There are a ton of different ‘make money online’ systems being promoted out there. This makes it super confusing for anyone that is looking to start an Internet business.
Which one do you go with?
To help you understand better the opportunities that are available online, I’m going to break it down for you. Basically, there are three ways that you can make money online:
- Promote Your Own Product
- Sell Advertising Space
- Sell Other People’s Products
I’ll go into detail for all three, but in this article we’ll discuss the first method…
1. Promote Your Own Product
This is pretty self-explanatory. If you have a product you want to sell, you can sell it online. This can be a physical product (like the many products that are sold each day on eBay) or it can be a digital product (e.g. an ebook).
Promoting your own products is not a good way to begin your Internet business if you are a beginner, for the following reasons:
a. Very time consuming
When you’re first starting out online, it’s best to work on learning the skill of how to drive traffic (visitors) to your website. This is the MOST important skill. You don’t need to have your own product to do this.
Creating your own product takes a lot of time and is not the best use of your time. It’s like buying a ferrari before you even begin to learn how to drive!
Once you’ve found a market that is hot, and you know how to drive a lot of targeted traffic to a website, and you begin making profits, then is the time that you will want to start working on creating your own product if you decide to do so.
b. Know your market first
Many people make the mistake of creating a product or service based on what they personally like. They spend a lot of time and effort on creating the product or service only then to find, many times, that there isn’t much of a market for it or that they’ve set it up all wrong.
By promoting other people’s products as an affiliate (we will talk about this in more detail later), you get to know your market. You come to know what they like and what they don’t like. Also, you get to know which products are successful and how those successful products are marketed.
This experience is invaluable.
I didn’t create my first product until I had been making a full-time income online for three and a half years, promoting other people’s products. Then, when I did create mine, I knew exactly what the market wanted and how to market it.
Was it a success? Yes, it was a HUGE success!
c) Traffic is king!
No matter how good your product or service is, if you can’t get it in front of enough people, you won’t succeed. When you’re first starting out, you typically won’t know how to drive quality traffic to your site. As this is the most important skill, you will need to learn how to do this first and learn how to do it well.
In the next article we’ll go over the second way you can make money online, selling advertising space.