I have been lurking around DP for a little while now trying to get a feel for how people are making money on the web. I am a stay at home dad and am looking for a way to generate some extra income for my family. I have general internet knowledge, I have bought a few domains via godaddy to generate referrals for some incentivised affiliate marketing sites but nothing extravagant. I have about $60 right now to invest, and will be adding another $95 to that sometime this week so that puts me at about $155. So, does anyone have any general advice for me as to where to start, maybe an e-book that has proven to be successful? I am just looking to get my foot in the door.....please keep the advice to the thread as I am looking for generally unbiased advice, not advertisements......any advice would be greatly appreciated.....thanks!! josh
Well I do not have any advice really other than read a lot before you invest your money into anything. DP is filled with information that can make you thousands a month you just have to dig for it. DP pretty much is a treasure box somewhere located in some sand dunes so just search. To give you an example in late July 2007 I started with $100. Now its October 2008 and I have made over $10,000 with just that $100 starting out. The options are endless and you can definitely do it just pace yourself and don't jump ahead of yourself.
READ READ READ.... Find out what you really want to do first of all. Remember , blogs are FREE and you can put google ads on them. Try going to www.Blogger.com they are good. Start with a blog. $155 want get you much as far as a site goes and marketing. Unless you can code your own site... So i recommend going with a blog first. Join social networks ,forums - be active. Get your link for your blog out there.
Here's just a quickie: Make a blog Read other topics Make sure that your life as a Dad is not affected by any of this Join social networks (Forums) When you start making more money, you'll have more options!
start a blog, have self-hosted website.. all u can start with around $55 bucks, you can check my wordpress hosting in the my sis too.. all u need is time and passion. Also, u can check out my blog.. I am experiencing this too.. not intentionally making money, but to create traffic and readers.. so, bottom line, you can later monetize with the massive traffic and regular visitors and stickiness of your website, hope that helps. if you want some e-books, let me know, I have a few I can share. cheers
like Ramphix said take your time doing your research b4 you spent any money and take a look at my signature i have a lot of valuable info there.....that could get you started on the online marketing system......no need to spend more than $20.00 and i will be more than glad to help you get started.....trust me anybody could make a living on the internet you just have to stick to this forum and get to know people......everybody that signed up in this forums was because they are struggling paying bills and trying to take care of their families.If you have any questions please email me at i will be glad to help you....good luck!!! and yes you can....just believe in yourself and put your mind to it.
Your best bet is to look at business models that are already successful online and copy what they're doing (not steal, but copy the underlying structure) and apply it to your own product/service, then improve on it. Why reinvent the wheel?
Bugzy, I recently involved with health nutrition company that's going bananas in this country. I generate pretty good residual income for my family and planning to have money for my daughter's college with it. You budget is enough for this. If you are interested, PM me and will send you information for you to decide. Alex
Hi, My first question to you is: How much money do you want to make? There is a simple reason for this question. If for example your response was: $5000 per month then: That's $1250 each Week Would be $178 each Day $7.41 per hour So now I have to ask: "Do you think you can sell 4 products each day that cost about $45 each? (JUST 4 PRODUCTS!) If your answer is yes, then congratulations! The next thing you need to do is find a way to build a business around your idea of income. Why? Because 9 out of 10 people who are creating blogs etc. are maybe getting traffic now, but there is no guarantee that that traffic is steady! So it's very important you build a business around your idea before you are going to invest all your money. So look at your hobby's and search for products you can sell. If you are going to advertise on Adwords then please choose a product that gives you atleast $20 in commission because advertising can be expensive Normally I test a product first (direct linking) before I'm going to setup a review site / presell page. If a dirct link can't give me at least 2% conversion I stop promoting it. And you saved your self a lot of time. So step 1: Look at your hobby's Step 2: Search products you can promote with a healthy commission Step 3: Do PPC (adwords) with direct linking with a daily budget of (??) Don't forget to track the results so you know which keyword made you the money! Step 4: If it converts atleast 2% create a presell/review page. If it doesn't convert move on to an other product. Step 5: Watch your sales / costs to see if something is profitable. And if you see a product is profitable, find the weakness in the product, fix it by creating your own product and sell it! And a new business is born Good luck! Dennis
Well, what do you think you would enjoy doing? Do you enjoy writing? Try getting jobs as a freelance writer. A lot of webmasters and blog owners hire other people to ghostwrite their content for them. If you think you'd be good at graphic design, then find some freelance design work. If you want to earn money as a webmaster, then you need to read all you can. Start your website and/blog out about a subject or hobby that you know a lot about. Read tips on how to promote and market your website. Read about "bum marketing", so you'll get an idea as to how to promote your site/blog for free (without spamming).
