How can I make money online? was the question knocked my mind during late 2006 and I had done lots of searches on Google, Yahoo & other search engines to find out the best ways to make money online. But as a newbie, I could not find the best methods that were free to join and explore. As time passed through, I read lots of articles, blogs and forums on how to make money online and gained knowledge on the topic and followed some gurus on internet marketing blogs and forums to get up-to-date trends on the market. Once I had gathered some reasonable facts and information about making money online, I started to put my knowledge into play and joined some recommended programs & websites and still keep on learning new things – That puts me in a level of earning a decent amount of monthly income by online and I am happy to be a successful internet marketer. I would like to share my experiences and knowledge so far on making money online.
It is very clear that day by day there are more people are moving towards internet and there are companies which pulls more and more users towards internet with the help of new technology; a good example would the Google Balloon (That is called as Google loon) which helps people to use internet who are in rural areas or has no technical facilities to access internet, also helps people who travel to such areas. As far as number internet users are increasing, it is obvious that number of online shoppers is also increasing which puts every businesses to have an online presence to get more sales. On the other hand, this kind of situation opens up wider choices for people who are looking forward to earn online as well as to develop a career as internet
Skills to Have to Make Money Online
There are courses on internet marketing or making online money, offered by local area institutions and there are universities have some degree program specialized on internet marketing. From my point of view, there are no set of skills required to make money online. If you are passionate about earning online, you can DO it. Anyhow, if you have dedication and patience on learning about making money online, there are lots of resources available online for you to gain more knowledge on it; you should not have any certificate courses to do so.
Ways to make money online
You can earn money online by participating on any affiliate programs, by connecting two parties (example : connecting nannies and parents, linking job seekers and employees and etc.), by offering professional services and there are many ways. Affiliate programs are designed to give a percentage or a specific amount of sales amount (i.e commissions) for each sales that you refer. We will discuss more about it in this site.
If you are familiar with a subject, for an example babysitting, You can develop a website to connect babysitters and parents. There parents can post their jobs vacancies and babysitters can apply and work for them. You may charge parents with small amount of fee during registration or pay some annual membership fees or etc. These kind of services needs some expert knowledge on the subject and internet marketing.
By professional offering services in the sense, you can write articles (if you are good at writing), help others with some coding (if you are good at programming), help others on promoting websites on search engines (if you are good at search engine optimization) and there are variety of online services that you can offer.
Make money online for free with affiliate programs
Affiliate programs are free to join with. Once you join with any affiliate programs, you will be given with any referral identification number or referral URL. You have to use that given unique identification details when you promote the product or service. There are popular affiliate programs such as Amazon affiliate program, Click-bank, web-hosting affiliate programs and etc. You can register with Amazon affiliate program for free by visiting here https://affiliate-program.amazon.com
As per date (June 2013) you can see there are Amazon programs that are specific to countries; such as USA, UK, Germany, France, Japan, Spain, Canada, China and Italy. You can register with all these programs and promote, or just stick with one of these. I had started with USA based program and then now expanding with UK based program as well. Note that to you can live anywhere in the world to become a member of any of these programs (but, there is a limitation; if you live in some particular states of USA, you cannot participate in these affiliate programs, you can check it with Amazon affiliate programs FAQ page or simply Google to get more information on that). Let me explain you very simple steps on moving forward with Amazon affiliate program.
Once you register with this affiliate program, you have to add tracking ID, If you are a member of USA based Amazon affiliate program, you can set an ID by yourself and there will be “-20” added at end of your tracking code. Then, you have to choose the products that you want to promote. To do so, you can simply go to www.amazon.com and search for the products that you wish to promote. From the individual product listing page you can find the ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number), take that number, go back to your affiliate program site, paste the ASIN on search box and hit “Go”. You will get a screen like below.
From there you can get your affiliate URL for that particular product; you can notice that the affiliate URL ends with your tracking ID. So, If anyone visits using that affiliate URL, Amazon can understand that you are referring someone to their site and if the person you refer buy the product, you will be added up with commissions. Commissions vary from product types, you can check these on their site itself.
I highly recommend US Amazon affiliate program for start up. Once you are established something, you may go ahead with other affiliate programs like ClickBank and etc.
