Last week I ran into an old friend from college via Facebook. He and I chatted for a while and I found out that he was also involved in internet marketing.

I was intrigued so I asked him how he was doing with it. He said that a few months ago he set up a website selling an ebook and now he’s making close to $3,000/k on autopilot.

Now I’m not going to tell you his niche of course, but it’s a niche that my friend is very familiar with. He created the product and webpage himself.

It’s a rather obscure niche also. My friend is generating traffic via free search engines (mostly Yahoo and MSN). All he did was create videos and posted them on YouTube.

His sales page is not your typical direct response salesletter with bullet points and such. His site does however have a video above the fold which does very well at converting visitors into buyers.

I’m telling you this story because I thought it was interesting how someone turned their hobby into a profitable business without really much thinking about it.

There are probably tons of people out there who create websites just for fun and are making nice sums of money. I think the key factor to their success is that they provide really good content. Everything else works itself out.

You probably have a passion but your passion may not be in a niche where people are buyers. If that’s your case, the best route is to find a hot niche, hire someone who is passionate in that niche to work for you. You pay them to do something that they already enjoy doing.

You can find these passionate people in forums. Did you know there’s a forum for just about everything online? My brother is a member of a fashion forum, a shoe forum, a photography forum and a computer overclocking forum. There’s even a forum for flashlight lovers, lol.

Go find these people in  the forums, strike up conversation with them and then hire them to create content for you.

When it comes to generating a full time income using the internet, you have a multitude of methods. I’m going to give a brief overview of just some of the options that you have.

1.) Promote Products as an Affiliate

This has to be one of the most common ways for people to start their internet marketing career. As an affiliate marketer you don’t need to create your own products or provide customer support.

The downside to this is that you will constantly need to look out for new opportunities to promote as conditions change. The affiliate program may fold over, you may not get paid for whatever reason.

I think the biggest drawback with promoting a product as an affiliate is that you will be building someone else’s business. Now if you were building a list however, then you can leverage that list to launch a competing offer to the affiliate product you’re promoting. If you’re sending traffic to an affiliate offer, then you should be able to gauge the conversion rate of the product. Just create your own product and offer affiliates a higher payout.

2.) Launch Your Very Own Product

Launching your own product requires more work but the efforts are multiplied by a great factor. Now you can set up your own affiliate program and recruit affiliates to generate sales for you. You don’t have to pay them until they make a sale so it’s free advertising.

Many people shy away from creating their own products because they don’t know what product to create or they’re afraid their product will not be good enough for the market.

Here’s an easy little way to generate a product idea.

Create simple little software and sell it for a low price. If it’s your first product then it’s ok to start small. You can leverage on the success of your first product to create bigger and better products.

To get ideas for software programs, just look at software that’s already in the marketplace. You want to look for simple software, not something overly fancy. Go to a software directory such as downloads.com and see which types of software are being downloaded and getting good reviews. That site will give you those stats.

Now go to a freelance programming site such as Rentacoder.com and post a project. Rentacoder and other similar sites work on a reverse bidding process where the lowest bidder may get the project. Be very detailed on your project specifications and make sure to only accept bids from someone with a good feedback.

Once you have the software created, list it on the free software directories found online. Downloads.com is just one of those types of directories.

3.) Build & Flip Websites

A website in the information age is a valuable asset that can be created and then sold to an investor. You don’t need to create flashy 100 page websites. Just create a 10 to 20 page website focused on a specific niche. Make sure that the content is of decent quality.

What you’re going to do is build the website, generate a little traffic and revenue for it and then sell it in a few months. Many baby boomers are looking to supplement their income and work from home. They want to go the easy route and just pick up an already proven and profitable website.

A general rule of thumb is that a website which generates about $5/day in income should be able to fetch you $1,000 when flipped. Here’s what I would do to get a brand new website to that income level.

I’m going to use Adsense as the monetization method simply because Adsense is the easiest monetization method. Just paste some code on your site and you’re ready to go. No need to write good sales copy or reviews.

You’re going to choose a niche in which there are high paying advertisers for Adsense. There are some niches which will pay over a buck per click on Adsense. The way to pick those niches is to target high cost products. Examples are finance niches, and medical niches. Plastic surgery would be something I would try.

