Earning money part-time – practical?
On the one hand it seems like the perfect situation, make extra money with the web whilst still keeping your day job. But just how practical is it to do? Well for a start it’s by no means realistic for all types of web businesses, for example with a full online store. So I’m talking about a proper ecommerce site where you’re taking orders and shipping out products to customers. Don’t get me wrong an ecommerce store requires much less man-power than a real one but you still have all the usual headaches like dealing with customers, returns and managing stock etc. This is before you get to all the other essential activities like marketing and site development, there’s no way your going to manage this when you get home from work. Actually something like selling on eBay could be quite a chore too, anything that involves a lot of communication with people is going to require plenty of time.
I hear a lot about passive income these days but I think many people have the concept wrong. It’s not an income without work but it does mean the business doesn’t need constant attention in order to earn money, you can often put the time in when you have it which is ideal for many people. So what is the system and how much does it cost? Well I’m not selling a system for a start but in short I make money by building sites that I then sell advertising on, the great thing about this concept is I’m not responsible to anyone. How much time you want/need to put in is really up to you, but ultimately only you will be responsible for your success.
There are some other great little businesses that earn money with the net but if you’re looking to start part-time then:
- You can’t be spending too much time dealing/negotiating with people.
- Shouldn’t need you to check in every day, you want to only spend time when you have it.
- Not much investment (I’m assuming if you’re willing to do 2 jobs you’re not rich!)
- You want to focus on learning one or two main skills, you don’t have the time to learn everything.
The great thing is that building sites really does tick all of the boxes above and its getting very accessible for non-technical people to get started. But since I’m not trying to sell some overpriced ebook or pyramid scheme there’s no need to promise a magic formula that will do the work for you. It’s still a complex and time consuming business to learn, but if it was easy wouldn’t everyone be doing it?
On a slightly un-related note check out the video by Jim Rohn above, only just discovered his stuff lately but he does have some genuinely good points (not just the Anthony Robbins hype). Until next time.
Why do some websites fail while others are winning!
Please excuse the Charlie Sheen reference, I know were all “winning” in our own way but how do you win when it comes to creating a successful website? If two people are sites in the exact same market what determines which makes money and which doesn’t? It can’t be luck all the time.
1. Picking the right market. This is essential, if you’re in a super competitive industry then you better be there for the long haul because in the online world nothing happens that quick, especially if you’re trying to build a brand. Remember it’s better to be number no1 in a niche than No 83 in a multinational dog-fight. Maybe it’s an ego thing but I keep seeing people trying to compete with million pound companies with 1% of the resources and quality, it’s not smart thinking.
2. Dedication. It’s easy to give up on anything when results are distant but you have to accept that any legitimate business opportunity weather its earning money online or opening a shop on a high street it takes time. I suppose people think that because it’s the internet there should be a way to make money online instantly. The truth is reputation and trust are built online the same way as offline, it takes time.
3. Spending time/money on the wrong things. This usually happening when people start their first website and many hours are accrued just by tweaking that top banner image 10 pixels to the left. No site is perfect and the thing is if you have no traffic at the start it really doesn’t matter if the new shade of lilac goes with the grey menu or not. It’s important to have a professional looking design but don’t go nuts with it, in the scheme of things its way down the to-do list.
4. Finding a path to cash. It is essential you have at least some idea how the site is going to earn money before you start. Yes I know Google,Twitter,Facebook didn’t know either (twitter still doesn’t make money) it’s not the same thing. If you’re building the site to earn a living and not just as a hobby then it’s an investment and it needs to make a return at some point. There are lots of revenue streams from advertising to ecommerce that can generate big revenues but only if implemented correctly, monetisation isn’t one of those things that works out itself.
5. Marketing strategy. The reason most people leave this out is because internet marketing is much more of a technical exercise than in the offline world. You really need a plan out where your visitors are going to be coming from and how you’re going to work with that medium. If its facebook then you better understand viral media and social marking. If it’s Google then you better have a strong grip on SEO and PPC. And the thing is if you don’t understand them then you better have the money to pay someone who does otherwise your going no-where my friend.
So I didn’t include luck on the list even though as we know it’s always a factor in everything we do. However I believe very much in volume and quantity when it comes to success online, do enough for long enough and something’s gonna work (not very technical I know). There’s more to a successful web business than this and certainly true if you want to earn real money on a consistent basis but if I were starting out I would concentrate on those 5 points and as Mike Tyson said, “Refuse to lose”!
Why so many scams for making money online?
I was wondering today just why it is that there are so many scams when it comes to making a living on the internet or trying to earn any amount of money online? It’s hard to tell but I suppose the main draw of the whole get rich quick market in general is the amount of money there is to be made from the un-suspecting public. It’s not a new phenomenon either as people have been looking for easy ways to make extra cash quickly long before the internet arrived on the scene.
In many ways the situation is reminiscent of the whole dot com boom at the start of the millennium where people decided to just throw money at the internet with the hope (and expectation) that it would just throw even more money back at them. As we know it worked for a while until the dot com crash when everyone suddenly realised there was no legitimate way to make that money back. The same is true of so many of these get rich schemes I see dotted around the internet today, their founding principle is because it’s using the internet its bound to make money and even better because its online you don’t really need to know how it works as the internet takes care of all that too!
