Make Money Online as a Marketing Expert

Make money online as an SEO consultant

Search engine optimization is not rocket science, but it often seems that way for anyone who hasn't taken a little time to learn about it. This means it's easy to become an expert and help others.

I suggest following Google's procedure for getting certified as an "Adwords Qualified Individual" and/or take ExpertRating.com's Internet Marketing or SEO course. With that, you'll pretty much have what it takes to start marketing yourself as an "SEO consultant".

Put together a good-looking website, add those easy-to-obtain seals/certifications, and you're ready to make money online by offering your services to local businesses. Your basic service might involve reviewing client websites and making professional recommendations for improving natural search ranking. You can also offer enhanced service and charge additional fees for actually assisting with those changes, or managing PPC campaigns.

Create SEO'd minisites for small businesses

Most small businesses already have websites, but whether they're getting traffic is a different story. Helping them get traffic is an excellent way to make money online. Rather than offering to design/redesign websites from scratch (unless that's what they prefer), I suggest offering to create alternate "search engine optimized" minisites for businesses purely for search engine marketing purposes.

Keys to success may include:

• Creating some search engine friendly templates for fast deployment.
• Selecting a keyword-studded domain or subdomain for your clients.
• Rewording text from their site so it appears unique to search engine crawlers.
• Optimizing the text, titles, filenames, and so on for search engines.
• Helping clients to build inbound links.

Obviously, you should start by enhancing your knowledge of SEO and gaining some basic web design skills.

Be a professional link builder/broker

It's well known that inbound links are a crucial element of search engine optimization. However, manually building them is an extremely time consuming process. To make money online as a professional link builder, you can:

1. Give clients suggestions for increasing the usefulness of their website in a way that will encourage natural linking.
2. Charge per link for adding a client's URL to relevant forums, free directories, related blogs, and social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, etc.
3. Charge by the hour + expenses for negotiating inbound link purchases from high quality (relevant and high traffic) websites.

For #3, you'll find that many webmasters prefer to buy one-way links rather trade them (two-way links are considered rather weak for SEO).

The major problem I see with existing text-link programs is that publishers (website owners that accept payment for placing links on their page) often group several links together in a clump. This is obviously going to look suspicious to intelligent search engines like Google. To differentiate yourself, you might offer links on a designated section of a page, or within contextually relevant text.

When starting out, you obviously won't have many publisher relationships established. So whenever you receive an inquiry from a prospective client, 1) contact potential publishers for pricing, 2) get each site's Alexa.com rating, and then 3) put together a bid/estimate for your client. There's obviously a bit more to it, but this general type of service can be very attractive to today's webmasters. The tedious, time-consuming, detail oriented nature of link building means that opportunities should continue to grow for the foreseeable future.

Make money online as a social network developer

The value of social network marketing for many companies (large and small) is blatantly obvious. And they're aware of it -- we hear about social media trends in the news almost every day.

However, many businesses hesitate or fail to take advantage of the opportunities because 1) they don't understand how social media marketing works, and/or 2) they don't have the time to participate in a manner that social media requires.

And that's where you come in. As a social network developer, you can assist companies with some or all of the process:

1. Determine which networks they should participate in (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc)
2. Setup their account on each network, and design their web presence there.
3. Participate, interact, build relationships, relay content, respond to messages, and provide general account maintenance. *Since you will be representing your client in the networks, it will be important to work closely with them and get their input frequently.
4. Keep track of traffic statistics for reporting to your client.

Obviously, before approaching potential clients, you should know all the ins and outs of operating on social networks. Start with a Google search for "social media marketing".