Now the question is “How to promote the affiliate URL?”
You have to have a website or you can use your social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest.com, Google plus and etc. But, I strongly emphasize to have a website of your own and use all the combinations of your website and social media profiles for promotion.
Before thinking about getting a website, you have to ask yourself, what kind of products that you are going to promote? You do not have to be an expert or have huge amount of knowledge about a particular product type. You can learn by yourself. To start with, you may go ahead with the product that you are familiar. For example, it may be coffee maker or laptop or baby monitor or etc. Once you finalize the product type that you are going to promote, learn the market, how many searches are being done on search engines (go for popular search engine Google) and do a keyword research. You can visit http://seoguideforbeginner.blogspot.com/2013/03/how-to-do-keyword-research-free-with.html to learn on how to do keyword research and find out the keywords to target.
Once your keyword research is completed, you can buy domain and web-hosting – You have to spend some money with it. But this investment worth a lot for you to earn good money online.
Find the list of individual products from Amazon that you are going to promote. Some tips to be taken into account when selecting the products to promote :
- Select the products that has good customer ratings and reviews – more is the better. That will have good conversion rates.
- Select the product that has a good price, at least above $100 – Then only you can earn good commissions from it.
Now time for you to spend time on web designing. You should not be a professional on web design. You can simply install wordpress and start working around. If you need a help hand, you can post a project on Freelancer.com and ask someone to help you to install wordpress on your site and ask them to prepare a training guide on how to create posts & pages, how to install themes on wordpress. So, you can learn from it and complete your design. When I had started, I had no ideas on what is wordpress. Anyhow, I figured out on how to install it to my site and I learned online on how to improve my site, how to do posts, pages and etc. You should not worry, Google is there for you with all the answers. You should put some effort and time and search on Google with your question to find out the answers – believe me, setting up a website using wordpress is very very simple, you will realize it on later days.
Some tips to consider on how your web pages should be?
- You should have good content about the products that you are promoting,content is very important and it should be unique. You should not copy it from somewhere else. If you are not good at writing, you can still outsource using Freelancer.com, there are plenty of good writers or iWriters.com is another option for you – Of course, some investment requires here as well (if you are outsourcing), but nothing to worry about, in case everything is perfect, you are going to make huge amount of money with Amazon affiliate program.
- You have to have a disclosure and privacy policy pages – use Google to find some tips on it.(Amazon affiliate program strongly advice you to have a disclosure on your page saying that you are an affiliate and earning commissions from Amazon by referring)
To learn more on it, you can always be a member on any popular internet marketing forums where you can post your questions for free and get answers from some experienced people.
Once your website is ready and live, then you have to think on how to get traffic to your website and send that traffic to Amazon and earn commissions. There are various traffic sources to be considered; such as traffic from social media marketing (using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, Google plus and etc), traffic from niche forums/blogs/other websites, traffic from Google (this is diamond for many websites and Google is one of the best traffic source). You may learn all these things as time passes. Anyhow, you can learn some ideas on how to optimize a website for search engine like Google by visiting here http://www.etheeseoservices.co.uk/how-to-do-seo/
Do not forget, learning by experiences worth a lot.
Let's see what are other possible ways to make money online; you can offer services online. There are websites where you can find jobs posted and you can work on those jobs from your home. Good examples of those websites would be Freelacner.com, odesk.com, Elance.com, peopleperhour.com, and etc. On these places you can see projects are posted on under various categories but not limited to data entry, data processing, excel, word, PDF, web design, programming, web promotions, social media marketing, search engine marketing and so on. So, if you have skills on those particular categories, you can join those websites for free and bid on projects and keep it going. If you are good at article writing, you can earn with iwriter.com, needarticle.com, helium.com and so on.
NOTE: other than these ways of earning money online, there are SPAM programs too available in the market that are targeted towards newbies (mostly). Do not get trap with those programs.(You can see/notice such programs saying like earn $1000 within 3 days, get $8000 per month, data entry from home and earn $800 per month and etc). Before join any such programs, do some research on that program on Google or ask experts on internet marketing forums about that program – you can be part of popular internet marketing forum Warrior Forum – That is really helpful for you to learn a lots about make money online.
