I suppose it is time for me to ramble on a bit more about making money online since it has been over a month since my last post. I should at least write about what I said I would in previous entries. At this point I am not sure how much detail I can give about the make money online programs that I have tried with out getting into trouble. On the other hand, I see a lot of sites criticizing each other and never hear about any negative repercussions. At least none that I would care about. I think I'll go ahead and explain an online store I tried and had a little success with. As far as making money online goes these programs are very popular now and you have probably seen a few yourself. I feel safe about this because I can describe it in detail without actually mentioning any company names or stepping on any one's toes. There are tons of them around now. You can buy an online store to sell just about anything nowadays. In my case it was electronics.
Does it work? Yes but only because of skills I acquired elsewhere. Specifically, I mean that my other attempts at learning how to be an online marketer gave me a lot of information I needed to make it work. If someone who knew nothing about making money online just bought in and tried it they would fail miserably. The basic idea is to sell you a website. Now this website will be pretty much what they advertise. That is to say it is designed to sell products of whatever type they are trying to push. For the money I paid it actually wasn't so bad. Especially considering what some of the other make money online sites out there will give you for the same amount. They gave me my little electronics site nice and pretty and most of the links worked. It had little menus along the top of the page where you could get to different categories. Given, the categories were ridiculous. If I click monitors in the menu i get a bunch of accessories. God forbid I click monitors and it shows me an actual monitor I could buy. Looking back, it was terribly designed but they had the right idea. They did have a different page for each product and descriptions. That alone is a lot of work and certainly warrants some payment. Naturally it had to be tested so I had a friend who is also in the business of making money online go there and buy something. He bought my overpriced merchandise and after a bit of waiting I did receive my expected cut.
There is one thing I want to point out about this particular make money online business real quick. A common technique that most of these online stores use. They try to push the program. By this I mean they try to push you to sell their make money online program and give you a commission each time you do. It's not really a bad thing but in some cases it can be because it defeats the whole purpose of the site. If you buy into one of these make money online programs and they put more emphasis on selling the program to other people than on selling the actual products you should be wary of it. Looking at it from another perspective, if you are trying to sell merchandise that you own then you need to push the program. You want as many people and websites out there selling your stuff as you can get but in many cases this leads to sort of a pyramid. If everyone who buys in only makes money online by selling websites to other people then it makes you wonder if anyone is actually having any success selling the electronics or what ever the case.
Most of these programs allow you to set your own price for any given item. They set the price that you pay then you can adjust the final amount according to how much money you want to make off of each sale. One of the nice things about making money online with these sites is that they usually come with all the billing taken care of. Most will set it up so that you can accept all the major credit cards from day one without having to set up any additional accounts or anything. This marketing idea has been around for a very long time and certainly is not Internet dependant. I'm sure you have all seen the commercials on TV for similar money making systems that do the same thing minus the website. The off line end of this particular market just centers around other forms of promotion and advertisement such as newspaper and magazines. Regardless of whether you're promoting an online or off line program it is best to look into all available media types at your disposal. The more the better.
As i mentioned before it is very unlikely that your average Joe could just buy one of these make money online stores and actually be successful with it. The problem is that most people who buy into these businesses do not know the first thing about online promotion. Naturally, the sites that sell these stores claim that anyone can do it just like all the other Internet gurus out there seem to do. Don't get me started on make money online sites again. With any website regardless of the product the one thing that determines failure or success is traffic. If you can't get anyone to visit your site you won't sell anything so you won't make any money. This is how a lot of people get sucked in and spend way more than they should. It's not the cost of the make money online program. It's the cost of the advertising.
Many people will get their site up then spend even more on pay per click and not make a single sale. After this, most will give up. The average person looking to make money online does not know how much they should bid on a given search phrase. Chances are they will bid too low and get no traffic. As for me, I bid too high and got overcharged at first. Only after a lot of spending then tweaking then spending more did I find the proper balance. Even then I still don't have any guarantee and any investment I make is a risk. Conversion is everything with pay per click. Especially when selling high dollar products. The more expensive merchandise generally costs more to advertise. There are tricks to try and get around this of course but it holds true in most cases. What search terms you choose probably have the most obvious impact on this. If you are trying to make money selling flat screens then you don't want to pay for people who searched for stereos to visit your site. You want people who did a search for cheap flat screen or something to that effect.
