The RoadMap To Internet Riches
Many people will tell you it is easy to make a lot of money online. These people usually have something to sell you.
It is POSSIBLE to make a lot of money online - if you know what you are doing.
This page is a guide to the various ways to make money online, and will ultimately include links to training for each and every task you need to master.
If you can't find the training you are looking for here, then check our request list. Your votes determine what we produce next!
Business And The Internet
Anatomy Of An Online Business
An internet business is a business like any other. You have a marketing funnel, which gets the attention of prospective customers, and brings them into contact with your sales process. You have a method for making a sale and collecting money, and if you are sellng your own product, you also have a method for delivering the product and providing customer service.
Click here to view additional training materials on The Anatomy of An Online Business.
If you are new to the internet, or have only been a user of the internet up until now, you may need to understand a bit more about how the internet works, and how websites come to appear on the screen of your computer.
Click here to view The Internet Basics.
The Internet Basics includes the following:
What is the internet and how does it work? What is a website?
How does my computer find websites? How does my computer find out what to display on the screen when I visit a website?
What is HTML and how much of it do I need to know? What is php and do I need to know that?
How do I put up my own website? How do I get a domain name? How do I get my site hosted on a server? How do I get the files for my website across to the host server?
How do I make the files for my website?
Click here to view The Internet Basics.
Where Does The Money Come From?
Ways To Make Money From Websites
A website can make money in a number of ways.
1. Advertising - you may be paid per click, per 1000 visitors, per month, or a one-off fee for a permanent ad.
2. Leads - if your visitors complete an online form requesting a quote or more information, you can be paid for that lead.
3. Commissions - if you recommend other people's products, they will often pay you a percentage of each sale you bring them.
4. Sales of your own products - either one-off sales or subscriptions.
Click here to view additional training materials on Ways To Make Money From A Website.
Coming soon - additional training and information about each way to make money from websites.
The easiest form of advertising to place on your site is the form which pays you for each click. Called "Pay Per Click" advertising, or PPC advertising, this form of advertising will pay you anything from a fraction of a cent up to more than a dollar each time a visitor clicks an ad on your website. The actual amount you are paid depends on some arcane algorithms developed by the PPC provider, based on variable like the subject matter of your website, the country of origin of the person clicking, and other rumored factors like the phase of the moon, your mother's maiden name, and the way you hold your mouth ...
Seriously, though - don't worry about exactly how much you get for any given clicks. just focus on the fact that more clicks equals more money.
PPC advertising is a good place to start because it is easy to set up, and that allows you to focus on learning how to attract visitors to your website. If you chose, for example, to start by creating your own information product, you would have to spend the time researching the market and producing the product - a process which takes most people several months - before you earned a dime online. PPC income can start immediately.
And if you haven't learned how to bring visitors to your website by the time you launch that information product, your new baby is going to have a very lonely time of it ...
The ability to bring visitors (also known as "traffic" in the trade) to your website is an absolutely essential skill if you want to make money online. You should aim to master this skill as quickly as possible, if only because other people - who haven't bothered to learn it yet - will pay you well to do it for them!
What Do I Need To Know?
Skills Required To Make Money Online
Depending on which monetisation methods you choose, you will need to master at least two of the following skills at least to the level that you can outsource the activity effectively:
1. Building websites.
2. Generating free traffic.
3. Generating paid traffic - profitably.
4. Writing articles and blog posts.
5. Writing pre-sales copy.
6. Writing sales letters.
7. Creating digital products.
8. Sourcing and logistics for physical products.
9. Customer service.
Building websites can be done quickly and easily using the right software, or it can be outsourced cheaply to someone else who has the software - if you know exactly what to specify.
It is actually easier to use the software yourself in most cases than it is to learn enough technical information to cost-effectively outsource website development.
If the quote to produce your website is more than $1000, it means that you don't know enough technical information yet. The website developers aren't trying to rip you off - it's just that they know it will take longer to develop, and require more revisions, if their customer is vague about what they want in the first place.
You also need to be alert for developers who quote you for building the Taj Mahal, when all you need for phase 1 of your business is a foundation and a caravan selling hot dogs.
You don't want to invest in a site with all the bells and whistles - secure areas, member log-ins, forums, databases, and custom coding - until you are sure the niche is going to be very profitable for you.
All you need to begin with is a home page, a few articles, the required legal pages, and a blog.
Before you sally forth the build your website, however, you need to do your market research. Every successful business, online or offline, begins by finding a market, and then figures out what the market wants to buy.
