When the Internet began people were aware of the flexibility available and had all sorts of ideas to make money online. The attractive thing about making money from the Internet is that fact that you can do it without leaving your house or even having an employer. The freedom of making money online and the endless possibilities is what attracts most people. However once you take the plunge and actually commit some time to research the ways that you can make money on the Internet successfully, you will realize that it does take a lot of hard work and in a lot of cases you will not get any money for a while when you first begin. Of course it does depend on your ideas and work ethic, some people have been so successful that they can do it full time.
Internet marketing is the most popular method of making money online. There are various ways to do it. Making a website and selling the website space for advertisements can be very lucrative. It all depends if enough traffic can be driven to your website. Google Adsense program for instance pay on a per click basis. The more visitors you get to the site the more clicks you get and therefore more money. Driving traffic to a website is the hard part, this is primarily due to the competition of other websites. Most websites are setup so that they will rank high in search engine results, not all websites can be on the first page of such results and so the most relevant web pages are chosen. When you have a lot of competing web pages for a particular keyword it can be very hard to get ranked on the first page of search engine results.
Affiliate programs can be used if you have chosen to make a website. You receive a commission of a sale if you bring traffic to a website that has something to sell. The most popular affiliate marketing programs out there are Clickbank, Commission Junction and Ebay. The first two allow you to promote digital products, whereas with Ebay niche marketing you can promote any product you want. With Ebay you also get the added bonus of its brand. People are more likely to buy from Ebay due to the popularity and trust factor of its brand name, this will help you because more of the traffic will convert to sales. Before you sign up to any affiliate marketing programs make sure the commission you will receive is going to be worth your time.
Affiliate programs can be used in conjunction with SEO or PPC programs such as Google Adwords. In this case you do not need to make a website, instead you pay for ad space and pay for every visitor that is brought to the sales page of the product you are promoting. The cost of the click is directly proportional to the amount of competition of the keywords that you are bidding on. It is a balancing act of making more money than actually spending on the advertisements. However it can be done, some people make a very good living from this, but as with most things you will need to do a lot of research on how to make your campaign successful.
Article writing is one other method of making money online. This is not as popular as some other methods, mainly because you earn on average a set amount of money per article. With Internet marketing the sky is the limit. As a writer you will need to get some clients that can give you work on a regular basis. Forums are a great way to do this. You may initially find that nobody wants to work with you because you have no reputation, you will therefore be forced to write for a bit less than you first intended to.
Selling on Ebay for profits is a more traditional business model. You will need to find wholesalers and buy products in bulk in order to keep your expenses to a minimum. Then you set up nice looking sales pages and sell these products on Ebay for retail prices. It is just like having a virtual shop. This is attractive to a lot of people simply because the overheads are kept to a minimum. There are no maintenance costs for a real shop, no need to employ anyone to sell to customers.
There are a lot of ways to make money online, but if you want to be really successful then you will need to have a unique angle on your approach or have an idea for the next big thing.
4 Comments
Tom - StandOutBlogger.com
July 12, 2008 at 21:30I love adsense, but my stats have been really low the last couple of days.
Chetan
July 13, 2008 at 11:13Has Kontera been good for you?
And why don’t you cloak your affiliate links? Like the one you used in this post for Clickbank 🙂
Zak
July 13, 2008 at 20:52My Kontera earning still low but it’s improving with the time.
For cloacking affiliate links, I think it’s not a big deal, people that want to register with your referral link will do it even if they know that’s a referral, anyway Im not ready now to pay for these plugins and Im looking for a simple free one.
tonywong
August 1, 2008 at 20:42Interesting post, this. There are so many ways that one can potentially make money online that we often fail to succeed, and it’s primarily because we lose focus in the face of this flood of opportunities. FOCUS: that’s what I keep telling myself, and not too successfully at that 🙂