There are many worries about the economy we are facing, and there are thousands that have lost or are about to lose their jobs.  But it is important to have a game-plan in place in case you lose the security of a weekly income.

Here in this blog I talk a lot about how to make money online, so that will be the focus of this post.  It should be obvious that during tough financial times you need to be as frugal as possible and still be able to live.  Cut out anything that is an unnecessary expenditure and focus on how you can generate some income.

No matter what the economical climate is, there are still tons of ways to make a lot of money with the power of the internet.  There will always be people who will spend money in any recession or depression so these are the people you want to target in your affiliate marketing campaigns.

1.  First, consider who your target audience will be

Think about the type of clients that will buy from your website, or who will be drawn to your blog.  Whether you are starting a BANS store selling ebay products or simply setting up a blog to make money with Google adsense, you first need to know who you want to reach because this will determine what types of products you want to promote.

Obviously, even in a depression there will be rich people spending money on things only rich people can afford, so with this in mind you can sell products like jet skis and luxury boats.  You can market toilet seat warmers or high-end clothes.  The possibilities are endless once you start thinking like a marketer.  After all, the first job of a marketer, especially an internet marketer is to know what your potential customers are looking for.

2. Know HOW to market your website or affiliate products

You want to find the best method to market your blog or site.  With Web 2.0 there are just an unlimited number of possibilities.  Here are some ways to promote your affiliate products:

Twitter, Squidoo, Hubpages, EzineArticles, YouTube (or any other video site), Craigslist, USfreeads, Ehow, About.com, Forums and many more.

And all these methods are totally free.  In a recession you don’t want to have to worry about expenses when trying to MAKE money so these tools can go a long way for you.  Several of my Squidoo lenses make me a couple hundred a month and the actual Squidoo revenue that the company pays is very slowly getting better each month.

If you want to create your own website on a particular niche try to target very specific keywords and get as much unique content as you can on there.  Right now I hire a lot of writers to do most of the writing for my many different projects, simply because I do not have time to write 20 articles a day, but even if you can’t afford to hire someone you can write at least 2 or 3 articles a day.  Set yourself goals and no matter what… meet those goals.

When submitting articles to Ezinearticles I find it best to use a URL redirect instead of taking all the time to make a landing page.  This way you buy the domain name and set up the redirect in about 5 minutes and you are done.  Then all you have to do is use that url in the resource box everytime you write an article.  If your articles are well written and address a specific need, the readers will more often than not click on your link and you have a potential buyer.

Spend Some Time Each Day Building Backlinks

This really is the most important part of SEO (search engine optimization).  You need a game plan to slowly but effectively build backlinks that are on legitimate and high ranking websites.  make sure these links are “dofollow” so you get some of that “link juice” as they call it and it will boost your site up.  But be careful, build them too fast and Google will send you to the wood shed. Build links to your site naturally and you will see your site climbing every week.

For all the reasons mentioned above I love to use Linkvana.  I mentioned it in my last post but it is just too great a product not to talk about it.  You build links with the membership on a blog network with sites that are PR3 and higher, all for the membership fee each month.  It might be steep to some at $147, but the price will soon be going up to $200.  You can try it for one month just to see if you like it for that price, but I am sure you will stay for many more months as you see how much money it can make you as the traffic comes in.

Of course it will only make you money if you already have an optimized website that can translate into sales when the targeted traffic roles in.

Check out Linkvana here to see if it’s right for you.

When combined with the ebay affiliate BANS software, you can really do well with your monthly income, but as with everything else in affiliate marketing, you must be patient and build things slowly.

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1. Squidoo or Ezine Articles: Which is Better in Article Marketing? ...