The only two things you need to do to make money online are:

• Find/create an offer that sells
• Get traffic to that offer

Simple right? Well not really. Finding an offer than sells can be difficult for most of us. The fatal mistake that we make is not doing enough keyword research to find what people are searching for and buying. Luckily this can be done fairly easily online these days. But most of us give up too early. We try one to sell one product for while, when that doesn’t work we try another, never giving anything a chance to work.

Before you create your own product in a niche, or if you’re having trouble getting sales, why not try to sell someone else’s product first? This will prove whether there is a market in that niche (people are buying) and will also test your selling skills. If you’ve determined that people are spending money in your market (from amazon best/hot sellers, high ranking affiliate products, lots of Google ads in search results, etc) than most like you need to work on your pre-selling skills (teaching people about the niche and relevant products) and getting website traffic.

If you’re creating your own membership site, and you’ve seen that other similar sites exist in that market, then my advice is to get something up quickly and test it to see if you can get sales. Probably the most important skill you can develop is speed of implementation. If you’re trying to sell other people’s membership site or any other products then you can see if there are ads in that niche market showing up consistently each month in Google’s search results.

Some people recommend sending quick traffic to an affiliate product using Google adwords to see what sells. That can be quite costly as you try different products and keyword phrases are getting more expensive. Not only that, the same experts often say that only certain keywords will work for certain offers so you also need to test different keywords. A cheaper approach is to pick a product that has been shown to sell and set up a variety of pages to test the commercial viability of the product.

Getting free traffic is getting harder and harder as new websites are being added every minute and free seo software tools are being created that give certain people the leg up on the competition. Some great ways to get traffic are:

• set up a blog – hands down the best way to get started. I use Wordpress which is free – install some free search engine optimization (SEO) software as a wordpress plugin to help you get traffic.
• create videos either with your web cam, camcorder or using something like Camtasia for recording your desktop.
• use tags in your blog posts that contain the keywords for your niche
• create articles on EzineArticles.com that point to your money page
• create blogs/pages on Squidoo.com, Wordpress.com and Hubpages.com that point to your money page

At the end of the day, you need to keep trying and testing different offers until you find the winners. Then do more to get traffic to those offers. Nothing beats real data to determine what you should do (or not do) next.

There are lots of strategies on using membership sites (can be added to product sales for example), but I wanted to point that if you are just selling memberships you are missing out on potential sales. Here’s why I say this (using real experiences). I try to base my opinions on reality and actual test results as much as possible.

Recently I was working on selling a guitar lesson on using diminished scales for a local jazz guitar teacher. I wanted to try out Extreme Member’s product sales feature (which uses a membership to sell products – not ideal in my opinion). So I created a new membership for this product and the related pages (thank you page, product page, etc). As you create these pages they can show up in the sidebar under the Pages widget. During this process someone who was a already member of my guitar coaching program purchased the diminished scale lesson! They had a problem since it wasn’t fully integrated, but that made me realize that these customers will buy other things as well. Very interesting!

I also got an email from someone who recently canceled their subscription, saying they didn’t have enough time to practice guitar and didn’t want to pay monthly. So you need to offer your membership content as downloadable products for those who don’t want to join. It’s about offering a variety of options for your content. The great thing about these two points is that I received real feedback from taking real action. Now I just need time to get it all done!

A great way to get more sales is to ‘provide teaser content’. This is a snippet of content from your members-only area that is publicly visible. Then when people read that content they hopefully are interested enough to sign up to get the rest of the content.

Here’s an example of using teaser content to encourage sign ups. This can often be done using membership software such as Extreme Member.