So many marketers dive into this business with absolutely NO direction whatsoever. They do what I call, “winging it” and it shows. They drift from one program or game plan to another and never stick with anything long enough to even see if it’s going to work.
So let me get this first rant off my chest right away.Rant 1
If you can’t accept this fact, then you are doomed right from the start. If you’re expecting to set up your business on January 1 and see your first sale come in on January 2, you are going to be in for a great disappointment. Offline businesses take over a year to see a profit. Why should online be any different? It is that mindset that dooms people right from the start.
So, your first step is to make a decision. What do you want to do to earn a living online? Write it down. Look at it everyday if you have to. Anything else that has nothing to do with your plan is NOT to be bothered with. So, if you decide that you want to earn a living online by becoming a copywriter then don’t start looking at the Clickbank marketplace to see what affiliate products you can sell. You’re going to be a copywriter. So the first step is to look to see where you can get good instruction on how to become a copywriter. Learn what you can and become the best copywriter you can be.
Afterwards, when you’re making gobs of money as a copywriter and you get bored and you want to earn money doing something else, fine. Then you can write down another goal. But until you’ve completed your first goal, you are not to bother with anything else. And trust me, there are plenty of distractions online, so this will be harder to do than you know.
Why?Here’s why. As you are studying to become a copywriter, you are noticing one very important thing.
You’re not making any money doing it yet. Therefore, you are beginning to become impatient, especially if you have bills to pay. It’s taking too long. You can’t wait for your first paying client. So you start working on something else in the meantime.
Guess what happens?You never really put the time into the copywriting that you should and ultimately, it falls apart on you.
And then, to make matters worse, the thing that you dropped copywriting for also falls through because it didn’t provide results immediately.
So, step 1 is very simple and it needs to be followed if you’re going to have any chance of success.Make a decision and stick to it, no matter how much it kills you to do it!
Okay, but what if you don’t know enough to make that decision? Let’s face it, if you’re first starting out, you may not even know what’s available for you to do when it comes to making a living online.
What then? While I would love to cover every possible way there is to earn a living on the Internet, I just can’t. There are so many different ways to do this that this report would be about 300 pages long and nobody would read it.
So, I’m going to do the next best thing. I am going to give you a list along with a brief explanation for each item. This list will comprise the most common and popular ways of making a living online. I will also try to give you an idea of what is involved with doing each item so you’ll know if the amount of work involved is something you want to do.
This is probably the most critical part of this whole process because what you choose is going to be stuck with you for a long time, IF you follow the rules that I’ve laid out.
Okay, let’s get to our abbreviated list.Disclaimer: I am in no way endorsing all these options. I am simply pointing them out.
1. Affiliate Marketing – This is where you decide that you’re going to promote other people’s products. There are literally hundreds of thousands of products online in hundreds of different niches. The possibilities are virtually unlimited. To be successful in affiliate marketing, you will need to learn a variety of skills such as advertising methods, writing sales copy, how to use marketing tools like autoresponders and so on. Affiliate marketing can be very lucrative. It can also be very frustrating because of all the pieces that need to be fit together.
2. Product Creation – This is very loosely tied to affiliate marketing, except instead of promoting somebody else’s product, you’re going to promote your own. So, in addition to learning all the skills required for affiliate marketing, you’re also going to need to learn things like web design, content writing and so on. I don’t personally recommend that people dive right into product creation as the first thing they do. But it is an option, albeit the most difficult of the list.
3. Service Creation – This is very similar to product creation except in this case you’re creating an ongoing service for people. An example of this is Aweber, which is a service for people who are looking for a solid autoresponder. As you can guess, creating your own service is a massive amount of work. Aweber is not run by one person. They have a whole team over there. So this is also something I don’t recommend doing as your first thing out of the gate.
4. Freelancing – This is where you learn a skill such as copywriting or programming and offer your skills to others. A good copywriter can make as much as $2,500 for a sales page even if he’s just starting out. Of course, to do anything like this, you need to get a solid education on whatever it is you want to do. If it’s copywriting, you’ll need to take courses, read books and practice a lot. You’ll need to start out, when you feel you’re ready, by most likely offering your services for free in exchange for testimonials if the copy converts well. If you’re looking to become a programmer, you’ll need to learn a language and also practice a lot with creating applications. Again, you may need to offer your services for free at the start.
5. Work A Job – Believe it or not, there ARE jobs you can get online, such as Medical Transcriptionist. To get these jobs, you will need to be very skilled in the area that they require and most likely have related work experience. Going through places like Monster.com and other work at home recruiters is going to be your steady job at the beginning. Getting a job online is not easy as there is a ton of competition. The upside to this is that once you get a job online, you don’t have to worry about making sales to earn a living. You do the work, you get paid. Just don’t expect to make much.
6. Get Paid To Sites – These are sites where you sign up and perform certain tasks in order to get payment. These sites run the gamut from paid to read emails to paid to surf to you name it. The pay from sites like these is miniscule at best and at worst, some sites don’t even pay. If you’re looking for a solid income online with get paid to sites, you’ve got a long wait.
7. Recruiting – This covers a lot of ground, but for the most part recruiting comes down to MLM programs. You get paid for bringing in people. This is not far removed from affiliate marketing except instead of promoting a product, you’re promoting a site to get people to sign up under your affiliate link. You’ll need the same skills for this as you would for affiliate marketing. The up side is you get recurring commissions as opposed to a one time sale. The down side is that the average retention for recruiting people into membership sites is about 90 days, so it’s hard to build a solid income from doing this.
Those are the main things that you can do online to earn an income. Some provide more opportunity than others. Notice I did NOT say that some “work” better than others.
This is another fallacy that needs to be nipped in the bud.Rant 2