Everyone knows the Internet is a goldmine. Knowing how to fully take advantage of that goldmine is a different story. Where to even start? It is important to keep an open but cautious mind when learning ways to increase your earnings off the Internet, as there so many opportunities out there, and it can seem hard to narrow them down. This article seeks to highlight some of the best money-making methods online:

1. Be an affiliate marketer.

As an affiliate marketer, your job is to promote products or services for others. This can be done through a variety of means--be it email campaigns, website advertising, or social media promotion. Affiliate marketing remains one of the most consistent ways to make serious money online, and requires less work than starting your own business.

For more on Affiliate Marketing, see our article “Affiliate Marketing: The Basics (Plus 2 Steps to Get Started!).”

2. Turn traffic into money through advertisements.

There are quite a few ways you can monetize your website traffic, including

Google AdSense, which remains the most popular go-to method for digital advertisers and people willing to sell website space for extra revenue. You can be making money whenever someone clicks on the ad. Additionally, useful analytical features of the program automatically discern what types of ads would be most successful on your website. One should keep in mind, however, that the revenue generated from these ads won’t be that big if your website has low visitation. That’s why it is so important to promote traffic!

Traditional banner advertising (TBA) is another advertising method that will monetize your website’s traffic. With TBA, you will most likely be working directly with advertising clients instead of going through third-parties like Google AdSense. Search the following forms of TBA on the Internet to find advertisers that would pay for ad room on your website:

• Cost per click (CPC): You get paid a little every time the ad is clicked. When using this method, you must keep track of how many website visitors click an ad. This can be done using statistics-tracking software like Google Analytics. Report the number of clicks to your advertising client and they pay you at the established rate. Or, as is true with affiliate products, the link imbedded in the ad may be specialized for you so that the click or sale can be traced back to you. You may be able to choose how much to charge, or they may choose for you, but either way, the price should be relatively low, as clicks do not guarantee a sale or more business for that person. If the person provides you with the ad to use (which is most often the case), make sure it’s appealing and fits in well with your website.

• Cost per 1,000 pageviews (CPM): This method is nice because the quality of the ad or what is being advertised (and the likelihood that the ad is clicked on) is not as important--you are paid every time the ad is viewed 1,000 times. The advertiser will probably decide to pay a rate of approximately $3-$10 in advance so you’ll showcase the ad up to 1,000 views, and then the process will repeat. This is a general contract--some advisters may choose to require more or less views. Advertisers will likely be more willing to pay more to advertise on more successful, traffic-driven websites.

• Pay per lead (PPL): Often associated with pay per call (PPC) advertising, these methods include using ads that encourage visitors to take action with the client. The visitors see the ad and call, or email, or otherwise contact, the client. There is more than one way to employ pay per lead advertising (as is true with most advertising methods), like working the number into a blog article. Pay per call advertising is often arranged by third-party companies, like InterGMedia. Check them out and see what products you could be promoting.

• Call per action (CPA): Common in affiliate marketing, this method means the advertiser only has to pay when an actual sale is made through their advertisement. You will be paid a commission of the sale, which can be quite substantial, depending on the commission percentage and the price of the product or service. Call per action advertising may seem harder to pull off successfully, but it should be noted it is the method with the greatest potential for obtaining high amounts of revenue. Likewise, you have a greater incentive to make the ad successful.

3. Market and sell your own products or services.

Having your own unique product or service is probably the best way to make money online, but not necessarily the easiest. The work goes beyond the digital realm and requires some creativity, aptitude, and long-term commitment. You must also consider manufacturing and shipping costs, if the product is physical. Your product or service doesn’t have to blow the world away--it can be somewhat basic, if you desire--but there has to be a recognizable need for your product or service, be desirable enough so that it won’t be a tough sell, and have a profitable production margin. Your are responsible for the success of your business, so the more work you put into it and the more you learn, the better you do.

Some general tips and guidelines for selling and promoting your own product or service:

• Information products like ebooks are inexpensive and relatively easy to produce and deliver. You could probably sell actual books for more money and become more popular and potentially profitable by self-publishing, but e-books are less expensive to produce, don’t have to be shipped or bought at a physical location, and you won’t have any unsold physical copies burning a hole in your pocket.

• If you prefer to write less, audio in its many forms is always popular. If you know a foreign language, you could easily create some language-learning content and sell it on disc or, more simply, require payment for online access. Or if you enjoy reading, you could record and sell non-copyrighted audio books. You could also make your own music or start a podcast that could get  sponsored.

