Thursday 29 September 2011

How to Make Money Online (For Beginners)

 “I am trying to figure out where to start with internet marketing. I just read your post about lifestyle and I know the kind I want for my family, I just don’t know where to start…”
-Lynn Woolums Smith

Hi Lynn! I actually hear this question a lot, so you’re not alone. In fact there are 161 searches every day for “how to make money online for beginners” and more than 700/day for “how to make money online”…

There are a number of ways to make money online. Options range from creating your own product to sell online, making money as a professional blogger, managing an online community, developing a content site on a hot topic – just to name a few.

All of these are just various ways to deliver content online. Your first step will be choosing a niche, which is the market or topic you are going to focus on.

Speaking of focus, with so many options to make money online – focus is key. You want to choose a niche and a business model, and work on that one project all the way from start to profit. Don’t let all the other options distract or derail you.

Once you decide on a topic or niche, you should sit down and map out a plan for your internet business model. What market are you targeting, and how can you best serve that market? This is the angle you want to work from, vs the more common: how can I make the most money from this market? (Most people get it backwards and then get frustrated when that doesn’t work out for them)

So you choose a niche, create a blog or website, set up social media profiles to interact with your target market on the topic, and you create and share useful content that will build your reputation and readership in that niche.

I can hear what you’re saying…
“That all sounds great, but how do I make money from it?”

How to Make Money Online (For Beginners)

The absolute easiest way to make money online is with Affiliate Marketing. You don’t have to create a product, set up a shopping cart and merchant account, do customer service, work with clients, etc. It’s very much like a traditional commission-based sales job where you earn commission on any sales you refer.

The difference is that you’re doing it online, and you can do it from home without ever doing in-person or phone sales. You simply recommend products and/or refer people to specific merchants through the content on your website.

The method I prefer is creating SEO Content, or content that is optimized to rank well in the major search engines. People find it when they are searching for that, click through, and buy what they need or want. This works really well because you write the content once, and it continues to rank well and earn you money for years to come. As long as you maintain your search engine rankings.
“How can I make 3-4k a month or more? What steps will it take to get there?”

I know this is stating the obvious, but it should be said: It takes time, work, and being both persistent and consistent. An online business is the same as any other business in that it requires an investment on your part to get it up and running. The positive side of online business is that it takes a lot less time and money than most traditional offline business models.

Do these 10 steps, in this order, to get started:
Choose Your Niche
Register a Domain Name
Set up a Website or WordPress Blog
Set up a Facebook Page and Twitter account
Download and read SEO Fast Start (free)
Create Optimized Content for your Site/Blog
Sign up for Affiliate Programs in your niche
Write Product Reviews for those products
Get links pointing to your pages or posts
Continue creating content, getting links & interacting via Social Media
Once you get all this set up and you’re making money as an Affiliate, you can look at other ways to monetize your site. You might create short reports on your topic to sell, test contextual advertising, or look into even more methods to make money.
Yes it’s work. And yes – it’s worth it!
If you do these steps, and continue to learn & tweak as you go, you’ll start earning money. You can increase your traffic (number of visitors) and your income as you continue to grow and market your website. It takes time to get to a consistent $3-5K per month in revenue, but you could easily do that within the first year.

Best,

p.s. Lynn was referring to my Lifestyle & Income of a Super Affiliate post. Give that a read if you haven’t already as it will give you a sneak peek into my life and success doing the exact things I outlined here. If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a comment below.

Wednesday 21 September 2011

When Somebody says Something's Impossible, How Do They Know

Judging from the way people talk, pretty much everything is apparently impossible to achieve.  I’m confident Columbus’s quest to reach the East Indies via the western route was regarded as impossible by most.  I’m equally confident that not even 200 years ago practically everybody believed flight to be impossible.  In short, pretty much everything awesome anybody has ever done has been called impossible.


Theoretically, one could try to find out whether or not something is impossible by applying scientific principles and mathematical formulas to the problem at hand.  If, after being able to rule out all possible scenarios, you discover something is either physically, biologically, or mentally impossible, you have your answer.
But it doesn’t work that way in real life.  It’s nearly impossible to actually prove something is impossible (ironically enough).  Just because you can’t figure out how to do something doesn’t mean it’s not possible, it just means you don’t know how to do it yet.  It’s very easy, on the other hand, to prove something is possible:  just do it! 

People have a tendency to believe something is impossible merely because they don’t know how to do it.  They’ve never actually tried, of course; they just can’t figure out how to do it.  So it must not be possible, naturally.

For example, many people would say it’s impossible to earn a significant income on the internet, but I’ve managed to do it and so have many others.  Still more would say it’s impossible to become wealthy without winning the lottery (a very common belief among low-income workers), but thousands manage it every year.  As it turns out, impossible is pretty easy, namely because most things people consider “impossible” are merely things they never bothered to try themselves.

