The thing is, there are thousands, possibly millions of websites you can work with and make money online. However, the business models or even the strategies you use to make money online differ from website to website. Some websites can pay better than others, while others pay peanuts, and so on…
Here’s a list of some of the top 21 websites on the Internet according to Alexa:
- YouTube
- Tmall
- Baidu
- Sohu
- Taobao
- Wikipedia
- Yahoo
- Jd
- 360.cn
- Amazon
- Netflix
- Aliexpress
- Bing
- Microsoft
- Ebay
- Twitch.tv
- Apple
There are ways to make money with each of these websites, but you need to research and find out how you can do it. Research is usually the best way to find undiscovered treasures hidden on the internet.
For example, below is a list of ways you can work with these websites and earn money. Don’t just look at the more common direct methods like employment which most people think is the only way to earn a living. Look at creative ways that you can make money indirectly.
All these websites combined are worth trillions of dollars. This means they make more money than they’re able to comprehend. Which means there must be a way to siphon some of the dollars.
Before I tell you what you can do to make money with these websites, let me just say that there are so many ways to make money with any of these websites.
As you can see below, you can earn money in various ways:
- By offering a service to a company (consultancy).
- By selling your own products online (books, online store)
- By buying something from one online store and selling on another (arbitration)
- By buying a service from one website and selling on another (arbitration)
- By buying a website and selling it at a profit.
- By becoming a middleman.
- By selling your time.
- By maintaining a company’s social media accounts.
- By writing articles for a website
- By mystery shopping or playing online games for a company.
- By taking online surveys on behalf of companies.
- By selling other people’s products online (affiliate marketing)
- By working for online companies (online job, gigs)
Think of other creative ways. Actually, the list is endless. The models and methods vary from company to company and as I said before, there are myriad ways to make money online.
If you Google the words, “How To Make Money Online”, you will get more than 7,630,000,000 search results.
If you Google the words, “How To Earn Money Online”, you will get more than 7,330,000,000 search results.
Notice the search results are very close. That means there are many people searching for ways to “earn money online” or ways to “make money online”.
People use these terms interchangeably without realizing that the terms actually mean two different things.
Obviously, there’s an exodus from the traditional 9-5 daily grind to remote online jobs. Who needs a 9-5 job and struggling to pay rent in expensive cities like San Francisco or New York when you can easily make money online?
With a simple laptop, your office can be anywhere you like. You could be sitting in your bedroom or travelling to a remote tropical island off the coast of Africa while enjoying your favourite drink. More and more people are quitting their day jobs to do remote work—working only from their laptops.
According to studies by Global Workplace Analytics and FlexJobs, the remote workforce has grown by 159% since 2005, and remote workers will make up as much as 50% of the entire workforce by 2020, thanks to the ease of making money online.
Let me just say that you can make money from just about any website as long as they need a service and you have the skills to perform a task. However, later I will move into more specific ways to make money online.
I’ll begin by telling you about my own online journey.
Several years ago, I was telephoned by a company, which asked me if I could modify and modernize their website. They had responded to an ad that I had placed in a bulletin board. By then there was no Facebook or Instagram. I said that I could, although web design was still new to me. I needed the money, therefore I said I would do it for a small fee. I didn’t even know what amount to charge. All I wanted was a few coins to get me by. It wasn’t a terrific job but they didn’t complain. That company became my first web design client.
From there, I graduated to other more advanced jobs, and my skills also improved. For example, I noticed that most websites had dynamic web pages developed using a content management system (CMS) and a server-side programming language like Java, ASP or PHP. Python had not entered the scene in a big way. There was no Django to fuel Python.
So I embarked on another journey to learn these programming languages, and work became easier for me. Previously, I only knew HTML and CSS. Developing purely HTML and CSS websites required each web page to be weaved separately and then join all the pages together. This created spaghetti code and sometimes you could get an error that cost hours of debugging before you discovered what was missing.
Server-side programming removed all the headaches of HTML/CSS coding and generated dynamic web pages that were stored on the server-side database. You could generate hundreds of web pages this way as long as you created the content for it. The CMS managed everything. Examples of popular CMSes include WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Others include Django and Laravel, but these are more of web development frameworks.
Cut a long story short, I became quite good at this, having learned to develop in several CMSes and frameworks.
