Most people still have the feeling that making good money online is for big businesses and brands. However the Internet makes it easier than ever to start your own business with almost nothing to invest.

Big companies are often moving slow and if you hit the right market those big companies’ only solution is to buy your innovative fast growing online business.

Here are some tips to get you started.

• Most people think of selling things. When you have indeed a product to sell. You can just start by creating an online shop with for example Amazon Webstore or sites like eBay and start right away. I know someone who is just selling Ikea stuff on eBay. Some people just don’t know how cheap Ikea is and she makes a profit.
• If you don’t have a product to sell. You can either sell a service like cleaning, consultancy etc. Or you can start buying cheap products from China on alibaba.com.
• Best of all is just to start selling product of others. Become a publishers for an affiliate network like tradedoubler.com and start selling. You get a commission for each sale you make. You may need a website which you create with free online tools. You can also use advertising like Google Adwords and redirect your clicks to get the commission. (read the affiliate program regulations)
• If you think affiliate marketing is too complicated just get started with sites like Friendhunter.nl. On friendhunter you can become a headhunter in one minute. You just register on the site. Then you start to contact all your friends asking if they are interested in this wonderful new job you saw.
• Talking about friends. It is good to have a lot a friends online. If you have a lot of online contacts or friends in for example social networks. People are also willing to pay for just sending these friends a message.
• More like a creative one. Act like a Brand. Be creative. Do what you love most. Because then you have never ending energy and ideas. When you have a brought idea/concept. Give it a name and logo. Start spreading this idea, keep moving. You will become an online identity which people trust, like, hate. Big Brands will want to be associated with you.

Good luck! End keep me updated.

Lately I meet more companies doing online advertising, like Google Adwords, without a good analytics in place. When you don’t measure the results of any campaign, you waste your money.

You see your traffic is growing and you think you are doing a good job. But is this traffic interested in what you offer? Do they ask for more information? Do they buy your product? If you don’t measure that, you don’t know .

In stead of using your own analytics tool you should start with implementing Google analytics. It is free, and in stead of focusing on the amount of traffic you will move forward to a ‘relevant traffic’ focus.

With analytics you get insights in all visitors but you are especially interested in the visitors who buy, subscribe on your site etc. When you follow their behaviour you know what they search for and where they came from.

With this information you don’t need to buy expensive advertisements on crowded websites anymore. You buy ads on relevant places which pay off directly.

I do believe performance based marketing has a bright future. For anyone involved in advertising it is very attractive to pay per sale, per lead etc. in stead of just buying reach without any further guaranties.

Publishers have the opportunity to place ads while sharing the revenue. Customers get to see more relevant ads because ads that don’t pay will disappear.

Affiliate networks will however face a hard time to stay relevant. As tracking software will become free and available for everyone. Affiliate networks will have to compete with affiliate managers within the advertising companies to find and built relations with relevant publishers.

Why would you still pay the affiliate network if you can do it yourself.

Google is already offering Pay per Action advertising in beta and I guess it is just a matter of time before Google starts offering this tracking solution for non-Google ads as well (similar to Analytics campaign tracker). By then anyone can start his/her own affiliate program for free.

If the tracking software is for free. Affiliate networks will need to show their relevance by delivering better tracking and/or better publishers then we can find ourselves. In this situation they can’t afford to charge monthly fee’s. They will probably have to work performance based themselves.

It is possible to protect your Brand name in Google Adwords.

A nice example you find if you try to make a text-ad with the term  “Euro 2008″ in it. You get the following message (see picture):

Trademarked Term.

Due to trademark reasons we do not allow advertisers to use “Euro 2008″ in their Google Adwords ads.

If this is a wise decision for all brands, I don’t think so. It has an effect on your distribution which you should consider. However it can give you some Brand control.