Different ways to make money online.
There are tons of ways to make money online, some of which I've tried, and many of which I won't try.
But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't.
You just need to understand what you're good at, and get on with it.
The following discusses some of the more common ways that you can make money online. I will try to explain the pros and cons of each, and a short description about what you have to do.
Product Creation
Here, you create an e-book, a video course, software that people will buy.
Beginners often start out with an e-book, often advised to buy some PLR content then sell that. Often what happens is that the PLR content is pathetic, and the person doesn't understand how to market it, create sales pages, optin pages, landing pages. And gives up.
The experienced marketers all do this, and are often successful because it can be very lucrative especially when coupled with a sales funnel that sells a range of products to help the purchaser.
PROS: Can make a lot of money doing this. You are in control of your destiny.
CONS: There are a lot of moving parts where if you were to get a few of those parts wrong will make no sales, and cost you to run. Takes time to build a product and/or arrange for other offers to sell.
Recommendation: I did this as my first thing as a brand new internet marketer. It took a long time, I didn't know what I was doing, I got a handful of sales but really didn't have any idea of what I was doing wrong. The amount of time it took put me off it for a long time. If you are confident in your ability to create sales letters, optimize opt in pages, and are knowledgeable about a particular topic, this could be for you. If you are unsure, I would wait until you are, and if you still like the idea, give it a go, it's a gay way to generate income.
Solo Adverts
This is where the business owner builds up lists of subscribers, and then charges people to send e-mails to their list.
The work in this method is in building up the bit list, and making the subscribers to that list buy things. Essentially you have to train people to buy.
The experienced marketers all have a list.
That list represents the majority of their income and some quite probably pay for solo ads as it is a very quick and easy way to make sales.
PROS: You can make a lot of money doing this. It is easier than product creation to understand.
CONS: The main skill here is being able to convince people to take the action that you want them to, if you can't make that work, you will get frustrated. You are to a certain extent beholden to the auto-responder companies who may shut your account down without warning.
Recommendation: I did this for a few years, and got quite successful. Then auto-responder companies started to shut down accounts without any warning or reason. I stopped because of that, although the method was very profitable. If you know how to convince people to take action you might want to do this. It is probably one of the simpler things to do, but until it is connected to a funnel is likely not reaching its potential. I would recommend building the list as part of a funnel, as it has more chance of success.
Blogging / Content Creation / Advertising Publisher
With this method you have a blog, and you create lots of content. The idea being that people pay to advertise on your site, and you get an income from the users that clicks on those ads.
This is very simple to do. If you are an expert in this area you could probably make this work.
Well, the content at least. The challenging part can be the visitors to the site. To make this very profitable you would need to rank on search engines to get free visitors. This takes even more time and effort. You can pay for traffic, and the difference between what you pay for the traffic and what you make from being a publisher is income. That is a lot hard to do profitably, but it is immediate. So could be a good way to get started.
The experienced marketers often have blogs, although the best ones will sell their ad spots for a premium, or sell their own products.
PROS: You can make a lot of money doing this if you are ranking in a search engine for high traffic terms. It is easier than product creation to understand. There is no actual selling involved.
CONS: Quite time consuming - although you can outsource. Takes a time to get the content right, takes even longer to get it to rank in search engines. This take a long and concerted effort.
Recommendation: I do this, I'm a runner, and write a bit about that, I enjoy researching. Some of the posts I'm not interested in writing, I outsource. If you enjoy research and are already reading up on a topic, as it is your hobby, I would not do this one. If you know a lot about search engine optimization, and enjoy writing articles, then you could give it a try.
Affiliate Marketing
With this method you get other people to buy someone else's product. You are promoting another product creator.
This means that you need a means to get people to the product or offer.
But. You don't need to know how to get people to purchase (the product creator does that).
The experienced marketers often promote other products as well as their own. It's very quick and easy to do. If you have a spare bit of traffic, it's essentially money for nothing.
PROS: Some of the most successful marketers got their start in affiliate marketing, because it's a much easier thing to do that some of the others mentioned here. You will still have the ability to learn. You can build up a list, and send offers to them (a little like solo ads). You can promote through a blog (Advertising publisher). You could put it in a sales funnel (like a product creator might).
CONS: You need to make sure that you are promoting good offers. There are people who are still learning about product creation, and that will affect your earnings.
Recommendation: This is actually what I do all of the time, since it fits so nicely with everything else. This is a great way to learn. Software is there to support you so that you do not need to be particularly technical, and can still learn at your own pace. If you implement a list, a funnel and earn affiliate income you are also building your skills for the other areas. This is quite and easy, and has relatively small amount of learning required to get sales.