Making Money Online

Making money online. I found that there are two ways to do it: invest time or invest… money! I started this blog 4 months ago and so far I made an incredible…. Nothing! I have Amazon affiliate links set up, Clickbank links, and a few other programs that I promote but I’m able to generate nothing but a few clicks! We’re far from talking about sales! So I got into other programs such as My Online Business Empire (MOBE) and DotComSecretX which look a lot more profitable. And they are… but you also need to invest a LOT of money to get started! MOBE is $49 to start with but you need to buy a $2000 license at the end of the first 3 weeks. DotComSecret is only a $1 to start but you need to buy at least $1000 of traffic to generate your very first sale. So where do we go from there?

How long does it take to become profitable? How much does it cost to start?

I started a search online to see what could be some real expectations. When could I quit my job and live solely from my online income? The answer is… an average of 3 years! Not so bad! But it does require a LOT of perseverance. Most people who are on a quest to making money online want it fast! So PERSEVERANCE is the answer to your freedom. (Follow this link to read my article on increasing your perseverance) That’s why it’s so important to pick a niche that you LOVE and feel PASSIONATE about. Because before you can claim your perfect lifestyle you have to put in 1000 hours of volunteer work! (that’s 3 years at 1 hour/day) Are you still up to the challenge? Is your freedom worth it? Mine is! That’s for sure!

As I said, the other option is to invest money. You must have heard that time is money, well in the case of online business, it definitely is. I still haven’t found a system where you don’t need to invest in purchasing traffic. And traffic, when you start off, is the most difficult thing to get! Even for a blog! Purchasing “clicks” for your ads or sales funnel is about $1 each. So for example, in the case of DotComSecretX, you need to buy 500 clicks at $350 to generate 20% opt-ins (people who give you their email addresses) and of those 100 people, an average of 1% will buy the product you sell. That means that the product you will sell needs to be priced at $700 if you earn a 50% commission and don’t want to lose money. Obviously, that is a very difficult challenge! If you repeat this process week after week and month after month, you will eventually start making more profit because you won’t be starting from an empty list anymore. But you want that list to expand so you need to buy even more clicks! In the end, it eventually becomes profitable and you can make a lot of money, but the initial investment – for the first year maybe! – is massive! No wonder all the internet gurus say that the money is in the list! It definitely is! A list is worth a lot of money and therefore costs a lot of money to build!

How do you start?

Still, I don’t want to discourage you from starting. There is definitely money to be made if you are willing to put in the efforts over the years to achieve your objective. I stared my blog early October 2013. I knew NOTHING about blogging and I was surprised to feel some resistance. I don’t usually get stopped by challenges like this but this time I felt like I was starting from so far behind and I had no clue about what I was getting into. I love human interaction and I didn’t see myself learning programming behind a computer screen for hours. I found John Chow’s course super easy to use and very very well documented. It’s a step-by-step process of 30 days which is simple and perfect for beginners like me. The first few days are spent on creating an identity and finding what we want to write about. I answered all those questions and started building my blog but I find it especially interesting to go back and read more about specific topics such as traffic, monetization, linking strategies, content creation, etc. I now like to use the course as a reference guide while I gain deeper understanding of what I am doing.

Blogging With John Chow

$37 course on how to setup a blog

This is the course I used to learn how to set up this blog! It’s a step by step plan to have everything up and ready in 30 days! The fee is a non-recurring $37. They will try to sell you other stuff like an already made blog in a profitable niche but I chose to do everything from scratch.

$97 course with VIDEOS on how to setup a blog

This is the same course but with VIDEO tutorials for $97. I have not tried this one as I thought the price difference wasn’t worth it but feel free to give it a try and let me know!

The next step: How do you get more traffic? … for free!

What is the solution? Well, I was lucky enough to stumble upon the blog of a Swedish guy – Henri Juntilla – who blogs at www.wakeupcloud.com. He describes in full length how he made his first money online and how it took him 3 years to earn $3000/month with his blog and websites and to finally live solely from that income. This guy really cares about his readers! Visit his blog, send him an email, or get one of his books! You can tell that he genuinely cares about helping others succeed! His books range from $3 to $7.

