Continuing Adventures

On-Line Businesses: Formula to Make Unlimited Money

November 30th, 2007 | by lissie |

My brain hurts! I think I have been doing this on-line business thingy now really for about 2 months and I am facing information overload! There are just so many options and so many possibilities for making a go of it - but its a jungle and there is a HUGE amount of marketers after your cash. You really have to be wary. I am very cynical and a bit of a marketing nightmare but even I managed to fall for a scam. It’s not a Nigerian, send me all your retirement savings, type scam. It was just an over-sold product which was asking too much for what you got. Its OK I got my money back and found an excellent forum in the process, but I have never been caught like that before so I was a bit mortified! I think they got me because it was last week when my partner started is job and for the first time I was feeling very unemployed and not contributing! So yes the successful marketers do prey on the desperate which is pretty sad.

So what have I learnt:

• The amount of information is over-whelming. I am an extremely quick reader and good at absorbing new ideas and I still struggle. Its very easy to fall into the trap of darting from one thing to another. A business plan seems like a good idea but at the moment it changes weekly.
• The three key skills you need to make money online are :
  • marketing skills - how to find a niche, how to promote, how to write good headlines - do you like the headline of this post?
  • writing skills - curiously not essential, but definitely useful
  • technical skills - not as important as many people think but definitely having some helps
• I enjoy writing - I’m slightly surprised but I do actually like it - I gather that a lot of people don’t online, or struggle because English is not their native language. There are ways around this, but I gather that I have a bit of advantage because I can string sentences together.
• Marketing is becoming a bit less of a mystery to me. I need to become more comfortable with it - I think you can do it ethically without ripping people off and oddly I think that’s pretty important to me (thanks Mum - I think!)
• I have enough technical skills, there are wonderful resources out there if I don’t know how to do something, I know enough to ask the questions and then find out what the answer means - technical is the least important thing on the internet and the easiest to hire!

So I think I have made the breakthrough - I think I know how to make money online. I would love to share it with you - but you will have to wait for my E-Book and because you read this blog you will be able to buy it for $47 for a limited time only and then it will go back to the regular price of $99 ! Sorry just kidding, the formula is quite straightforward regardless of what the marketers will tell you.

Find your niche.

You need to specialize in a couple of niches which are specific so you can rank well for a specific search. “ballroom dancing” is too broad “learn to dance salsa in northern Perth” may be better.

Really you should start with a profitable niche. I made the classic mistake of guessing that some of the stuff I know about may be profitable. In fact you don’t have to guess there is software that will tell you, unfortunately I just bought it yesterday not 2 months ago! A profitable niche already has people selling in it - otherwise it wouldn’t be profitable. You should probably test that the niche is profitable before writing your website/E-Book/affiliate marketing campaign whatever. The software will generate the type of searches people do on websites like Google and tell you how many people are advertising on the searches and what they are paying Google for the advertising.

Create a Product

Having found your niche then you decide on your product. Website is obvious, but not the only answer. Other options are:

• HubPages Seems like a good way to quickly put a article for free, no website or domain required. Because they are a big site they get listed in Google very quickly compared to sites like this blog!
• A blog. Cheaper and technically easier than a website. In fact free if you go with something like Blogger. You can always move on later, you can have paid advertising and make money even on a free hosted blog.
• E-Book, video or podcast (audio file to the Luddites!) - you can create an E-Book or whatever and then get others to promote it using ClickBank, you pay the promoter (aka affiliate) a % of the sale. Its a good place to buy because you get an automatic 2 month right of return - which is how I got my money back on the scam!
• Sell someone else’s product - the other side of above - find some products in click bank and promote them on your website or where ever. If you decide to buy something from ClickBank let me know before you buy and I will give you a refund of 1/2 the commission I earn (you will need a Paypal account to get the cash, unless you live in NZ and I will see you at Christmas!) Oh all the product at clickbank are “info products” ie. they arrive in your email like a link to an ebook or a subscription to a course so its not like I need a warehouse or anything!
• Sell a training course, this seems to be the latest and greatest. Theres lots of free software to allow you to create a training course with video, audio clips etc.

Promotion

You need visitors to your sites. Preferably you want people to find you naturally i.e via search from Google, Yahoo etc. Those people probably want to buy something e.g. if you type in.

How do you promote:

• well you link from other sites, e.g. see my new article on Vacation Packing on Hub Pages ;
  
• you can pay for ads on google - so long as you pay less than you make its a sensible thing to do, but I havent done it yet;
• you can get popular on Social Networking sites like BloggingZoom which basically attempt to get a “people’s view” of the usefulness of blog posts on the internet. So if you think this is useful remember to click “zoom” on the little box at the top or bottom of this post - thanks!

Moneterize

Its an awful word isn’t it! Basically though if you look at one of my HubPages you will see at least 3 ways for me to make money on each page:

• adsense (the little classified ads which are supposed to be related to the content);
• Amazon. if you click on any item and then go on to buy that or some other book etc you will earn me a commssion - so if you were planning to do some Xmas shopping!
• EBay: similar to Amazon, again buy something having first clicked on the link in the article then I will get a commission.

So I think I know the HOW I just have to make it happen now!

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