Truth About Making Money Online
There is a recession. Some marketers are simply telling us to ignore it and it will go away. Sorry, but that won’t work. I’ve been examining sales not just in my business, but in the businesses of my clients and can tell you the recession IS affecting internet businesses.
While the sales of some products are down, other products are selling better (covered this in more detail in the last issue of the Monthly Mentor Club). So there is an effect taking place whether you acknowledge it or not.
Ignore it at your own peril.
At the same time, we have hundreds of thousands of people looking for information about making money online. They need a little extra part-time income…or they’re looking to replace their job.
While you can’t do very many searches in this field without finding promises about making a million dollars without work, those simply aren’t true. The truth is you’re going to work hard (especially at first) and the income will slowly start coming in. Eventually if you stay consistent and committed to the task, you can build a very successful business. Just don’t believe the HYPE!
I’ve seen it happen too many times. People get started in their online business. They see very little results (maybe a sale of an affiliate product or two). When things don’t happen as quickly as they’ve been told (they didn’t make ten grand this month), they think they’re doing something wrong. So they give up on that project and jump into another subject. They never give their business consistent enough work to make it profitable because they’re looking for the holy grail of online income.
It’s easy to get taken by work at home scams. They sound so enticing. Just do this and watch money pour in. They prey on your hope. You tell yourself, “Maybe, just this once, it will work for me.” Sadly one disappointment after another follows.
Here is the first rule about making money online.
#1 – It always requires hard work to get it started. While we talk about the dream of outsourced business and vacations where income continues to come in, you have to realize there was WORK to get to that point. You have to get the systems and team in place to make it happen. And that doesn’t happen overnight.
#2 – It takes time. YES, I’ve seen people making a full-time income their very first month online, but that is NOT the norm in this market. It’s rare even for those who have the right system and personal help. For example, I don’t take on coaching clients who tell me they have to have a full-time income their first month. The likelihood is low for this. Instead we shoot for a year of consistent effort for a very nice part-time or full-time income online.
So what ways really work in making money online?
1. Information Products
If you’ve read this blog for very long, I’m sure you’ve realized this is one of my favorite methods of making money online. You write an ebook, record an interview, or produce a video. You then package it up (such as a DVD or a digital download). Create sales copy and start selling it.
Your work this week can produce an income for months or even YEARS to come. Work once and get paid on it forever. That ebook might sell for $29.95 or more…and cost you 0 to deliver (talk about nice margins).
This is my primary business and the one I’m most passionate about.
2. Professional Services
This includes such services as coaching, consulting, copywriting, web design, or virtual assistance. Because they aren’t fully automated they sometimes get a bad rap as trading hours for dollars in some circles. Yet, what is you ENJOY doing those activities?
I enjoy the coaching. It’s fun. So even though I would make more money working on more of my own projects (#1 above), I still want to do it. In addition the coaching puts me with my customers so I see the questions they’re asking and where they have the strongest desires for more information. So it becomes a research element as well.
And that’s not counting the fact that for many people starting out it takes time to build that large volume of sales you’re looking for. If you’re good at web design, do some web design projects for others. Or even barter your web design skills to get your other projects in front of people with large lists (you design for them in exchange for a mailing about your product). Or take your web design skills and work for local businesses to produce the income you need WHILE working on your own projects.
Not to mention you can also put together a team of people to do the work for you. For example, my friend Glenn Livingstone recently put together a team to offer his own PPC management service (if you’re spending thousands of dollars on PPC – you owe it to yourself to see what he can do for you).
3. Affiliate Marketing
Others online will pay you to promote their products and services. Check out the Clickbank.com/marketplace or join Commission Junction. You focus on advertising and promoting other people’s products for a share of the profits.
In my own business, I do this one as well although it is more of a secondary income source. I sell my products and services. In addition I refer other tools and services when I find a good choice. My principle which you should steal is find the best solution for your customers and clients. Then contact them to see if you can get a commission for promoting it. Don’t go promote simply because you earn a good commission! Would you recommend them even if there wasn’t a commission involved is the question? If the answer is yes, then go to town to your promotion.
For example, do you have an audience who needs PPC services? If so, you can team up with Glenn. Let him handle all the hard work of managing the PPC campaigns and the staff required to do so. You share in the profits by being an affiliate with him.
4. eBay
This is NOT one of my primary income streams although I find it good for generating leads at times. Yet, there are hundreds of thousands of people who earn a good part-time and full-time income with eBay as their primary promotional tool.
There are even two eBay services in the little town I live in. You bring items you want to sell and they’ll list them for you online. They earn their money as a percentage of the selling price for everything they offer. You could setup a similar service or you could simply become an expert in a specific subject…reselling items through eBay.
