Infopreneurship: Turning Your Passion Into Web Income
“Infopreneurship” Defined
Someone who sells information is an Informant. Someone who gives information freely and makes money as a result of the dispensation of that information is an infopreneur, short for information entrepreneur.
The informant knows puts a price on the information he is selling and knows beforehand how much he will earn by giving up that information.The infopreneur cries out to all and sundry, “Come one, come all! The information in my website is free! You be the judge of the value of that information!
The internet is the information highway where ‘Content is King.’ Actually, the better way to say it is, UNIQUE or ORIGINAL CONTENT IS KING. Off the web, the rule for sucessful businesses is ‘Location, location, location.’ For the web it’s ‘Information, information, information.’
Let me explain. Off the web, your business can be found if it has a good address, if you locate your store in a high traffic area. On the web, to achieve high traffic, you must rank high in the search engines so you can be found easily by those looking for what you have to sell. There are other ways to achieve high traffic such as newsletters, opt-in lists and other marketing techniques.
Off the web, you sell a product, service through a useful and original concept. On the web, you still sell a product but sometimes the information itself IS the product. This is made possible by the two most popular internet monetization models: Contextual Advertising and Affiliate Marketing. Let us tackle the second one first:
1. Affiliate Sales. This accounts for the biggest chunk of sales on the internet. To earn a commission from the sale of the product, without having to take care of production, inventory, billing and shipping entails a lot of product marketing. And the internet gurus have mastered this trick by advertising heavily, creating mailing lists, multilevel marketing, and best of all, the soft-sell approach, which means writing a review that contains a referral affiliate link within the article so that the reader who is interested in the product may find it convenient that a link to what he is looking for is right there.
2. Contextual Advertising, especially the Pay Per Click Model is the best thing that ever happened for publisher or website owners, and for the advertisers themselves. It is online advertising payment model in which payment is based on qualifying click-throughs. The advertiser pays only when his ad receives a click. The advertisers decide the keywords relevant to their offer that should display their ad and the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click for that keyword. The publishers agree to set aside valuable internet virtual real estate, which really means a space on their web pages to show the ads in. The idea behind this is that the ads are related to the information on the page which assumes that the site visitor is interested in finding more about the topic or in buying a product that is contained in the text or image ad units.
Content Before Design
The web crawlers, robots or spiders that index your web pages cannot read images, just the published word. Thus the most awful looking content-rich site could rank higher than the prettiest flash animation website. And it’s because of this that, when starting a site, you should focus more on your topic, do a lot of pre-design keyword research, find a your niche than on the design of your site. Of course one must still have a visually appealing, easy-to-navigate, content rich site will still do better than that awful looking content-rich site.
Another key to generating more traffic is exerting efforts in getting repeat visitors. Thus the website must be dynamic and constantly updated with fresh information. What site visitors do not realize is that there’s a lot of work behind the scenes as far as optimization, page creation and feature inclusion is concerned. All these are designed to attract both new and repeat visitors.
Monetizing Your Site
So how can you turn your passion into web income? For example, if you like to write about the care of your pet, you can make money by signing up as an affiliate for pet supplies then make a review of the different products available in the market. Or, simply sign up as an Adsense or YPN publisher, optimize your site with the proper, time-tested techniques for integrating the ad units into your pages and you earn every time an ad is clicked. Of course the click rates earn you way less than the referral commissions but no further action is required on the part of the site visitor for you to earn on the clicks.
Another good example would be a travel website. Income can be earned from hotel booking commissions,car rentals, tour services, airline tickets or via clicks on ads to hotels that are magically ported to your site by Google or YPN.
The best websites are owned by those who are passionate about their subject matter. In fact, it could be because of that passion that the website was built in the first place. It is really hard to write about an obscure place in Africa, for example, when one has never visited or lived in that place, or when one does not love the place. Basically, the successful website owner is the one who is deemed the ‘expert’ on that particular subject matter.
Here’s how it works:
YOUR PASSION => WEBSITE => MONETIZED => WEB INCOME
And the difference between ad cents and ad dollars would be the depth of that passion that leads you to develop your website to the best there is in your niche so that it ranks high in the search engines and attracts new and returning visitors.
Conclusion
Actually, one of my websites earns pretty well just from being an information provider about my home town. Skill is required to make sure that there’s more than enough information in your site to keep your site visitors, who can honestly be called your customers, happy — but not too much that it would render the advertisements therein useless.
Thus, know that you do not have to have an actual product to make money one the web. All you need are the proper internet marketing tools that you will apply to the websites that contain your passions.
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