Why most websites never make money
Id love to know the stats but I’m betting that the vast majority of new websites started by amateurs online never make any money. There’s many reasons why but the end result seems to be the same for so many people, they spend lots of time/money getting the site up and running and then nothing happens for months and they cant work out why. Before giving up they usually try offline marketing methods in an attempt to get things going, like leaflet drops, business cards in supermarkets and even launch parties (my favourite).
The thing is no matter the size or function of your site unless you embrace SEO, PPC or both then your doomed to failure. The problem is though both these skills are time consuming to learn and implement, but isn’t everything? Even when you know seo it still takes plenty of time to get results so that combined with running the site could make it hard to achieve part-time, but anythings possible.
Ok so after all that negativity what do you actually have to do to make it with your site?
- You have to get out there and connect with other bloggers and websites, this is at the core of Internet marketing. A good way to get started is guest posting, this is were you write a post or article for someone else’s site and in exchange they give you a link back, sounds simple but trust me its still a lot of work. As we know incoming links help both with search engines and your overall popularity so no-matter how long it takes you’ve got to do it. If your not sure where to get started myblogguest is a free forum where you can write guest posts for other webmasters.
- You have to stand out at least a little bit because there’s a million sites out there all doing the same thing. Honestly if you want to build up return visitors you’ve got to give them a reason to come back. Ultimately you’ve got to give your audience what they want and in a clear structure they can understand. So if your an online store offer discounts the competition cant because even though you take a hit in the short term on price the exposure you gain long term is always worth it.
- Consistency is another big part of the equation, are you going to stick with this gig? Are you going to be getting new links for your site on a weekly basis. Will you be creating content for your site for the next 12 months every week to keep it fresh? Obviously the amount of work required is going to depend on the niche your in but even so the work is going to be there until you reach your goal, are you prepared for that?
So that’s my problem, I’m just a realist I suppose but better that I think than one of the get rich quick gurus. I’m always looking for legitimate ways to earn money online that actually deliver a return for the time spent. I cant imagine anything worse than spending lots of time and money on some system that I didn’t fundamentally understand, are you prepared to trust in luck? Or do you want to spend time learning a process like Internet marketing which is already proven?
Earn money from home – the ideal investment?
Petrol is getting so expensive it will soon be more cost effective to walk, so more people than ever are thinking up ways that they can earn money from home quickly. I suppose it follows on from the work at home Moms phenomenon that dominated the 90s, you remember all those ads in the local classifieds on how you can make money fast from the comfort of your own sofa? I’m not sure if people are more sceptical now or not, but there’s definitely a lot more people trying to work this business out for better or worse.
I call it a business but in reality there are so many people doing different things and it definitely depends on experience. A few I’ve been reading up on are:
- Selling on eBay
- Forex (stocks) trading
- Online investment clubs
I really have no interest in selling my junk on eBay (is there a big market for empty pizza boxes?) and also forex/stock trading scares me more than saw II. However the online investment club is a new one for me as I’ve been following it on another money blog at 4 hour workweek, Eric also gives updates on how much he’s making per month with it which is great.
It seems like he’s getting around 7% APR which is great considering how much most local banks our paying on interest lately. The basic principle is you make lots of little loans (as low as £20) to people based on their credit history and also what they are doing with the money. In theory only a small portion of the loans will go bad so the risk is spread out. The reason I’m including this as an online job is that working out who to lend to and how much takes time and effort in itself and I suppose it could be quite interesting too. It’s your chance to play bank manager! Like any investment though it’s not without risk and as usual the more risk you take the more you can make. But at the same time how safe are the banks anyway, even bank robbers have given up stealing from them.
How much can you make? Well some people are claiming up to 8-9% interest so for £10,000 invested you could make just under a grand a year which is pretty good. It does seem a lot safer than shares/stocks so might be an alternative for someone unwilling to head down that road. I do have to mention that if you’re in the UK you will need to try Zopa as that one Eric talks about isn’t available here.
Investing money is one of those tricky things I’ve never got to grips with, I once heard the saying “if you don’t understand it don’t put your money in it” by a famous stock broker. It’s true there are plenty of stories of people losing the house on this or that investment, but most of the time it comes back to the fact that they didn’t do their homework beforehand. It’s the same with any advice I give out whether it involves an investment of time or money, you gotta research it first, too many people dive into things based on “facts” by some anonymous internet nerd J
This may seem a bit Tony Robbins but you should also consider the things you’re teaching yourself as an investment. I mean lots of people (I didn’t) invest 1000s of pounds going to university in the hope of making big money 10 years down the line, it amazes me so many people can’t invest even a fraction of that time learning something new for free. Maybe it’s a case of where to learn as there’s no course on earning money online so how do you know who to listen too? Ultimately though it all comes back to trying things out and being prepared to fail because it’s the only way to succeed at anything. Most of the things I try don’t work and so can seem on the surface like a huge waste of time but it’s not. That knowledge acquired is only available to you and other people who have tried and failed and that does have value.
