The 5 Most Profitable Ways to Make Money Online

So you wanna make some extra cash, perhaps even replace your income, through the internet? You’ve started researching different systems and ways but you’re so confused that you’re thinking about giving up? Read through this article and the different tips inside to figure out what you need to do.

Adsense

Ah, the infamous adsense. You’ve probably seen these things all over the internet, on crappy web sites to authorities. And you’ve probably heard that the barrier to entry is practically none – so you probably started out with this model, except that you don’t know how to get traffic or how to increase your CTR, and what not. First let me explain what adsense is, then I’ll explain some basic tips to increase your CTR and traffic, and finally I’ll finish off with some pros and cons and what to realistically expect.

Adsense is something Google invented. Its purpose is to target consumers to different businesses’ websites in exchange for a small fee. You, the person with the adsense, also get a small fee (albeit much smaller at first). If your traffic level is consistent and your CTR (how often your visitors click on the ads) is high enough, your income will be pretty consistent as well. Adsense is the ultimate beginning level of making money online because it’s easy and it works.

Basic and essential tips to get you started:

• 1. Use square/rectangle and skyscrapers shaped ads
• 2. Blend your ads’ font colors to those used in your site
• 3. Put the ads above the fold (meaning your visitors won’t have to scroll down)

A CTR of 3% is average and anything below or around 10% is pretty good. Anything above that, the website owner is probably doing something extraordinary. Personally, my sites are around 9% because I blend my ads very well. If you’re using PLR (private label rights) or you’re rehashing used material, your site’s traffic is going to peter down quickly, because only using unique, quality content will guarantee that other website owners link to your website and thus “cement” your google rankings. If you don’t use unique, quality content, your rankings will deteriorate and you must keep working at it until you burn out.

Now let me explain some pros and cons – pros: it’s easy, fast, gets results. The cost is barely nothing; you can own your own .com or use a free blogger (.com is better because you can then sell your site). But there are some significant cons as well: the payoff to the amount of time and effort you spend is very small, you must keep working at it for several months before you see some serious payoff. You should expect to make around $1 a day at first, depending on the market. Basically, it’s a poor business model, but because it’s popular and the barrier to entry is so small, everyone is doing it. It’s extremely competitive and unless you are fully committed to doing this or have an unusual edge with unique, quality content, you shouldn’t approach this method.

Don’t listen to the marketing hype that others are making $10,000/month – either their business model’s illegal and Google is immune to the tricks, or they’ve been working at it for many years with authoritative, quality content. Now that we’ve finished exploring adsense, let’s move on to affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing

Most people start off with either adsense or affiliate marketing – the payoff for affiliate marketing is usually bigger but more inconsistent, primarily because someone has to actually buy a product in order for you to get money. Most affiliates start off by signing up with Clickbank, and I advise you to do the same. Let me briefly explain what affiliate marketing is, some basic tips on increasing your sales, and finally the pros and cons.

Affiliate marketing is when you – the affiliate – promote someone else’s product and if a visitor buys through your link (that is they click on your link that directs them to the official website), and the visitor actually buys the product, you will receive around 50~75% of the sale. The cut is pretty big because the products are usually digital products with little cost of manufacture.

Random Tips from My Personal Experience:

• 1. Read the hoplink FAQ on clickbank because if you don’t use the correct formatting, you sale won’t count. (This has happened to me initially).
• 2. Place the affiliate link above the fold and below the fold. Make the sign pretty clear.
• 3. Don’t say “Buy” in the affiliate link, because it’ll decrease your CTR. Instead, say something like “Check Out Official Website” or “Visit Official Website” or just plain “Official Website”
• 4. Don’t hardsell the product, that’s the merchant’s job. Your job is to softsell it – describe your previous problem, how you found the product, how it solved your problem, and the final result. Then just place your link on your website/article.
• 5. Cloak your affiliate link because when visitors see the hoplink on the status bar, they may either not click on it or delete the affiliate portion to steal your commissions. Use affiliate cloner – they’re the best.
• 6. Don’t BS your audience. Give them quality educational content and preselling material (presell is what I explained in #5.) When you’re explaining the pros and cons of your product, don’t hype it up; be honest because visitors can tell right away.
• 7. Track your sales (see clickbank faq for tracking id) and spend more time on what’s selling. Put your article marketing, forum postings, and social bookmarking on steroids! But at the same time, don’t neglect the other products because you can redirect visitors that were searching for product B (not selling well) to product A (making a killing).
• 8. If you’re a beginner, consider taking the organic traffic route rather than the PPC – pay per click (paying for traffic) – route because there may be some legal issues with saying negative things about a product if you take the PPC route. With the organic route, there are none; you can say whatever you want. Not only that, but you’ll probably burn your cash on PPC if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Now let me list some pros and cons for affiliate marketing. The pros are that the payoff is much bigger. In fact, you can realistically replace your income with this method. You can promote multiple products listed on Clickbank without actually developing them – so that you’re essentially leveraging off of others’ hard work. You don’t have to worry about conversions because the merchants are already split-testing their salesletter. The number of variables you have to worry about is significantly fewer than creating your own online business; but of course, you still have to really work at it. The cons include: affiliate marketing is pretty competitive, the pay can be inconsistent, and how much you make depends on how well the merchant’s salesletter converts.

