There are several ways to make money online, I have tried and tested different online business models, some were successfully, some were not, but its down to what you feel comfortable with doing. I have shared methods that have worked for me. Hopefully this article will help you decide which method is best for you.

1/ Offer Or Sell A Service

The best and the least expensive way to make money online is to provide a service to other people, whether you are a dog groomer, programmer, seo expert everyone needs something done for them, you can do this by advertising your services offline through friends and family, make sure you set up your own blog or site advertising your services and promote your brand online using social media.

2/ Create And Sell Your Own Products

You would need a bit of capital if you are going to create your own products, unless you have graphic design and programming skills, you would need to outsource the work if you want quality and professional looking products. You can create ebooks, training materials, webinars, software and much more. Read my free product creation report for more details – Download Free Report

3/ Set Up Your Own Retail Store

I have sold products via Ebay its a great way to make extra income, but depending on what product you are selling, Ebay can be very saturated and you would need to stand out from the crowd, the alternative to this is to have your own retail store. I use and recommend Niche Blueprint 2.0, its a step by step training course that teaches you how to market and set up your own online retail store quite easily.

4/ Set Up Your Own Social Networking site

Creating your own social networking sites is not difficult at all, there are free scripts and paid scripts you can used to create a social networking sites you could use scripts like Ning, Kickapps, phpfox and many others. If you need to make changes to a script just hire a programmer from many of the freelancers websites such as Get A Coder.

Other Ways To Make Money Online
Here are some other ways to make money online – click here

Before you start creating your online business, make sure you do your market research first check out pervious Posts: Find Product Ideas , How To Choose The Right Niche (part 1)

In the pervious posts I talk about how to find a niche and how to preform indepth keyword market analysis. Check out pervious Posts: How To Choose The Right Niche (part 1) ,  How To Choose The Right Niche (Part 2)

Get to know your competitors better, Who are your competitors? What are customer needs and preferences are you competing to meet? all this shapes your business decisions. Competitor analysis identifies the strengths and weaknesses of competing products or services. Find out exactly where your competitors traffic is coming from. Find out exactly which keywords are sending them the most traffic.

Here are some tools that is great for competitive analysis.

KeywordSpy

KeywordSpy – SEO & PPC Keyword Research software tool, that unveil your competitors most profitable Ad copies and keywords.

Quantcast

Quantcast.com -presents the demographics of web sites as well as the estimated monthly unique visitors, similar sites and the profile of a typical visitor of the site. Unfortunately, the results are sometimes unusable, because there are simply too many sites quantcast doesn’t know yet.

Compete

Compete.com – provides information for every site on the internet including site traffic history, competitive analytics, visitors, keywords that are driving traffic and more.

Google Adplanner

Google Adplanner – Free research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. Provides statistical profile of visitors to any website.

I hope you have found this post useful, let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.

In the last post I talked about how to pick a product / niche idea and keyword research. Now you can take the keyword research to the next level and do a indepth keyword market analysis which will give us the evolution of interest over time and keywords that our competitiors are using.

SEO For FireFox

SEO For FireFox – Once you have install the plugin, their are lots of features you have access to:

A couple keyword research tools are located just below the search box including:

* Google Insights – compare search volume patterns across specific regions,
categories, time frames and properties.

* Google Trends – shows historical search volume trends.

* Google Sktool – The average amount of traffic the keyword matches each month
on Google.com

* SEO Book Keyword Research Tool – cross references many popular keyword research tools.

* Google Traffic Estimator – shows top bid estimates and click volume estimates
associated with Google Awords.

* Google Keyword Sandbox – Google’s keyword research tool.

In addition to pulling in this valuable marketing data this tool links to the resources where the data was pulled from, so it makes it easy for you to verify the data and further analyze it by citing the source. You can click on any of the data points to dig deeper.

Other SEO Tools for serious market research :
15 Useful SEO Tools

The first thing you need is to have a product or niche ideas, the best place to get ideas is yourself, what are you interested in and what knowledge or skills do you have, read this article “How to find product / niche ideas”

Once you have some ideas, you want to look deeper to make sure there is a good market for them before you even think about creating a product or service.

The best resources I use to ascertain if their is a market for my idea, are places that tell you what people are searching for.

1/ Google Search based tool

Google Search based tool – Enter your niche or product idea in the word or phrase box, or select a niche from the categories on the left handside.

From the keyword ideas list copy a keyword or keywords that you want to analyse more.

2/ Google Adwords Keywords Tool

Go into Google Adwords Keywords Tool and paste the keyword or keywords into the box.

Try and look for keywords that have around 2 – 3  words in them. With between 2000 – 5000 or more per monthly searches using exact match phrases.

3/ Google

Next I like to see what sort of competition there is for those keywords. Just look at page 1 of Google. You really are only competing against the first 10 websites. Type your search term (without quotes) into Google search engine. If the top ten positions have a page rank of three or less, then your niche will have a good chance of ranking in the top ten of Google. Use SEO for Firefox plugin, to check the page ranks..

More Niche market resources to try:
More Niche Resources
10 hot Niche Market Research Sites

Part 2 is going to talk about indepth keyword research….

Running and building your own online business can be very rewarding, but at times it can also be extremely challenging. Luckily, there is a lot of advice and lots of great resources to help you make your business dream come true. Here is a list of the best resources that I use most of the time to help build my online business.

These resources will help you learn how to start your business from scratch, help you find great ideas and help you stay motivated and make your business successful.

Entrepreneurs Journey

Entrepreneurs Journey – is a blog (weblog) website aimed at those interested in Internet business and Blogging. Entrepreneurs Journey provides useful content and interviews from entrepreneurs from around the world.

The Warrior Forum

Warrior Forum – Is the best place to learn about internet marketing, ebook selling and home based business.

Entrepreneur.com

Entrepreneur.com – Great content on how to start an online business, also a great place to network with entrepreneurs just like you.

Think Big Magazine

Think Big Magazine – is a free online business magazine which shares stories that inspire and motivate people.

Meet Up

Meet Up – This is a great place to meet like minded entrepreneurs and business owners, which can help form mastermind groups, plan meetings and form offline clubs in local communities around the world.

Mixergy

Mixergy – Mixergy is where the ambitious learn from a mix of experienced mentors. Mixergy holds events were business people take some time out of their schedules to help teach others what they learned from their own experiences.

startups – uk based

startups – Startups.co.uk is the number one leading source of information for UK entrepreneurs. Whether you are a budding entrepreneur ready to start a business for the first time or you are an established entrepreneur looking to do it a second time, Startups.co.uk have all the news and information you need to get your small business starting on the right foot.

Other links to resources

Top Social Networks for entrepreneurs: visit website

101 Useful Resources for Online Entrepreneurs: visit website

10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs: visit website

I hope you have found this post useful, let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.