Maybe it’s the emergence of new technologies but something tells me it has more to do with the age old issue of “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”. The problem occurs mostly with people who have a little knowledge who then extrapolate that into a pretend understanding of a much greater problem. More often than not this problem relates to money and people seem to think that since they use Google or some other medium every day they are then qualified to make it work for them for great financial gain. In truth I don’t blame the scammers themselves in the get rich quick niche as they are often just servicing a need that is always going to be there. Namely a group of people who want to make vast sums of money with little or no effort, is it all their fault for exploiting this obvious group?
Not that they don’t use some pretty un-ethical means to promote these offers I have to say. Everything from fake testimonials to photo shopped cheques worth millions of £££ are used to “prove” their claims. If you made any of these claims on TV or even in a magazine without proof you would probably be sued immediately but you can get away with saying whatever you want on the internet (more or less), it’s like the new Wild West.
So after reading all that the question that’s still burning in your mind must be “are there legit ways to make money online”? Well yes there are but most of them are not shared around for free or even in a £99.99 eBook because with scale and overuse almost any technique for making massive amounts of cash will be burned to the ground. There is simply only room for a certain number of people in any kind of idea and that’s a fact. However expectations are important also, if you want to make millions then you really do need a spectacular idea (ie next facebook) but if you have slightly lower ambitions then there are definitely some great opportunities out there. Until next time.
Make money online by blogging?
One of the most general questions i get from day to day is if it is possible to earn money online by blogging. The reason i say this is a general question is that there is more than one way to make money from your blog and it will also depend on the type of blog you have. The first thing that you have to realise is that your earnings depend very much on the content of your blog. If you are just going to create a blog about yourself and what type of cereal you had for breakfast then its pretty unlikely many advertisers are going to want to pay for traffic coming from your site. The key is to consider weather your traffic is “buying traffic” or not, what i mean by this is does the person who hits your blog for the first time weather from search engines or social media have the intention of making a purchase? If the answer is no then you are going to find it hard to convert any of these visitors to your blog into real cash. Consider as well that many of todays advertisers work on a commisson basis and if your traffic isnt making them money then you can bet they wont keep you around for long. So supposing you do have traffic to your blog that is worth money, how can you monotise it?
- The first i will mention is probably the most well known from google called adsense. Its very simple to use as all you have to do is put the code on your site and google works out what your site/blog is about and displays the relevant ads. You can do some configuring as far as colours etc go but its pretty much what you see is what you get.
- Another way to earn money from your blog is allow other people who have blogs or sites to place their links on your site. For this you do need to have a reasonable popularity level for your blog and also some authority to go with it as this is what people are paying for. The main way to get these jobs is just to become and authority in your niche and wait for people to contact you.
- The last way i will mention is a little more work but can sometimes yield alot more money. This is direct affiliate marketing whcih involves you linking directly to another website or blog who sells the product or service that you are talking about. This will envlove a little looking around to find the best place that sells the product and not everyone has an affiliate scheme but most of the bigger sites will.
So there you have a short run down on quick ways to make money from your blog. As i said at the start these are not the only ways to earn money from your website but they are a start!
Welcome to earning money online
So this is my first post here on Earning Money Online and i have to say its a very exciting time. Never before has there been the opportunity for so many people to make a second income or even fulltime wage from the internet. The great thing about the internet today is that in order to build a website you really need little or no programming knowledge. For instance setting up a blog on many of the free blogging sites is as easy as signing up for an email account on Hotmail!
So what are my methods for making money on the internet? Well im going to get into that in alot more detail in future posts but let me just that that its no-where near as difficult as you might think. The main concept that i am going to preach is getting traffic from google (if you haven’t heard of them then this may not be the blog for you!). Traffic from google really is the key because it converts into real money if you target it right. Too many people today are going after social traffic such as Twitter and Facebook without any idea how they are going to make money from these people. The key is to know what the people hitting your site are looking for. Now i know most people who come to your site will be looking for something but the key is if that thing is an item for sale. Let me explain, if someone searches on the internet for “funny videos” then its very unlikely that that person is expecting to make a sale during their time online. For a start funny videos just isn’t something anyone expects to pay for. However on the other hand if they hit up google and type in “Phone charger for Nokia 9500” then this person has a real need to buy something and thus they are much more valuable. Take it from me i would take 20 visitors looking for a phone charger over 10,000 looking for funny videos any day.
I know it may be a hard concept to understand but at its heart it really is about quality over quantity in all cases. Now i know many of you may be looking at google and thinking how can ever compete with the No1 sites at the top, especially if its a big brand site like ebay or amazon. However alot of the time these big sites are just there as a default because they have trust and not because they have necessarily done alot of work to rank for that specific keyword. Now this does not mean that they are easy to beat but in alot of cases there is more to the search engine results than meets the eye. Most of it does come down to practice but hopefully over the next weeks and months you can share my knowledge of ranking sites on google for profit, maybe ill learn something too!