I have been a rock music fan for ages. I remember my pre-teens age and my parents unhappy with my habit to enjoy Iron Maiden, Accept, Judas Priest and other bands’ music to the full capacity of my music stereo system.

No surprise once I have found internet marketing interesting and started my search for a niche one of the first ideas that occurred to my mind was to make a website on rock music. The website is online and slowly grows.

But now I have more experience than a year back when I started this project. I realize that it takes much time and effort, that I am short of some great concept and, most important, it is a low paid niche. I have that feeling for weeks now. Recently there was a sale of an established music website on sitepoint.com. The website with 728,000 unique visitors generates $790.00 in profit per month. It should take a few full and part time employees to run a website of this scale – moderate forum, update miscellaneous website sections, manage adv issues, etc.

Obviously, you need a team of great volunteers who agree to work hard and properly and for free. And I have a feeling that this sort of stats applies to all music websites online. It is fun to run this kind of project, to discuss recent news, read interviews with your favorite bands. It is easy to get traffic, to build ‘sticky’ community members, but it is not good for a commercial project.

Affiliate stores (CD’s, DVD’s, digital music) do not make any considerable amount of money for these websites. Adsense makes pennies. I am still to try Chitika. The only type of adv that is likely to work is CPM (banner impression).

Below are some stats facts about the music website I refer to. Imagine that web traffic for some other sort of niche – 722,000 uniques, 5,616,000 page views…

URL: truepunk.com

Established: 15 Oct 1998

Uniques/Month: 721,776

Page views/month: 5,615,706

Monthly Revenue: 786.18

Statistics and Facts

Message Board Posts

518,930+

Message Board Members

26,515+

Product Reviews

1,282+

News Postings

1,085+

Mailing List Members

5,516+

Band Interviews (Ramones, Misfits, No Doubt, etc.)

150+

Summary: This revelation proves me that niche is of great importance if you are trying to earn your living online.

And this relatively little amount of money ($790.00) for that enormous amount of traffic makes me doubt my own belief that traffic = money. Here we add one more variable: niche (high paying) + traffic = money.

[eminimall]

[tags]niche, search marketing, networking, online communities, forums, traffic, link bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, text-link-ads, links buying, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, duplicate content, links, earn your living online[/tags]

You think you have a brilliant idea for a website, you generate great (from your point of view) content, but despite this you are short of traffic – search engines are slow to pick up your pages and promote them to the top of their indexes, viral marketing is not that powerful as you expected.

You conclude that your website needs promotion, it needs more traffic. You start your research of the most efficient ways to get that extra traffic by using some marketing techniques like this or this. Your appetite grows – you want more and more visitors as you notice that it leads to an online recognition and a bigger amount of earnings. And here comes a manual or a guide on traffic generation (pdf). It comes from a well known person in affiliate marketing – Allan Gardyne, AssociatePrograms website owner.

The manual is free and in fact lists all efficient tactics for getting traffic to your website or blog. 77 tips plus 2 bonuses. Every tip comes with some comments that make it more understandable – when I was looking through the table of content I could not get some points.

Not every tip is universal. Some tips are great for e-commerce type of website, other work for affiliate marketing websites, etc.

Summary: a well written guide is a collection of useful tips for getting more traffic to your website. It is a free edition – so, grab your copy. Print it out (I prefer using FinePrint tool to make it more comfortable for future reference) and explore the tactics you are not familiar with or have not tried so far.

Most tips cover just the top of iceberg. They show you the direction. Your task is to check if it works for you and try to employ its maximum potential.

[tags]traffic tips, search marketing, networking, online communities, forums, traffic, link bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, text-link-ads, links buying, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, duplicate content, links, earn your living online[/tags]

I have my own way of searching for freelance projects online. I would not say that it is an original way or that my search always results in getting new projects, but I hope that you will find some tips to add to your own search techniques.

Imagine that you are a freelance PHP developer. And you need new projects. Here is my program:

1. Search freelance websites. The nice list is available here. Not all freelance websites are equal. Industry leaders: elance, getacoder, guru, freelance work exchange and a few others.

2. Coder’s forums:

- devshed.com
- codingforums.com
- phparch.com
- phpfreaks.com
- daniweb.com
- sitepoint.com

Webmaster forums also work. Check the forum sections: ‘help wanted’ or similar. You can also post your own adv offering your services if they are in line with the forum guidelines.

3. DesignCrowd.com – A nice place to search for freelance projects. The owners scan online resources and re-post the projects doing a great job for you. According to their statement they have about 80 resources on the list.

4. Kebberfegg – a cool tool that does miracles when combined with some news aggregator. You create custom search feeds that scan many online resources for the word combination you need and deliver the results to your PC.

5. CraigsList.org. To make your search of this marketplace for freelance opportunities easier – read this post and apply the tool.

6. ComputerJobs.com – one of the main IT job resources. It is not focused on freelance or telecommuting jobs, nevertheless you will find some job openings as well.

7. Indeed.com/ SimplyHired.com (the latter is reviewed here) – mega job websites that searching job sites, newspapers, associations and company career pages. The best ways to work with this sort of job portals – create custom feeds and add them to your news aggregator.

Summary: You can use the same techniques to search any freelance jobs – for designers, copywriters, search optimizers, data entry, etc. Just make the required modifications according to the nature of projects you need.

Would like to add more techniques or websites to look for a freelance job? You are welcome.

[tags]freelance jobs, how to get a job, telecommuting, networking, online communities, forums, web forums, traffic, link bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, text-link-ads, links buying, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, duplicate content, links, earn your living online[/tags]