I won’t go into the details of this, but I noticed that this was just one type of job and I was practically employed by someone who was probably sitting in a bar drinking a beer while I worked my ass off developing his/her website as long as they paid me. Many times the pay was meager after hours of toil. Most of the time, clients didn’t care how much I had sweated and toiled to produce the finished work. And sometimes they refused to pay.
There came a time when I got tired of the whole thing and decided to look for alternative ways to make money online. I was looking for something that did not demand much of my time but paid well with less effort.
Fast-forward, I tried a couple of other online methods but these did not yield much profit. Here are a few examples:
- Blogging,
- Web design
- eCommerce
- Dropshipping
- Taking Surveys
- Virtual assistant
- Freelancing
- User testing
- Data entry
- Transcription
- ETC…
Most of these gigs were quite engaging and took most of my time. And I enjoyed little freedom, to say the least. If you're already working in a 9 to 5 daily grind, the effect is similar to trading your time for money, working for several employers and getting paid peanuts for the skills you put in. Surprisingly, some people are quite comfortable with this arrangement and will do several jobs both offline and online without complaining.
My research took me on a journey where I evaluated several alternatives to make money online. Of particular importance, I was looking for something that had the following criteria:
- Passive income
- Low investment
- Low risk
- Low learning curve
- Scalable
- High potential
- Hands off.
- It can be automated.
I found a few online business models that fit these criteria:
- eCommerce
- Dropshipping
- Affiliate Marketing
- Blogging
eCommerce was ok., but required a small investment in inventory. Besides, there were many issues about shipment and order fulfillment.
Dropshipping was similar to eCommerce except that the risks associated with inventory, shipping and fulfillment were greatly reduced.
Blogging required the creation of a ton of content, search engine optimization (SEO) and a great deal of time before a website can rank on search engines.
All in all, there are people making a kill with these business models, but the sacrifice is huge.
So, you can guess what I settled for. Affiliate Marketing. YES, I found affiliate marketing to be the best fit for my purpose.
Affiliate Marketing is a type of performance-based marketing whereby you collect a commission from a sale, a lead or some action a customer takes. You can learn a great deal about affiliate marketing simply by Googling “affiliate marketing”.
There are several affiliate marketing models and compensation plans but the most popular ones are, Cost Per Action (CPA) and Cost Per Sale (CPS).
When I started, I was faced with a ton of problems. I attended many online courses the gurus were selling, but nothing came of it. I just couldn’t make any money online. Not even a consolation dollar.
I wondered what I was doing wrong. Naturally, I suspected the competition. Little did I know that everything had something to do with my mindset until someone helped me. My approach to affiliate marketing was all wrong. Besides, I was unfocused and trying many shiny objects at the same time and getting zero results in return.
What really changed my life was the realization that I was trying to sell to people. People hate to be sold and if you try it you will fail miserably.
People like to be approached in a gentle manner using a language they understand without suspecting you’re trying to sell them anything. You must learn to appeal to their subconscious emotional part of their brain. I know I’m revealing a lot of information the gurus won’t speak about. I don’t care because all I want is for you to start making money. Even if you don’t find this information useful, I’m sure someone will pick it and run with it.
This is called COPYWRITING. Once I learned this little trick, the sky was the limit. In my profile, I’ve shared much information about copywriting especially if you go through some of my earlier articles.
But that’s not all. To become good in affiliate marketing, you must determine to learn marketing in depth. Copywriting is just a part of it. Copywriting is simply a way of using words to persuade people to buy something. Copywriting is a marketing skill you cannot afford to ignore in the online marketing world. Copywriting helps you to PreSELL the product before sending your prospective customers to the actual product.
The secret to making money online is that there is no secret. Everything you need is already there, as long as you know how to use it.
The other thing you need is an email list. The reason for this is that once a lead becomes a buying customer you have no way of contacting the customer if you don’t know their email address. The customer becomes the property of the product vendor or merchant.
This is not an article about affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is just one of the ways to make money online. I’m just giving affiliate marketing as an example. There are myriad ways to make money online depending on your preferences and passion.
However, keep this in mind that in everything THERE’S THE HARD WAY and THERE’S THE EASY WAY. I decided to take the easy way. Affiliate marketing is the easiest way to start making money online within no time, at low risk but with huge potential. Besides, it has a very low learning curve compared to the other methods.
The best way to learn affiliate marketing is by getting someone who is sympathetic enough to hold you by the hand. The hard way is to try to learn it all by yourself. By any luck, this may take you several years, and by then affiliate marketing will have gone a notch highe
No comments:
Post a Comment