Make Money

How does one make money online?

Everybody wants to make money online, but what is the best way to get started? This is the million dollar question..

First, let me give you the cold hard facts:

• There is no easy way to make money

In fact, many internet marketers agree that it was harder for them to make their first $5,000 than to go from $50,000 to $500,000.
Anybody that promises you an easy, effortless way to make money online is not telling the truth. Yes, there lots of opportunities to make money and once you have been doing it for months or years it can truly be amazing how much money you can make with relatively little effort but rarely do people discover a money making opportunity that is easy and effortless if you start out with zero experience.

Here are the top two ways to make money if you are new to the Internet:

1) Make money blogging (or putting up any content site and running ads)

2) Make money as an affiliate

Of all the online opportunities to make money, these two are probably the two easiest to get started. However, there are clear challenges with each money making opportunity.

First, lets talk about making money blogging. The facts are very clear. Large successful blogs can make a lot of money. There are thousands of bloggers pulling in thousands of dollars per month by just writing what they are passionate about.

Take the guy behind Sabahan.com for example. He’s a young blogger based in the island of Borneo. And he’s earning several times the monthly local wage just through his blog. He shares his metrics and experiences in this wonderful post: What it Takes to Make $3000 Online
However, there are also over 180,000 new bloggers coming online every single day so it is a very crowded market. You trully have to be very passionate about your space and write excellent content to rise to the top.

It is possible and you too can make money blogging but the second biggest challenge on how to make money blogging is that it takes a lot of time to get started. For the first six months, for example, we did not make any money from this blog. Now we earn 5 figures from this blog in a good month - and it’s only a part-time hobby.

If you are looking to get started on blogging - check out copyblogger.com.

In particular - this post: 5 Steps to a Truly Unique Blog that Attracts Readers and Revenue

I seriously love that site.

Ok - now on to affiliate marketing

To make money as an affiliate is the second opportunity that we wanted to highlight. This one is a truly exciting opportunity and a lot of people have become incredibly wealthy as online affiliates. I remember that when I was working at eBay, we used to pay the top eBay affiliate over $1M per month and it was just one young 27 year old sitting in his shorts in front of his own computer in Florida. That is a truly incredible success story on making money as an affiliate.

However, the biggest challenge if you are new to internet marketing is that once you join and affiliate program you are left asking what now?

What do I do now to become successful and to start making money?

This is where 99% of affiliate programs fail and we have failed also many times over the past 5 years. However, we have also learned a ton about what it takes to make affilates incredibly successful so that even new affiliates that are brand new to the Internet and just learning how to make money can become very successful.

Here are the key items that an affiliate program needs to help new affiliates make a lot of money:

Offer an end-to-end money making system that affiliates can just plug in and start using in two minutes.

That system has to give affiilates:

• Their own professionally build and fully hosted website
• Their own lead generation system with a build in auto-responder
• Tools, training, videos, a formum and webconferences to help them become successful
• Build in promotion tools to start driving traffic to their own website

In short - pick a program that provides you all the prebuilt tools you need to start marketing a product: sample blog articles, sample emails, banner ads, sample pay-per-click ads and more.

While getting started on affiliate marketing can be tricky, there’s one guide we recommend.

The Adwords Black Book by Mr.X

Mr. X is a top gun affiliate marketer in the UK. And this book he teaches you his tricks to successfully making money online. This is the SINGLE best book I’ve read so far on affiliate marketing. The reason is that Mr. X shows you how to build your own list while marketing your affiliate product. This puts you in an opportunity to later launch your own business.

For example, you’re using affiliate marketing to pitch Joe’s Cat Collars. You send Joe 2000 visitors of which 100 became buyers. Joe pays you $20 per sale. You make $2000.

Not bad - but you can do better.

Mr X teaches you how to send the 2000 visitors to Joe - but - to also collect their emails and names and get them to opt-into your own private list. After you sell $2000 worth of Joe’s Cat Collars you can use this same list of cat-enthusiasts to sell Sally’s Kitten Cleaners.

You make the same amount of money as an affiliate - but you now also own a list that can make you repeat dollars year after year.

It’s a simple concept that so may people ignore. The Adwords Black Book explains it well. You can purchase it here.

Good Luck with all your internet marketing efforts. It may be tough to break into this field - but it’s worth it.

Recent posts by Mike

• Do you think SEO in other languages is easier?
• Google Slap - How to recover from a Google Slap?
• What Does Your Order Button Say?
• Will Knol Rule The Search Engines? First Analysis Indicates...It Just Might
• Are small businesses dropping out of AdWords?

About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike

If you want to see what's in the private lab...

Ask yourself... which part of your business would you most like to improve?

I can send you 7 tactics related to your specific needs, if you like.

You don't have to buy anything, just take it as a backstage pass into our private course.

Will it give you the solution you've been waiting for?

There's only one way to find out.