Now create a website in that niche, place the Adsense on the site and then promote the site using article marketing. Create 5-10 articles and submit them to Ezinearticles.com, ArticlesBase.com, and personally contact other webmasters to have them syndicate your articles. These articles that you use for syndication should be of higher quality than the articles which you use for your site content because the articles should be good enough for people to distribute.

Make sure that you include Google Analytics code on your site so that you know which keywords are generating the traffic for the site. In a few months time, you will use the traffic stats as proof that the site generates decent traffic. You will be able to sell your site more easily.

4.) Domaining

This term is referred to when someone buys a domain and sells
just the domain to someone else for a profit. There is a group
of people successfully doing this up to today. You would think
that all the good domains have been taken already. That’s just not the case. Every day, domains expire and they’re grabbed up by investors. They use special tools to evaluate the value of a domain before investing.

I’ve dabbled in domaining here and there with a small amount of success. You must remember that the overall profits from selling your portfolio is what should be considered. Let’s say you sell a few domains for a loss. The domains that you sell for a profit should wipe out your losses and generate an overall profit for you.

Those are just some ways that you can make money using the internet. Of course they are not the only ways to generate profits online. Whatever route that you choose, the most important factor is to do a lot of things. Some things will work out and some won’t. The more actions you take, the more likely you will find something that may be a hit and send you on your way to financial freedom.

Feel free to comment and let others know what’s your preferred method of generating income online.

As blogging and in particular blogging for profit becomes ever more popular amongst online entrepreneurs, we’re seeing new tools developed to assist in this process being released, what seems like every week.

In this post I’m going to talk about one such tool, Firepow Blogging Software,because I believe it might just be a cut above the rest in terms of it’s flexibility of use, and overall effectiveness in accomplishing the three primary aims of blogging - creating a blog, managing it or maintaining it, and getting traffic to it.

It was hard to know where to start with this post because there are so many individual features of this software that could be mentioned.

To give you a brief overview of how it works…

Firepow is based on the Wordpres platform, and allows a user to install a fully customized and functioning wordpress blog with a few clicks of the mouse.

If you’ve used Wordpress before, you’ll know that one of the best things about it is it’s ability to be enhanced by third party plugins. You’ll also know that it’s not hard to get LOST in all the plugins and potential feature additions that CAN be made.

The first thing great about Firepow from my point of view is that they have done the plugin work for you. The best 50 or so plugins from around the web have been programmed into the software so as to be automatically installed when your blog is.

That’s a good feature, but it’s even better when you consider that while these plugins normally require manual fiddling to get installed, tweaks made to your theme CSS code and more - the software actually does that part for you too - so you click the button, and you have the function of that plugin added - VERY time saving!

The “Create” part of the process is also helped by the ability to create your own custom wordpress theme completely from scratch, with more functionality than we’ve seen from free theme generators EVER before - not to mention the ability to create your own categories from scratch, automatically create the perfect permalink
structure for SEO, and more.

Before even getting into the Wordpress panel of the site Firepow creates you’ve also got a site management tab where all your blogs can be managed from one place, an SEO tracking tool to monitor the search rankings of all your sites, and a task manager
that tells you what needs to be done to maintain your blog/s and when.

I dare say though that the best things happen once you’re actually IN the blog.

Here you have crazy abilities to make your post content better, easily being able to add relevant images, videos, or trackbacks (automatically building backlinks to your site) to your posts… and even that’s leaving alot out.

OR the crazy abilities to monitor your blogs success, like being able to split test the results of different posts, monitor your traffic through in depth reporting (utilizing Google analytics), monitoring your search spider activity, the popularity of your posts, the terms people are searching on your site, and more still.

I feel like I’m getting too salesy in this post to you but I can assure even with everything you’ve read here, I haven’t even really touched the surface of what’s going on inside this thing called Firepow - heck we didn’t even get to the promotional tools.

The best thing I can probably do is tell you go to look at the darn thing yourself:

http://www.garyhuynh.com/likes/firepow

Oh and I could also tell you that if your into blogging and you don’t, you’ll probably regret it big time.

I hope you’ve found the information here valuable, and don’t hesitate to leave your comments on Firepow here to share with others.