Invest Kid

I know, I know. I’m getting off track here. I have been talking about affiliate programs and marketing for a while, but now I feel the need to discuss something else.

As you may or may not know, I’ve been trying to set up a new blog. (Don’t worry, I’ll still use this one!) But I didn’t know what to write about. But then I thought, “I need to take my own advice and use the strategies I posted. And by doing that, I found my perfect niche.

(* indicates the field chosen for the end product)

Decide who and then go even more in depth:

• Kids, teens, or adults?
• girls, boys, teen girl, teen guys, men, women*

Decide what and go more niche:

• personal or business*
• rants, entertainment or corporate, teaching*

Decide when or what stage (optional):

• starting your business*, managing your business, ending a business, all three
• pregnancy, starting a family*, raising kids, all three
• retired athletes, current athletes, future athletes, all three

Decide where (optional):

• businesses in Atlanta*
• families in Dallas*

Your complete product is now: “How women can start a family and start a business in a big city”. It’s a large topic but small enough so that you do not get off topic and can zero-in on a specific group.

Anyhow, if you are still wondering what topic I chose, here it is: “Teens: the Good Life”

Check it out later; it’ll be at www.fizzlr.com

<a href=’http://www.mylot.com/strategize/4776′>myLot User Profile</a>

I am making this post so that my blog may be viewed on myLot. It will be deleted in a few hours.

Along with selling your products on your own website, you can post them for sale in forums. Most people would not think that it would work as well as it actually does. Forums such as Digital Point get millions of views and have thousands of members. Someone is bound to see your product and your chances of finding a buyer increases.

On the downside of this, you have to keep a good reputation. A single bad checkout may cost you you business. In most forums, users can give you a “Rep Rank”. You may have a rank of 10, but if 1 person gives you a 2 for bad checkout, your rank goes down to probably a 7 , depending on how many total ranks you have received. Believe me when I say this: “Word spreads fast!”

Of course, we can’t rule out Ebay, Craigslist, or other classified ads/auction sites. I would first start out on Craigslist and if your product doesn’t get sold, you should move on to Ebay. I say this because Craigslist doesn’t charge a listing fee and buyers are usually more legitimate. (In my humble opinion!)

There are also countless strategies to advertise your products and store. I’ll explain them later, but for now, go ahead and get started building your website and creating some forum memberships. Remember: you can find free webhosts that provide free cPanel hosting. I know this for a fact! x10hosting.com is a good one. Get started!

There are basically two ways you can interpret this question. 1.) “Where will my buyers purchase my products?” and 2.) “Where will I show off my products so everyone can see them?”

The first interpretation is what I’m going to go over in this post. You should almost always sell your products on your own website! Post them their and allow your buyer to check them out using whatever tool you choose to. If you are using affiliate programs it would be much simpler. You’d list a picture and link it to you affiliate URL. However, if you are not an affiliate, you should consider using Zencart (my favorite) for checkout needs.

To go more in depth, I need to tell you actually where to build your site. I think I’ve said this before, but if you are less technical, I would recommend using Iompi to sell your products. Ecrater.com also has a program for those who want to quickly set up a site. Others who would like to build nicer sites with more tools and customization, you should try Zencart for processing and your preferred CMS tool for your homepage. cPanel is definitely a must for any website builder and has auto-installed scripts. There is not much more to tell you and I don’t want to drift off into web design, so I’ll leave it at that!

When I think about marketing, I instantly think of an annoying man trying to sell me something. But online, it’s much different. This type of marketing isn’t face to face. Your buyer has all the time in the world to come back and buy your product. Unlike when you are in the store, the buyer needs to make the decision whether they want to purchase the product or come all the way back to the store again and get it. It’s a whole different game online.

The first step to successful online marketing, whether it is your own product or an affiliate product, is to choose your niche. A niche is the topic, basically. It’s the whole idea of the website. (And by the way, you will need a website. We’ll get into that later!) In order to choose your niche, most people would tell you to think about what you like to do. Or think about what you have done. However, I believe that this approach is silly and quite unsuccessful. In order to have a profitable niche with a product, you need to think of a niche that has not yet been discovered by everyone. For example, this blog is about making money online. There are millions of blogs about making money online. But how many blogs are about a 13 year old girl making thousands of dollars each week? Name one. That’s the point, you can’t.

A strategy that I prefer to use to create a niche is looking at what people like to do. One day I joined myLot. It’s a community of people who get paid to participate in the website discussions. This is a good website to look at because you can see what people like to talk about and what people like to do. Take cheerleading and photography for example. As a teenage girl, I love cheerleading and photography. But when I look at myLot, there are 2 members who enjoy the hobby “cheerleading”. Yet there are 1,744 members who enjoy the hobby “photography”. That’s a huge difference! And if you don’t understand, this means that you’ll have over 1,744 people to market to if you have a photography website. Now this doesn’t mean that you should go start taking photos of your backyard. These people don’t want to buy photos, they want to learn how to take them, edit them, and sell them! Of course, a page where you sell your own photos wouldn’t hurt. Are you seeing what I’m seeing? This is a money making opportunity!