I'm certainly not going to recommend that anyone looking to learn how to make money on the Internet go off and try one of these programs. While it is possible to make money with them it is not likely unless you really know what you are doing. There is so much information you need to know to be successful with one of these. The web design skills alone are enough to stump most people. Fact is, the site you buy will most likely have some flaws. If you do not know how to fix them then it may become a serious problem. This of course will vary from company to company depending on their hosting methods and whether or not they even allow you to edit your site at all. Then there is promotion. You could try to make money online by promoting the site as a whole and get as many hits as possible or you could pick a particular product and direct traffic to that page only or both. As badly as some of these sites are designed, the prior may be a bad idea while the latter may still be feasible. You will probably have to edit the pages yourself to make sure they work properly and look good if you ever hope to make any money online with it.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
The Search for Ways to Make Money Online
Searching for ways to make money online has taken up quite a bit of my time. There are plenty of sites that will sell you programs or books on how to get rich. This is the part where I go on about how wonderful my life is and how making money online can change yours too. I think I am supposed to list a few things that you will be able to buy with your new money. Cars, travel and I see the word lifestyle used a lot for some reason. Let's not forget the ever present testimonials.
Excuse me while I edit some screen shots of my accounts to make it look as though I know what I am talking about. A lot of make money online sites lately seem to require your email address before they will even tell you the price. I guess there are obvious reasons for that but I think it is bad marketing. With any luck, you will avoid another lecture about working from home and being able to set your own hours. Imagine having the freedom to make your own schedule and be your own boss. This should be as emotional as possible. Everyone has a program or system that they may or may not give you any details on until you have paid. Obviously, you should not buy in if you do not have any details and can not see how it is feasible to make money with the program.
If the site owner is creative then a long, drawn out description of the system should now follow. In many cases half of the information is more hype. It can be difficult to find the bottom line on many money making websites. We will go through the easy steps that anyone can do. Next I will tell you what a great deal you are getting and there are some creative ways of doing that. A lot of people throw in pictures of cars or big houses at this point. The cost of make money online programs varies greatly. Some books on the subject can be found for a few dollars while other so called investments cost hundreds.
I hate those sites with a guy gloating about how rich he is and how easy it is to do. Making money online is hard. I am not interested in sites like that when searching the web, personally. Some of them are so long It would take half an hour just to get to the price. To my amazement when reading through some of them, it was all fluff. There were no details on how the system actually worked. On some, there were so many testimonials it was ridiculous. Others had pictures of cars, houses and the infamous lifestyle so far down the page it was hard to find any relevant information at all. Without any details about how the system is supposed to help me make money online I am not very likely to buy in.
Free make money online programs are not hard to find. At least until you get to the bottom of the page or the end of the presentation. There are a few free money making systems out there but none that I have seen pay any reasonable amount. Maybe I should do a post on those. Most will require your email address and some will even tell you up front to expect spam.
This blog will be used to document all the things I have tried and what I have learned so far. Consider all the products bought and sold on the web every day. Obviously there is some money to made there. I will try to do a post for each system that I have tried so that anyone interested in them can know exactly what to expect. Maybe it will save a few people some money or time if nothing else. I hope your are not still waiting for a sales pitch or something. There won't be one. I will probably lecture you about affiliate marketing though. Out of all the make money online ideas I have come across that one seems to make the most sense. I will, of course be going over the basic concepts and explaining my experience with them in future posts. For the moment, I will just define it for those who are not familiar with it. Affiliate marketing is basically selling a product for a company and getting a commission. There are many affiliate programs out there. Merchants can sign up if they have a product they want promoted online and advertisers can sign up if they want to try promoting those products. These programs vary a lot but the basic concept is the same.
