4 Steps to Make Money Online
It has become increasingly apparent over the last few weeks that there are some things missing from my approach to make money online. The most successful people in internet marketing out there have amassed a large collection of web properties that collectively give time many thousands of unique visitors each day. That’s a lot of eyeballs. That allows these people to quickly try out a new advertising product and quickly get measurable results back.
Quite often I like to work backwards from the goal to see what the next steps should be or if there’s something that I need to learn. Lets start with the goal of making $10 000 each month online passively. How do you do that? There are two options that immediately come to mind:
- Affiliate selling - try to get people to buy products by having them follow your link back to an online store for a purchase or other conversion.
- Sell advertising space - typically start with showing some Adsense ads, or Text-Link-Ads and sell space on a site.
Both of those things will put cash into your wallet so long as you can reach enough people. How many people do you need to reach to make $10 000 each month? That’s a difficult question to answer. It really depends on the niche, the quality of the marketing copy, the placement of ads, and the quality of the traffic (how targeted it is for the niche). Chances are you’ll need several thousand people a day to reach that $10 000 goal.
How do you get in contact with thousands of people every day? There’s targeted email opt-in lists, but getting many thousands of emails in the first place requires attracting people to a form. You’ll need a place, a website or sites that many people will find, and keep coming back to. This introduces two more questions.
- How will people find the site?
- What will be on the site to keep them coming back?
The answer to the first question is: links. Everything on the internet is found via links. You’re on a website somewhere and there is a link back to a new website that you haven’t heard of or you do a search on Google which results in a link to the page. So how do you get links? get links by advertising your website other places on the web. Post comments on related websites, pay for advertising on Google’s network or utilize some Search Engine Optimization techniques to get into the search results.
That will get people to the site, but how do you get people to keep coming back? Quality. Examine the websites that you keep going back to. Invariably they have some commonalities: interesting content or convenience.
How do you know what’s interesting or convenient? Test. Do some research to see if there’s enough people out there interested in a particular niche that it’s even feasible to get that much traffic. What is the competition like? Are these people likely to either click on ads or purchase a product?
To sum everything up Here’s the 4 Steps to make money online:
- market research and testing
- create a presence with quality websites
- build traffic
- monetize it
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Great article!
I’ve chosen a slightly different attack vector - build a network of small sites, building each one until it makes $100-$200 a month passively, or close to passivly as possibly can be.
- Blogs need constant posting to generate traffic, so they’re mostly out. An exception is Video Blogs. They just take 10 minutes a day or less. I’m experimenting with one right now - http://panicroom.tv, and will see what the time:return ratio is. (To promote it, I made a sister site this afternoon, http://videoblogtopsites.com to promote it. )
- proxy sites. Yes, I unfortunately have quite a few of these. They make $50-$100 a month each. Killer on the server, but I have an “advantagous” hosting situation, and dont have server bills to worry about right now.
- dead but still earning sites. I have one of these, just sitting there with “coming soon”, and the obligatory Google ads. Funny, it makes more money down than up.
- I’m also building a number of more ambitious sites.
I keep throwing things at the wall, and things are starting to take off.
I think your goal of $10k a month is very doable, for both of us. Best of luck in your efforts!
Bussiness Making Money Online
Thats really one good article to read
Post comments on related websites, pay for advertising on Google’s network or utilize some Search Engine Optimization techniques to get into the search results.
Are these methods working for you? For me they did not produce.
If I had to name two things that bring links I would say Content and Relationships.
-I could be wrong, but I’ve found that posting comments on related sites is only good if you are 1) genuine and 2) doing it to build a mutually beneficial relationship and Conversation with the editor and readers of the site.
-According to “the 22 immutable laws of branding” Advertising doesn’t build brands, publicity does. Rather than get a few readers with adsense why not get tons of readers by getting others to write about your blog?
Some reasons this may be better:
The readers coming in from the other site have a high opinion of you because they heard about you from a source they trust (as opposed to Adsense which gives you no such reputation)
News is always more important than advertising in a readers mind. What do you read on a site the posts or the Google Ads? I think it is better to be in the post of a site than in its Google Ads.
So how do you get in the post? Ask. That’s what John Chow did (link below). He asked 200 news sites related to his field to write about him. Sure, I bet a lot did not but it is a numbers game. And it is a better numbers game than paying for readers one by one.
I mentioned it on another of your posts but will expand it here.
These are some awesome articles that I have found on traffic and revenue.
http://www.johnchow.com/index.php/so-you-want-to-be-a-google-whore/
http://www.johnchow.com/index.php/the-internets-biggest-google-whores/
A list of traffic building ideas:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/06/how_to_get_traf.html
Here is something that I have been doing (I am not expert though, so take it with a grain of salt):
I have just started doing this (after reading about Chow) and am getting over a 30% response rate. I email related sites (10 a day) and ask if I can interview them via email and post the interview on my blog. I put a list of questions at the bottom of the email (they can answer when they want). And I shamelessly (and I joke and say out right that I am being shameless) ask for a link, a post, or even just some feedback.
I do everything I can to promote them well. In the end we both benefit greatly. Seth Godin, in the link above lists interviews as one of the best methods for traffic. It makes great content.
Sorry to write so much, but if it helps you then it was well worth it. And if not, sorry.
posting comments turned out to be the biggest thing I’ve done to create new traffic and readers. However it is hit or miss.
Yes you have to post good comments. if you’re not contributing back to the site then it just comes across as cheap. Posting a comment that just says “Great Post” is fine, but don’t expect people to click on your name to get more of your perspective.
There was one comment that I left in a forum that directly resulted in a spike of about 50 RSS subscribers. Having those extra readers resulted in a modest but sustained jump in traffic.
There are a few sites that I have commented enough on to make it on the top commenter panel. Some of those are giving me an extra 5 visitors/day. which isn’t a lot, but if I can convert them into rss subscribers then they’ll likely come back.
The same is true for my adwords campaign I’m only spending $1/day on adwords. that sends about 4 people to the site each day.
In my case being on the top commenter list for a blog is therefore worth about $1/day to me for a comparable amount of paid traffic.
National Finance Center
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting
A bit more of practical advice would be handy. The John Chow site indeed covers a lot of what is said here. Maybe an other way of seeing things would be nice …
Great article…Newbies should spend more time planning out traffic generating
ideas
Especially how to obtain high quality one-way backlinks, to achieve organic
rankings in the SERPS
Best Regards
Vincent
President - Friend Inviter™
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