There are many legit ways to make money online. If you search for this term on Google, you’ll be overwhelmed by the tons of...
There are many legit ways to make money online.
If you search for this term on Google, you’ll be overwhelmed by the tons of search results you get.
Here are some search results appearing on the first page of Google…
40 easy ways to make money quickly - Save the Student…
20 Legitimate Ways to Earn Money Online - The Work at Home Wife…
40 easy ways to make money quickly - Save the Student…
50 Legitimate Ways to Make Money from Home - Scott Alan Turner…
21 Legit Ways To Make Money Online - Forbes…
35 Real Ways to Actually Make Money Online - Lifehack…
I have nothing against all the websites that purport to show you how to make money online and which feature on the first page of Google, but what I can tell you is that the greatest noise is at the frontline.
Obviously, the webmasters behind these web pages have done an excellent job of search engine optimization (SEO).
Actually, Google reports that there are over 151,000,000 web pages where this term is found.
Check it out for yourself.
Perhaps by the time you hit the search button, the results will have increased.
This goes to show that millions of people are searching for this exact phrase or another phrase close to it.
This also goes to show that millions of people around the world are desperately looking for legitimate ways to actually make money online.
I have gone through this dilemma myself before I started actually making money online. And I lost money, effort and precious time dredging through a worthless quagmire of information and websites which amounted to nothing.
You’re lucky because I’ve already done the dredging for you, and if you will follow my advice you will perhaps, also begin to make money online.
Guaranteed.
Making money online is not rocket science. I mean, there are millions of players who are trying to get in today than at any other period in the history of the Internet, but it is still doable. In fact, there are more people earning a living online today than at any other time in the history of the internet.
History Repeats Itself
Making money online is a repeat of history. In 1849, gold seekers from Mexico, Chile, Europe, Australia, and even China emigrated to the U.S., flocking to the San Francisco area. What followed was a frenzy of human activity never seen before, with thousands of people from around the world moving to this particular area in California. They traveled on horseback, on carriages, and on foot. The journey was treacherous and many people lost their lives and property to highway robbers, hostile Red Indian tribes, wild animals and disease.
The California Gold Rush, as it’s commonly known, triggered one of the greatest human movements in history, but only a few people actually found gold. These were mostly the first ones to arrive. Obviously, these people became rich, but the people who became extremely rich were the ones who sold the tools and implements to mine the gold, like the shovels, pans, rockers, etc. and the clothes for mining the gold like the canvas pants, shirts, and the overalls.
Surprisingly, the internet opportunity is still not visible to 95% of the people out there. That’s because 95% of the economy is still operating offline.
The Game Is Rigged
Making money online is easy, although it has become a little harder and sophisticated. According to some surveys, only a paltry 1% of online marketers make good money online. Another 0.1% are believed to be online millionaires, but this figure is not confirmed. This is because the game is somehow rigged against the small man or woman who wants to enter. The barrier to entry is getting steeper.
Sadly, the remaining 98.9% of people hardly know anything about making money online or are just sitting on the fence posing as skeptics who believe that the whole idea of making money is a scam.
That being the case, there’s an underground group of online entrepreneurs who have mastered the skills of making money online on-demand, but you’ll hardly hear them blowing their mouths in a forum like this. Why should they?
They make good money that any senior bank executive would envy, and live like kings. So, they don’t feel any moral obligation to announce how much they earn or how they earn it. In fact, I know quite a number of online entrepreneurs who are making upwards of $10,000,000 a year, but they don’t even have a million views on Quora.
Luckily, I’ve been around for a while and fortunately, I’ve secretly explored what these guys do. What I can tell you is that they make money that any ordinary citizen would shudder at and it’s not magic.
Basically, there are quite a few profitable ways to make money online. However, depending on the degree of sophistication, these ways change from time to time:
1. Online Publishing — 
This involves self-publishing an ebook on Kindle, CreateSpace, and ACX Publishing. Basically, if you have something to tell the world you can write a book.
2. Amazon FBA —
Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) is a logistics and fulfillment service run by Amazon through which you ship your products to the end-customer. Basically, you find the products you’d like to sell either from third-party suppliers or your own warehouse, and Amazon handles the fulfillment (storage, repackaging, sales, shipping, and customer support).
3. Drop-Shipping —
Dropshipping is a retail fulfillment method where an online store doesn't keep the products it sells in stock. Instead, when the store sells a product, it purchases the item from a third party supplier like AliExpress and has it shipped directly to the customer. The store is hosted on a platform like Shopify, WooCommerce or BigCommerce.
4. Blogging — A blog is a personal or business diary-style informational website published on the World Wide Web. It consists of discrete, often informal posts that are typically displayed in reverse chronological order. Blogs can make a lot of money through monetization in several ways such as affiliate marketing, banner displays, pop-unders, and subscriptions.
5. Affiliate Marketing — Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a person or business (called merchant) compensates one or more affiliates (associate, or partner), for each lead or customer sale brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts or affiliate links. The affiliate simply chooses a product they’d like to promote, then markets or promotes the product through affiliate links, to earn a piece of the profit from each sale, performance or lead.
6. Information Products — An information product is a digital product where information and data are compiled in a specific structured manner and format to instruct, educate or guide the consumer for educational and other purposes. The format can be in PDF (eBooks) or other media like video, audio or a combination of eBooks, video, and audio.
7. Software and Mobile Apps — Developing and selling software online is fairly an advanced undertaking, but simple if you know computer programming. Developing mobile Apps is a relatively new field, but one that is growing rapidly. Think of mobile Apps as the new Web browser.