• Use video to demonstrate and promote your product or service. You might consider creating original content for sale or starting a video blog that could earn money from advertisements.

• For everything you produce, create an entire product line by converting the product, into other formats. For example, if you wrote an ebook, you could convert and expand the information and niche using video, email campaigns, or an entire website.

A good business model and a good marketing plan go hand in hand. They compliment each other like peanut butter and jelly--they may be fine on their own, but they taste much better together. Well-developed social media marketing in particular is a staple of modern business success. Whether you are new or seasoned in the marketing game, remembering the following marketing rules will allow you to reach your company’s goals successfully:

1. Not even the best marketing can improve a bad product or service.

Although experts have confirmed the fact that successful marketing ultimately contributes the largest amount of success to a business, it is common sense that people won’t want your business if it isn’t quality. Apple Inc. has arguably the most elegant marketing campaign of most businesses, but one can see how the effect of their marketing strategy would lose its touch if they technology wasn’t genuinely good.

Drawing people to your business is only the first step--drawing them back is the second and equally important step, and it all depends on their experience. Keep in mind that word-of-mouth remains one the biggest factors in a business’s success. Also keep in mind that higher quality products/services provide the freedom to increase prices, and depending on the success of your marketing campaign, substantially more profits.

2. People can sense authenticity and respond positively to it.

Any company people can trust is going to fare far better than a company they feel like they can’t. Even companies that offer better prices will probably do worse than competitors who appear more authentic and therefore more trustworthy. Honesty is a huge component of trustworthiness. If the consumers smell a fish in the water, it is time to re-evaluate.

Marketing is an opportunity to let your company’s voice be heard, and that voice should be real. This may be easier for small businesses, as they tend to come across as more caring, but one must remember large corporations have hearts as well. After all, they too started off as small businesses, and companies have roots. Business size does not have to be an indicator of ethics. Regardless, emphasizing the fact that your business is run by real people who are in it for more than the money will always attract more people to your cause.

3. Keep open ears--remember to listen and respond to consumers.

Have you ever been to a store where the employees treated you dismissively, or struggled to communicate with salty customer service reps? Odds are you did your business elsewhere from then on. As a customer (or client), there is nothing worse than feeling unimportant and unvalued. The saying “the customer is always right” has a definite amount of truth behind it. Whether or not the customer is a quote-on-quote “ideal” customer is not necessarily relevant--every last customer is of value to your business. You may consider employing marketing strategies that seek to respond to common customer concerns and re-establish any lost faith. For example, if consumers are concerned about the potential dangers of your product, post something or create an ad that clarifies it is safe or emphasizes the importance of safe use.

Additionally, anticipating what the customer might want or like ahead of time and giving it to them is a win-win solution. Ask yourself what your consumers would be pleased by--a new innovative product, perhaps, or even something as simple as having direct communication with the communication. The communication can be quite light-hearted. Have some fun with it! Make people know that you care about them and want to develop positive relations.

4. Look beyond the data.

If your company is trying to target a certain audience, and all your social media posts and ads clearly reflect this incentive, it is going to come across as selective. Nobody likes reading droll posts that only someone in the industry would understand, or sitting through a commercial that has nothing to do with them. Although they can’t technically be described as marketing, those annoying commercial run by lawyers targeting the few amount of people who might be able to take part in a class-action lawsuit are a perfect example of exactly what not to do when marketing; indeed, if you could list everything wrong with those commercials (such as impersonality and boringness) and create something that was the complete opposite, you would be well on the road to success.

Companies that appear to only care about drawing in certain people--regardless or not of whether they actually do--are not favorable. Even if your company is selling cat food, you should try to find a way to make the marketing accessible and open to dog owners, should they choose to get a cat. Appealing to everyone may be impossible but something as simple as throwing in the line “for pet lovers everywhere” could make all the difference. Otherwise, they have no reason to pay attention and will forget about you completely, when instead they may recall you later on and bring in business. As the experts teach, just one really effective ad can stay in someone’s subconscious and bubble up again when the time comes.

5. Make media content widely accessible.

This is a fairly simple concept but quite possibly the most crucial of all. When people have a need that your company can fulfill, it should be easy for them to find you. This means having a prevalent website that is connected to a variety of social media accounts, which are likewise all linked together. By strengthening the connections between different platforms--whether it be Facebook, Google, Youtube, email, television, etc.--you increase brand-name recognition, and therefore, success.