Hi all, I've been reading various internet marketing resources sporadically for a number of years, but I haven't attempted to get anything moving yet. Recently, however, it has become clear to me that my current income is totally inadequate and I need to take action. I have some potentially neat ideas for future projects, but right now I just need to get some income established. What is the best and fastest way to establish a reasonable income online? By "reasonable," I don't mean thousands a month, but just something that builds up to $400-800 within a decent time frame. My eventual goal would be to make around $2-3k per month, but I understand that will require considerable time and effort. So, for now, what's my fastest route to several hundred dollars per month online? The big limitation here is that I have virtually nothing to spend, so it has to involve a lot of free resources, even if they require some extra work. I know nothing happens instantly, but I'd like to establish something that has the clear potential to bring more than a few pennies within two to three weeks. Something I can show the wife without her chuckling, if you know what I mean. Anyone up to the challenge?
I'll provide some more information that might help some of the experts here: Strengths: I have excellent communication skills, an IQ that is well above average, sharp critical thinking skills, an innovative mindset, leadership abilities, and some prior experience in internet content creation. I also have a great deal of time freedom and the ability to work full time. Weaknesses: I lack focus at the moment, and despite my communication skills, blogging has never seemed like an attractive option (although it's possible I just haven't found the right niche). More generally, many of my interests are significantly outside the mainstream, and I have trouble doing things "strictly for the money." I'm willing to do such things, but they need to be clearly outlined in a step-by-step manner. "Make a blog with Adsense on it and keep your fingers crossed" is not the sort of advice I am looking for. Current situation: I am disabled and my house is starting to fall apart, which is why I've recently become strongly motivated to find some way to apply whatever skills I have to online income-generation. But again, I need to be able to show people something more than $3.62 in an Adsense account or the equivalent in order to be taken seriously. People are depending on me and I need to find a way to bring in real money. I have no particular interest in getting rich, although if it were to happen, I'm sure I could find good uses for the money. But what I am trying to do, above all, is find a simple and straightforward way of moving toward several hundred dollars a month within a short period of time, and then seeing what happens from there. Completing offers at freebie sites and the like is out for me, as I have no interest in this route and cannot qualify for enough offers anyway. I am looking for work I can do which has quick results at a decent level of return.
That's a difficult one. Don't make a website where you plan on making money off of ads. It can take a very long time to get enough visitors to make that worthwhile. Most people earn peanuts with Adsense. If you have any skills, you can often market those here in the Buy, Sell, Trade forums. If you are a writer or good with graphics, you can find some jobs there.
Thanks for reading all of that, and I look forward to any responses I get. If anyone is able to point me in the right direction, I'd be happy to provide a testimonial or reference to that effect.
tennisplayer89, Thanks for your response. That's the impression I've gotten as well. The trouble with that is that so far, I haven't seen anything of that nature that isn't "peanuts" as well. But maybe I'm just not looking hard enough. I do know that most of the "paid forum posting" opportunities seem pretty ridiculous to me in terms of payment. Granted, I've written 25,000+ forum posts in my lifetime for free, but even so, a nickel per post or something similar doesn't sound like a very productive use of my time. Do you know of anything better?
Are you a good writer? Can you research a topic (any topic), and write a good piece of content on it? If so, you can probably get paid to write content for blogs, or write articles. You say you have experience creating "internet content". I don't even know what that means. Can you code php? HTML? Do you know graphic design? Whatever skill you have, somebody out there wants it. You just need to find them, and convince them that you're worth spending their money on.
No graphic design skills to speak of, and my HTML skills are pretty run-of-the-mill. "Internet content" in my case refers to written work such as how-to articles and personal websites. I've been an unpaid political and philosophical essayist for some time. I may look into doing sales copywriting. While it isn't necessarily something I'd have chosen in different circumstances, I think I could be pretty good at it. Churning out tons of generic SEO content articles and the like doesn't sound too viable for my personality, and at the rates people seem to be paying, I'm not sure it fits the bill in terms of time and effort vs. return. I see a lot of people wanting 400-600 word original articles for $5. Putting aside the production-line monotony of something like that, I'm not sure I could churn out enough content to make that economically viable. I guess maybe I should have specified that I'm looking for something a bit "outside the box." Over the past several years, I've already investigated most of "the usual" opportunities fairly thoroughly.
I guess another way to frame my question might be to say that I know this forum is full of people who are making very good money online, and I doubt any of them are doing that by churning out full-length articles all day for $5 each or making forum posts for 5 cents a pop. Maybe I'm asking the improbable in the sense that I'm looking for some "inside tips," so to speak. I do know this is a very competitive industry and no one can be reasonably expected to reveal too much. I guess I'm hoping to get lucky and find someone willing to bend the rules a bit to help me out.