The best tip I learned from him is guest blogging. If your blog is new, it won’t drive a lot of traffic, so writing an article in the same niche but on a blog that has a larger audience will drive traffic to your site. Another good example is to post your articles to a directory. There are many directories out there so you have to test which ones work best for you and your niche. After testing several, here are my best 3:

Newsana > I post my articles on that site on a daily basis and that drives about 5 readers a day to my blog

StumbleUpon > I also post my blog on StumbleUpon and I get 10-15 extra daily readers!

Scoop.It! > I don’t get visits on my blog from this but I get links to boost my Alexa ranking

So that’s it! I hope that all this information is helpful to you! It sure would have been for me when I started!

Getting started with passive income

Getting started with passive income. The more I talk about my project of retiring within 4 years (I will be 37), the more interest I get from other people who want that for their lives too. The concept is very enticing: not having to work because you HAVE to, simply if you WANT to. Having the ability to chose any activity that you like doing and not having to factor in the salary. For instance, I’ve considered customer service hotel jobs for a long time, but always stayed away because of the lower wages than what I’m earning now.

But how to do you get started? The best first question you can ask yourself is: What activity would I do voluntarily, 1 hour every day, for an entire year. Because chances are really high that the activity that you pick won’t bring you any money in the first year. If you get discouraged along the way, then the time spent on building your passive income stream will be lost. (Which is, statistically, more likely to happen than not!) So you want that lost time to have been spent on something you like. Most people I met who live solely on passive income did it in 3 years. Answering the question about what you would do for free will also ensure that you pick something that you feel truly passionate about, not something that will simply get you money fast. Because if you pick something for the latter reason, you’ll struggle in the perseverance part of the project. (Read more on perseverance here) Once you have found your topic, you have to share it with people. We get money in return of the value we provide. You get that salary that you have because it roughly equates to the value you contribute to society. The problem with regular jobs though, is that you can only be in one place at one time, so your income is always tied to your physical presence. When you develop an information product, such as recording a song or a course, writing a blog or an ebook, or selling a membership, then your income isn’t tied to your physical presence anymore. If what you produced provides enough value to enough people, then you will make enough money to live solely from that income. It is still preferable to diversify your sources of income, so that if one fails, you have a few other ones to rely on. But it is also imperative to start with only one source, as it too easy to spread out your efforts and end up not having a single steady source of income.

In my case, blogging is the first building block of my passive income. I started 4 months ago and I’m still not earning any money from it. But my audience is growing and I don’t want to pollute my blog with too much publicity. For the time being, I focus on providing valuable content. I already published my first ebook on Amazon, which talks about the subconscious mind. If you are interested, you can get it by clicking on this link.

I also bought a $37 course to learn how to set up a blog. It’s a very complete and detailed course that teaches you how to get started, step-by-step, in 30 days. I knew nothing about blogging before and I highly recommend it. You can get it here. They will try to sell you already-made blogs when you purchase the course but I wanted to build my own from scratch. There is another version of the course that includes videos. This one is $97 but I haven’t tried it. If you find that videos are worth the price difference, then you can get it here.

With that you will also need is a hosting plan to save your blog and allow the world the see it. I use GoDaddy which is the world’s largest domain name registrar. You can get your domain name here. The cheapest plan is $10/month.

Finally, you need to have a clear image of WHY you want to be financially free. The most difficult challenge you will face along the way is discouragement. It will come from other people but from the voice in your own mind too. I suggest having a very clear idea of where you want to go with this project, what it will allow you to do once your passive income streams are set up, and even a visualization board that you can look at daily to remind you why you are putting in the efforts.

So that’s it! With a strong determination, a $37 course plus $10/month you can have your window to the world, share your passion and start earning money!

If you need more details on how to do this, it will be my pleasure to help you out!

Happy earning!
Martin