Making money online - The hard truth and what to avoid.
One of the most common questions we get from our readers is how to legitimately make money online. Obviously we spend most of our time telling you what to avoid since we are an anti-scam site, but we’re writing this article in an attempt to point you in the right direction and if you are going to try and venture into the epic cyberspace economy, tell you some basic pointers and what to avoid doing.We don’t officially recommend any site or person to make you money online, so if you are after a name or a website, you are looking in the wrong place (though we recommend some marketing books at the end of the article). We don’t recommend any specific site or person for one very simple reason – there is no guaranteed recipe for success, even if the person teaching you is legitimate. Different methods work for different people, and the amount of money you make will vary on many different factors. We don’t want to recommend specific sites and then have people coming back to us complaining that they didn’t make any money.
Most people looking to make money online won’t really know where to start. They won’t have a website, a blog or much experience online. The good news is that all can change relatively easily. It is also true that you can make money online without actually having a tangible product to sell, which most people won’t – and this is where we start – making money online without selling a product that you own.
The 4 methods of money making without having a product you can sell are as follows- (there are more, but we talk about these 4 significant methods here)
1. Affiliate Marketing and Advertising
2. Questionnaires and Surveys
3. Start-Up Investments
4. MLM
Affiliate Marketing and Advertising
Online marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry and the natural step for beginners is affiliate marketing (or advertising). This refers to selling or advertising the product of somebody else. Affiliate marketing generally refers to selling someone’s product and affiliate adverting refers to advertising someone’s product. You can do either, or both. Marketing a product generally means you get paid a percentage of the sale that you induce i.e. a commission, and advertising generally means (but not always) that you get paid for someone showing interest that you induce. Usually this means you get paid for a click, and not a sale.Because affiliate marketing is so popular, several major marketing and advertising platforms have emerged making it easier for both the product owners and their advertisers to get started and start selling.
Affiliate Marketing
For affiliate marketing, the two leading platforms are ClickBank and Commission Junction. These companies aid you in affiliate marketing by suggesting possible products to sell and providing you with a referral link. A referral link is your own personal link to the website that owns the product, which you want your viewers to click. You place these links on your website or blog. They can be text links or they can be provided in banners or other image based adverts. It all depends on the company/person owning the product(s) produce for you. A referral link means you don’t actually have to sell anything on your own site or blog. Setting up such systems can be complicated and off putting to beginners. A referral link means that when the customer is ready to buy or is interested, they click the link and go to either the marketing platform site or the site of the product owner, where all the payment processes are dealt with. As we said, a referral link is unique to you, so even though the payment is done elsewhere, the marketing platform still knows it was you who was responsible for the sale, and you will make your commission. Sites like Clickbank and Commission Junction will let you browse at products so you can choose which ones you think your site should be selling. Obviously common sense would dictate that you should probably sell products related to the niche of your website. No one is going to buy gardening tools from a website that reviews movies!
Affiliate Advertising
That’s the basics of affiliate marketing, and now for affiliate advertising. Advertising means you show adverts for other companies on your website or blog, but you’re not selling their products. If someone clicks on an advert from your site and makes a sale, then great! But you don’t get paid for it. Instead you get paid simply for the click. You typically don’t get a lot of control of what adverts are displayed on the site, that’s up to the advertising platform (if you choose to use one) – they are placed their by the advertising platform and every time they get clicked, you get money. The money you get for a click is nearly always less than making a sale from affiliate marketing, but getting a click is far easier than making a sale! The three top platforms for affiliate advertising are Google Adsense who are the dominating force, Yahoo Ads and Adbrite. These platforms place adverts automatically on your site after you sign up (you just need to place the code they provide you into your site) and then you are good to go. If you choose one of the platforms we mentioned above, they should automatically make the adverts fit into the niche of your website.
For very popular websites, you will find that people or companies will approach you directly and pay you a fixed amount for displaying their adverts/links for a fixed amount of time. This bypasses the whole pay-per-click platform and companies are willing to pay big bucks for you to display their adverts, if your website is popular enough.
So essentially that is the basics of what they are. Affiliate marketing refers to selling other peoples products, and affiliate advertising simply refers to advertising other companies and/or products.
Affiliate marketing/advertising is usually the common step for people looking to make money online because theoretically there is no limit to the amount of money you can make, and there is a wealth of [FREE] information out there to help you get started. However, that said, most people will still fail to make significant money. Our personal motto = persistence is key.
Both of these money making methods are potentially extremely lucrative, but simply knowing what they are and how they work won’t make you money. Even if you get a website set up, simply plastering it with affiliate links and adverts isn’t going to make you any money. First you need to do two things – make your website truly useful and get people to visit it.
