How to make money online (from someone who's tried it all).

Here's my two cents for anyone who doesn't know how to make money online and is looking for advice or ideas.

1). If you have time on your hands, ie: You don't want to be making $10,000 in 14 days or something ridiculous like that -- and you can wait a good 12 months, then content websites and SEO is a real nice way to make money. It takes time and persistence, but if you work hard at it, you can be making a fairly nice, regular income in as little as 12 months. The good part about making money this way is you get residual benefit from your effort. Once the sites are all up and making money, they pretty much stay up and make more money. If the content is interactive, such as enticing readers to keep coming back with forums and chats, etc - your income will just keep growing and growing until you get to a point where you don't really have to do much of anything.

2). However, if you don't want to wait that long and want to start making money right away - you need a product. You absolutely must have a product. The product can be virtual (ie: digital) or it can be a physical item. The again it could also be a service -- but you want to try and steer clear of the services -- they take too much time and people annoy you. They want stuff for nothing and the more you bend over for them, the harder they whip you. But products are a sure way to make"quick" money. The only problem is it can take a little trial and error (and some losses) before you actually latch onto a product that you can actually move fast enough to make a nice enough profit from. The downside to making money with a product is that once you've made money one week, you have to do it all again the next. If you stop selling, you stop making money. A product based business is quick to start, bit it's also quick to end -- very little residual benefit.

3). If you have plenty of money, you can simply buy your way into profit. Same as the real world. If you've got plenty of money, there's no reason why you should ever be broke again. Anyone on planet earth that goes from basically not having to work -- to becoming broke should be punched in the guts for being a moron. If you've got plenty of dough, you can easily make money out of PPC, Sending mail out on high quality lists, advertising on forums etc. There's also quite a lot of smaller websites around that get a nice amount of traffic, but they can't even get someone to pay $1.00 for advertising. See people are like sheep. If they see 15 ads all over one site, they want to advertise THERE! (Why? Don't ask me, I'm just telling the story).. Yet they wont pay a little guy $5 a month to advertise on his site. If you have a spare several hundred dollars a month, you can go around and find all these little websites and get your link on the front page of say 80 websites. If each of those 80 websites gets 100 visits a day, that's 8,000 visitors every day x 30 days = 240,000. Would you pay $400 to put your advertisement on a website that gets 240,000 uniques a month? Would you do it knowing that your ad was the only one on the website?

4). You can sell stuff on eBay, but threre's a reason why people call it FeeBay. The fees are too high. I can give you one bit of advice if you're selling on eBay. Don't even CONSIDER selling low cost items. You'll fail miserably. The fees are just too high to sustain low cost items. You need to find a higher priced product, sell less of them and try very hard to get it for as cheap as possible. Don't even bother trying to find dropshipping stores, because you wont find one that sells stuff cheaper than what's already on eBay. Save yourself a month of searching and grief. If you're going to sell on eBay, you need to contact manufacturers NOT wholesalers. FORGET the word "wholesale". The word you're after is "manufacturer" or "public outlet" -- and you need to buy in bulk. Big bulk. If you have $200 in your bank and no product.. just forget eBay.

What NOT to do:

1). Do not EVER -- {{{{EVER}}}} pay to join a "plan" that explains that if you join them they will make you money. They don't make you money. They suck everyone dry. If you REALLY want to promote a program that has a downline or something, or a program that relies on referrals for income, then go to hotscripts.com get a script, pay someone $30 to install it onto a website if you don't know how and you can run the SAME thing. The only difference being that you don't make 20% of 1% of the sales, you make 80% of 100% of the sales. ie: Just use your brains.

2). Don't pay ANYONE that tells you that they can send you 100,000 visitors for $9.95

3). If you ever see a web page online where a guy is talking like he's on speed, grinning (he might have his arm around a pretty girl).. or sometimes he's even sitting near a fireplace in a cashmere sweater.. close that website immediately. Don't listen to it. It's all lies. If you see pictures of flash boats, red cars or people holding heaps of money, you're in severe danger. If you can't unfix your eyes from the computer, just grab your coffee mug and smash the screen open or something. Do anything, but don't look at that website. It's evil!

4). Never pay for anything that a). Requires a subscription b). Part of your subscription goes to an upline. The idea sounds all well and good, and in theory it's fantastic. Problem is that 99.9% of YOUR downline wont pay their second subscription -- so the only person who'll be making any money is your "upline". The higher up in that line someone is, the more money they make.


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I could probably keep typing all day, but that'll do for now.

 

how about 100,000 links for free? Should we go for it or not?

 

lmao. okay...
Great post...
I definitely find that people seem to recommend making 'content sites' a lot, the problem with that is that I'm a web developer! I don't feel like I know all that much about anything except CSS and javascript!
Can you give me some ideas or examples or what kind of content works?
Thanks!

 

Yep, because it's free -- nothing to do with money -- just some fun

Well your answer is very simple!

If you're a developer (like me) .. just create consoles and programs for people to add content themselves. I am currently building a CMS that lets people who have absolutely no idea how to build websites (or what SEO even is).. and they can add some content and have a perfectly SEO's website.

Basically, I have programmed all my SEO knowledge into the website. All they have to do is enter some information. Then after that the site is basically set up and they simply add content, just like a blog.

