There are a HUGE amount of different ways of making money online. This is great news of course because it means there is “something for everyone” so to speak, but on the other hand it can be very confusing for the beginner. If you sign up to a few mailing lists, your email inbox will be bombarded with the latest “make money on the internet” offers – all with very tempting sales pages. It is very easy to be taken in by the “hype” and send off your money. I personally doubt whether more than 1% of people who actually buy these kind of products make any money…..
So how is money made online?
Essentially it is no different to making money offline, in the so-called “real world”. Come up with a product or service, make your offer to the world, and make potential buyers aware of your offer. That’s it in a nutshell. So to really narrow things down, to succeed online you need 2 things – a product or service, and a way of letting potential buyers know that you have that product or service.
I tried various different methods – this is my first attempt at a web site:
www.blood-pressure-reviews.com
This site is in the format of a Blog (like this site you are now on), the idea was I wrote review articles on various drugs for reducing blood pressure with a link at the bottom of each article to buy that particular drug. If the customer bought I got paid 25% commission. It didn’t work, for various reasons although I make a few dollars a month in Adsense earnings. But I did learn a lot from that experience.
I suspect the biggest problem that most “newbies” have, certainly this happened to me, is that while it is not too difficult to come up with an idea for a product or service to sell – the biggest question is how on earth do I get people to find my product offer? In other words, how do I get traffic?
That is a whole subject in itself and you can buy various training programs priced from a few dollars right up to several thousand dollars, only on this particular topic. As far as I can tell there are 3 main ways to get traffic to your site:
1) Buy it via advertising on other people’s sites, Google Pay Per Click etc
2) Redirect other people’s traffic to your site eg Forum Posts, Blog Comments etc
3) Get it free through so-called SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
I actually used the 3rd method above – what this means is through various means to get your site listed high up in the Search Engine Rankings. Again, a very involved and sometimes specialist process. I’m not going to go into the various ways of SEO, because there is a HUGE amount of information on this subject – from free to VERY expensive. I actually spent a lot of time trying to use SEO to get traffic to my Blood Pressure site above, and by and large I failed. I had to make a decision as to how I was going to try and make money online; I was very busy getting nowhere.
Then it hit me. Over the years, like most people, I have collected a large amount of ebooks with resale rights on my computer. I never did anything with them, they were just collecting “virtual dust” on my laptop. I noticed that a number of people were selling these ebooks on eBay, the famous auction site and thought to myself “I could do that!”
The beauty of eBay, and a lot of people overlook this, is that it gets a MASSIVE amount of traffic to it. Ebay is consistently in the Top 5 of most visited web sites which is a phenomenal achievement. What this means is that it is possible to use the traffic that eBay are already getting (literally MILLIONS of hits every day – and these are people who are ACTIVELY looking to spend money, not searching for free information).
So I made the decision to start selling a few ebooks on eBay, and then at the end of March 2008 disaster struck! Ebay without warning suddenly banned all products sold via digital download, meaning it was no longer possible for a customer to order an ebook and you could fulfill that order by sending them a link to a download page.
About 95% of the ebook sellers on eBay disappeared overnight – mostly never to return. I was quite upset about this myself, I had been on the verge of launching a business and thanks to a change of policy at eBay it was over before it started. I was back to the drawing board.
And then…..I saw the opportunity that almost all of the established ebook sellers had missed. More on this tomorrow….