Like all things, learning to make money online is going to take some practice before you get good at it. Just figuring out how to weed out the scams from the real business opportunities takes some know how. So many sites out there now try to convince you that it is so easy and fast to make money online. Many claim that you will be making money the first day with their program. That whole concept is ridiculous and you should not fall for it. The amount of reading you must do to learn this or any business is a huge investment of your time. Before I really started getting serious about it I thought time was no big deal. It got to the point where all I would do on any given day was work and read. As soon as I got off the clock at my job I would go home and start reading. I would read all night. Before I knew it, it was early morning and I still had several browser windows open with things that had caught my eye and I decided to read them later. Any time or labor you put in to something is still an investment regardless of money spent.
Finding a mentor can probably save you a lot of time and money. I wish I had one. Lately I have been reading this blog about how to make money online. It explains a lot about search engine optimization which is presently my main educational goal. I have read most of the posts which are terribly long, hence my rambling on. In my search for ways to make money online I have never come across anything quite like that blog but I agree that there will be room for new marketers due to the expansion and longevity of the web. As a new marketer myself, I'm kind of obligated to. I suppose I should get started experimenting with search engines so I love that blog for walking me through it and explaining so much. I have had a few AdWords failures and am very interested in learning to optimize sites to pull organic traffic. Learning to pull search engine traffic seems like it would be absolutely fundamental to any marketer. There are a lot of books out there about how to make money using AdWords. After reading a few I was pretty disappointed. For the most part, these books were nothing but more hype and a general overview of an AdWords account. Certainly nothing that made me feel as if my money was well spent on them. I am still interested in learning how to make a profit doing this, so I guess I will be searching for more books that have a money back guarantee. A few that I saw went on about how it you do not need a website or any other methods of traffic generation. Even a few that seemed to be of the opinion that other methods were a waste of time. If you are going to be using paid advertising and can make money doing so then that's great, but I see no reason not to toss in some organic hits as well. If more hits is the whole point then the more sources the better.
One thing that motivates me to get in to the make money online niche is interest. If a person can not even use a mouse and keyboard but still wants you to teach them, you know you have a product with high demand. Everyone, their mom and their dog wants to know how to make money online. With so many fraudulent methods out there however, it is not surprising that most people will not waste their time even listening to a pitch. I first noticed the demand for it when it came up at work one day. A guy I worked with was telling someone about an eBay store he had purchased and had high hopes for. Not knowing he was interested in that sort of thing, I started talking to him about it. We exchanged ideas, told our stories of being ripped off and such. When I looked up I realized that every other person in the store was closely following our conversation. At that point I had already made up my mind to try the make money online niche because after my own search I know how frustrating it can be to get your hopes up and waste so much time. The real potential of the market did not become apparent to me until i started talking to people I knew about making money online. I guess that's enough for this post and I will write more soon. I hope this blog will be of help to someone in their search for ways to make money online.
Excuse me while I edit some screen shots of my accounts to make it look as though I know what I am talking about. A lot of make money online sites lately seem to require your email address before they will even tell you the price. I guess there are obvious reasons for that but I think it is bad marketing. With any luck, you will avoid another lecture about working from home and being able to set your own hours. Imagine having the freedom to make your own schedule and be your own boss. This should be as emotional as possible. Everyone has a program or system that they may or may not give you any details on until you have paid. Obviously, you should not buy in if you do not have any details and can not see how it is feasible to make money with the program.
If the site owner is creative then a long, drawn out description of the system should now follow. In many cases half of the information is more hype. It can be difficult to find the bottom line on many money making websites. We will go through the easy steps that anyone can do. Next I will tell you what a great deal you are getting and there are some creative ways of doing that. A lot of people throw in pictures of cars or big houses at this point. The cost of make money online programs varies greatly. Some books on the subject can be found for a few dollars while other so called investments cost hundreds.
I hate those sites with a guy gloating about how rich he is and how easy it is to do. Making money online is hard. I am not interested in sites like that when searching the web, personally. Some of them are so long It would take half an hour just to get to the price. To my amazement when reading through some of them, it was all fluff. There were no details on how the system actually worked. On some, there were so many testimonials it was ridiculous. Others had pictures of cars, houses and the infamous lifestyle so far down the page it was hard to find any relevant information at all. Without any details about how the system is supposed to help me make money online I am not very likely to buy in.