Again not my subject of expertise…but an incredible way to make money online. You can even start off by selling some of the items you don’t need around your house to get some experience and feedback in your account.
5. Selling Advertising
You’ll hear people talk about Adsense sites quite a bit, but I wouldn’t develop a site just for Adsense. Instead I would consider it a site where you sell advertising. For example, many of the most popular blogs have advertising as one of their primary income streams.
While they post Adsense, they find it more profitable to sell banner ads, buttons, and blog reviews. At this moment I don’t have a single personal site where I’m selling advertising because I find it more profitable to run my own offers or affiliate promotions on my site (I concentrate on traffic that converts instead of just generating a lot of visitors).
This doesn’t mean that advertising can’t be a primary source of your income though. If you love creating content, running blogs, etc. You can focus on generating traffic to these sites, and then sell the advertising to others. Or another form is to sell “LEADS” to other companies. You generate high quality leads at your site and sell them to others (this is more profitable when you have very targeted visitors interested in a specific subjects such as mortgages, construction, lawyers, etc.).
6. eCommerce
Sell physical products from your site. This is another one I don’t do personally (everyone focuses on specific subjects). While you could potentially ship these through a dropshipping company, the times I’ve worked with extremely successful clients they had negotiated their own deals on the items they wanted to sell (having the items produced overseas and then shipped to a fulfillment company here).
The advantage here is you can setup a complete ecommerce store selling these products and services. And potentially you could even use eBay as a lead generation model (or set your store up on eBay itself).
7. Domain Real Estate
Domain speculation is another “easy” business you can do. You find great sounding domain names and then sell those to people looking for a name for their company. You spend $10 for a domain name. In exchange you sell an average one for $500. Really good ones can go for MUCH higher!
Or you put together complete businesses for people. You’ll find some of the sellers at http://marketplace.sitepoint.com are selling these types of turnkey businesses while others are selling complete businesses they’ve run for years. You could even make it a practice of buying good online businesses, fixing them up, and then reselling them (just like a quick turn real estate investor).
Which One For You?
Which opportunity is right for you? I don’t know. I’m sure I didn’t even cover all the ways you could make money online. Obviously I’m most partial to the first 3 since those are the ways I make money in my business. I simply wanted to open your mind up a little to find the right source for you to make money online. I know people who make money simply using method #2. Then they expand into information by teaching how they do it.
Others I work with make money simply through affiliate programs. Eventually we try to expand them into information as well (for more ownership of their business). But which one is the right one for you, I don’t know. That’s your choice.
Related Entries:- 7 Ways to Make Money Online
- 10 Ways to Really Make Money Online
- Two Blogging Profit Models
- 5 Reasons to Create Your Own Products
- 5 Ways to Find a Million Dollar Niche
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I do agree with you. I’ve seen people making a full-time income their very first month online, but that is not the norm in this market. It’s rare even for those who have the right system and personal help.
Hey Terry and everyone reading this article by Terry,
From my own experience, it DOES take work and lots of it to succeed online. It also about finding the right opportunity and taking massive action with it.
Some people think that they can do some work for a week or two and then make a nice full time income. This is not true at all.
It takes a lot of patience. For me, it took 4 years to finally make a full time income online. I even put that on video. Just go to my name above and you will be able to see that. I am not seeling anything on the video. it is just my personal story.
Terry’s products are great to follow and it will help you to really succeed online.
Tal
While I subscribe to your new paper newsletter, (and your blog) I’m not in any rush to start the type of Internet businesses you advocate. That said, I have a small online marketing firm and I find your information extremely useful when designing campaigns for my clients. It’s part of the reason I am much more effective than most of the local “marketing” firms.
That said, I am seeing a huge influx of business. Marketing firms float a bit when the economy is going strong because too many small business owners think they don’t need to market because business is booming (WRONG).
Then when the economy tanks, suddenly my phone rings off the hook with calls like, “when can we meet to talk about that quote you gave my employee two years ago? By the way, I had to lay him off.”
Your marketing should be fifty percent of your activity day in and day out. Because when the economy tanks, I can’t be as much help to you as I’d like without some kind of base to work off of.
While I can get you targeted traffic in any economy, it’s a heck of a lot easier and cheaper if you’ve kept up a steady marketing campaign year after year.
I don’t agree with looking for opportunities. You should start to look to build a long term sustainable online business rather than affiliate programmes one day and then info products the next.
You’ll just jump between opps all of the time or wait until another opp comes out and you’ll be tempted to go and try that.
Making money online means HARD GRAFT. There’s no quick bucks online.