Now it’s your turn. I want you (yes you!) to join myLot and discover your interests. Choose an interest that has at least 1,000 members and read the discussions. This is like auto-generated content. Members will ask questions that they really want answered in depth. Just post a link referencing a post on your blog and just like that I promise you’ll get 10 permanent visitors instantly (if your content is good).

So you know what to sell (or you know how to decide) and all that’s left is to put it into action. Use my tips under the “Preparation” category to prepare your business. Make sure your content is good or else you’ve blown your reputation. Word spreads around the internet fast if people think you’re a scam… but that’s a whole other topic. Good luck finding your niche!

For affiliate programs, you need a few things to your store known to the world wide web. Here’s a simple list to get you started.

1.) The first thing I would recommend is an idea! You should know what type of product you want to sell and/or promote. This is beyond the obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many people will build an entire website full of graphics about golf, when they realize they want to sell t-shirts. It’ll put more work on you later if you don’t make up your mind now. A resource you can use to aid you in this life-changing decision (haha!) is affiliateguide.com. (I don’t like creating links.)

2.) Next, you will need a website to put all of your affiliate items on. This step includes finding a host, domain name, and building the actual site. A lot of people say that you can’t do all of this for free, but believe me, you can! There are many different things you can go with as far as web builders. If you are more advanced, I would recommend a content management system like a Joomla! site and a ZenCart marketplace. For everyone else, I would suggest something like Iompi. You can just post the pictures of the items you’re selling and put a link in the description. It’s as simple as that. Also, if you want to make your site more favorable to the web community, you might want to think about getting a top level domain name. Currently, Register.com is having a promo for small businesses. You can get a free domain for one year. I’m not sure how long this will last, so hurry!

3.) Now you need to create your identity. Some people choose to make up an entirely different person. But I prefer a less dramatic strategy such as just creating an email address made specifically for your affiliate program. If you have a domain name already, you don’t need this. You can just use admin or joe or whatever@yourdomain.com. But if you don’t you should consider using an easy joe@www.com. They don’t get any simpler than that, folks!

4.) Sales! Record your earnings! Never just count on your affiliate program. Keep track of your number of sales and find ways to get more. Submit your site into rotators and use your link as a forum signature. You’ll be amazed when you see how many people click on forum signature

    I received a comment earlier today about upgrading on PTR sites. Rolex-Mails, Capital-Mails, and the other similar ones will lower your payout requirements if you upgrade. To answer the question that was in the comment, I will say, “Yes! Upgrade!”

Now, I don’t mean to be hypocritical, but I have not upgraded on all of the PTR sites that I have joined… yet. It is a good idea to await until your first payout to request an upgrade. However, some of these sites require a $400,000 payout minimum. For those, I would suggest upgrading almost instantly. You will receive the money that you earned in about a day, and the upgrade would have paid for itself already!

So, if you have just joined a PTR site, I recommend upgrading so you can get your payments faster and at a lower minimum.

I have requested a payout from bestflymails.com and I awaiting the actual payment. I really hope I get this money. It was $8,888. I want to approve this site as a trustworthy one, but I must wait until my PayPal account shows me the money!

Lately I have been looking around for more ways to make money. I want to stay away from more PTR sites, as I have signed up for enough of them already. I seem to be interested in affiliate programs, but selling things is not exactly something I like to do. Selling products requires a lot of work and you have to continually find new customers. Consistency is the key.

In my next post, I’ll show you what you need to get your affiliate store up and running. (Oh and by the way, we have about 430 visitors! When it hits 500, a domain will be given away!)

You may not know this, but when I first began this blog, I wanted to show how even a kid could invest. Well instead, I started a blog about making money with no investment. Kind of conflicting, don’t you think?

So, I would like to show you a site where you can practice some investing without having any money. This is so when you do get into real life investing, whether in stocks, real estate, mutual funds, or something else, you’ll have at least some knowledge on you. Urladex.com is an investment simulation that uses websites’ alexa rank instead of stocks. It is easy to keep track of and has all the benefits of real stock trading…

… Except, there’s no real money!

I’m about to move on to my next project, but before I do that, I want to give you a few more updates and tips about my PTR experiences.

As you all know, I recently set my Rolex-Mails goal to $1,000 by the end of this week. So far, I have $545. I can reach this goal quicker if you guys could consider signing up as a referral for me.  =)

Also, I have signed up for over 7 different PTR programs over the last couple days.  I think I’ve said this before, but you might as well sign up for them all if you sign up for one. I think I have benefited from this method.  I have over $300,000 in my user accounts, but this money is not what I call “sure money”. Although it’s not in the pending stage, it is to me. Unless the money is in my possession, it is still pending because I don’t have that money. Understand?  Even though I clearly understand it myself, I’m already shopping for items I want to buy when (if I do) get the money!

For now, I am taking a break from posting about PTR but will regularly post updates so you can evaluate my earnings for yourself. I am not sure what method of making money online I will tackle next. Maybe I’ll look at domaining…

And don’t forget to keep track of the hits score at the bottom of the blog. Once it gets to 500, a domain will be given away. Check the designated post for details.