A Simple Strategy to Make Money Online

2011/12/08 – This is the sixty four thousand dollar question and something that we would all like to know when we’re first looking to start out in our make money online adventures . The simplest answer is that there are no simple immediate solutions and the old phrase ‘it depends’ comes to mind.

What does it depend on?

Well it depends on you and and your work ethic. It depends on getting the right advice from the start and learning, learning a lot! It depends on your ability to focus on one thing at a time and not allowing yourself to go chasing after the latest thing that’s going to put $10,000 in your pocket by next week! I’m not trying to put you off. What I’m trying to do is make sure that you are aware of certain things that will enable you to make money.

So if you’re serious about wanting to earn income online then carry on reading and I will get to the real ‘meat’. You need to learn this lesson first. I’ve been at this for 10 years and I wish I knew back then, the half of what you’re going to discover by reading on!

First of All a Word of Warning

Is making money online easy? No, it isn’t, well at least not for a start. Before you read any further understand this, it’s HARD WORK and if you put in the hours and dedication then yes it is more than possible. I have to say though that it’s a worry to me personally that in these financially hard times, people are looking to make fast cash using the Internet.

It very possible to make cash on the Internet, but it does take time and won’t pay the bills for some time to come. So if you come across this post having been lead to believe that that there are riches to be had online overnight, then that’s bull! PLEASE make sure that you understand that making money is more than possible but ONLY with hard work and dedication

Now having got that out of the way and you still want to earn some money online, then lets get into the details.

The Hardest Part of Making Some Money

The funny thing is that the hardest part is making those first few dollars. Once that’s out of the way then it’s all about scaling things up to increase those first few dollars.

I’ll throw this into the hat early on – it’s also wise to be diverse as one thing that works well today could turn on its head tomorrow and all of the income goes down the toilet with it.

Decide from the outset to treat this as a business and not a hobby. Plan, even if it’s a simple plan. The important thing is that you have something to aim for. When you do that it becomes easier to accomplish those plans, and then make more challenging plans to aim for in the future. OK now the warnings are out of the way and you’re still with me let’s crack on

There are Many Business Models and One Thing That Does Make Money Online Is…

Affiliate Marketing. Many people ask the question “what is affiliate marketing“? Well it’s ‘one’ thing that does work, has stood the test of time and is probably one of the simplest areas to learn your trade. Here are a few reasons why it’s a good idea to start to learn affiliate marketing:

•  It’s simple and low cost to start even today
• You get paid a commission for each sale, usually 5% – 100%!
• You don’t need your own product to make money
• The product owners want to sell more so they provide resources to help you get sales
• You can get paid for future sales to your original customer if you join the right affiliate programs.
• The products available to promote are very diverse

How this works is, you decide on a product to promote. It could be anything from cheap products like hairdryers (yes I know they are not all cheap ) to industrial machinery costing thousands of dollars.

 How to Choose What to Promote and My Biggest Mistakes

The biggest piece of advice that I can give you here is to start with something that you have an interest in. I was actually fortunate enough to be given this advice early on and more or less turned around and did the opposite! I decided if it makes money then ‘I’m interested in it’! Wrong decision.

I decided to go into two markets that were totally boring and I had absolutely no interest in them. Did I make money in those markets? Yes I did and still do. The problem is I’m not interested in scaling them up because, I really seriously have no connection with them. I could make more money if I did more with the sites like adding regular content etc.

So my point is, choose something that you can connect with and learn your trade on that project. I can tell you here and now that if you put in the effort you will learn and enjoy the process more, even if you make only a little money to start with.

What you do learn will never be wasted as you will go on to use that knowledge in other markets or niches of the big markets.

A Simple Plan to Start the Money Making Process

• Find a niche – one that is obvious that people spend money in (adverts present)

• Write about the niche

• Monetize the niche – make some money

• Develop the niche – and make more money

• Create your own info product – make solid income

This is a very simplistic plan but it does work. You would start out by testing the area that you’re interested in. First look and see that it’s likely to be profitable as well as interesting. Do this by searching in Google for keywords relating to your market and look to see if there are lots of little adverts at the side of the Google search results.

If yes that’s good, if no then try another niche. This is a quick and dirty method of knowing that people are paying for advertizing in the market, and indicates that money can be made or they wouldn’t be paying for the adverts. There is much more I could say about niche selection but that’s for another article.

Let’s say you decide on the broad market of biking. The next step is that you need to be prepared to generate some content. That means write, or have written for you, content that is about motorbikes. It could be along the following lines of:

• About your motorbike

• About a specific motor bike brand and model

• About trips that you have been on, on your bike

• About trips that you plan to go on

• About bike maintenance

• About good value insurance for your motorbike

• About camping on the road

• About eating on the road

• Things that have annoyed you on your travels (controversy can be good)

• Etc.

Let’s put it this way, if it’s of interest to you as a biker it will be of interest to others. So basically aim for a niche where it’s obvious people are spending money in.

Remember this though when generating content, everything that you write about doesn’t have to be about making money. It needs to be about building a relationship with your readers, helping them and relating to them.

You’ll want to make some money in some areas of your content however, so did you spot any ways of monetizing the above topics?

There are multiple products that indirectly make you some cash. Usually this will involve the visitor clicking a link. So looking at the list above, from the top down, you could refer your readers to new and second hand motor bike websites. Refer them to bikers holidays and bikers accessories. I’m thinking bike pannier bags, maps, water containers etc.