You should make something similar. As for what type of content.. anything "interactive" is good! Ideally (if you're a developer), you don't want to write any content at all (excerpt maybe some starter content that pulls in interest). It's best to create and administrate a system where "users" come along and add the content for you. ie: One thing I do with my websites is pull content out of the forum database and display it on various website pages (including the index page), and voila! Instant, automatic, updated content -- and I don't have to do a whole lot of anything to keep it running.

Automation is very nifty. But there's people around who don't know what about development, and probably couldn't care less about it and will therefore never know much. Such people should concentrate on community based interactivity such as forums, networking. Such people should spend an hour or two each day writing articles that will generate interest and questions, which will get people returning to their website.

ANY interactive content is great. Review sites are pretty cool. People love writing reviews, and its quality content.

Also, niche sites are very good to create. Find topics that not too many other people have created websites for. Then create the BEST website online

Example:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Go there, then type in a topic that interests you (one or two words).

Once you've done that find out how many people are searching for related terms. Click "Approx Avg Search Volume" to see if there's a term that is heavily searched. Then make a list of the most heavily searched terms. Then go to Google.com and type those words into the search engine. Then look at the number of pages that Google has listed. Then divide that number of pages by the "Approx Avg Search Volume", and make a list. You will see if there's a particular keyword or search term that is highly searched but very few people have content for it.

 

sounds good! I am gonna give it a try

 

Well so you should -- zeriouz is the best traffic generation system online

 

can you suggest me what kind of blog we can make? and which type of content we have to put inside the blog that may increase the traffic to our site??


I think we have to Consider:
Title Tag
Meta Tag
etc etc

For on page optimization.

Similarly many people i think also submit their sites to many free online directories.So is it right way to increase the traffic??
Similarly blog marketing,forum marketing,youtube marketing etc etc people perform to increase the productivity + page rank and get visible on the high rank in Google.

 

The reason why I set that "ridiculous" amount was because I was always hearing it can be done and I studied a specific schedule. The money I made was to create more projects to keep my income rolling.

 

Oh please!
First you start this thread:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1021105
Then
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1038202
And now this one!
And people actually beleive you. Jesus!
No wonder the brainless idiots on this site haven't made a dime yet...

 

I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about or referring to.

I can assure you that I did not make this post:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1021105

 

Your generalizing a bit too much. I disagree. I could prove you wrong here just from personal experience. I sold hundreds of products on Ebay.

But for of the things you said I agree with you.

 

Mate, you most probably did.. and if so, well done..

..but I still believe my advice is just fine -- as it was directed to people who have abdolutely no idea. Or lets put it this way.. even if such people "did" get a hold of such a product, they'd probably not ahve made any money 30 days later.

No offense to people who have no intended.

 

Ya selling on Ebay is competitive I agree with you on that. Most important thing is you do your research so you don't get yourself into those get rich scheme dropshipper that give you crap.

But if you find a good dropshippers and the right products you can make some money. The key is you look for things people will want and what people are not selling already. The harder your product is to get the more leverage you get the more you can sell it for. If you go for the usually stuff like mp3 and such, most likely that wouldn't work with a dropshipper if you selling on Ebay, because Ebay has cutthroat prices for those things. Your better just selling on a website with your dropshipper in those cases.

 

"Anyone on planet earth that goes from basically not having to work -- to becoming broke should be punched in the guts for being a moron."

Best line from the whole post.

 

Mate, in all honesty -- I have never found a "dropshipper" offering any prices that are worth my time. If you have found one, then I'd be interested to know who it is.

As I said in my advice, the only way to obtain absolute minimum cost price is to look for manufacturing outlets or wholesale prices, direct from manufacturers.

Of course there are exceptions to the rule. Of course there are people who have and do make money out of dropshipping, but its a plain out fact that to find such prices (that someone else hasn't already found) is damn near impossible.

99.9% of businesses on planet earth work very hard at promoting their products and getting them into the hands of people and companies that can get the products sold. Now, if you go to ANY "online" dropshipper and try to find a product, I can tell you two things:

1). If you check on eBay, it will already be being sold for 20% less than the price the "dropshipper" is offering you..

2). Thousands of people would have found that product long before you even put your slippers on in the morning.

If I were to give advice to anyone about how to sell on eBay, I would give the exact advice I gave above - and the reason I can say that is because I've been there and done that. I know what I am talking about.

The good news is that 95% of people who want to make money online don't have any money to invest. They're looking for "dropshippers", where they can sell products for little or no upfront cost. But if you can get a hold of bulk items at manufacturers prices, you've got so much more of an advantage it's not even funny.

I thought so

 

That's a great post. It's what a lot of people who start venturing into the online world should read. I dread to think how many people have bought into these MLM schemes and scams etc

 

I made that post and I have no association with mrlen...

there is no need to insult or be hateful. I worked hard to attain my goal so I can be able to help others achieve. There will be a free blueprint that will help others succeed but right now, I have been working with another DP member who was looking for someone to JV with and understand the ropes. We want to make things happen.

why am I doing this? there is a serious problem arising with our economy and what better time to learn some self sufficiency?

I have worked really hard trying to get my offline clients to go online, put many hours into this and really wanted this to happen.

I dont appreciate the mockery.

IB

 

I've been through the school of hard knocks myself, and agree with almost everything in this entire post. Well written and a good read for any newbies out there.

Carol

 

Really, nice post. I've got much useful infor for myself.

 

Yes, it is useful because I have been there.