8. Coaching and Consulting — Believe it or not, if you know something many people don’t, you can be a consultant or a coach for that field. And you can make money doing exactly that — Offering consultancy services or coaching other people.
Although it’s quite possible to invest in and run all of these businesses concurrently, the best strategy is to start with one model and then once it becomes profitable, it can bring you money to move on to the next model.
The degree of complexity can become an entry barrier for you to move from one model to the next. So, the best option is to start with one model and make it profitable before moving to the next one.
How do you exactly make money online?
You make money online by solving a problem or meeting a need in a specific market called “a niche”. A niche is simply a part of a larger market, that specializes in a specific section of the larger market.
It’s best to look at life as a series of supply chains, with each supply chain having its own market and value chain.
What’s a supply chain?
A supply chain is simply a network of all the individuals, organizations and systems involved from the source of raw materials through manufacturing processes, activities and distribution to delivery, marketing, and sale of a product or service to the end-user or consumer.
A value chain is similar to a supply chain and follows the same pattern as the supply chain, and adds value to the supply chain at every link in the chain.
For example, in the food industry, the supply chain consists of the farmer, distributor, transporter, wholesaler, retailer, and consumer.
If you want to go into the food business, you can either enter as a farmer, distributor or retailer. Typically, the farmer makes a very small margin because of farm inputs, labor, and other costs, but the distributor can make good money if he/she understands the market and has more flexibility to weigh the market elasticity of price, supply, and demand. The retailer, also, doesn’t make much money because by the time a product reaches him/her there’s a huge cost accumulation in the value chain.
Enough said about the food business.
Let’s return to the online business models.
As mentioned earlier, we shall have to choose one online business model.
We want a model that has a low barrier to entry, low cost of starting, low operating costs and highly profitable. The model that seems to fit this description is affiliate marketing.
Now that we’ve laid the pieces together let’s examine how we can start to make money online
Identify A Niche
Business is simply about fulfilling a need or solving a problem. There are various ways to find a need. For example, Quora is a great Question and Answer forum where you can find the problems people are looking for a solution.
Identify The Offer or Product
There are a number of steps to starting affiliate marketing, but we can’t just proceed yet before we identify an offer. The offer will be our vehicle. It is what we shall be promoting. The offer must be aligned to solve a problem or need for a particular niche market.
Join An Affiliate Program or Network
Before you begin to promote an offer, you must join an affiliate program or network. An affiliate network acts as an intermediary between merchant affiliate programs and website publishers (affiliates) and facilitates the administration of affiliates accounts and transactions.
There are hundreds of affiliate networks and thousands of affiliate programs.
Here are just a few top affiliate networks:
Amazon Associates
CJ
FlexOffers
ClickBank
JVZoo
WarriorPlus
MaxBounty
Peerfly
Joining most affiliate networks is just a breeze. You will be taken through a simple verification and approval process. You may need to prove that you have a website or blog where to promote your offers, but a mere Facebook page will just do fine for most affiliate networks if you don’t already have a website.
Once approved, you will get an affiliate link and you can start promoting their products immediately. You can even start making money the same day.
Promoting Offers
Ideally, you will create a website or blog to begin promoting your affiliate links, but this is not necessary. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms will just do fine as long as you observe their policies.
Don’t send traffic to an affiliate link directly
You might be tempted to send traffic directly to an affiliate link from Quora, but this is not wise. You might get yourself banned from Quora. So, instead, build an external website or blog and then send traffic to that website or blog.
Build an Audience.
Audience is the new currency. Sending traffic directly to a product offer isn’t the best idea either. Instead, take time to build an audience. Any time you want to promote an affiliate offer you can send the offer to your audience.
Build An Email List
Email is still the most effective method of promoting an online business. To build an email list, you need to build a squeeze page.
What’s a squeeze page?
A squeeze page (or lead capture page) is simply a landing page created to request prospective subscribers to opt-in your email list by leaving their names and email addresses.
Almost no one these days will give you their email for free, therefore you must give them something of value before they can agree to opt-in to your email list. This could be a free eBook, a video or a free course.
You can check out my Quora profile for a few free courses on how to create an email list.
Although you can create your own squeeze page and connect it to an autoresponder, by far the most efficient way is to use a Sales Funnel. With a sales funnel, you don’t even need a website. Everything is handled within the sales funnel.
You can check out my Quora profile for a link to some of the most popular sales funnels in the market.
Growing Your Email List
You can grow your email list by promoting your offers through various platforms like your website, blogs, and social media. My favorite social media platforms include YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
The steps shown here are not exhaustive y any means. For detailed steps about online marketing and affiliate marketing, in particular, check out my Quora profile for a detailed course about the topic.
In Conclusion
In conclusion, making money online isn’t easy.
In as much as a little toddler must learn how to crawl before they begin to walk, online marketing has a learning curve. Making money online is not a get-rich-quick scheme.
As mentioned earlier, there are people who are making millions online, but they all started from somewhere. There are many moving parts and the ground is treacherous.
The easiest way to make money online is to find someone who is already doing it and copy exactly what they’re doing.
“If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you'll achieve the same results.” — Tony Robbins
In fact, if you would rather have fast results, you can just skip all these steps and leverage the work of other people, who have already developed systems that can save you time, effort and money.
Warning: Only buy recommended systems that have withstood the test of time and are proven to work.
There’s the hard way and there’s the EASY WAY.
Leveraging is a smart way to get into online business faster without going through the hustles and bustles of building websites and sales funnels.
Saves you a great deal of time, effort and money.
Obviously, this will not come without a price, but this is nothing compared to the value packed into some of the systems I recommend.
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