Working from home the next gold rush?

Many people think they can make money working from home simply by making a website or paying for someone to make one for them, and then waiting for customers. Not so.

Having the best designed website in the world in nice but irrelevant if no one visits it. The best website in the world award therefore goes to he who gets the most number of visitors. If you want to make money as an affiliate, here are the tricks you need to know.

Hardly surprisingly that Google has the best website followed by Yahoo and YouTube, in terms of number of visitors. Alexa rate the hottest URLs - The hottest pages on the web right now. Makes for interesting reading. Alexa publishes traffic reports and most popular websites at http://www.alexa.com/

This article explains how best to advertise your website, to get the most number of visitors for the least cost per sale. For more information like this, please visit www.slumdogaffiliates.com and join our affiliate school.

Best way to attract visitors to your website? In a recent survey, affiliates were asked how they get visitors to their websites. 53% use pay per click advertising through programs like Google AdWords, 46% post details of their websites on forums, 33% use Blogs and Squidoo lens http://www.squidoo.com/

31% post articles on article websites, 31% rely on SEO and search engines, the best of which is Google, followed by Yahoo, Live Search and Ask.com. 21% use conventional non-Internet forms of advertising, such as adverts in newspapers or free classified ads - or printing business cards for free with Vista Print - see http://www.vistaprint.com/ Just leave business cards with your sales message and domain name (not other contact details) for people to pickup in hotels, on public transport, telephone kiosks.

As the number of websites proliferate, the cost of pay per click advertising increases as Google auctions search words - as people bid against each other for the same search words, advertisers get less clicks per dollar, and Google gets more dollars per advertiser. Google's keyword tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal allows you to find search words and terms that attract less number of clicks for less money so by studying the form, you can significantly reduce the cost of advertising with PPC.

For example - if selling mobile phones, everyone wants to use the search word "mobile phone", so if you sell the Nokia xyz234 - less people pro rata will bid for the search term Nokia xyz234, so the cost per click should be less, and the number of clicks will be less, but people searching for this product are more likely to buy as they specifically searched for this product, rather than generalised. We provide tools for our affiliates that measure the effectiveness of pay per click - our simple PPC Calculator and Blog Posting Alert spreadsheet has saved us thousands of dollars.

Text ads appear around 5 times more expensive than banners ads placed on the content network, and the new Google display ads are worth considering, as they appear to have the edge over normal banners. We recently found that a text ad cost us 15 cents per click, whereas a banner on content advertising cost us 3 cents. If you really want to increase your advertising effectiveness and reduce your advertising costs, place a site meter on your website from http://www.sitemeter.com/ to see how many visitors you get, how long they stay on the page, how many pages they visit on your site. Then count the number of sales enquiries you get. Our new blogging tool measures the effectiveness of PPC advertising - it simply measures the cost of advertising per sale.

Whereas the majority of affiliates focus on the cost per click and loose money, wise affiliates measure advertising not by cost per click, but by cost per sale. If you advertise products and get paid $25, then don't spend $30 on advertising to get each sale - sorry if this sounds obvious, it's just that most affiliates don't measure the effectiveness or cost of advertising, they just rely on gut feelings and are happy enough to get lots of clicks - but if no one buys your product, perhaps what you are advertising is too costly in the first place - this is why it is so important to find niche products to sell, rather than sell stuff that everyone else sells.

Two examples - everyone sells mobile phones, so the cost per click for advertising is expensive, the profit is not great because the market has become so competitive - but sell a niche product like hovercraft, and you have few competitors and the cost of advertising is less, the margins are better, so the commission cheques are more generous. Insight and experience like this can save you or make you thousands of dollars, so please visit www.slumdogaffiliates.com and join our affiliate school.