So what can you do increase your control? Let’s move on to creating your own online business.

Online Business

This is pretty much the pinnacle of making money online (and forex, our next point). You’re a big boy now, and you’d like to actually make a 6-figure income without answering to anyone else. This is where the hype no longer plays – you WILL need to work your butt off, you WILL need a sound business model (remember you’re building an actual business here), you WILL go through bumps and bruises, and you WILL have to learn through them. Online businesses are still businesses. You’re going to be building long-term web sites, striving for authoritative status. You’ll need to become an expert on the market niche and you’ll need to write many quality, unique articles. You can promote other products through affiliate marketing and you can also produce your own products.

Here Are Some Basic Tips on Online Businesses:

• 1. Create a list. A list is a database of email addresses and first names that visitors sign up for, usually in exchange for some free, quality learning material. You can use your list to promote your own product and others’ products.
• 2. Always split test your salesletter. Download some free A-B split testing script. Small changes will yield huge differences.
• 3. List your own product on clickbank with 75% cut (not 50%). This will put your sales growth on super steroids. Convince the affiliate marketers that your conversion rate is high and that the demand in the market niche is growing.

Let’s talk about some pros and cons of making your online business. The pros are obvious: you’ll make tons of money, the pay is consistent, and you only need one online business to replace your income. The cons are also obvious: you’ll need to work your ass off, you’ll need to go through a lot of failures and using them as feedback to improve your business (kind of split testing), and you’ll have to do a lot more work.
There’s a lot more to creating an online business, but for now let’s move on to Forex trading.

Forex Trading

“Screw stocks, I want to play the biggest game in the world!” You’re probably thinking… Welcome to the extremely exciting, and extremely unforgiving world of Forex. It’s the world’s only pure Darwinian playground – where the small speculator (that’s you) actually have an edge over the corporate powerhouses, those that usually dominate the stock world.

I won’t explain what forex is (you can do that on your own) but I will go into detail some tips on how to actually succeed. I’ll also briefly list some pros and cons and definitely some warnings. (Note that this caters more to technical analysis trading.)

How To Trade Forex Tips:

• 1. Learn to manage your risk and cut your losses short. What does this mean? It means that you should have lots of “losers.” It’s just that your winners are larger than your losers. Don’t strive for accuracy – Strive for consistent trading.
• 2. Keep a journal on the market you’re trading. Keep a detailed account on the market’s behavior, and your psychological reactions when trading. Review it when you’re not trading to create “daily rules” for your trading.
• 3. Never ever increase your stop loss. Take the loss. Increasing your stop loss to avoid a losing trade is what makes 95% of traders lose money. Only move your stop loss to trail your winning trades. In fact, most of your trades shouldn’t hit your target; they should hit your stop loss, whether it was profitable or not.
• 4. The single most important tip: Know who you are. Your personality and character dictate what kind of trading system you will trade. Most traders who have a trading plan fail because they can’t follow their own plan; and this is because they subconsciously don’t want to. If you’re a laid back kind of guy, you cannot day trade – your mind won’t let you and you won’t be able to follow your day trading plan. Likewise, if you’re a fast paced kind of guy, you won’t be able to position trade, and perhaps even swing trade. I could write a whole book on this, but I won’t dwell on it too much.

The pros of forex trading is that you actually have an edge – it’s not a fixed game. Huge corporations, hedge funds, and institutions are losing tons of money (80% of them don’t really know what they’re doing) and you can be on the opposite side of the trade.