Bike parts is a good one, as is referring your readers to good insurance options especially ones that you have personal experience in. Then we have bikers camping gear and cooking essentials.

All of those products and services have affiliate schemes online and over time as your readership grows then there is a good chance that you will make some cash in this niche.

I threw in the controversy angle because that sort of content can be great at getting people talking and socially sharing the content that you create. Social sharing is done by your visitors using Twitter and Facebook for example.

So I have this Content Where Do I Put it?

There are multiple systems that you can adopt here. You could place your the content on sites such as Squidoo, but my recommendation would be to build your own blog. You see places like Squidoo are great. You can write a piece of content and have it online in a Squidoo Lens within a couple of hours. The problem with that is you don’t own Squidoo or similar sites. So they can take your content down on a whim. It’s far better to use them in a different way, that I won’t go into today.

Having your own blog site is different. You control it and can write what and how you want to. You can add in monetization methods without fear that you are going against some hidden terms and conditions.

So let’s say that you build your blog (easier than you think) and start adding content to it regularly. You can maybe add in some Adsense ads (more in a minute) to start the ball rolling. You are now making some regular if small income. So this has tested the market and shown that it’s possible to make some cash in it. Now is the time to ramp up your efforts by joining affiliate schemes that fit your market.

So in our example above find out where the affiliate programs are and join them. This is a big topic in itself but here are a couple of simple ideas.

• Amazon (good for products and easy acceptance)

• Commission Junction (vast amount of products and services, easy to join, vendors approve affiliates. Some approve instantly others will check out your website first)

• Ebay (good for products but hard to get accepted to their program)

If you can’t find an affiliate program for a product go to Google and type in the ‘product or service name +affiliate’ so as an example ‘motorcycle boots + affiliate’ without the apostrophes.

What’s Adsense?

I mentioned Adsense above and it’s a very simple way to earn an income from your blogging in the early stages. If you run a Google search for a product then usually down the right hand side of the search results you will see several small adverts.

These are called Adwords ads. Now Google allow people to pay to run those adverts and the way that Google promote them for their paying customers is by listing the adverts alongside the search results.

Another way that Google promote these little adverts is by allowing website owners like us to display those adverts if our content is relevant to the advert. So If we have content about say ‘motor bike boots’ and we have added a simple piece of ‘Adsense code’ to our site page, then Google will detect this and and show the Adwords ads on our site that relate to ‘motorcycle boots’.

Then if a visitor clicks those adverts we earn a percentage of what the Adwords customer pays Google. I believe it’s about 65%. So over a month these clicks can add up into a nice bit of money. The most important thing is though that it proves to you that there is money to be made, and it’s time to scale things up as described above.

Marketing Your Site

Something that I must highlight is that you will also need to find ways to get website visitors or traffic as we call it in the trade. You don’t need to dream up how to do this, there

are plenty of methods that can be adopted. It’s something I will elaborate more on in the future articles.

What comes Next In the Money Making Plan?

So now you are making steady income, keep doing what your doing. That’s adding regular content, which by the way, is not just writing, it’s alsovideo, audio, PDF downloads and anything else that adds visitor value.

Make sure that you are collecting email subscribers – see the little box below or in the sidebar? That’s an email subscription box and Aweber make it super simple to add them to a website or blog.

Aweber will manage your subscribers, and this will allow you to contact them by email and let them know that you have more great content for them available on your blog. Or from time to time you can tell them about special offers etc. that could earn you an affiliate payout.

Now to Really Ramp Up Your Money Making Plan – Create your own Products

What, I can’t do that? I can hear you! And yes you can, OK it’s more advanced and I won’t lay it all out here but that is, or should be, your long-term plan. If the thought scares you then think of it like this. A new born baby can do nothing much. Over time they learn to smile and gurgle then further on they start to talk and crawl. Once they are toddlers they progress to walking confidently and then to running! Do you see the analogy?

By the way I’m not talking about manufacturing motor bikes here. When I talk of product creation, I’m talking about creating information products. Things like guides, course or even DVD’s. The list is endless.

So if you follow the process you will grow and flourish much as the baby does. So much so that by the time you get to making that first product, all the bits and pieces will be in place to allow you to be the product creator so that you keep all of the profits and you can even pay affiliates to promote the product for you! Do you see we have come full circle here?

You the affiliate have turned into paying the affiliates

In summary

We have covered a lot of ground here and I know that you will have many questions. In fact as I was writing this I thought of probably 20 spin off articles that I will need to write over time to help flesh out this article fully.

Anyway this is a solid plan that works today, just as it’s worked for years. The crucial ingredient that makes it work however has to be present, and that is you, You have to turn up and put in the time. Don’t worry about what you don’t know, find out about it when the need arises. This isn’t rocket science, the answers will be all around you when you look for them.

Our number one rule is – be ethical! Treat people as you would like to be treated and you won’t go far wrong.

Take the time to comment below if you want some immediate questions answered. Make sure that you join our list so that we can let you know when more content is published. I will try and keep it shorter next time promise:)

P.S. One final thing, if you do choose to follow this method (or any other) then never stray from it UNTIL it’s making you money. Work it hard and choose that initial niche carefully as guided above. BSO’s (bright shiny objects) will come along and tempt you to easier riches. Don’t be tempted or you will never take action and make money online with anything.