Over the last few years I have tried several ways of making money online.
I wanted to get rich quick. Don’t we all?
I fell for the hype and got out my credit card, but I’m not ashamed. I’m human, and the sales copy was brilliantly written and tapped into my psyche and convinced me.
I gave it a shot, and I failed many times, but I’m not afraid because that’s when I learnt my biggest lessons.
I have had a few successes and many failures.
3 Ways I’ve Tried (and failed) To Make Money Online:
1. Make Money Online Simply By Purchasing A Domain Name?
- If you are holding on to your domain names hoping for the day you get a big offer for it, don’t hold your breath.
- Ever been shocked that a particular domain name is still for sale? Ever been amazed that it hadn’t been purchased already by someone else? Don’t be. There are thousands of domain names like that
- No matter how exclusive a domain name you think you have, there are a million ways someone with real content will beat you in the search engines and sidestep you by merely adding a dash or another word to the domain name they buy for $25 to avoid purchasing yours for thousands of dollars
2. Make Money Online With Affiliate Marketing?
- There are lots of variations on this, one common example is that you are promised $1 every time you sell a digital product. Your task is to get your hyperlink in front of a large audience so you buy advertising space on big websites such as TradeMe, NZHerald, YouTube, Facebook etc using an ad network such as Google Adsense, AdBrite etc.
- Unfortunately the click-through rates are never as good as you thought they would be (the mega affiliates have already saturated the market and made all their money before you got your affiliate code) so if you ever make a sale, it’ll cost you $1.10 to make it (oops, you only made $1 on that sale so you just made a loss of 10c…)
- Another variation is starting a small blog and featuring your affiliate links in the sidebar (or in the articles themselves). Sorry, your web traffic levels probably won’t reach critical mass, and the poorer quality your content, the worse the future looks for you if you rely on free traffic from Google
3. Make Money Online By Blogging?
- Could you quit your day job and start writing full time and earn an income by selling advertising on your amazing articles? Probably not.
- It seems that the only people making money by blogging are those that teach others how to make money from blogging…
- I’ve written some pretty awesome articles over the years (if I do say so myself) and I actually have been able to turn one popular article into a small business, but I’m not going to give up my day job to write full time, are you?
My Slow-Cook Recipe For Making Money Online
I have had a small number of success at earning money online, so here is my recipe if you want to do the same:
- Find a niche that lots of people are interested in (and ideally only a few people are servicing)
- Do a better job than your competition at writing interesting, engaging content (eg articles, reviews, start discussions)
- Attract the people that are interested in this niche (eg with organic search engine traffic, direct marketing, advertising, Facebook, Twitter)
- Monetise the web traffic (with Adsense, or direct ad selling, or hold out for a buy-out of your business)
- Sidenote: On average you need 100 visits to earn $1 with Adsense. Getting 30 visits per day? Hooray, you’ll earn $2/week!
There is no magic bullet.
And if you see a magic bullet for sale then that get-rich-quick gun fired a long time ago and you are too late to rake in a huge pile of cash.
What about you?
If you have tried and failed, or tried and succeeded at making money online, add your comments below.