Of course, you’ll HAVE TO HAVE TO HAVE TO do your homework (because 95% of small speculators don’t know what they’re doing). Remember that the forex market is a jungle and that you’re either predator or prey. The wealth potential is staggering – you can literally take $1000 and turn it into $100,000 within two weeks. Of course, you shouldn’t expect such results, but because the market is unregulated (there’s no central exchange), brokers can offer huge leverage to the clients. And remember, leverage without a structured trading system will kill your account.

Forex is a huge opportunity to those that have done their homework. Realistically, you’ll have to commit your time and effort to do your own homework for the following 0.5~2 years. It’s usually not until the 3rd live account and the 3rd year that most traders start earning money. But of course, if you focus on investing in your forex trading intelligence, you can accelerate that time period. In fact, there are several forex systems and educational products that are several $1000s; Don’t buy them, you’ll just be wasting your money.

Well, we’ve explored the major ways people make tons of money online. But what if these activities seem pretty hard? And pretty scary? Well, there’s another way to make money that doesn’t require much risk.

Another Way to Make Money (if you’re afraid of losing money)

One great way to make money is to become a freelancer. As mentioned in the adsense section, people can use PLR material – partially unique material others can use – to rewrite them and then publish them. The thing is, (and I can tell you from direct and indirect experience), that rewriting these articles is a pain in the ass. You can go on elance, getafreelancer, and/or the digital point forums and market yourself as a article rewriter. Of course, your english has to be pretty solid – master the basics and learn some basic keyword research. Rewriting articles can go from $4 to $10. The $4 are poor quality rewrites from non-English speakers. The $10 aren’t necessarily top quality; it’s just that sometimes the people charging $10 have more traffic directed to them.

So what you can do is this? Market yourself as an article rewriter, charge about $5~7 for a 400 word article (the average size). Of course, you’ll be inundated with orders, so you’ll have to regulate the flow of orders somehow. Make sure the quality is high, so that your credibility doesn’t go down and your existing clients will continue to order from you. Make sure you get your money at least 50% upfront, or even all of it – because clients sometimes don’t pay afterwards.

You can work several hours a week like this to make a couple hundred dollars a month. You won’t get as much cash as making your own online assets, but maybe this is what you’re looking for.

Final Note

I really hope my article’s helped you on your journey to financial freedom, but if you’re a little stuck, try searching for competitors’ websites (those that are profitable) and copy key elements from there. Learn to code a bit of html and php (trust me, they help). Learn the basics of building businesses, learn to manage costs by putting them on excel spreadsheets, and never stop investing in yourself – always read and learn. Here’s a caveat, however, and that is that most people don’t know what they’re talking about – they’re not profitable at all. Only read from those who know what they’re talking about.

Think about it, the people who make the money are invisible. The people who want you to think that they’re making money (to sell you something) are boasting (ok, there may be people making dough that boast, too, but you get my point).

Regardless of what path you take, there’s no such thing as easy money. Lower your expectations, don’t fall into marketing hype, and work diligently. Let me leave you with two quotes, quotes that have encouraged me during the tough times of making money online. I sincerely hope these quotes will do the same to you:

• 1. Live your own life, for you shall die your own death. – Latin Proverb
• 2. Do not succumb to the pressures of the outside world. Mind your own business. Pay yourself first. Become stronger, Become smarter! – Robert Kiyosaki

So Where Do I Go Now?

So now you’re a little bit closer to achieving your financial goals. You now know what these “internet gurus” are doing to pay for their Mercerdez Benz. And by now, you’ve realized that, “Hey, this thing takes a lot more work than I thought.” With that in mind, if you’re still committed and still willing to work hard to build passive income… then congratulations, you’ve completed the first step. Now, all you need is a good business model to follow. By now, you’ve also hopefully realized which route you want to take – if you haven’t, that’s still all right.

If you want to make money in any of the above methods, want a more complete blueprint, or just accelerate your learning, check out the online income section of my website. Be sure to check out what the best online educational products are, and feel free to browse some more.

If you want to make money through forex trading, but you don’t know which system to follow and want to accelerate your forex education, definitely check out the forex section of my website. As a teaser, let me just say that there’re tons of products to choose from and it’ll depend on whether you want to learn discretionary trading, or mechanical black box trading – we have products reviewed for both paths. Personally, I love Hector’s trading course (discretionary), 5EMAs trading system (mechanical), and Bird Watching in Lion Country (educational). Be sure to check them out.

Author: Alex Hawk
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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