You need to have a strategy and a system to make money online.
Good luck!
Sean
Thanks Terry. That post was interesting. One thing I would like to add is my personal experience, although I’m 17 years old, i have been around the internet around age 14 through 15 years. I had written freelance articles in hopes of making the big money, i was really tempted for the fact that quick money can be made online but at the end of the whole show, i made just a few bucks and I began searching for opportunities. The point is that if you do not really know what you want, you will be deceived by the hype. All you need to do to just choose a program that you love, study the materials available and stick to the plans. Do not drift about, close your eye to the hype and stay focused and you will really succeed. If you have chosen affiliate marketing, i think you will like my affiliate marketing blog at http://oketimothy.blogspot.com I have no product that I sell. All that you see is pure and sincere content. Once again, May God bless Terry Dean. You are a source of inspiration for me. Thanks so much.
Terry, you are spot on with advertising and blogs. I just added banner ads to my blog and it’s doing much better than Adsense.
I think this great informative post drives home a very important point:
– Making money online is not for the short-term opportunists.
While it is a possible to make online business a full-time career, many people are given the wrong idea that it is achievable with little effort in a short time.
From my own experience, people who really built successful online business usually possess the following qualities:
- Capacity for hard work
- Take the venture seriously and manage it like a business
- Unflagging self-belief for success
- Mental strength to face failure without losing enthusiasm
- Highly creative in terms of trying out new ideas and strategies
- Competent in basic skill sets, eg: Copywriting, web authoring, internet marketing, etc.
- Highly intelligent!
I have the greatest admiration for those successful online entrepreneurs, and I am glad to have joined the club.
Sometimes trading hours for dollars (via personal labor) isn’t a bad idea. A brain surgeon makes 500,000 a year doing it. Rush Limbaugh just signed a 300 million dollarcontract doing it (3 hrs a day plus 5 hrs a day research). Nobody can do what they do for them…ask Bill O’Reilly he hustles 15 million a year doing it…these guys can outsource maybe one day a week of their show but anymore than that and the product–THEM is lost.
Yes, systems are good, yes, automation is good but if you can hustle $50-200 an hour, go for it! Work hard, hard, hard!!!
Your advice is sound. As an ecommerce fulfillment house, we handle the shipping and return processing for hundreds of successful webstore merchants.
Although there is a huge range of merchandise being sold online, the one common element among our clients is working hard and working smart–plus keeping the focus on the longer term– thinking in terms of years, not weeks or months.
John Lindberg – President
EFULFILLMENT SERVICE INC
Great breakdown on the 5 types of income-generating online models. I personally focus on number 1 as well, although I still do some number 2 and 3 and used to do number 5.
I find that creating and selling information products bring in the most revenue for me.
Cheers,
Welly Mulia
The recession is affecting everybody everywhere. I guess the only thing you can do is to diversify.Adding a few more income streams can help even though it will be small amounts of income in the beginning and concentrating on writing good content.
Have you read the post on Problogger.net about how to make a blog recession proof? Lots of great tips.
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/10/16/13-tips-to-recession-proof-your-blog/
Finally, somebody in the IM market agrees there’s a recession!
“Ignore it at your own peril.”
Classic.
Ryan
I am relatively new at working online. I see the opportunities for great success, but I also see that it takes a while to get up to speed. Diligence and patience seem to be instrumental in making whatever you choose to do online become a reality. But the long haul effort does work – I am realizing it more each day.
hi terry good post, thanks for your words, I prefer to sell information products as well, , I have 2 years working with affiliate marketing, so I prefer these two business model.
Some of the reponses make you wonder. Interesting advice from people whom I doubt are as succesful as Terry…
-Jim
Regarding recession: even during some hard times there will be always opportunities for new products, to buy or to promote as affiliate. You just need to adjust to “conditions”
Thanks Terry for the “straight to the point”advice.
You tell it the way it is… which is so refreshing.
Hard work, dilligence and focus are the keys to any business, online or off.
Better yet… having a pasion for what your doing is a major part to success and most importantly,
BEING GRATEFUL everyday for having the chance to create and do what you love whether it be online or not, is the most important key to success in all areas of life.
Cheers & happy ThankEverything Day to all!
Quality content rules in the long run. A lifehack or quick-fix might do it for a few. But that´s about it.
Thank you for the great blog post. One question – what service do you suggest for ebooks? I am looking to add that to my income stream. Also another key is DIVERSIFICATION!!
Little Twig: I would suggest doing ebooks in simple PDF format – which there are many tools to create them this way along with selling them on Clickbank.com as they will handle payments and pay your affiliates.