, "How could I stand out in the crowd?"

Every minute the numbers of aspiring bloggers increases as the numbers of published or created Wordpress and Blogger blogs as well as with other platforms like Typepad, Livejournal and Tumblr, also increases. A lot of people, just like you, are trying to be the guru or respected authority in a specific niche and most importantly, gain online income. After all, what's the use of capitalizing on web hosting, domain, trainings and sleepless nights trying to compose a new post if you're not going to be paid doing it?

In order for you to stand out in the crowd, you need to have an "x" factor that your readers are looking for a writer. If you pick up a newspaper in the morning, which section do you usually seek and read right away? Isn't it that we all have a favorite section? And surprisingly, we often have a favorite columnist on it. The same principle applies in blogging. Be like the columnist that you like and follow his examples in gaining some popularity on your niche. Learn of his writing techniques and try to emulate his example. I didn't say to copy his style of writing, just get ideas and establish your own. Remember that you were born original so don't die a copy.

By putting together your self in the shoes of your readers, try to determine how would you react on your posts if you were reading it on your own or your readers perspective. We all want people who provide value and what they really want, be a provider of them

On our next post, we will be showing how you can promote your website.