So the next time somebody advises you not to do something because it’s “too hard” and “you’ll never succeed,” ask them how they know.  Have they tried it?  If not, it’s probably fine to ignore their advice.

Friday 16 September 2011

Is passive income possible?

Passive income is the idea for many people. It sounds great doesn’t it, to earn money with no effort really, just sit on the beach and watch the sunset. For income to be truly passive you need to not have worked for it, so if you inherited a bunch of shares and received dividends or something like that, that would be true passive income.



Most people’s idea of passive income is income which was worked for initially, then became passive. This is the passive income I am talking about in this post. Some think this is unachievable; others are just going for it. Me, I am going for it!

I have discussed passive income on here a little before, including my ideas and what I am doing. You can check my previous passive income posts here and here for ideas.
I want to know what you think.

One comment on one of those posts really resonated with me “No matter how much money you make, if you are a slave to money, I would still consider that as being poor.” – Mike from Adstalker. I totally agree, which is why creating streams of income, particularly passive income is so important to me.

I think it is possible, but I know so many people who do not.
Why do I think it is possible?
Because I know people who are doing it!
I know people who own businesses and barely have to do a thing with it. They run themselves, which is how a good business should be. They get the profits, and hardly have to work. It took a long time to get to that point and yes, there are issues every now and then that need to be dealt with, but on the whole, it is a relatively passive form of income now.

I know others who have written books and still collect the royalties’ years later. You need a really good book for this, but it is possible.
I know landlords who own enough homes to live more than comfortably. They selected them, and then go agents to manage them and they hardly have a problem. Yes, there have been times where repairs need to be made, or problem tenants, but the pros have far outweighed the cons.

Passive income is possible. A lot of the time the issue is the work needed beforehand to create the stream of passive income that puts people off. Putting in the hard yards before reaping the benefits can seem like to much work.

I am at the stage where I have been putting in a lot of work and things are starting to pay off. I have a long way to go, but I have a couple of small passive income streams which I plan on growing and other income streams which are not passive, but the money I make through them will be invested to create other streams of passive income.

What are your thoughts – is passive income (the type you work for first and turn it passive, or almost) achievable or even realistic?

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Kylie

Wednesday 7 September 2011

A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.
Ellen Glasgow
Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.

Tuesday 6 September 2011

How to Make Money from Hobbies

Here are a few ways you can make money from hobbies.

Sell Hobby-Related Products

This is the route I took with my scrap-booking hobby. In fact, I was so enamored with scrap-booking, that I began the business at the same time I started the hobby.
I went the direct sales route, but — thanks to the internet — there are now many avenues for selling hobby-related products. EBay, Craigslist, and Etsy are just a few possibilities.
In fact – if you’re looking for a good selling niche for the internet – hobby related products are one of the best. Passionate hobbyists are known for wanting to collect anything and everything to do with their passion. So finding a way to source inventory and sell to them is a viable business option.

Work for a Business Related to Your Hobby

My husband is fond of saying that when he retires he wants to work as a marshal on a golf course. Since I’m not a golfer, I had to look up what a marshal does. About.com defines it this way:
A person whose job it is to patrol a golf course, keeping the pace of play up and responding to golfers’ questions or concerns.
Marshals are mostly volunteers, meaning they don’t get paid or get paid only in free golf. But someone who is into golf and wants to earn some money while being around the sport could look for a paying job in a pro shop or at a golf store.

In fact — no matter what your hobby — there is probably a business where you could share your expertise by helping customers, and get paid to do it. You probably pass places like bike stores, garden centers, bakeries, and craft stores when you’re out and about. All of these businesses either cater to hobbyists or employ people who are passionate about what they do. In fact, those people tend to make the best customer service people because they know so much about their subject matter.

Teach Others about Your Hobby

I have a community college near my house and twice each year I get a continuing education catalog full of non-credit classes that members of the community can take. There are always a number of hobby-related classes, which tells me that people are eager to learn about their hobbies.
Here are just a few from the most recent catalog:
  • Knitting
  • Drawing
  • Calligraphy
  • Painting
  • Jewelry making
  • Ballroom dancing
  • Cooking
  • Investing
  • Photography
  • Writing
  • Music lessons
If you’ve been at your hobby for a while and have a lot of knowledge about it, there are probably people who will pay you to teach them about it. You could check out community colleges and extension offices to see if they’re looking for instructors. Or, if you’re willing to market, you could go it alone and offer your own classes or even private instruction.


 Julie Mayfield.

Non-Taxing Tax Quotes

The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.

Mark Twain