I'm new to all this stuff too. I would say check out John Chow's free eBook and read blogs like ProBlogger and Copyblogger. (That's what I'm doing). I also like Gary Vaynerchuk for motivation.
If you are just starting out I would recommend that you don't invest your money right away. You can open a free blog at www. blogger .com and start from there. Then like everyone said READ, after you have some visitors to your blog get an AdSense account at www. adsense .com and post some ads on your blog. This is how I started out, and it is the cheapest way to go. NOTE ! Don't expect thousands of dollars to start rolling in the day after you make your blog. It takes time....
There's a lot of truth to what Marcho says above. Many a dollar has been wasted by overzealous beginnings - not that I'd have any experience with that, but I have a friend that may...
Don't invest such little money because when someone only has a little bit of money to invest it means they work hard for that extra money they've got and if you tanked, that's more disappointing than anything. You might want to start out with free promotion of your blog/site and you need to get an idea of what you want to promote and how you're going to get it out there.
First make sure you enjoy whatever project you pick, because you will be spending hours at first working on it with very little income from it. Also when choosing a project always consider the time needed to initially build the project then maintaining it. Example: If you build a blog you need to set-it up, pick a them/ subject , add content on a daily or weekly basis. Second you need to pick how your going to make money from this blog. Will it be from affiliate programs, Google adsense or will you be selling your own product or service. Remember just having a blog will not get people to visit it, you will have to get it ranked in the search engines. or get traffic to it by other means. Dont' waste your hard earned money right now, their are plenty of free resources & software products you can read & use out their for free. And most of the crap people are selling is re-boxed or outdated so be careful on what you spend your money on. Don't get me wrong their are some very good programs & books out there, but not in your price range right now. Research your ideas & look at the competition for each one, are they buying adsense ads and how much are they spending? Check the top 10 sites and check their avg traffic to each one, through sites like compete. Also check to see how many true comps it has for the possible tageted keywords, check how many searches the keywords gets on a daily basis. You always want to have enough searches daily to enter a new market and check your long tail keywords because many markets have a ton of longtail keywords that will produce quality sales that you can get ranked for pretty quickly without to many links needed. Start small and grow into your dreams... Anyway i hope this helps,
I appreciate the advice guys, wow DP really looks after its members!! I realize that I wont get rich right away and I think I am going to start up a blog and get my feet wet, before I could read the advice I went ahead and invested some money anyway in a PR4 domain which I have installed wordpress on. That took me like 5 hours to do, theres a lot there to learn for a n00b. I think the domain is a spanish word that may not even relate to what I will be blogging about so I may just use that to test the waters on a pay to blog site....I dunno....will having a PR4 domain help me at all in getting traffic or benefit me at all?
PR does not translate into traffic. I have sites with a PR1 that beat PR5 and 6's in search results. Does it help well first you have to look at where are those links are coming from and are they themed related. Plus you can get a PR 4 from just a few sites anyway, so your domain may not have any real value in the way of links. Plus check to see if those links have been removed, since you purchased it... Also check the sites anchor text used from the sites currently linking to it! and this will give you a good idea of what the old site was ranking for, plus go check out the wayback machine to see what the site was about, we always check that out first. Plus check to see if it's black listed, and or kicked out of google, etc..
Hi bugsy, There is tons of marketing material free on the net, at this early stage, you're in the right places, blogs and forums. 99.9% out there is garbage but they paint great pictures. Here's one straight up idea, since you have affiliate programs that can make money, advertise one. You can buy 1000 video ads for about $100 for testing purposes. These are like video branding services on YouTube. They will download hundreds of videos from YouTube matching the keywords you provide, and insert your ad into the beginning of the video clip and then re-upload it across our various YouTube accounts. Advertise your affiliate. Be glad to guide you further if you're interested. Happy advertising.