Making your website useful usually means focussing it on some sort on niche and writing good quality content regarding that niche. If you can get people to see your site as an authority regarding its theme, they will trust you and then are more likely to click adverts on your site and purchase products based on your recommendations. Choosing a niche is important, and the best advice we can offer is to pick a niche that you are interested in. This will make you work harder and make the process more fun. Next, you need to get people to visit you site.
Getting people to visit your site is a whole massive subject in itself. The most common word you’ll hear regarding site visibility is SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and refers to the wide range of techniques one would use to make your site or blog ranked higher in search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Most people will rely on search engines for the majority of their visitors. Of course selecting an appropriate niche is a deciding factor is how many people will find your site through search engines. Select a niche that is too popular and you will get bogged down with too many competitors. Find a niche that is too unpopular, no one will find your site interesting except a rare few, and that’s no good. It’s all about balance.
We won’t go into too much detail about SEO here, but here are a few basic pointers -
Keywords – select relevant keywords and key phrases. Again, like selecting your niche, this has to be balanced. Not too competitive, yet competitive enough. There are tools for selecting good keywords. Obviously they have to be relevant to your niche. Use Google’s function where they tell you how many people have searched for it when you type it in their search box, and compare that number to the amount of results found after clicking Search.
Site Design - If you know how to build sites, make sure the URL addresses are relevant and contain keywords and phrases. Same applies to H1 and H2 tags. Make sure your keywords and phrases appear on the web pages. Don’t over stuff your content with keywords, as Google et al. will penalise you for that. Also make sure the web page title contains keywords and phrases as well.
Backlinks – Don’t SPAM, but try and get links to your web pages on forums and other web sites. Search engines like Google like it when other sites link to yours, and will rank your site higher because of it.
Good Content – As we said before, nothing beats good content. Google likes good content, and so will your visitors. If people are pleased with what you write, then they will be more likely to return.
Article Marketing – Write articles for free article submission sites like EzineArticles.com
Social Networking – Don’t underestimate the power of sites like Facebook, Twitter or MySpace.
So to summarise - build a site - select a good niche - write good content and make it useful. Employ various SEO and Article marketing strategies to get people to visit it and place your adverts and links in places where they will get seen. If you do everything write, there are no limits to how much money you can earn. Remember though, it takes time. Don’t expect to be earning hundreds in your first week. You won’t. Determination and perseverance is the key, and so is research. This site explains the basic basics of affiliate marketing and advertising. There are thousands of sites that will offer more detailed information, especially on SEO, article marketing and other useful tactics to increase your site visibility. This information can be found for free on the Internet.
Of course, there are many scams that claim to hold the secrets to affiliate marketing and advertising and claim they can make you rich. If you don’t want to fall for these scams, then you should realise that there are no secret underground techniques or programs that will guarantee you success. Any website using hype in order for you to buy their products are just selling false dreams. Affiliate marketing is a job with tons of information to learn, and earning real money takes a while. Get-rich-quick scams serve to provide false promises that ultimately dishearten its members. They usually sell rehashed marketing material that you can find for free elsewhere, and package it into fancy looking CDs and books and sell it to you along with promises of unlimited wealth and financial freedom. It’s deceptive and misleading, and if you want to pay someone to help you with Internet marketing, avoid the hype! You can find more information on get-rich-quick scams and how to spot them here.
We also cover affiliate marketing and why get-rich-quick scams are misleading in this article - Tips to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing and Why Get-Rich-Quick Scams Don’t Work.
Questionnaires and Surveys
We won’t go into too much detail as we already have covered these elsewhere on the site, here. We will say that you should not pay to take them, nor hand over personal information. You won’t make that much money doing them and you can’t make a living from doing it. The money is not great and not regular.Start-Up Investments
This refers to investing in [usually] online start-ups. We don’t offer advice here, other than avoid hype. Obviously anyone investing in a site like Facebook back when it started will probably have earned enough money to never have to work again, but these opportunities rarely happen, yet there is no shortage of sites claiming to be the next Google or Facebook looking for “investors”. Buzzbot or Tazoodle anyone?MLM
MLM stands for Multi-Level-Marketing and many MLM programs operate online. Essentially MLMs are legal pyramid schemes that allow companies to hire people as contractors to help them sell products. People who sign up for MLMs will typically sell products to people in their area. (like the “Avon lady”) They receive commissions on the products they sell. Additionally, many MLMs will offer the chance to recruit others below them, where they can also receive a commission on products sold by those people as well. The difference between MLMs and illegal pyramid schemes is- The income into the plan coming from selling the product must outweigh any commissions for recruiting new people. This means that the number 1 priority must be selling the product. If a scheme seems to prioritise recruiting new people, or claims that most of the money coming in will come from new people joining, then it is illegal.