This is even more crucial online than offline, because there is very little in the way of "passing trade" online - every person who comes to your site will have been searching for something in particular, so if you know in advance what your customers are typing into search engines, you are a long way ahead of the game.
Where Do I Start?
Market Research Online
1. Brainstorm possible niches.
2. Look at volumes of searches in each niche.
3. Evaluate your online competition.
4. Choose your product or advertising.
5. Identify good keywords - these will be different for paid traffic strategies as opposed to free traffic strategies.
6. Plan your traffic-generation strategy.
Click here to view additional training materials on Market Research Online.
A niche (pronounced "nitch" by Americans, and "neesh" by the rest of the world) is a small enough segment of a market that you can effectively target those consumers.
For example, it would be impractical to start out by trying to tackle "travel". You couldn't possibly satisfy the couple looking for a $1000 romantic weekend getaway, the adrenaline junkie looking to base jump into canyons, the family looking for a fun budget holiday close to home, and the student backpackers who want to do Europe on fifteen dollars a day.
Even within one of those segments - say, for example the family looking for a fun budget holiday close to home - there is just too much to cover. Do they live in Alaska, Florida, or the South of France?
Family holidays in Florida is starting to get closer to it, but depending on the monetisation model we have chosen, we may need to get even more specific - budget family fishing holidays in Florida, Florida family camping holidays, or Florida theme park holidays on a budget.
If you are going to sell an electronic book, you may need to focus on just one of these topics, but if your site is monetised through advertising, you could simply make a page for each of these types of holiday, all on the one site.
What Sort Of Website Do I Need?
A Niche Site By Any Other Name ...
Oddly enough, at the time of writing this page, the many and various types of websites which were required for the different ways to make money online have evolved to be more and more alike.
The driving force behind this convergence is Google - the citeria Google uses to evaluate a website affect your ability to get a site ranked in the Google search results, but they also affect the price you will pay for paid traffic to your website.
This means that people relying on free traffic and people relying on paid traffic now find themselves building very similar sites.
1. A blog, for continuously updating the site with new content.
2. The legal pages - privacy page, terms of service page, and disclaimers on sites selling products or services related to making money, investing, health, legal matters, real estate, or any other potentially litigious field.
3. A contact page.
4. Articles rich in keywords relating to the topic of the niche site (some sites just put these on their blog, while others separate them as static pages).
5. A site map (for search engine robots, not for human visitors).
6. Specialised pages (the money pages).
7. An index page, which links to all the other pages.
There was a time when you could throw up a simple, one-page website, and start to make money.
Those days are gone.
Google's ongoing war against low-quality websites has lifted the bar for everyone.
The list of pages required for a website these days may seem daunting, but we have clients who are complete beginners putting these sites together in no time.
You just need the right tools, and someone to tell you which parts are essential, and which parts you can safely ignore.
Over time, we will be adding more video tutorials on how to do each of these steps.
Remember - if you're stuck at a task we haven't covered yet, add it to the request list!
Most hosting providers now have a simple "point and click" method for installing a Wordpress blog on your domain.
If you haven't ever used a blog before, you will be amazed at how professional it looks, and how little of the technical stuff you need to understand in order to publish blog pages to the web.
Privacy is very important, especially if you are collecting names and email addresses.
Unless you plan to rely 100% on advertising revenue - not an approach we recommend in the long term - you will need to start building up your own subscriber list in your niche.
Start with PPC advertising, because it's quick and easy, but remember that it is simply a means to earn a bit of cashflow while you learn the next steps. You would need to have thousands of websites running PPC advertising in order to make a decent income from PPC advertising alone. Some people do just that, but they usually have the resources to pay others to do the work, and the patience to wait 3-5 years for their initial investment to pay off.
How Do I Make Money From My Site?
We recommend that you start with PPC advertising, and use the earnings from that to fund the tools and education you need to get into more lucrative monetisation models - such as selling leads (also known as Cost Per Action or CPA advertising) and earning referral commissions (selling other people's products, also known as affiliate marketing).
If you have a few hundred or a thousand dollars of capital, you could afford, financially, to move directly to the more lucrative models. However, if you don't have the skills that you would learn by working your PPC sites, especially keyword research and free traffic generation, then you will struggle to make the other monetisation models work profitably.
If you want to short-circuit the process and jump straight to affiliate marketing, you will need to master paid traffic generation without losing your shirt. We are developing a lot more detailed information about affiliate marketing and how it works, but if you don't want to wait for ours, then you can find some good information in Commission Blueprint - it's what we used, and it worked for us.