The Best Way to Make Money Online – My #1 Recommendation [FREE TRAINING]
The 4 Best Ways to Make Money Online
I’ve always had this innate, burning desire to be my own boss; to run my own business.
But there was one big obstacle (or at least I thought it was an obstacle) – I hated sales. I just didn’t have the personality to convince someone to buy something from me. It’s just not in my DNA.
So having an online business was an attractive option for me – I didn’t have to sell one on one.
However, there are many different online business models to choose from. All of them have their advantages and disadvantages. Here are the first three. Then I’m going to reveal my #1 recommendation that anyone can start – even if they have no experience at all.
Here are some of the criteria I used to determine why these online business models are the main ones.
- Easy to set up
- Can make real money/profitability
- Long-term potential
- You don’t have to reinvent the wheel
- Relatively low capital or start-up costs involved
I’ve split the first model into two areas.
1a. E-commerce (Amazon, eBay, Shopify)
The first model you can employ to make money online is through e-commerce. This is a huge opportunity. We’ve all heard of Amazon and eBay. There are lots and lots of people making money online through e-commerce.
Here’s how e-commerce works. You have to get an inventory of products you want to sell. Then you make product listings on different e-commerce platforms such as eBay, Amazon or Shopify. You optimize your listings for search engines and/or promote your listings through ads, email marketing and so on. Over time you can also piggyback on product reviews on your online store. People search for reviews and come across reviews on your platform and if they are happy will buy from you.
Amazon generated $136 billion in revenue in 2016 and accounts for a little over two-fifths (43%) of the online e-commerce market.
Advantages:
- Relatively easy to set up
- The relative cost of an online store is considerably lower than a brick and mortar (offline) store – no buildings, no rent, no employees, no overheads, etc.
- There is a huge market for online shopping (79% of Americans shop online for one product or another)
Disadvantages:
- Highly competitive. You’re even competing with Amazon’s own products (Amazon Basics)
- The margins are low (you have to sell almost at cost price to be competitive)
- You have to stock inventory of goods
- You have to give a percentage of your revenues to Amazon, eBay, and other online platforms
- If you are using PayPal or credit cards, a percentage of your earnings will go in merchant transaction fees
- Have to deal with shipping and handling, returns and customer service (all of which can be time-consuming)
- One or two complaints from a disgruntled customer and Amazon or eBay can shut down your operations
1b. Drop Shipping
Drop shipping is a spill off of e-commerce, but with a twist. Here’s how it is different. You don’t need to stock any inventory. You basically advertise someone else’s products and make it appear to be your own. Customers pay you a particular price for the product, then you buy the product at a lower price from the manufacturer or distributor and have them ship the product to your client.
From the client’s perspective, they are buying from you and you are shipping to them. You are a middleman without appearing to be a middleman. So it’s really e-commerce but without some of the disadvantages.
Advantages:
- You don’t have to own any products
- You don’t have to get involved in shipping and handling
- Relatively easy to set up
Disadvantages:
- You’d have to deal with customer service and complaints
- You are at the mercy of the manufacturer or distributor
- Very low margins. You’d have to sell really low to get a profit. (Consider wholesalers as competitors).
- You have little or no control (except maybe your prices)
- You have to pay the shipping costs or pass it on to your customers
2. Blogging / Content Creation
The second model you can use to make money online in through blogging.
We live in an information age. People are searching for information and valuable content all the time. Information is the new gold. For example, Google processes 40,000 search requests EVERY SECOND!!! That’s approximately 1,261.4 Trillion searches each year.
People are doing research, checking out review sites like TripAdvisor, they are reading blogs, accessing the news, and mining data in ways that have never been done before in the history of the human race. And all of this is because of the Internet. And if you can implement strong search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) strategies on your website or blog this can become a really powerful business for you.
By using the right keywords (low-competing, high-volume, longtail keywords) your site can attract traffic for years and years to come. You won’t even be able to stop it if you wanted.
Here’s how content creation as a business works. Let’s say you have 100 articles or posts on your website or blog (you can easily do this over a period of 1 year (2 per week) by yourself or faster if you had help). And let’s assume you get a conservative amount of traffic – let’s say 5 visitors per post per day (5 visits x 100 posts x 30 days) based on social media techniques, SEO strategies and other tactics that drive traffic to your website, that’s a possible total of 15,000 visitors per month. Now let’s say you repeat that process over 3 years, you’d get 45,000 visitors per month at the end of 3 years. That’s a lot of traffic!
Traffic is one thing. But, in addition, there are several ways you can monetize your blog. You can sell ad space on your site. You can charge people to write an article about their product or service on your blog. You can place targeted ads through Google AdSense and every time someone who visits your site clicks on one of these ads you earn a few dollars or sometimes cents. Let’s say you’re getting around $0.80 per ad click (totally possible) and about a quarter (15%) of the visitors to your site click on an ad, that’s a possible $5,400 a month in income from just ad clicks alone. What would an extra $5,400 do for you? Wouldn’t you quit your job if you were earning that steadily? I bet you’d quit for even less.
Advantages:
- There is a growing need for content and information online
- You can get free traffic from search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo
- You can build brand reputation over time
Disadvantages:
- It takes time to build out content
- It takes time to build traffic from search engines
- It takes time to build authority or reputation
- You are at the mercy of the search engines (they can change their SEO ranking methods and you can lose rank easily. It has happened to many websites over the years).
3. Sell Your Own Digital Product
The third model is to become a digital publisher.
Digital publishing is one of the best ways to make money online. I worked in a market research company that sold its own digital research products. Some of these products sold for as much as $3,000. I know of digital products that can sell for $5,000 or even $10,000, depending on the amount of research that went into creating the product and the amount of proprietary or unique and valuable information.
Advantages:
- You get to own and control the product.
- You can create it once and sell it an unlimited number of times.
- There is no shipping involved.
- You can position your business in any niche
Disadvantages:
- It takes a long time to build brand reputation and authority
- It takes time to create your digital product – research, writing, editing and then publishing and marketing
- Not recommended for beginners as it works best when you already have a list of emails or followers
The #1 Recommendation
Alright, I said I’d show you four different ways to make money online. The next post will be dedicated to my #1 recommendation. Click here to view my #1 recommendation – the easiest way to make money online.