Do you want to make money online? Do you have the motivation and passion to make it work? Well then, this is the post for you. Making money online is hard, but possible. If it was easy everyone would do it and you wouldn’t be able to make lots of money from it. Be glad it’s difficult. If you haven’t decided how you are going to make money or don’t know how to, this post is going to help you. In this post I will be breaking down the 3 best ways to make money online for a beginner. Time to put your money hat on boys and girls… lets get started.
1. Affiliate Marketing
Guide To Affiliate Marketing: How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is one of the easier methods to make money online. You will make less money doing this than you can selling your own stuff but with this you can avoid: having to create the product/service, customer support etc.
Affiliate marketing is just selling other peoples products for them, in return you receive a commission for each sale you make. For example if you are promoting someones software that costs $90 and you get 50% commission per sale you refer you will get $45.
How do I know if I sold something?
This is tracked through an affiliate link you will receive when you become an affiliate, this link will go to there sales page. Your affiliate link will have a cookie which works for a certain time period. Meaning if someone clicks on your affiliate link and purchases within the time period you get the commission. The time period is usually 30 days, it will say on the offer. Note: if the person clicks on another affiliate link after yours that will override yours and the last clicked link will receive the commission.
How to find affiliate offers?
There are tons of affiliate networks you can find products to promote. A few places you can check out are: ClickBank, Click2Sell, Affiliate Window and Amazon. If you can’t find an offer you like*, you can just search google for a product + “affiliate program” or the niche you are in + “affiliate program”.
*I strongly believe in only promoting products you think are good. No need to trade your morals for money.
How to promote affiliate offers?
To promote affiliate offers you need traffic. To promote this stuff you could have: a website, a wordpress.com blog, a social media following (Facebook, Youtube, Tumblr etc.), forums (link in signature). Learn how to get traffic with Tumblr, you can do this with or without a website.
That’s all you need to make money with affiliate offers. These sections can be broken down in more detail but it’s best not to get information overload when starting out.
After you start making some money it’s time to dance…
2. Selling An Information Product
What is an information product?
An information product or “info product” as they are often referred to, are exactly what they sound like – products providing you with information. This can come in the form of an ebook, a course, a membership or even an app.
Why choose to sell an information product?
Selling an information product is a great way to make money. They require little money (if any) to create, most people have knowledge of something they can share and they don’t require shipping like physical products.
How to sell the product?
This section is made up of two things:
- Getting the traffic for the product
- Having a system to receive payments for the product
The answers to both of these can be summarized in one word – “ClickBank”.
Let me go into more detail…
To get traffic to your information product the easiest way is to use affiliates (unless you already have an audience you can promote to). You can also use PPC pretty effectively if you know what you’re doing with that.
Awesome tip: The best way to guarantee a successful launch is to assess demand before creating your product. Your product has to be good. Not only do you need to make a product that customers want to buy, more importantly you need a product that affiliates want to promote. You need to find a product which has demand, you have the knowledge to create and affiliates want to promote. The first two can be pretty simple to figure out but to find out if affiliates want to promote your product you can contact them before even making it asking if they would be interested in promoting it.
When doing an affiliate launch it is a great idea to have prizes. These are cash bonuses for affiliates who sell the most of your product. This is great for luring in the big affiliates (the ones who make loads of money and can promote your product like crazy). Bringing in one of these is great because not only do they make you money from the selling they do, they also bring in other affiliates when they see the big affiliate selling your product. In the product launch game there is a lot of people playing follow the leader – capitalize on this.
Having a system to receive payments is insanely easy when going through an affiliate platform like ClickBank (be sure to check out other affiliate platforms to promote your product). Learn more about selling with ClickBank, that page should answer any questions you have about it if I haven’t already.
Probably went a bit more than the basic detail I intended to go into here. The only thing not properly covered in detail is creating the product but that is something which can vary greatly deciding on what you choose to do and hence I have not covered it.
After a product launch you should have lots of fun coupons to play with…
3. Selling A Service
What do you mean “selling a service”?
Selling a service is just selling your skills. Do you know graphic design? Sell your graphic design skills. Are you an expert at SEO? Sell your SEO skills. Pretty simple. This is something which can be done both locally and online. Now most niches that you sell your service in aren’t going to make you rich, but they are certainly going to bring in money which you can use to invest into a bigger project of yours or help you get on your feet.
Why sell a service?
Selling services are great for money in your pocket right now. They also require no investment. You get the money before doing any work, there is no risk of “I spent all this money and haven’t made anything back”.
How to sell a service?
Now this is going to vary based on your niche/skill so I won’t go into niche specific detail. But the basic principle is the same.
If you are going to sell a service over the internet you want to get on some freelance sites and forums. Look at sites such as Fiverr and Upwork and don’t fall into the trap of not succeeding with these sites. The first sales you get on these will most likely be the hardest. The success you have on Freelance sites are very heavily influence by your reputation on them (the ratings of your services, your hours worked, your reviews etc.) You should try very hard to promote your services in the beginning, this is not limited to the freelance website (promote outside of the website).
Another good place to sell services on the internet is forums. Money making forums are great places for this, people wanting to make money/start a business often need to outsource a variety of different skills. To promote your services you can become an active member in threads and post a link in your signature or post a classified ad.
Another great option is selling your services to local businesses. I have friends who sell their SEO services locally and earn over 6 figures a year doing this. The key to selling here is picking up the phone and calling up local businesses, easy to do but so many people seem to be afraid of picking up the phone. You need to be able to sell to do this, if you aren’t good at selling, tough luck you have to learn. An awesome way to get them to purchase your service is to offer them something for free first. For example my friends in the SEO niche would offer to rank them for a keyword for free, rank it and call them back showing them the results, then be all like “hey, I can do more awesome shit for you if you pay me” (paraphrasing here, probably best not to use that exact line).
Well that’s about it. Easy peasy…
Okay, so I lied, making money online isn’t “easy peasy”, you have to work hard so you can live easy. If you are motivated enough you can take the information above and with some more research into the thing you want to do you can start making money. There is no secret to it, just hard work.
-Smart Income 101