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.

Last 5 posts by

• Do you think SEO in other lan­guages is eas­ier? — Sep­tem­ber 18th, 2008
• Google Slap — How to recover from a Google Slap? — Sep­tem­ber 8th, 2008
• What Does Your Order But­ton Say? — August 29th, 2008
• Will Knol Rule The Search Engines? First Analy­sis Indicates…It Just Might — July 23rd, 2008
• Are small busi­nesses drop­ping out of AdWords? — July 23rd, 2008

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 Reining

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.