Free make money online programs are not hard to find. At least until you get to the bottom of the page or the end of the presentation. There are a few free money making systems out there but none that I have seen pay any reasonable amount. Maybe I should do a post on those. Most will require your email address and some will even tell you up front to expect spam.
This blog will be used to document all the things I have tried and what I have learned so far. Consider all the products bought and sold on the web every day. Obviously there is some money to made there. I will try to do a post for each system that I have tried so that anyone interested in them can know exactly what to expect. Maybe it will save a few people some money or time if nothing else. I hope your are not still waiting for a sales pitch or something. There won't be one. I will probably lecture you about affiliate marketing though. Out of all the make money online ideas I have come across that one seems to make the most sense. I will, of course be going over the basic concepts and explaining my experience with them in future posts. For the moment, I will just define it for those who are not familiar with it. Affiliate marketing is basically selling a product for a company and getting a commission. There are many affiliate programs out there. Merchants can sign up if they have a product they want promoted online and advertisers can sign up if they want to try promoting those products. These programs vary a lot but the basic concept is the same.
Like all things, learning to make money online is going to take some practice before you get good at it. Just figuring out how to weed out the scams from the real business opportunities takes some know how. So many sites out there now try to convince you that it is so easy and fast to make money online. Many claim that you will be making money the first day with their program. That whole concept is ridiculous and you should not fall for it. The amount of reading you must do to learn this or any business is a huge investment of your time. Before I really started getting serious about it I thought time was no big deal. It got to the point where all I would do on any given day was work and read. As soon as I got off the clock at my job I would go home and start reading. I would read all night. Before I knew it, it was early morning and I still had several browser windows open with things that had caught my eye and I decided to read them later. Any time or labor you put in to something is still an investment regardless of money spent.
Finding a mentor can probably save you a lot of time and money. I wish I had one. Lately I have been reading this blog about how to make money online. It explains a lot about search engine optimization which is presently my main educational goal. I have read most of the posts which are terribly long, hence my rambling on. In my search for ways to make money online I have never come across anything quite like that blog but I agree that there will be room for new marketers due to the expansion and longevity of the web. As a new marketer myself, I'm kind of obligated to. I suppose I should get started experimenting with search engines so I love that blog for walking me through it and explaining so much. I have had a few AdWords failures and am very interested in learning to optimize sites to pull organic traffic. Learning to pull search engine traffic seems like it would be absolutely fundamental to any marketer. There are a lot of books out there about how to make money using AdWords. After reading a few I was pretty disappointed. For the most part, these books were nothing but more hype and a general overview of an AdWords account. Certainly nothing that made me feel as if my money was well spent on them. I am still interested in learning how to make a profit doing this, so I guess I will be searching for more books that have a money back guarantee. A few that I saw went on about how it you do not need a website or any other methods of traffic generation. Even a few that seemed to be of the opinion that other methods were a waste of time. If you are going to be using paid advertising and can make money doing so then that's great, but I see no reason not to toss in some organic hits as well. If more hits is the whole point then the more sources the better.
One thing that motivates me to get in to the make money online niche is interest. If a person can not even use a mouse and keyboard but still wants you to teach them, you know you have a product with high demand. Everyone, their mom and their dog wants to know how to make money online. With so many fraudulent methods out there however, it is not surprising that most people will not waste their time even listening to a pitch. I first noticed the demand for it when it came up at work one day. A guy I worked with was telling someone about an eBay store he had purchased and had high hopes for. Not knowing he was interested in that sort of thing, I started talking to him about it. We exchanged ideas, told our stories of being ripped off and such. When I looked up I realized that every other person in the store was closely following our conversation. At that point I had already made up my mind to try the make money online niche because after my own search I know how frustrating it can be to get your hopes up and waste so much time. The real potential of the market did not become apparent to me until i started talking to people I knew about making money online. I guess that's enough for this post and I will write more soon. I hope this blog will be of help to someone in their search for ways to make money online.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Ways to make money online that actually work.
Trying to learn how to make money online has not been easy. This blog will document my education for beginners who want to make money online. Along the way i have read many pitches and seen many scams. If nothing else, at least this blog will show people what not to do to when looking for ways to make money online. If you have questions not covered in my blog please feel free to email your question to affiliatesyndikate@yahoo.com
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