Top 10 Ways to Make Money Online — Honestly
Do you want to make money online? Too many websites offering products related to making money from home, are over-promising and under-delivering. Here are some techniques and methods to honestly make money online now.
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1. Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs offer you a way to make money online by promoting products for people or companies. You do not need to have your own product and when you promote for the company and sales are made, you earn a commission on the sale (either a percentage of the profits or a flat dollar amount). You can promote the product through writing about it on your website, blog, Squidoo, or on Social Networking Websites. If you want to find some affiliate programs to join, you can look through Clickbank, CJ and ShareASale to start.
2. Build It & Sell It — Or Buy It & Build It
If you build up a niche website with high-quality content related to the topic of your site — you can either keep the site as it is or you could sell it for a profit. Personally, I’ve made numerous niche websites over the years and a lot of them are receiving targeted traffic, but not making much money. They may have Google AdSense ads on them, but are still not making the type of money I would like them to. If I don’t want to work on marketing that website, I could sell it to someone who actually has a product that relates to the topic of my site. Recently, I sold a website I built up for three years (it was not profiting at all and I didn’t have time to deal with marketing it) and I got a quick $3000 for it on Flippa. Some people call this “Blog Flipping” or “Site Flipping.” It works to make a quick chunk of money, but not sustainable unless you are driven to create numerous blogs, build them up, and resell them. Alternatively, you could buy a website on Flippa, build it up and profit from it.
3. Membership Websites
Residual income is the way to make money online. People sell ebooks and products online all the time — but to make a real sustainable, lasting income is by either having your own membership website or by promoting (as an affiliate) a membership website that you believe in. The key here is to only promote a membership website or program that you have tried, or are currently a member of — and vouch for it 100%. With so many scams online these days, it can be tough to find such a membership program. As of now, I can honestly tell you that I do believe in a few programs out there. Blog Masters Club is one — by David Grisley. It is currently not open to the public (just filled all slots) but if you direct people to signup on that page and they later make a sale, you will make a residual commission on their membership. You can still join and promote David’s other free products — and his affiliate signup page is here. Yaro Starak is also an honest marketer with a great membership site called the Membership Site Mastermind and strangely enough it is currently not taking on any more students. I think it is a good thing that they are not taking on every new person that wants to signup — because they truly to do provide individual training and help through their membership sites. Just like the other program — if you direct traffic and they signup to be notified when the program is available, you will still receive your commissions. Yaro also has other free reports you can promote as an affiliate and signup here. Lastly, a membership site that I am a part of is Easily Answered — it is a program that allows members to join and ask questions directly to the experts in related online marketing fields.
4. Product Creation & Sales
If you have your own product, you will make more money by selling it online. If it is a digital product, or one that can be downloaded (ie: software or e-book) you will profit even more. Obviously, product creation is not for everyone. But if you are an expert in a particular field, and want to share your knowledge on the subject, creating a product and selling it online is a fantastic way to profit. You can sell your product and use either Paypal, Clickbank or CJ (to name a few) to securely process payments. If you want to profit even more, you can then take that digital e-book and sell it as a paperback as well through Lulu’s Self-Publishing program. Once you go through the Lulu process and your book begins to sell, it will also be picked up and sold by other major book chains; such as Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com and more international bookstores online. Alternatively, if you want to make more money and have a great software idea — you can have a software program created, and sell it repeatedly for constant profits. All you need is one good idea — one thing that might save a user time, provide some entertainment or solve a problem. You can pay a programmer on Scriptlance a minimal amount for them to create the software (make sure you own full rights to it) and then you can sell it or provide it for free online. Example of software program types include: iPhone applications, WordPress plugins or any other general software that can be used on one’s computer.
5. Banner Ads
If you have a website that is receiving a decent amount of traffic, you could make money from banner advertising. This is a technique that has the potential to make a person a lot of money, but only if their website is receiving heavy traffic. For banner advertising, you can use Google AdSense ads, Text Link Ads or BuySellAds.com. You join one of the sites, and put a small piece of code onto your website. People can purchase ads on your website and you can charge a set amount per month, for certain ads to be placed in certain places on your website.
6. Pro Blogging
If you enjoy writing, and want to make money online as a professional blogger, then this is an option for you. Being a professional blogger is tough for many people because a person needs to know how to attract a wide audience, provide fresh content daily, as well as understand how to direct readers to take a certain action. I read a report written by David Risley about blogging, and he explained his thoughts on how bloggers don’t understand internet marketing enough, and internet marketers don’t understand bloggers. If a person can incorporate internet marketing into their blogging efforts, a lot of cash can be made. It is true. David is a prime example of this — and I believe his statements are true about bloggers and marketers. Personally, I’m learning how to incorporate the two together, on my blog here. So, if you want to be a full-time blogger and make tens of thousands of dollars per month from your blog, then being a Pro Blogger is the way to go. If you want an excellent resource and free report about what it takes to be a Pro Blogger — Read the Six Figure Blogger Blueprint, by David Risley. Another excellent resource on Pro Blogging is Darren Rowse’s Pro Blogger website here.
