Part of the guide: Affiliate Marketing
Building a business online is tough, especially when you’re following the wrong business idea. Honestly, some business models are suited better for certain people. There are just so many online business ideas out there, but few that actually work. Since I’m known as a slight guru in the online Network Marketing world, a lot of people come to me asking how they can earn a living online.
It’s seriously annoying when people ask such broad questions because it’s hard for me to give a real answer. I probably use around 6 different business models in my current business and they all work very well. So I thought I would break down six very simple business ideas/models that work like crazy:
1. Services
This is first on my list for a reason. Simply because it’s by far the easiest way to replace your income or start earning a living online. Most people consider a full-time income to be around $3000/month, most people can just about get by on that. Then around $5000/month to have a bit of a lifestyle. There are over 7 billion people on this planet. You just need 60 people to pay you $50 per month and you’re making $3000/month in cash.
Don’t you think you could get just 60 people out of 7 billion to pay you $50/month for a service of some kind? You can offer services like web design, WordPress installation and setup, SEO, website optimization, fan page creation, email marketing, and more. The number of online marketing services you can provide is getting crazy. The idea is to get offline clients to pay you around $250-$1000/month for an online marketing service.
You just need to learn a simple online marketing skill. If you can create professional Facebook pages, install WordPress, design websites, or rank websites in the search engines then you can easily offer a service… But that’s not entirely true. You don’t even need any skills, I know most people just outsource the actual services. Let’s say you choose the SEO service business model. You could go around your high street asking local businesses if they are paying for a professional SEO service.
Then explain how you can get their website higher up in the search engines for local keywords which will result in more customers for them. Once you’ve convinced them and sealed the deal, take 25%-50% of the money and spend it on a professional SEO service. Keep repeating the process until you’re making enough money – that’s it.
2. Blogging
Blogging is definitely one of the most popular online business models out there. In theory, it’s not an actual business model, but it sort of is. Most people blog for fun, some for profit – but very few people actually make a living from their blogs. It’s not that difficult, making money with a blog can be summed up in a 9-step process:
- Niche Selection
- Keyword Research
- Blog Creation
- Writing Content
- Social Media
- Search Engine Optimization
- Monetization
First you have to select the niche you want to start your blog in. Next do a load of keyword research to make sure there are plenty of searches going on in your niche. Doing so allows you to verify that the search engines can be a major traffic source for your blog. Most blogs get the majority of their traffic from the search engines or social media. Making sure there are plenty of keywords being searched is vital.
After keyword research you usually start publishing lots of great blog posts. Straight after you have to promote your content with social media and search engine optimization. Finally is the monetization. After you’ve done the first 8 steps you should be getting plenty of traffic. Once you’re getting traffic you can monetize it. You can monetize a blog by selling your own products, affiliate marketing, advertising or even by promoting CPA offers. Take your pick.
3. Affiliate Marketing
Every successful Internet Marketer uses Affiliate Marketing in their business. It’s definitely one of the easiest online businesses to start, but I wouldn’t say the easiest to make money with. According to Wikipedia, the definition of Affiliate Marketing is:
“Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts”.
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
In human terms, affiliate marketing is where you promote someone else’s product and take a percentage of the profits made from each sale. In the offline world, finding a product to promote isn’t easy. In fact you’ll be lucky to find a product that pays you 20% commissions. In the online world, anyone can choose from thousands of products to promote and get instant affiliate access.
All you have to do is choose a product to promote, get an affiliate link and drive targeted traffic to it. It sounds simple enough right? Well it was… A few years ago you could just send traffic straight to affiliate links and build a profitable business. Right now there’s a lot more to affiliate marketing… Product research, capture pages, copywriting, a whole load of techy stuff, and of course autoresponders. My point is if you’re not earning a living online yet – master traffic generation before you dive into affiliate marketing.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions in the box below. Also put your name and email in the form on the right to get more cool Internet Marketing tips, tricks, and secrets.
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Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Antwuan Bell, February 1, 2012, 23:40
David, Great post! I’m like Dean I like the break down of finding 60 people to pay you $50/mo to generate $3000/mo. This post has brought up some ideas for me to blog about so thank you very much for sharing. Your the Man!
Dean R. Black, December 18, 2011, 23:14
David thanks for this excellent article on ways to make money online. I especially like idea of just finding 60 people who will pay you $50 a month to do something for them. This would allow a lot of people to transition into working for themselves and allow them the time freedom to grow their online business even further. Leverage is the key, get people to pay you for your expertise.
Three posts a day. One email a day.
Everything I publish, in one short daily email. Real numbers, no hype, unsubscribe in one click.
Get paid 100%, on-chain, the second the sale clears
Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Stripped down, this is three plans: charge locals for a skill (Services), build an audience then monetize it (Blogging), or sell someone else’s product for a cut (Affiliate). All three end at the same bottleneck — traffic or clients you don’t have yet. The gap is that the post treats getting to that bottleneck as step one instead of the hardest part.
Meera’s bottleneck point is exactly where I always saw people stall out. Every one of these three models genuinely can work — I watched it work for others. What the post skips is that “can work” and “will work for you in a reasonable timeframe” are different claims, and nobody tells you that difference until you’re a year in.
I only know the affiliate side from the company end, so take this with that bias noted upfront — the products with the richest affiliate payouts are usually the hardest to sell honestly, precisely because the commission has to cover a genuinely difficult conversion somewhere in the funnel. The post lists affiliate marketing as the easiest of the three to start, which is technically true — anyone can get a link in minutes. But easy to start and easy to sell were never the same claim, and conflating them is where I’ve watched the most people quit early.
Before picking any of the three, name which bottleneck actually suits you — waiting for traffic to build, or cold-approaching local businesses. Different temperaments entirely. Which one would drain you less on a bad week?