Well, it has been awhile since I’ve posted anything so it’s time for an update! Today, for a change, I am NOT going to talk about Inbox Dollars as a great way to make money online… I imagine some of you won’t really feel too bad about that!

Instead I want to share a story will y’all about percieved value as it relates to marketing. I like most people have to go to a barber shop (or salon, as I guess they are called these days…) for my haircuts. Lately, and for reasons I can’t understand, I have been having problems with dandruff. It is especially noticeable when you’re stuck in the chair with a black cape on and the barber (stylist) is cutting away and it looks like the season’s first snowfall.

So I get thinking- hey, here I am with a hair expert… maybe I should see what they would recommend for a dandruff shampoo! And of couse, they have something! For only $12.95 for a 3 ounce bottle of extra special, salon-certified special secret recipie dandruff shampoo they can solve my problem!

Now, what does barber shops and dandruff shampoo have to do with internet marketing and ways to make money online? Simple- percieved value! Sure, I could go to the megamart and get a half-gallon of generic Head and Shoulders for the price of a cup of coffee- but because I am at the barber shop (salon) and they are “experts”, theirs must be better! Is it? We’ll see, I haven’t started using it yet (and I doubt you really care all that much about my hair anyway).

But the “make money online” lesson here is simple- as a customer with a problem, I went to the expert for a solution and got it! The percieved value here is that because I got my dandruff shampoo from an expert in hair-care it MUST be better than Head and Shoulders and the WalMart-knockoffs. To sell, you must be able to provide these simple things for your customer- a perceived value that your product is better, which is made credible by your position (perceived or otherwise) as an expert.

Rocket science? Not really, but it is a key concept in the battle to make money online. Perfect it and you will be well on your way! Because whether you are selling information, web hosting or dandruff shampoo the basics of sales and marketing (either internet marketing or brick-n-mortar retail) are the same!

Well look at this, two posts in one week! I was serious when I said I’d be re-committing myself to my duties here at homebasedhowto, getting this site up to the standards I had set out when I started. Plus as we all know (or maybe some of you don’t but will be learning), fresh content is the king when it comes to getting those all-important google rankings. Anybody can put up a cheesy sales page, cram it full of affiliate links, run an adwords campaign and hope they get enough sales to overcome the expense of buying all the clicks. I know this, because I’ve tried it! AdWords can break the bank relatively quickly, if you don’t know what you are doing. And believe me, I don’t claim to know what I am doing! I did run a campaign awhile back that was profitable, but only marginally so. It would have taken 10-15 more campaigns doing the same thing to generate enough sales (after buying the traffic) to be an income worthy of doing anything with. You can very quickly have high-priced clicks going to a page that for whatever reason, doesn’t generate sales and you will be upside-down in no time. There are people that have built entire home-based operations around this, and have been very successful. But they are targeting specific niches, maybe even sub-niches, where clicks can be bought cheap and you have very targeted buyers in mind. One last point I’d like to make about AdWords is that for the most part, people who click the ad are at least somewhat motivated to buy whatever it is they’re looking for- so if your landing page is good enough you should be able to convert reasonable well. More on this stuff later.

I prefer to go after the “natural” rankings, the ones that show up on the main part of the Google results. And believe me, those can be tough to come by- depending on what your niche is. Something broad, like “home based business” is an extremely competitive niche and by itself almost too broad. But getting this site to that coveted “First Page of Google” status is my goal, and I am going to do it! There is a certain segment of search-engine users who don’t pay any attention to the “sponsored results” (those are the AdWords listings), but again this will be very niche-specific. They will definitely be a tougher sell, but if your product is worth it they will be loyal customers and unlikely to cause you headaches down the road. Depending on the niche, the highly coveted #1 on Google can be relatively simple- I have several sites (outside the scope of this discussion, suffice it to say that they exist) where I am consistently #1 and always on the first page. But these sites don’t generate a great deal of revenue, simply because they are related to an obscure niche that doesn’t get searched for. My point is this- it is possible to get to that first spot, now what do you do when you get there???

As Ron White says in his famous bit about getting kicked out of a bar in New York City, “I told you that story so I could tell you this story…”. And here’s the story- a great way to monetize traffic you are able to get to a site where the traffic doesn’t cost you anything (natural #1 Google listing), vs. buying clicks through AdWords, is with Google’s AdSense program. The concept of monetizing traffic, if that term is new to you, is to simply get paid when a visitor leaves your site. It could be through a product sale at a linked sales page, a sign-up as an affiliate to a program you promote, or through AdSense. If you’re not familiar with it, take a look to the right and you’ll see AdSense there, in the box that says “Ads by Google”. Basically, those are people who bid on clicks and when the ad is clicked, they are charged. Since, by virtue of being the site owner, I am the one supplying the click, I get a commission for each click. Now it’s against the TOS of AdSense for me to ask you to click, so that is definitely NOT what I am doing, I am merely giving you a brief overview of the concept, in case it’s new to you. By the way, Yahoo and MSN also have their own “versions” of AdSense, but they are not
nearly as popular as Google’s, I imagine simply because Google is the #1 search engine and as such generates higher prices for the clicks, part of which is passed on to site owners who incorporate Adsense.

Is AdSense going to make you millions and fund an early retirement? Possibly, but unlikely. The way I see it, you need to give visitors to your sites two choices when they leave- either click the “X” and close out the window, or click a link that will somehow generate revenue- and AdSense is a great option for that!