Grow You

One of the best ways to improve yourself, your wealth and your long term wellbeing (as well as that of your family’s) is to have a second income. Why not just get all your income from one employer, you might say?

The Reason Why

Most people are reliant on a single source of income usually as an employee of a company, large or small. We seem to have long since moved on from where you didn’t need any money to survive! In days gone by we would forage for our own food and it didn’t need 8 hours a day to do it either.

But these days most people rely on getting money from one employer. We do everything in our power not to upset them in case we are fired. And now that the recession is hitting hard and companies are downsizing and laying off workers, practically everyone is afraid of losing their job.

Why not diversify with a second source of income? In fact, the phrase “second income” is a bit of a misnomer. Why not have 3, 4 or even 10 different sources of income? Not only will you lower your risk of loss if any of them goes belly up but you could potentially double or triple your present income or even more.

My Plan

There are two ways to make money on the internet. They both involve having a minimal website but you definitely don’t need to be a programmer – I’m not.

Affiliate

Half my plan is to make money as an affiliate. This means promoting products owned by others in a similar way to a car salesman selling cars that belong to the dealership.

The commission percentage that you can get varies greatly.

The worst commissions are on physical products. This is because profit margins are already squeezed tight and any extra sales that you can bring will still involve costs of manufacture and delivery to the product owner.

The best commissions are on information products that are delivered digitally such as educational pdf guides and downloadable/streaming videos. As broadband becomes available in more and more households and at higher speeds then video in particular is going to become even more popular.

There are many places to sign up and register to promote products as an affiliate but one of the most popular is Clickbank.

Create a free blog at Blogger.com. Choose a few products from Clickbank to promote on the same theme and then write a blog on that theme and link to these products throughout. You could do one on golf, high blood pressure, gambling or anything really.

Product Owner

You can make a lot of money as an affiliate and many people get rich this way but it is even better if you can make your own product. The reason is that if you make your own product then you can offer affiliates to go out and there and promote it for you.

You’ll give up some of the profits of your product but you’ll get back way more traffic. For example, say you have a $50 product and you can only sell one per day through your own efforts. That’s a profit of 50×30= $1,500 per month.

But offer affiliates 75% and if they bring you 10 times the traffic then you’ll make 0.25x50x30x100= $11,250 per month, over 7 times as much money!

The beauty of making your own information product is that it is much easier than you think. To get some idea, check out some of the products that people have made here: CB Analytics.

Progress

So far I’ve dabbled into both being an affiliate and a product creator. However, over the next month I am going to seriously ramp up my efforts. Stay tuned to find out how well I do.

I remember when I first started to use the internet back in 1994, I heard that you could make money on the internet.

Instantly I thought “SCAM”! After all, just look at all the scam emails and SPAM emails selling me things I didn’t want. Anyone trying to make money on the internet is a scammer, right?

Fast forward 10 years and now I realise how foolish I was and I wish I had gotten into the game earlier.

The simple truth is, there are many, many legitimate ways to make money on the internet.

How? Give Me An Easy Way!

OK, so how can you make money?

One of the easiest ways is to create a blog like this one. Do you see those ads on this site? They are the easiest way to start making money on the internet.

All you need to do is to start a blog on one of your favourite hobbies and write about it every few days. Add some advertisements and you’ll get paid once a month, it’s as simple as that. There are some people making thousands every day using this simple model.

The easiest and totally free way to get started is to go to Blogger.com. These guys are owned by Google so you’ll be able to integrate these “Ads by Google” really easily with one of their widgets.

It literally takes only 2 minutes to set up a blog and get going so what are you waiting for?

Taking It Further

I highly recommend going the above route if you are totally new to making money. So, what do you do afterwards?

Most internet marketers try affiliate marketing next. This is where you refer people to a product that they might need and in return you get a commission. But instead of the lousy 10% commissions that you might get in the real world, you can get commissions of 50% or higher on the internet!

One of the most popular affiliate programs is Clickbank. Many internet marketers use their program because they are US based and pay regularly. They have thousands of products that you can promote.

Take a look for yourself here: Clickbank Marketplace. You can see all the different products that they have from “make money online” to “improve your golf swing” to “how to cure your acne”.

The beauty is that someone else has already made these products, all you have to do is sign up using the link at the top and then go out and promote these.

An Example

OK, let’s say that you love golf. Then the first thing that you can do is to go straight to Blogger and create yourself a free blog.

After creating the blog, make sure to add the “Google Adsense” widget. You should be able to figure it out yourself but if not, here is a tutorial on the Blogger site: How do I put Adsense on my blog (using Layouts)?.

Now add your first post and keep adding them at least once per week. I recommend adding more, maybe every few days. The more posts you have the more traffic you will get from search engines like Google. Remember, traffic = $$$

Next, sign up to Clickbank. You can do that by clicking here or just using the “Sign Up” link at the top of the marketplace you saw earlier. Basically, this will give you a special “unique id”. Remember this for later.

Now, go back to the Marketplace and look for golf products. Just type “golf” into the search box. It comes back with about 50 products!

You can view the sales pages of each product if you want. That doesn’t matter too much because all these products are listed in order from most popular to least popular. Just go with what sells and pick the first 3.

Click on the “create hoplink” next to each product. You’ll be asked to input your unique ID and then click the “create” button. This will give you your special link.

Now just go back to your blog and use your own special link. You can recommend this product to your readers, you can write a short review (give the benefits mentioned in the sales page), you can just casually link hot keywords like “golf swing” etc. The limit is bound only by your imagination!

Traffic – Getting People To Your Site So You Can Make Money

A website is no good if no one is referring traffic.

The easiest way to do it is to put a link to your website in your signature on forums. Free, easy and requires no effort.

The second best way to get traffic is to write articles for “article directories”. These are sites that receive heavy traffic from Google and you can “siphon off” some of this traffic if you write articles. The best article directory out there is EzineArticles. I would stick with this one for now. Simply write a few articles and you can guarantee targetted traffic.

The Results – How Much Can You Make?

There is no reason why you cannot make $50 a day using this method. Think about it, you only need to make one sale per day to get this kind of money.

But remember, money doesn’t grow on trees and you won’t make that from day one. “Content is King” – you need to write regularly on your blog as this will ensure traffic and returning visitors in the long term. You also should do some traffic promotion as mentioned above.

As they say in Field of Dreams – Build It And They Will Come

I hope this helps you in your quest to start making money online. If you have any questions then please leave a comment.