There are tons of internet money making opportunities out there, and the list grows daily. You have affiliate programs, multi-level marketing programs, investment programs, pay for offers programs, etc. The list goes on. Some of them offer the promise of a quick fortune; some of them offer sustained income. The technique that I most often recommend is niche marketing.

Niche marketing is a very simple concept: you find a niche, develop a website around that niche, get people to visit your niche site, and find a way to collect money from those people. Seems pretty simple, but with many seemingly simple concepts, there are things that work and things that don’t. One niche marketing technique that does work is called “article marketing”.

Article marketing is the practice of writing articles and using those articles to drive traffic to your niche sites. That traffic is then converted to income by means of direct sales, affiliate sales, or advertising revenues. I personally use a combination of affiliate sales and ad revenues. These concepts can be a little tough to grasp for a new niche marketer, but I’ll post some resources at the end of the article that can help you. Here’s how it works (in a nutshell).

• Find a Niche – Finding a niche can be difficult for a beginner. I recommend starting with something that interests you and researching the marketability of that niche. A good tool is the Google Adwords tool. You can use that tool to gauge how many people search for keywords related to that niche. They can also give you an idea of how much money people pay to advertise those keywords.

• Get Your Keywords – Decide on a main keyword related to your niche, as well as some secondary keywords.

• Start a Blog – Start a blog around your niche and write articles that target your keywords. Post these articles to your blog.

• Get Traffic to Your Blog – This can be the hard part. You will want to find ways to get other sites to link to your blog. The two easiest ways to do that are by submitting articles to article directories and asking other blogs for link trades.

• Set Up Adsense – Adsense is free. You set up an account with Google. You agree to post their ads on your site, and they agree to pay you when people click on those adds.

• Set Up Affiliate Accounts – Another great way to earn income from your niche site is to set up affiliate accounts with vendors that offer products that relate to your niche. People go to your site, looking for information about your niche, they see an affiliate ad for a product that they are looking for, they buy that product, and you get a commission.

The great part about this type of niche marketing is that they are inexpensive to get going, easy to maintain, and offer long lasting, residual income. The money doesn’t start flowing in from the first day, and it takes some work to get started, but that is true with any business. If you do it right, you will get back what you put in.

To help save you a lot of time and frustration, I have listed the resources that I use to do my niche marketing. Using these tools will be a huge help to you in ensuring your success:

Sign up as an Amazon Affiliate – Amazon.com has a great affiliate program that will allow you to advertise their products to your visitors.

Go to the Keyword Academy – The keyword academy will walk you through the entire process of keyword research, starting your blog, monetizing it, etc. The info is extensive and easy to follow. They do charge a small monthly fee for their service, but it is worth every penny.

Be a Keyword Academy Affiliate – Webmasters Earn Money Here!

Check out Unique Article Wizard – They will help you to get unique versions of your articles out to hundreds of article sites. I could not imagine doing article marketing without this service.

www.GoDaddy.com – Domain names and hosting. Very inexpensive and great customer support.

Need some quick cash? Try Project Payday.

When writing your articles, it is best to make use of your targeted keywords. Try to include your niche topic keywords in the title and throughout your article so you will be easily found for those particular keywords.  Long tail keywords are more likely to be found than shorter keywords. For example you are not going to be found using the term ‘loans’ because it is a very competitive keyword and there are likely to be thousands of higher ranking articles and sites for that keyword. However the more specific you can be the more likely you are to be found. Using ‘self employed unsecured personal loan’ is far more specific and more likely to be found than just using the term ‘loan’.

Once you have written an article on your chosen niche topic you can submit it to various articles sites such as ezinearticles.com , goarticles.com or usfreeads.com. These sites allow you to place your articles with them together with a link to your site or blog.  They are then picked up by the search engines and drive traffic to your website, blog or hub.

The more links you can generate to your site, the further up the Google rankings your site will appear since Google likes incoming links and uses this as a marker to establish how good your site may be. It is better to have several links from various sites than to have links from only one source however.

The other thing Google likes when trying to bring your blog higher in the search engine list is regularly updated content. Keeping a site updated with new articles and blogs is another good way to establish yourself on the internet.

You can use social networking sites to drive traffic to your site, however, targeted traffic from Google is much much better. The reason is that visitors coming from your article writing are interested in your subject area and are much more likely to either buy an affiliate product or click on one of your adverts. Traffic generated from social networking sites tends to be more general traffic will less or no interest in your subject. They are far less likely to want to click on a related topic advert or buy a related product.

You don’t have to spend a lot of money, but you will have to spend a great deal of time writing up and submitting your articles to the multitude of accessible article directories and e-zine lists. A good piece of this burden can be relieved if you use an article marketing submission tool, which can be had, gratis or for a fee, from online sources.

Write an article with a high degree of quality in mind, and use all the knowledge you have accumulated about search engine optimization strategies to come up with a set of keywords that will effectively represent your particular bailiwick — and don’t forget that you want your article to be viewed as a rich resource for other authors. Once you have the article edited to your satisfaction, then insert the text into your article marketing tool, and launch it away

The Problem: When you send the same exact content to every article directory, you are promulgating hundreds, perhaps thousands of duplicate documents. Which is fine, until the major search engines process through them and begin to generate back links. They are engineered to detect duplications and to not create links beyond the first occurance of a particular packet of text. So you will likely end up with just one back link for your article and very frustrated.

Is there a solution for this? Yes, although it may not be the most attractive of solutions. Keep up the submissions but submit only one time for each unique article you write. This eliminates the duplication, and assures that you will get your back link for the article. It will take a long time, but eventually, if you submit at least one unique article per week, you will end up with a ton of back links to your website.

Now the enthusiasm kicks in! You can hardly wait to sit down to the computer keyboard and develop those articles that are going to bring the paying customers through your online site. Well, we hate to dampen your enthusiasm, but don’t expect to see that increase of traffic immediately or very soon. Perhaps you are not new to this approach, and in fact have had some great success with it in the past. But then the traffic levelled off, and then began to recede. The playing rules of Internet usage are in constant flux, so don’t be too surprised if something that worked a couple of years ago, doesn’t work today. And that most certainly includes such things as traffic-attraction schemes.

Bring in more traffic than you have ever seen with article submission. Use our world class tool to blast your article all over the internet.