A lot of people have approached me about making it big on the internet. They’ve heard of the Jerry Yangs, the Jeff Bezoses and others who have made billions on the web.

Truth be told, these are the very tiny, almost non-existent, exceptions to the rule. Most people who enter the business never make it, especially when they enter a niche not related to porn or gambling. The web business is dynamic and challenging endeavor that requires an enormous degree of creativity and luck. There is no magic formula, and a lot of trial-and-error is necessary.

But not to get discouraged! While few people, including this blogger, have struck it rich, many have been able to make a decent living off the web. In fact, tens of thousands of people make a living selling on eBay and other marketplaces.

I think the key is stop looking for an easy way to make a lot of money. Instead, do what you love. The online business is fiercely competitive, where you have to go up against people from all over the world. It takes an incredible amount of learning, tedious work and inspiration to gain the edge over your competitors. It’s hard to get inspired if you don’t do what you love and, instead, focus on getting rich.

Online classifieds are an effective marketing channel often overlooked by webmasters. Online classified sites like www.craigslist.org and www.backpage.com get enormous traffic from people looking to buy and sell services and products.

Although not recommended for link building as they expire in 7 to 10 days, online classified ads represent an excellent source of direct traffic. They are best suited for products and services catered to local and regional markets but may be used for global as well.

Placing an ad is not as difficult as you might think. In fact, much of Craigslist’s enormous popularity is owed at least partly to the site’s fast, no-nonsense design and the ease of ad placement.

Many people ask me, how do you promote a blog? Well, a blog is a website, so you promote a blog as you would any other site. But since blogs tend to be more personal and informal than typical websites, traditional techniques used to promote, say an e-commerce site, are equally effective for blogs.

First your blog should focus on a particular topic matter. Some people like to use their blogs to write about whatever comes to mind or rant about the 1001 injustices that life throws in their ways. Even if your blog falls into this category, chances are, there will a recurrent theme that surfaces over and over, and that theme would be your topic.

Once you’ve decided what your blog is about, go to Google.com and search for popular forums on your general topic. You should get a bunch of results. Pick only a handful– not more than five– of the most popular forums to join.

But before joining make sure the forum allows you to have signatures linking to your site. This is the least they can do for you for the time that you will put into to help add content to the forum.

It’s important that the forums you join are popular because you don’t want to waste your time contributing to ones that no one reads.

After you join the forums, become active on them. Use them to raise questions, answer questions, give advices, debate issues, and so on and so forth. But be sure to include a signature pointing to your blog.

Your signatures helps to promote your blog in two ways: (1) by helping to build links to your site and (2) by drawing direct visitors from people reading your message. Therefore, it’s important that you have something interesting to write because if people like what you have to say on the threads, they’ll check out your link to see what else you have to offer. Writing one-line responses simply to get links is not recommended since you risk getting flamed by other members and appearing like a village idiot.

As I’ve mentioned earlier blogs tend to be more personal and informal than other websites. Since forum exchanges share these traits, they complement each other very well. I’ve often come up with blog topics by reading the forums and vice versa.

Another point to keep in mind is that your fellow members on the forums are your peers. It’s important to avoid writing in a way that is condescending or even pedantic to your readers. Instead, write in peer-to-peer rather than a teacher-to-student perspective. This is true for both forum participation and blog entries.

When you walk into a sporting goods store, does the salesperson immediately assume that you play hockey? Of course not. In fact, he’d probably never make a sale if he greeted every customer with “Hi! We’ve got some great ice skates in just your size. Would you like to see a pair?”

On the other hand, the one-size-fits-all sales pitch — “Hello, may I help you?” — doesn’t exactly entice shoppers to break out the old wallet either.

Instead, the really good salespeople are trained to discover details about the customer before trying to pitch a particular item. A question like, “Hi, how are you? What sport do you play?” is a great opening line. It gets the customer to focus on a general topic, and then persuades him or her to narrow down the choices. And a focused customer is a buyer, not a browser.

What does this have to do with your online sales? Plenty. Especially if you’d like to increase your conversion by 50 percent or more.
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