If you are reading this, chances at some point you decided to use the Internet to earn some extra income (or, if you want to put it in finer words, “build an online business”).

However, behind every decision, there is a reason (or more).

What is your reason?

Maybe you will say “money”. And you will probably be right. And you will probably be wrong.

Yes, we all want to make more money. But you must never forget that money is a by product.

What you (most likely) really want is peace of mind. Or being able to spend more time with your family. Or send your child to college. Or freedom. Or ________________ (fill in the blank).

So what is your Reason (with a capital R)?

It’s worth devoting some time to think about it, because when you are feeling down (and you will), and obstacles get in the way (and they will), you will need to remember WHY you are doing this.

This will help you burn the midnight oil. Keep going. Try again tomorrow. Not give up.

And your reasons (or Reason) can change over time.

If you had asked me a couple of years back, I would say my reason was freedom (being able to do what I choose with my time).

Right now, these are my two main Reasons (one is 17 months old, the other one is a bit older) 😉

 

So what is your number 1 Reason? Leave a comment below!

 

 

If I could go back in time and leave a note to my past self, these are some of the things I would tell him/me not to do.

These are, in no particular order:

Not sticking to one thing long enough

These are some of the things I’ve tried in the past:

• Adsense
• Amazon
• Facebook Ads
• Adwords
• Bing Ads
• PPV
• CPA
• Mobile ads
• Banner ads
• Niche sites
• Review sites

And guess what? I’ve made some money in almost all of them. However, it wasn’t until I decided to focus on a few things that I started to have a steady monthly income.

(read the book “The One Thing” where you can get more tips on this)

If I had decided to stick to just one of them (let’s say Adsense), I would probably have become an expert, and would be earning some nice income out of it (plus, being an expert means I could teach others how to do it), instead of having a broad/generic knowledge in some of them.

Not outsourcing earlier

In your business, there are many things that you should not be doing. Period. Your time is better spent doing high value activities.

However, I’d also suggest doing a few things for your self, and learning, before outsourcing (This only applies to core business stuff, like doing keyword research or building sites, not other things like graphic design, you can outsource that from the very beginning).

Not building a list as soon as possible

If I had a dollar every time I read “the money is in the list”, I would have a lot of dollars. But trust me, it’s true!

As soon as you go into any niche, start building your list, sharing value with your subscribers, and establishing a relationship of trust. Not to take advantage of them, not to lie to them or squeeze every penny out of them, but to add value into their lives (if you do that, there is nothing wrong with making a profit with your list).

And that takes me to #4

Not focusing on adding value

Many of my old sites have now expired, and I didn’t renew the domains, because at some point they started earning less than the yearly cost for the domain, but trust me when I say I had some crappy (can I say crappy on a blog?) websites.

In the past, I found some cheap writers (not native), who wrote useless content, so I had whole sites where all of the articles were poorly written, and wouldn’t interest anyone.

Sure, I didn’t have to pay that much for the content, but this didn’t turn out to be a good business.

Never forget that visitors are not numbers, but real people, with real problems. If you can help them solve their problems, you are entitled to some profits (that includes things like sites with ads; affiliate sales or selling your own product).

Trying to find the next “loophole”

This is very tempting. I heard that if I build an Exact Match Domain, write 5 articles with 600 words each and use some keywords, I will be ranking fast. Or, I would dig into forums trying to find the secret sauce.

At the end of the day, business is simple. Just help people solve their problems, the rest will take care of itself!

 

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Obviously, I have made a ton of mistakes along the way, but many of them were great learning experiences, so not all mistakes are bad.

What are some of your mistakes? Feel free to share in the comments!

In 2011, I traveled with my wife 3 months around India. It might seem a long time, but it’s such a huge country, that we only had time to visit some places.

We used to watch TV in some of the hostels, and there was this Vodafone ad that we kept watching, with a very catchy song:

Anyway, I don’t intend to be “always on Facebook”, but at least I am now on Facebook. You can like my page to find updates about my blog or other articles I find online that might be of your interest.

See you there!

Raúl

In the online marketing world there is no shortage of courses, teaching everything you can imagine, and ranging from $5 to $5000, and mixed quality, so it’s a bit of jungle out there.

Why so many courses?

2 main reasons:

1. Some people really enjoy teaching what they know to other people
2. “Sell shovels to the miners instead of digging for gold”.

