How to make money online (For beginners)

Read through this post carefully, and then see the 10-Step Checklist at the end for getting started!

There are a number of ways to make money online. Options range from creating your own product to sell online, making money as a professional blogger, managing an online community, developing a content site on a hot topic – just to name a few.

All of these are just various ways to deliver content online. Your first step will be choosing a niche, which is the market or topic you are going to focus on.

Speaking of focus, with so many options to make money online – focus is key. You want to choose a niche and a business model, and work on that one project all the way from start to profit. Don’t let all the other options distract or derail you.

Once you decide on a topic or niche, you should sit down and map out a plan for your internet business model. What market are you targeting, and how can you best serve that market? This is the angle you want to work from, vs the more common: how can I make the most money from this market? (Most people get it backwards and then get frustrated when that doesn’t work out for them)

See: How to Become a Market Leader in Your Niche

So you choose a niche, create a blog or website, set up social media profiles to interact with your target market on the topic, and you create and share useful content that will build your reputation and readership in that niche.

I can hear what you’re saying…

“That all sounds great, but how do I make money from it?”

How to Make Money Online (For Beginners)

The absolute easiest way to make money online is with Affiliate Marketing. You don’t have to create a product, set up a shopping cart and merchant account, do customer service, work with clients, etc. It’s very much like a traditional commission-based sales job where you earn commission on any sales you refer. Just as one example, you can promote a web hosting affiliate program and earn commission on every new account sign-up.

The difference is that you’re doing it online, and you can do it from home without ever doing in-person or phone sales. You simply recommend products and/or refer people to specific merchants through the content on your website.

The method I prefer is creating SEO Content, or content that is optimized to rank well in the major search engines. People find it when they are searching for that, click through, and buy what they need or want. This works really well because you write the content once, and it continues to rank well and earn you money for years to come. As long as you maintain your search engine rankings.

“How can I make 3-4k a month or more?
What steps will it take to get there?”

I know this is stating the obvious, but it should be said:

It takes time, work, and being both persistent and consistent. An online business is the same as any other business in that it requires an investment on your part to get it up and running. The positive side of online business is that it takes a lot less time and money than most traditional offline business models.

Do these 10 steps, in this order, to get started:

• Choose Your Niche.
• Register a Domain Name.
• Set up a Website or Blog with WordPress.
• Set up your Social Media accounts.
• Download and read SEO Fast Start (free).
• Create SEO Content. Also read: Keyword Strategy.
• Sign up for Affiliate Programs in your niche.
• Write Product Reviews for those products.
• Get links pointing to your pages or blog posts.
• Continue creating content, getting links & interacting via Social Media.

Once you get all this set up and you’re making money as an Affiliate, you can look at other ways to monetize your site. You might create short reports on your topic to sell, test contextual advertising, or look into even more methods to make money.

Yes it’s work. And yes – it’s worth it!

If you do these steps, and continue to learn & tweak as you go, you’ll start earning money. You can increase your traffic (number of visitors) and your income as you continue to grow and market your website.

It takes time to get to a consistent $3-5K per month in revenue, but you could easily do that within the first year.

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Get Better At Blogging

Learning from other peoples mistakes is a lot more productive than studying their success, so here are some tips for blogging that was learned the hard way. It will save you a lot of time and headaches if you pay attention to the following:

When Writing:

• This is basic, but you have to remember it, check spelling and grammar!
• Hook your readers quickly by asking a question.
• Use lots of white space, bullet points and even colors to make your post easy to read.
• Get to the point as quickly as possible, don’t waffle on and on.
• Make an outline before you start, it makes things go faster.
• Write about things you love, it just make it more believable.
• You don’t HAVE to publish everything you write, if it’s bad leave it.

Getting fresh ideas:

• Be aware of what’s going on around you, the ideas will come.
• See what market leaders are doing and adopt it to your work.
• Look on forums what people are struggling with, and provide answers.
• Use Google trends to see what’s happening.
• Read magazines and newspapers to get ideas.

Your headline:

• Keep it short and sweet.
• Keep them fewer than 65 characters, or Google will cut them off.
• Your headline is super important , so spend time on it.
• Use a well researched long tail keyword or phrase as a headline.
• Try to think what people will search for and use that as a headline.
• Be controversial, but don’t offend people for the hell of it.
• Evoking curiosity is an art, but it works well in headlines.
• Get the readers’ emotions going and you have a winner
• See what magazine writers are doing, that’s how they pay the bills, so they must be good.
• Make it short enough to fit in a tweet.

Get more comments on your posts:

• Ask questions to encourage people leaving comments.
• Reply to all the comments you get, good or bad.
• Reply quickly and give proper responses, not just one or two words.
• Moderate your comments, you don’t want spam all over the place.
• Give value in your comments, don’t use them to self promote.

Scheduling:

• Publish consistently, if you want good rankings.
• Stick to your schedule, no matter what.
• Publish in the mornings and not over weekends.

Getting your SEO in place:

• Yoast WordPress plugin is a must if you use WordPress.
• Write for humans, not search engines.
• Infographics are a favorite with search engines at the moment.
• Don’t stuff your article with keywords, it doesn’t work anymore.
• Use sub-headings and headings to rank even higher.

Social media help:

• Don’t put 10 buttons on your blog, three is more than enough for sharing.
• Place the sharing buttons at the bottom and on the side of your post.
• Share your post a few times on Twitter to get more exposure.
• Ask people to share, ask and you shall receive, or something like that : >

Blogging takes practice, but you will get better the more you work on it, hopefully these pointers will make the learning curve faster and eliminate some of the headaches! Please give me feedback from your own blogging experiences and share this with people that will get value from it.

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