There are more ways to make money with internet marketing than you can shake a stick at !
The thing to do is to make a plan and stick to it.
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How Big Are the Opportunities Online
You can buy and sell goods, be an affiliate for someone else’s products or even source goods from China and sell on your eCommerce site, or Amazon. The number of ways to make money is rising with the size of the internet itself. Back in 2015 most sources quoted 3.2 billion people had some internet connection. That’s half the population of the world.
Now, six years later Statista reports that there are 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide. So as a percentage of the total global population, internet usage has risen almost 10% ( to 59.5 percent ). Of this total, 92.6 percent (4.32 billion) accessed the internet via mobile devices. How would your business be with over 4 billion customers?
I wrote this article to give you a few examples and pointers, but it doesn’t really matter how you start, as long as you do start. The following, in no particular order, are 5 methods that I found to be successful, reasonably easy to understand and implement. Your skills and interests may be different to mine, but the principles are the same, there are many ways to make it, in the online world.
5 Methods to Consider
- Compare goods on your website, give your advice about which is best and promote it
- Use an Affiliate Network to find an info product, buy it, read it, critique it and promote it.
- Use your own specialist knowledge, write your own info product and sell it.
- Use Offervault to find advertisers CPA offers , promote them, get paid per lead
- Promote Web Tools or WordPress plugins , either your own or other peoples
All these really require building some sort of website, so if you are a total beginner this is a bit of a stiff learning curve. Over the last few years though, building the website is not the huge hurdle it once was. With the free “WordPress” software, on which half the web seems to be built, a site can be ready to go within 5 minutes….. no I’m not joking ! You can be putting up your first website in just five minutes’ time, filling it with your products your advice and your adverts.
(1) Comparison Articles
This is ideal, a simple idea, buyers looking to make a choice on which camera, which shoes, which TV…. etc to buy, are always looking for reviews, to backup their own ideas. Review sites can be very useful, though Google is making it tough to compete with its latest algorithm changes, but if you can do a thorough job, point out ALL the good (and bad) points of the reviewed goods, then you can still do well with this approach. Once your readers click the buy button, you get the commission.
(2) Affiliate Networks
Rather than sell your own goods or services, be an affiliate for other peoples products. Networks like Clickbank host hundreds if not thousands of offers which you can promote with a fairly simple landing page. Many affiliates have multiple pages and offers running simultaneously, making a good income.
(3) Write Your Own Info Product
Everybody has something that they do well.
From bricklaying to Writing to Installing satellite dishes, there are experts in the blogging world who parcel their knowledge into courses. These have a ready market on the many course selling sites like Coursera, Udemy and Thinkific. Once written this is a stand alone stream of income, working 24/7 for you. Starting can be really simple, jot down in Microsoft Word or Google Sheets some notes on how you do your chosen job, flesh it out with the details and then choose the method of distribution, which might be Video, ebook, or one of the course distributors and follow their instructions.
(4) CPA ( cost per action )
This is a more hands on approach. CPA offers, as found on sites like Offervault, need only a simple web page (landing page) or Quiz page to qualify entrants plus landing page. Readers only have to provide their contact email to earn you the commission, no sale is needed, so it is a low barrier to entry type method. Although the payout is low and the offers change more frequently than affiliate offers, some people make huge amounts with CPA marketing.
(5) Tools and Plug Ins
One skill stands out above all others for work on the internet – programming. Although it can take some time to acquire this, it pays off massively if you can come up with programs, apps or plugins that help people – like bloggers for instance, do some task more easily. Access to a tool or plugin can be a monthly payment, giving you income for many months, for each customer. Even if you haven’t the skills yourself, having the ideas, can be enough, you can find coders online ( fiverr, people-per-hour and other hiring services ) that can do the programming , then you can market it.
Be Found in the Search Engines
If you’ve already had a go, made a website, made a few sales, then you know just how good it feels to succeed. Even if you’re not making a full-time living at it, you’re halfway there. The problem can be that there is too much conflicting information out there and you just don’t know which is the best way to go.