7. Free Reports & One-Time-Offers
An internet marketing method that can take your income from zero to thousands is this one. What you will need is to create a free, high-quality report on a certain topic or idea. The report will help people in some way or another. You will also need a domain name and a website that is hosted online. If you need a good webhost, I recommend Bluehost. This technique, which I employed on one of my websites several years ago increased my income by an extra $36,000 for that year. As soon as I took it off my site, that income disappeared. So what that means is this can dramatically increase your income in the very instant you put it online and set it up on your website. It will take some work to initially set it up — but once that’s done your only job will be to increase traffic to it. In the near future I will be writing a special report or article about how to create a free report and one-time-offer. I will provide you with every resource needed to do this — if you want to be notified of when that is posted on here, please subscribe to my RSS Feed here. As of now though, I do thoroughly explain the entire process in Book 3 of Honest Riches. Here are the basics of this technique: Create a free report on niche topic, get traffic to that free report, user will fill in email address to download their report, and immediately after filling in their email address, they will be redirected to a special one-time-offer page. Your OTO page will provide a bunch of high-quality ebooks and software programs at a special low price if they take advantage of their one chance to get it at that price. If they don’t buy, they can cancel that and go directly to their free report download page.
8. Social Media Marketing
If you haven’t joined Twitter yet, now is the time to do so. Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and YouTube (and many others) are all social networking websites that can help you increase targeted traffic and build up your reputation and income online. Social networking websites can be used to drive targeted traffic to your website or blog. My main website receives about 10%+/- of the total traffic from Twitter, with Facebook trailing closely behind. One method to increasing visitor satisfaction is to create a simple welcome page for users who are visiting for Twitter, for example. Instead of linking to the homepage of your site from your Twitter account, link to the special page created specifically for Twitter followers. You can give them a free gift or downloadable product to thank them for visiting. Whatever you do, try not to bombard fellow Twitter users with ads and sales pitches. Use these venues to build up a network of trusted friends and business partners. It’s a great way to interact with like-minded people, while increasing your website traffic and building your list. Perry Belcher created a short video explaining how to use Social Media Marketing for your online business.
9. Clothing & Brand Creation
This method is for the creative types, who enjoy graphic design and the creation of stunning graphics. If you are not that creative or familiar with creating graphics, then you could pay someone to create one for you. Once you do that, you can join Cafepress for free, open up a shop and upload your graphic. You can then choose which types of shirts and other products that you want sold with that graphic on, and set the prices. Anything above the set Cafepress base price, will be your profit — per shirt or item that is sold. If you have a niche website, you can take advantage of that and create a graphic, sell some items that relate directly to the niche product. This can create a nice income stream, especially if the topic of your clothing is popular or controversial.
10. Mailing Lists & E-Mail Marketing
E-mail marketing encompasses tactics which are used to correspond with possible clients and website visitors. Traffic your website receives from social networks and all other venues, ideally will join your e-mail list. Some Internet Marketers use e-mail marketing as their main method to profiting online. It is highly profitable if you are tactful and do not spam people. E-mail marketing is also an integral part of all of the other money-making methods listed above. It goes hand-in-hand with the other marketing techniques. In very basic terms, when targeted website traffic visits your website, you do not want them to read a little post and then leave (and never return). You want to direct them to join your “list.” You may offer them a free gift and in return they fill out their e-mail address and their details are automatically stored in your autoresponder e-mail management software. In the future, you can send out mass mailings to your list if you have some more free information or a product that you want to tell them about (either yours or an affiliate product promotion). This can be very profitable.
Personally, I use Send Studio’s E-Mail Marketer software to manage my list. There are no monthly fees and there are a lot of great features. With a high-quality list, it’s possible to send out one e-mail and make thousands of dollars from that single message. One important tip I have is this: create a short series of high-quality useful messages to send out that relate to your website. Do not try to sell the reader anything at all in the first 5 messages. If your readers are loyal and enjoyed what you provided, they are more likely to buy from you in the future if you promote a product to them. I’ve seen Internet Marketers take e-mail marketing too far by sending out spammy-type e-mails every single day trying to make a few quick bucks. Those tactics will annoy your readers and they will unsubscribe — it will also damage your reputation and word spreads fast online. So, if used tactfully, e-mail marketing is highly profitable.
Holly Mann is the author of Honest Riches [http://www.honestriches.com], one of the most sought-after guides to making money online through totally honest Internet Marketing methods. Holly shares free tips, resources and tools to help you make money online [http://www.honestholly.com] at her Honest Holly blog. Holly is known for being real and providing solid, no-fluff information and step-by-step tips. She is a veteran of the U.S. Army and a mother to a bright 4-year-old boy. She currently resides in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Discover my most recommended method of making money online
This article contains affiliate links, I will make a commission when anybody buy from it.
Originally published at https://ezinearticles.com on August 8, 2009.
