Making Money on the Internet - Choose Your Direction
Hi,
Many people dream of blogging for profit, and this goal is not beyond your reach. I am sure you have average or above-average intelligence, you must be willing to work hard otherwise you would not be reading my posts and visiting other sites, I’m sure you have a basic grasp of blogging technology.
Then why is that that some people just don’t make it? Couple of reasons. More often that not bloggers have unrealistic expectations of how fast their readership will grow and how much money they will make, and when these expectations are not met the disappointment can crush the desire to continue blogging.
Friends - it takes TIME! When I read my stats I can see that my feed are being picked-up by several hundred individuals — however not everyone will use services like FeedBurner so that you can actively measure how far your message is being spread. Not everyone will subscribe to blog alerts for fear of being spammed (I don’t spam).
The other trap that many fall into has to do with lack of planning. If you want to turn a profit as a blogger, the key to success is to make a realistic plan and stick with it.
There are a few ways you can make money on the internet:
- Affiliate Sites - you could set-up one or more affiliate sites and actively promote them and drive traffic to those sites. You make money when visitors click on the links and in most cases when they purchase a product/service using your affiliate ID. There are pitfalls to this strategy - your affiliate ID could get stripped off of the link or the visitor bypasses you entirely and enters the affiliate ID directly into the address bar.
On the other side, if you are able to market the right products, you can make A LOT of money through affiliate sales and referrals!
Two people that I can recommend to you are:
1. James Martell (www.jamesmartell.com) - he’s a local guy (Vancouver, BC Canada) that makes money through affiliate websites. He has A LOT of sites - not one or two and does outsource much of the work of running the sites. He concentrates on building quality articles to drive traffic to his sites. Here is a sample site of James’ http://www.1st-in-cell-phones.com/ - if you’ve ever run into this design, this is James’ work.
2. Rosiland Gardner (http://superaffiliatehandbook.com/) is another person you could read up on. She consistently makes $30k - $50k per month through affiliate sales. If I remember correctly, she’s another Canadian.
I am sure there are others, but these two come to mind as they were the first two that I am familiar with. Now mind you what they teach isn’t rocket science - but if you’re totally new the information they provide will help you.
Now as you read both of these peoples stories, you are going to think “Hey…wait a minute! They’re Internet Marketers!!” - and my answer would be YES, they are.
They turned their affiliate businesses into internet marketing businesses by teaching others how to become top-tier affiliates. This is called diversification, and every business needs to do this. There may be dry spells in one area, but if you’ve got other areas to work on they can hold you over.
Whether you decide to start a blog, and try blogging for profit or run affiliate sites you need:
- Readers
- Visitors
No matter the type of site - these two are important. No readers? Who are you going to sell to? No visitors? Same problem.
As a side effect of having many readers AND visitors you can diversify your income streams by selling advertising.
Self-proclaimed DOT COM MOGUL, John Chow made $29,000 in February 2008 (http://www.johnchow.com/blog-income-report-february-2008/). His private ad sales raked in just over $14,000.00.
That brings me to the second way you can make money - BLOGGING. John Chow (and there may be others) consistently makes $30,000 per month blogging. Of course he is monetizing his traffic and does several things to generate income:
- private ad sales
- affiliate commissions
- text link ads
- ReviewMe service
- Kontera
- TTZ Media (one of his services)
He blogs about making money through blogging. Pretty simple, huh?
I also suggest you follow Alan Johnson over at www.theratingblog.com:
As a blogger, I started out 3 months ago with, just like everybody else: a functional website and a solid business model, 1 visitor (myself) and no RSS readers/newsletter subscribers.
Three months later, having reached one milestone after another, I currently find myself receiving over 50,000 unique monthly visits/ 200,000 monthly impressions and, with over 1,500 RSS readers / 1,500 newsletter subscribers, it’s definitely clear that TheRatingBlog.com is on the right track.
Can you imagine if John Chow were to create internet marketing material and charge a premium for his products? Forget $30k per month - I’m sure he would TOP that easily.
John makes a lot of money selling traffic, so the more traffic your site gets, the more advertisers will agree to pay you.
Building a strong base of visitors is hard work, You will need to be able to market your blog effectively.
Too many bloggers spend all of their time writing posts and almost no time marketing their project or interacting with other bloggers. Most definately updating as often as you can is a great way to keep your blog high on blogrolls and high in blog search engines like Technorati.
Once your readers know that you update frequently they will return to your site on a regular basis.
However, it does not matter how often you update if nobody is reading your page, so dont skimp on the time that you spend drawing visitors to your site.
To make your dreams of blogging for profit a reality make sure that you set aside some time to draw new visitors by setting up link exchanges with other bloggers, making contacts in the blog community, and following other established modes of winning traffic (commenting on like minded blogs works GREAT).
Regardless of what you do success is not going to happen overnight. Building the kind of readership that blogging for profit requires takes time and you need to win your readers trust. TRUST is the key. It’s hard to build but so very easy to loose.
If you are going to blog for profit, stay committed to your project during the initial period. To stay motivated, set goals for how often you will update and how many readers you want to attract, and then reward yourself for sticking with your plan.
In my post tomorrow, I’ll go into another method of making money online - stay tuned!
Regards,
Mohamed
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Comments
Hi Sarah,
You are welcome. I will send you some information via e-mail and am working on a series of posts on affiliate websites. I hope that you will continue to visit and read the posts. Sorry, I don’t have an ETA as to when they will be available. But if you have subscribed to my blog alerts you’ll get notified of any new post to the blog.
Regards,
Mohamed
Hello Again Mohamed,
I like the idea of an affiliate website. How do I set one up? What do I need? As I said I am recooperating from an accident. Can I do this in my part time? I visited the sites you mentioned but all of them want me to spend money. Can I do this for free?
Thank You!
Sarah