The first point is clear, but what about the second one?

Do you know who got really rich in the California gold rush era? Many people came with their pickaxe and started digging, and after long days ended up with nothing.

However, some others sold the miners the tools and supplies they needed. And those people made tons of money!

Sure, selling wheelbarrows and jeans sounds much less glamorous than digging  for gold, but in the end it is a much better business model, with less risk, and a ton of potential customers.

How does it apply to the world of Online Marketing?

Well, you can find tons of people digging for gold (ie, people trying to get rich by doing niche sites/cpa/affiliate marketing…) and a few people selling them the pickaxes, profiting from the first group.

What are the pickaxes here? They can be

• Courses
• Services
• Tools
• Coaching
• etc.

So now you know why you will find so many people selling courses about how to make money online. Many of them actually make more money by selling the courses than by doing what they teach…

So how can you find out if the course you are thinking about purchasing is a good one or not?  The answer is, most of the times, you can’t. And sometimes the content is reasonably good, but you might not need it at that point (ie, it’s too advanced, even when in their sales page they say it’s for everyone).

(As a general rule, if it sounds too good to be true… it probably is).

But this wasn’t what I wanted to talk about in my post (doing vs learning).

Many people tend to think: I need to learn everything I can about XXX then I’ll start doing. They research. Purchase a course. Then another. Read forums, blogs… And in the end they devote 90% of the time to learning, and 10% to doing, when in my opinion, the percentages should be the other way round.

Sure, if you can get some education in the topic, that will probably help you, but there is nothing like rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty. You will probably learn much more by making mistakes than by reading the latest e-book.

And if you take a course, make sure to implement what you learn!

So, after reading this post, make sure to take some action!

See you on the next post 🙂

I was going to title this post “Why making money online is not as easy” (or even “not as easy as everybody wants you to believe”), but in the end I went for “online business”.

Why?

Because I wanted to emphasize that at the end of the day, you are building a business, not “playing around”. You have an investment (in time and money), expenses, risk… just as any other business.

When I got started (and especially after watching so many sales videos telling me how easy it was), I thought I could just work on it for a few hours, and everything would “click” straightaway.

Well, nothing further from the truth!

First of all, like with anything in life, there is a learning curve. And this is unavoidable. You will have to go through the four stages of competence. In the beginning, you will have no clue of what you are doing. At some point you will start thinking: “hey, I think I’m beginning to get it”, but a few minutes (or hours/days) later you will think: “I don’t have a clue about what I’m doing”.

And this is ok! This is perfectly normal, and you have to go through it whether you like it or not.

There is something else working against you: statistics.

According to Google, 8 out of 10 business fail. 90% of startups fail. 96% of business fail within 10 years.

What does this mean? Basically, that the odds are against you, and succeeding online is not the norm, but the exception.

Does this mean it’s almost impossible to succeed? I just said it’s hard, not that it’s impossible.

It will require a combination of hard work, resilience, focus and more hard work (ideally, a bit of luck too).

And then, as you are starting to see some light, you will get thousands of e-mails promising the next best thing. Try Facebook Ads/Adsense/Amazon/Pinterest/a secret traffic source/CPA/…

Then you would read stories about someone who got rich doing X. And you will want to do X. Then comes Y, and you think “ah, I should try that”.

Have you been there? I have, multiple times. And I still do sometimes. After all, we are all human.

Anyway, my purpose when writing this was not to discourage anyone, just to let you know that it’s going to be hard, but not impossible. And whatever you are going through, tons of people have been there, so it’s ok!

So after this philosophical post I’ll go back to more practical issues in the next days.

Let me know your thoughts!

It’s obvious that you can use the Internet in a million ways to make money, but if you arrived here, chances are you would like to be what is commonly referred as an “Online Marketer” or “Internet Marketer”, so we can narrow it down to 3 ways:

1. Ads: you make money each time somebody clicks on one of the ads in your website
2. Affiliate sales: You make a commission promoting other people’s products
3. Sell your own product/service

Each one of them have their own advantages, involved risks, amount of work/skills required… And you can make a ton (or none) of money doing any of these, so ultimately you need to pick.

What I’d personally recommend is start on step 1, learn and master it, then move to step 2, and finally number 3 (but that’s just a personal recommendation).

