How To Get Rich Online
I have read many articles about how to get rich online. I'm
not quite there yet myself, although my wife and I are making
far more money from the internet than any of my dozens of jobs
ever provided. Here are some of my thoughts on making money online.
First of all, there is no one sure recipe for success. I know
people who make good money buying and selling domain names, something
I not only have no idea how to do, but also don't have the right
mind set for. I know another businessman who sells a million
dollars annually in products online. I think I could do that,
but I have always hated the idea of having to ship things and
- in his case - hire employees.
My wife and I have a simpler formula. We create websites full
of great information, mostly about things that are of some interest
to us (fortunately I have a lot of interests). We have websites
about money, real estate, backpacking, brainpower, meditation,
Spanish lessons and more.
To make money with these sites we simply have pay-per-click
advertising and links to affiliate products that we make a commission
on. No products to ship, no retail customers to deal with, and
we make money while we are sleeping or on vacation. We like that.
I have also been selling ebooks for a few years now, so I do
have to check my email when I can to resolve any customer issues
with downloads.
Of course to make big money with this design, you need big
traffic. For us, the single best way to get that has been by
promoting the sites with articles that we distribute through
article directories. It worked better when we started doing it
in 2005, but it is still an important part of our marketing.
The process is detailed in my ebook You
Can Make Money Writing.
How to get rich online? Although we are not yet rich, our
own experience is that you get there by consistent work. We have
managed to keep growing despite the current recession. How? Here's
a simple plan:
1. Keep learning.
2. Keep trying new things.
3. Keep repeating the things that work.
Some Bad News?
I don't want to discourage anyone from trying to get rich
online, but I do want to tell you what you can expect. First
of all, although it's getting easier to get started online, it's
also more difficult to make money. There is just a lot more competition.
I'm glad we started when we did (late 2004). There are still
great opportunities, but be prepared to plan long-term and be
patient.
You'll see a lot of simple explanation of how to make big
money online. For example, once you have a website, you'll open
emails that say something like this: "Just link to my product
on your site or introduce it to the people on your mailing list
and you can make thousands of dollars per month." That will
be followed by some simple math: You make a commission of $30
on a $50 product, for example, and "all you have to do make
$55,000 annually is sell just five each day.
The truth is that there are plenty of good products that offer
commissions like that (ebooks and other downloadable products
offer the highest-percentage commissions). And yes, if you sell
just five each day you'll make $55,000 each year on that one
product. Find a dozen more products like that and do the same
and... well, getting rich online sounds simple, doesn't it?
Reality check: It will be rare to find products that convert
more than 1% of the traffic you send to them into buyers, despite
the hype. You also will be lucky to have more than two of every
hundred visitors to your site click on any given link. So if
you have 750,000 visitors to your site this month, 15,000 of
them are likely to click that link and of those 150 are likely
to buy the product - 5 per day on average.
Now, more realistically, if you have 15,000 visitors monthly
after building your site presence up for months, perhaps 300
will click that link and 3 will buy, netting you $75 for the
month or $900 for the year from that product.
I don't mean to discourage, but to prevent discouragement
when you look and wonder why with thousands of visitors you're
not making money. In most niches you'll need at least tens of
thousands of visits monthly to make a decent living, and hundreds
of thousands to get rich. That is possible. We have hundreds
of thousands of people visit our sites every month. But it took
a few years to build to that level.
How do you get rich online? Start right now and keep working
at it. Difficult or not, it sure beats having a job.
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