A couple of years ago, getting your website to be ranked, in other words when you type in ” best car polish” you need your Car Polish website to come up right at the top of the Google search results, was indeed a tricky and time-consuming procedure. It took months to rank even on page 2 or 3 and taking a lot of effort to do so.
Now though, after many changes to its algorithms, Google is nearer to its stated goal, of “providing the MOST relevant answer to search questions”. Google is weeding out all the scammers and ‘thin’ sites with hardly any information on them. People who try to game the system by buying links to make their sites appear to be more popular are also being found out and ‘slapped’ in the rankings.
The best advice is to write for your prospects, your customers , write full and detailed answers to their questions and you’ll be rewarded with a good rank. The higher you appear in the Google ( Bing ,Yahoo and others too of course but Google is the 900 pound gorilla in the Search Engine World ) the better. The more prospective customers you will see, visiting your site and potentially buying your goods.
As a rule-of-thumb, for bloggers to reach a point where you are able to see money coming in, providing you have chosen a viable niche and breadth of niche, its going to take you one to two hundred good quality , detailed articles, in your blog. But stick with it, even if you are only able to do 2 articles a week, that’s only a year of your spare time. Believe me that time just flashes by. Start NOW, take action ,don’t leave it, or you’ll be in the same situation next year.
Use Paid Ads to Get Seen on Googles Results
Of course there is always paid traffic. All marketers should use both adverts AND SEO methods ( ranking a website for the free traffic ) . Google or Facebook ads will get you a ton of visitors, or will it just drain your wallet giving poor returns or even none at all. Advertising is not always simple. Google ads are shown via an auction system, the price paid for the click is determined by bids, from advertisers. So before venturing out with Advertising campaigns, read up on the best strategies and start with low outlay.
The price of Ads is going to be largely determined by the niche. If you are advertising Credit Cards and Insurance, Ad costs are VERY high, so it would be difficult to compete with the big players, whereas “Farmer Fred’s Excellent Cheese” niche, might have clicks for pennies.
Get Some Training
As with most things, having a mentor, will speed things up enormously, but which one? There are so many and some quite frankly give rubbish help and charge a lot for it. After a few years in this area, you soon acquire Gigabytes of courses, downloads, books, ebooks, some good, some bad. When I was learning the business, Jeff Johnson was a big help, with his free WordPress plug in and his free advice videos on YouTube ranking. YouTube is huge, if you offer any sort of service on your website, Youtube is the best way to be seen and to carry your message.
Sean Mize too, gave me an enormous amount of help, in his series of audio podcasts. He has I think a very unique and approach, maybe not to everyone’s taste and certainly hard work preparing so many articles, but he gets great results, proving that to get the best results you should aim to become the “go to guy” in your niche.
After all if you wanted to become a great cook you might follow Jamie Oliver, a great footballer you would look at videos from Man Utd players, a great scientist you would read Einstein, or Laithwaite ….. and so on. Marisa Murgatroyd is another big believer in the ‘Maven’ or Expert model and gets good results.
I give more help in choosing a mentor here. Miles Beckler has made hundreds of really in-depth videos on YouTube about Websites and Marketing, both with SEO and Paid Ads, so have a trawl through there before making up your mind.
Beware of Huge Claims.
On YouTube for example many of the videos will have very unrealistic claims like Anik Singal’s “How I made $2.3 Million in Pure Profit in 2020….” which is pure clickbait designed to get as many eyes on his videos as possible, Anik is a prolific course maker, but unfortunately uses frankly HUGE claims in his video titles like the above one and “How I made an extra $34000 in 15 seconds of Work….”
I am sure Anik has some pretty good stuff in his courses, he has been around a long time, but for newbies, looking at this world for the first time, you have to bear in mind “would I buy a course from him, given these massive claims?