- You don’t have to purchase large amounts of product before joining. Some legitimaite MLMs require you buy a certain amount, but watch out for schemes that try and offload copious amounts of product onto you that you don’t have a chance of selling yourself.
When choosing an MLM to join, the best advice is to sell something you are passionate about, or could become passionate about. Research the name of the MLM company you are joining. There are plenty of scams out there pretending to be legitimate MLM that operate for a few months to a year before they collapse on themselves. How long has the MLM company been running? Does it have good feedback on the Internet? How much stock do I have to buy to join? What sort of commissions do I get? Does the product have good feedback? These are the questions you need to ask before enrolling.
Those are some ways you can make money online without a product. Affiliate marketing and advertising is clearly the main method, and the information we presented here is only a fraction of the information you would need to make a good go at it. Remember though, that there are no secret guaranteed methods to success and all the information you need can be found for free on the Internet. You can always use Google to look for tips and tricks to affiliate marketing. If you do pay for help, either buy a good book or sign up for a reputable long standing program that doesn’t sell false hope and will provide you with helpful training. To overuse one piece of advice - avoid the hype!
If you have a product and you want to sell it online, you’ll need a site, and much like we discussed above, you will need to generate traffic to your site.
A good example of having a product is to create membership sites, where people will pay you a registration fee (perhaps a monthly fee) to access whatever products or services you offer. There are many sites that do this – sites that sell stock photos, porn sites or just information based sites. Of course setting up sites like this is no easy feat, and most will outsource the creation of the website to professionals.
If you have a tangible product or digital product you want to sell in a more traditional way (i.e. person pays you and then receives a product) you can still set up a site online, and most people who have little experience promoting websites will then invest in SEO experts to make your site search engine friendly, meaning you will be found in search engines like Google. Also you can pay Google for premium listings where you will then appear at the top of Google’s search engine results for certain keywords and phrases. To further help falling victim to any money making opportunity scam, also be aware that you will not get rich from
- Signing up to any cash gifting pyramid scam that places a high priority on recruiting new members and claims you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars even millions. Even if this program does offer digital products.
- Signing up for schemes that claim to have secret underground techniques that will give you unlimited wealth.
- Posting links on the Internet
- Posting links on Google
- Completing surveys or questionnaires (as we mentioned above, you can make little money from this)
You may make significant money if you
- Work hard and be persistent, persevere and are determined.
- Don’t fall for hype or get-rich-quick scams.
- Realise that making lots of money is never easy nor quick nor guaranteed.
- Create useful websites that people want to visit.
Summary
Whilst the information we presented to you is only a tiny fraction of the masses of information you would need to know to successfully become successful online, it serves to point out that whilst it is entirely possible to make money online, one should not be taken in by websites or promoters full of hype that claim it is all so easy to get rich in cyberspace. Common sense tells us that if making money online was so easy and quick, everyone would do it. The fact is that most people fail to make any significant money online, and one possible reason for such a high failure rate could be contributed to all these schemes that promise great riches with no risk that will ultimately serve to disappoint.As you can tell the majority of this article is about affiliate marketing because that is where most people turn to, to make money online. The information provided on this page is only a small fraction of the information you would need to know about the subject. If you want to get to grips with affiliate marketing you need to learn the foundation to the industry, so to get you started in the right direction, and to maximise the chances of becoming successful, we recommend two great books (below) that provide a great insight to the marketing industry that get-rich-quick scams simply fail to provide.
Remember that if you are looking to make a full time income online, whether it be through selling other peoples products, selling your own product or selling advertisement space on your website, you can expect to put it a lot of work. There are no secret shortcuts to success, even though sometimes websites may make you think there are. As we’ve said several times alone in this article, persistence and determination are key traits to have to make it online. If you don’t have that, you may as well stick to your day job. That’s the hard truth.
| smsmoo Says: |
| thank you! |
| 06/18/10 |
| outinthecold Says: |
| Very informative in a non-encouraging way. I would like to do the affiliate thing if I can figure how to blog. |
| 07/21/10 |
| ThatsNonsense.com Says: |
| Thanks for the comments guys. We prefer a non-encouraging cautious approach, because if this article is enough to discourage anyone,
then they probably wont make it with affiliate marketing anyway. The point is you must be determined, and aware that is how you will need to be in order to become successful.
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| 07/21/10 |
