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 0.25×50x30×100= $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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 at 9:46 pm and is filed under Make Money Online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.