Struggling At Making Money Online?
I was having a clear out of one of my email inboxes the other day and found something I completely forgot about. It was something I wrote to a subscriber sometime last summer in response to his struggles at making money online.
I understood exactly where he was coming from because just about everyone faces the same problems – including me. Instead of just sending the email into the digital wastebasket, I thought it would make a good post, and possibly help somebody else.
Here it is, with some parts removed for privacy reasons.
[START OF EMAIL]
Hi,
First of all, don’t listen to people who have negative viewpoints as they will only put you off.
Now, to be honest with you, the internet marketing niche is probably the toughest one to break into so I would advise you to go into other niches if you want to make money.
I started out by building one WordPress website in the relationship niche and like many, I thought money would come rolling in from affiliate sales. I knew nothing about WordPress and FTP but I learned as I went along. I am technically-minded and had done a lot of computer programming so it wasn’t too hard to get my head around.
To flesh out the site I used content from the product merchants I was affiliated to and wrote some articles myself. I also submitted my own articles to article directories to get traffic. That was it really. I thought traffic would come pouring in. Little did I know at the time.
I didn’t make a single sale for a couple of months and the first year I only made around $1000 dollars from it. I used this small amount of money to build more websites in other niches. That first site of mine has been changed a lot since I started it but it’s been #1 on Google for a couple of years now and gets very steady traffic. It has good content and fills a certain need for many people.
The point here is to only go into niches that give people something they really need.
Domains don’t cost much and it won’t take long to create a site with WordPress and add some unique articles. You can write them yourself, rewrite some PLR or you can have them written for you for a few dollars each.
Getting traffic is the hardest part and where most people give up. To build traffic submit your RSS feeds, submit your posts to social bookmarking sites, Web 2.0 properties, comment on blogs, post on forums, create free blogs linking back to your main site, all the usual promotional tactics.
Once you have built and done some promotion for a site you can then monetize it with affiliate offers. If it makes just one sale a week it pays for your hosting many times over. Repeat this in a number of niches and soon you should have a steady income from multiple websites.
And be patient as it could take some time for some to get off the ground like my first site did.
Truth is though, to be a success in IM you must have your own product and brand yourself as an expert as you said. And, if you haven’t realised by now most IM products are knockoffs of others and once you have seen one you’ve just about seen them all.
So don’t go buying the latest hyped up IM product unless you are sure you need it as you will probably be wasting money. There is some absolute rubbish being promoted but there are a few quality IM products once in a while. Whatever you do, don’t fall for the get rich quick stuff. If it worked why are they selling it to you?
As for tools, Market Samurai is really good for keyword research and lots more beside… in fact I used it today to quickly find some RSS feeds to add to one of my sites.
And have you tried Ed Dale’s 30 day Challenge? It’s some of the best training around and it’s free.
Bottom line is, get into multiple niches because all the gurus do that and make a killing at it.
It will mean lots of hard work and can be very boring at times but think of the rewards.
The naysayers will look at you differently then, won’t they?
I hope this has helped you in some way [NAME REMOVED] so good luck.
To your success,
Terence
[END OF EMAIL]
What I will add to this is that providing good content for your visitors is probably the best thing you can do to build a successful website. I know everyone says that but it’s true.
