So you’ve probably been wondering how to make money online either as the main source of your income or to supplement your current income. In either case if you’re like me and have felt like you’ve been burned, scammed, or taken advantage of you’ll want to keep reading. The truth is that yes you can make money online but you’re going to need to know things that most people don’t know, or have no clue what to start looking for.
Tom Petty sung it best in The Last DJ, “How much ya gonna pay for what you used to get for free?” And a lot of people selling how to make money online products are doing just that. You come into this online marketing world with no knowledge of how this stuff works or where to even get the tools to help you much less figure out where to get these tools for free. And that’s where they get you. Now is that is scam? That’s debatable but I personally feel that it’s about as ethical as credit card companies printing their contracts, your rights, interest rate changes, i.e. the really important stuff that if you knew about it you would never sign that contract in a million years, in font that’s so small that I’m not even sure Microsoft Word has that font size available. And then they put the Click Here or Sign Here in big vibrant letters and the contract in boring black and white font.
Most of what these make money online sellers are promoting things you can find for free in a Google search but you gotta know what you’re looking for. For example Google has a program called AdWords that’s free. Just type it in on Google and you’ll see a link for it or simply do a Google search for “keywords” or “how often words are searched for” or “keyword search” and you’ll find pages that are free and all you have to do is type in a word or phrase and you’ll see how often the word gets searched for and how much competition there is for that word or phrase.
For example, on Google’s AdWords the phrase “home brew” gets about 1.5 million searches globally and about 450,000 locally and the competition for this phrase, i.e. how many websites there are for it, is pretty low as indicated by a status bar that says competition near the top of the page and there is a small sliver on the status bar indicating low competition. I use this to promote a home brewing kit.
The next thing you’ll need is to find products to promote. ClickBank is a great place to start and it’s free to join and promote products. What they do is show you how often the product gets bought, viewed, etc. and if you decide to promote a product they give you what’s called a “hop link.” What this hop link does is it creates an ID for you that is unique only to you so that if someone clicks on it they will be taken to the vendor’s website and if they buy you get a commission.
Commissions on ClickBank are nice and run from 10% to 75% or greater. Now there are other vendor sites like ClickBank and you’ll have to do a Google search for them but once you find out what ClickBank is all about it won’t take much thought to get an idea of what you’re looking for.
The next thing you’ll need is traffic and lots of it. Simply put you cannot survive online marketing without traffic and preferably lots of it. So how do you get that? You need to get your product or your link onto a top rated website. Google for example gives ratings of 1 to 10 for websites that draw traffic and demonstrate that they have what people are looking for when they search for specific things. It may take a while for a solo web page to get a ten or it might not there’s no way to really tell for sure. But what you can do is find top rated sites either by a Google search or just type in the word or phrase you’re using and look at the first 10 to 20 links that show up.
Now what you have to do is to get your link or product onto their page. Some people may want to charge you for it so the best thing you can do is do like the pros and contact them and see if you can make a deal. That’s how soda companies get their stuff on FOX or CBS. Now if you don’t want to pay you can find some top rated blogs or article submission sites, like EzineArticles or WordPress for example, or do a Google search for the top rated blogs out there.
Now what you have to do is write an article or review of the product and put the keyword in the title, or better yet make it the title, and also with the hoplink your posting at the end of the article, which you should finish with click the link below to learn more or something like that, take out the words Click Here! and put in the keyword. Now it’s obvious that you should want to have that same article on more than one blog or website. A nice little trick you can do is called back linking where you also put at the bottom of the article a link to your previous blog or webpage so that there are many ways for people to see your stuff.
If that sounds like a lot of work I understand and there are people out there who have simplified the process by writing programs to do the work for you. But be smart about it and look to see if there’s a free software out there that will do the work for you. Try searching for “free traffic software” or “free auto traffic software” or something close to that before you go spending your money on something that’s overpriced. Some people will want to charge you as much as $100 to $400 for a program you can find for free or for a better price elsewhere. Also if you notice too a lot of these make money at home vendors do what’s called blind selling where they tell you what a product isn’t and never tell you what it really does. Most of these sites will give you three or four up-sells when you purchase their product so to get started it’s 27 or 37 dollars but to make the most out of it you’ll have to spend an extra 300 to 500 to get their “best” results. Why hide the up-sells? Take note too that these websites have a lot of content on them and if you do a word count you may find 1,000 to 3,000 words or more on any web page. Also does it make sense to buy something from a person or business that doesn’t have a number where you can call a customer service department?
Now is this going to make you a lot of money on your first day? There’s no way to know for sure and most people out there advertising are showing their best results and implying that if you buy their product or such you can do the same and make $14,000 your first day too or some other erroneous number like that so that you’ll buy their product hoping and dreaming you’ll be doing that on a daily basis too. Nothing like that happens unless you take action and lot’s of it.
As Tony Robbins says massive action. I personally think it’s wrong to leverage people with their hopes and dreams and although most don’t directly promise you that you still feel let down if not scammed when the results you get don’t match up with what they advertised. But you also can’t blame them if you got their product and just took a little action here and there and say you got ripped off. You really have to take massive action and make it a must for you to succeed as if someone you really really loved would DIE if you didn’t take massive action. But if you take massive, lots of action, and things still don’t work then move on and learn from your mistakes.
By the way how much action is massive action? Here’s the mindset you need. A 65 year old man got his first retirement check for $99 and said this is unacceptable and went from place to place trying to sell his chicken recipe and after 1009 no’s he got his first yes and that’s why there aren’t many Colonel Sanders in the world today. You should also learn from your mistakes in this process and grow while doing it and learn instead of being like the fly that hits his head against the window all day trying to get out.