Now let’s dissect each one of them

 

1. Make money via ads

The idea here is very simple: you build a website -ideally more than one, so you get to diversify-, and put some ads on it, related to the topic/niche of your website. Then, each time someone clicks on one of the ads, you get paid, regardless of  whether that person ends up buying something from the advertiser or not.

This is a great way to get started online (in fact, it is how I got started), because you don’t need to know how to sell, how to create a funnel, how to increase conversions… The only thing you need to know is how to create a website, and that’s it.

One of the most popular solutions out there is Google Adsense.

Why? Because you don’t need to find any advertisers, or rotate ads. You simply insert the code they provide for you, and Google will supply you with an endless amount of ads. Not only that, they will find the ones that will make you (and therefore them, since Google is not an NGO) the most money. Plus, they have one of the best payouts in the industry.

What do you need to make money via this system?

2 things: A Website + Traffic. That’s it!

Now if this sounds so simple, it is because it is, well, simple. But, as most things in life, simple does not mean easy.

To get a website that makes a decent amount of money, you need the following:

• Do niche/keyword research (not all niches pay equally)
• Create quality content for your visitors
• A traffic strategy in place. Will you be getting SEO traffic? Or will you be driving paid traffic?

In future articles, I will talk in detail about this, but for now, let’s go to the pros/cons:

Pros:

• Easy to get started
• Low investment required
• You don’t need a great knowledge  to get started

Cons:

• Low payouts
• You will need to build a portfolio of websites
• If you aim to rank your sites via SEO, that will require time.

 

2. Make money as an affiliate

The way this works is the following: you get a special link (called affiliate link), and you provide that link to other people. If the visitors purchase something, you get a commission on the sales.

That commission will vary a lot. For physical products, it’s usually low (between 5-15%), but for digital products, it’s much higher (usually around 50%).

However, physical products have a higher perceived value, so don’t discard them just because the commission is low (look at how many people are promoting products from Amazon.com, even when their commission is usually around 5 to 7%).

The great thing is that there are affiliate programs in almost any niche, so you won’t run out of items to promote.

Popular affiliate networks are Clickbank or JVZoo (for digital products) or Amazon.com (for physical products).

Pros:

• No stock required
• No customer support
• You don’t need to think about creating products
• You don’t even need to create a website

Cons:

• You are dependant on the person selling the product/service. If they stop selling, or ban you, your income goes to 0.
• You also depend on the seller’s ability to sell. You might be the best promoter in the world, but if their website does not convert, you are wasting your time.
• You are not building a customer list (instead, you are building it for somebody else)

There are multiple ways to promote an affiliate offer: you could have a website and add the affiliate links there, you can promote via e-mail marketing, via paid traffic… The possibilities are endless.

 

3. Sell your product or service

We are now at the top of the chain, so you will need some (but not that much) knowledge on how to sell online.

Basically, you create an offer (for example, an online course), sell it to visitors, and keep 100% of the profits (whereas in the previous 2 methods you are getting paid only a certain %, or even a few cents per click if you are doing ads).

Why do things get interesting here? Well, because if you can create multiple products, and  sell a few copies every day, you can make a very very decent amount of money.

And something very important too: You are creating a customers list. It’s much easier to sell something to a previous customer, than to someone who just found out about you. And you can only do that if you sell your own product.

Pros:

• You get to keep 100% of the profits
• You can tweak everything that you like: the sales page, the offer…
• You get to build a customer list (a great asset)

Cons:

• You need to create the product
• You need to deal with customers (some very grumpy, trust me)
• More time involved

 

I know that the explanations were very broad, but I’ll go in detail for each one of the methods in the upcoming weeks, so you will know what to do, step by step.

I have personally tried each one of the methods; in facts, I still have Adsense monetized websites that I built in 2010 and that are making me money every month (and we are in 2017). I also have a few websites promoting Amazon Products (one of them, for ex, has been bringing me around $200-$300/mo since 2009), and I also sell my own products.

Hands down, the most profitable method for me has been #3, building my own products, but I have also made money with the others, so my personal recommendation, if you are getting started, would be this: build a website and put some Adsense ads. Learn how to do keyword research, how to build a website, how to bring SEO traffic…

Once you get the idea, and make your first dollars, promote some products as an affiliate. And when you have learnt some more lessons, go ahead and sell your own product. Despite involving some more work (and more risk), it’s the best way to make good money online.

As always, feel free to post your comments and I’ll do my best to reply to everyone. I’ll see you in my next post.