Eternal question: How to make money fast
Ok so I was thinking about this today. If I was starting from no-where and I had to learn how to make money fast with the internet what would I do? It’s one of those weird hypothetical questions because what exactly are the rules of the game? If you’re saying that I have none of the knowledge or resources that I have now to help me then it changes the situation quite a lot. But anyway technicalities aside I wanted to look into the question as I think it’s one every new person to the internet business world is asking. One thing I do want to clarify is how much money we are talking about and what kind of timeframes are involved. There’s so many get rich quick scams on the net these days that promise millions overnight with no work that I want to be realistic with people over what can be achieved. So what I’m going to look at is how easy would it be for a completely new person to the industry to make £500 extra a month part-time (I’m going to assume most of you still have day jobs).
- Writing content. I have actually talked about this one on the blog before and I really do see it as a legit source of income that you can just get started straight away with. The thing about writing content though is that you don’t really get paid all that much in the beginning. This is because there’s a big price range when it comes to quality of content as people are using content for all types of purposes. Most of the prices are in US cents and I’ve seen quotes from 1c per word all the way up to 3c. There was a post by a guy over at smartpassiveincome.com where he talks about how he started his online business just by writing guest posts for other bloggers. Seems like he was actually getting quite good money but I think the key to his success was getting developing a regular deal direct with bloggers who were looking for quality content. So there were no middle men and he was writing quality content for around 3c a word. He says he was only doing about 2-3 hours a day yet was making over £600 a month which is very impressive. So it does seem worth looking into but you’re going to have to wait for a while till the bigger pay cheques start to come in.
- Building websites. So as you can all guess this is my favourite method for making money because it’s the one I’ve spent most of my internet career on. It’s a method with solid foundations because as long as there’s an internet there are going to be people surfing around trying to buy things and if you can attract those people (even if it’s a small number) there is money to be made. There’s no doubt that this technique is much more technical than the last of just writing content for money however the great thing is that a website can be making you money while you sleep were a labour intensive things like content creation can feel more like a 9-5 job. One major problem with the website thing though is the time it can take to get results. Since Google and other search engines will be one of your main sources of customers you need to realise it can take a few months before you get any traction there. Still the webmasters who have mastered the overall skill are often able to generate money quickly.
- So this method is very unusual and it’s something I only recently learned about myself. The good thing though is it seems like a very fast way to make some extra cash, indeed some of the figures I’ve seen says it’s possible to make around £500 in a week or two with it. I first read about the idea at theregister which is an IT news site. They don’t usually have stories about making money through the internet but this “gambling for free” idea caught my eye. Now don’t get me wrong I’m not advocating gambling as a way to earn money as I hardly ever do it myself. I don’t even play the lottery because I think it’s a system to keep people lazy and stupid. Anyway you may or may not know that many of the online betting sites give away cash bonuses for new players or so called “free bets”. They can do this because of the huge potential value of a new customer on these betting sites. The “free bet” can be anywhere from £10 to £100 and it’s added to your account as soon as you sign up. However the thing is you usually can’t use it until you deposit and equal amount of your own money via credit card and then you have to bet the whole amount (and hopefully win) in order to claim it. Ok so no secrets so far however there are also lots of sites that let you bet on a team to lose like Betfair etc and this means you could bet against yourself ie the free bet on the other site. So normally when you bet against yourself both bets cancel themselves out however when some of the money is free (ie 50% of one bet) then you are guaranteed a return. Now the return probably isn’t going to be huge as you can expect anywhere between 60% and 70% profit. So on a £200 bet 50% of which is free you could maybe make between £10 and £30 profit depending on fees and other conditions. That amount of profit may not seem like a lot however when you consider the sheer number of betting sites that are doing introductory offers its clear you can make some good money very quickly. The original article here probably explains this better than I have done but hopefully I’ve got across the basics.
I actually have a few more ideas for making some quick cash but I don’t want to confuse people with more ideas than they need as the internet is often confusing enough. It’s also worth noting that if something’s too good to be true it probably so all the methods detailed above require a reasonable amount of work in order to earn a return. Even with the last “gambling” idea you have to keep detailed track of what you’re doing and spend time signing up to all these sites and adding your details, nothings easy lol. Still hopefully it will give you guys some inspiration on how to make money fast with the internet.
