…And learning the information necessary to get started and have a chance at succeeding can be even more difficult. As you browse around the Internet for ways to make money online, if you haven’t already found this out, you’ll be bombarded by marketers selling you crappy products, making big promises of income you can create with their methods or products. And you’ll also find you can quickly become overwhelmed by all the steps and processes required to make even your first buck online.

1. Find A Way To Make “Now” Money

Your ultimate goal should be to build a long-term money-generating business…one that’s successful, allow you to quit a job you don’t like, have more time freedom, travel and live the life of your dreams, and one that will earn you an income for a long time to come.

BUT, you have to be able to make money quickly, for a couple of reasons:

• First, you need to make money right away to encourage you and make you believe success is possible. You can have a ton of determination and strong will power that will fuel you and push you forward, but without seeing results you’ll grow weary and lose enthusiasm to keep going as long as it takes to build a steady, sustainable, real online business.
• Making money now will also allow you to continue growing your business. Just like any real business, you must invest in yourself and your business to grow it…invest in advertising, buying the proper products, tools, and systems to make your business bigger and make your life easier, and to invest into growing yourself personally (training, events, books, etc.). So, you have to get results and make money quickly to be able to plow money back into growing your business even more.

 

Systems I Recommend To Create “Now Money”

1. Drop Shipping, Retail & Online Arbitrage – I’ve been making money online for several years, and along the way I have encountered many programs that promise to help someone make fast money online…but NEVER have I seen something where the majority of people who applied the training provided began earning money in their first few days – most of the time it’s just a select few who have success with the training and system provided.

…Until drop shipping and arbitrage came along…

Researching products on eCommerce sites like Amazon, Overstock, and Walmart with a goal of finding items that are selling for a higher price on Amazon or Ebay, you can generate hundreds of dollars in extra revenue quickly, if you find the right items.

Once you have the potential items to sell, you can go about it 2 ways; 1) simply list the item for sale on Ebay or Amazon, and when the item sells, buy it from the source you found it and have it shipped to the customer (here you’re being the middle-man, and this is called drop shipping), or 2) buying the items, listing them for sale on your Amazon Seller’s account, and shipping them into Amazon’s warehouses – and when they sell, Amazon does the fulfillment (packaging, shipping, etc. This is called Fulfillment By Amazon, or FBA for short).

It sounds so simple, so easy, that it seems to good to be true…but I did it, and in my first week, I had sold my first item with over $100 in profit!

This system takes real work…it’s not going to provide you a big, leveraged, time-freedom-producing income. To do that, you’ll need to progress to other methods I go into below. But this IS a great way to get started online, because you can easily and realistically begin earning $100/DAY PROFITS with this system within a few weeks if you go through the training and apply yourself!

Best of all, no recruiting, buying advertising & leads, or selling necessary!

You can see my article that goes into more detail on Drop Shipping & Retail/Online Arbitrage here.

2. Get Paid To Write Short Articles – Depending on how skilled you are at writing, you could make enough money starting off by writing articles for sites like iWriter, TextBroker, HireWriters. Again, this isn’t “break the bank” kind of income, but can be enough to fund your other business costs as you begin growing your online business and long-term income.

If you have some articles you’ve previously written, or a portfolio of your work, that can help you garner a high rate per article from the outset. If not, you can make up for it in the volume of articles you create, and work your way up the pay scale quickly.

3. Do Freelance Work – You have skills, so why not make money offering those services to others. There are many ways to reach out to people who are in need of your services; sites like Freelancer, Upwork, and Fiverr. This is a way to earn money right away, being paid per job you complete, or per hour you work…but it’s also a short-term method of getting started making income. You still want to keep you eyes open for the opportunity to grow and build an online business oriented to provide you a leveraged income down the road, giving you a stable long-term business.

Maybe there is a skill you’re really good at: accounting, graphic design, web design, marketing, customer service, administrative work, and the list could go on and on…whatever it is, you can earn far more than you make in a job, being employed by someone else, by offering that one service to people who are willing to pay someone like you to do it, all around the world, no matter where you’re located!

If someone is going to pay you to do that work, you might as well be working on your own terms, from home or wherever you want, whenever you want, instead of having to clock in, work in a cubicle, and be told what to do by a boss everyday. Doing freelance work on the Internet is a perfect way to get started down the path to freedom. But, as with anything worthwhile, it will take a good deal of work. Start here, and then work on becoming a better marketer and business owner, so you can create a long-term residual income producing Online business.

2. Create Your Own Product

Once you get started making some money online, perhaps using one of the methods I listed above in ways to make “now money”, you’ll want to progress to a higher level of marketing and online business building by creating your own product.

Why? One big difference from freelancing that I just mentioned: LEVERAGE!

Creating your own product is based on the same premise as using a skill set you have to offer your services to others through freelancing, except by having your own product, you’re one step closer to having a leveraged income that comes in whether you’re working or not.

…With freelancing, you are trading your time for dollars: and by that I mean you only get paid when you work, spend time on a project, and put in the effort to complete a task so you get paid. With a product of your own, you create it once, then market it and get paid over and over and over from doing the work just once.

What would your own online product look like?

An online product can be packaged in many ways. Some of the most popular formats are:

• eBooks
• Videos
• Membership sites
• Pay-to-attend webinars

In essence, you’re taking the knowledge you have on a subject and delivering it in the best fashion possible to teach people that subject. Then, once you have that product “packaged”, you can market it to the people interested in what you have to offer (aka your target market).

Would some examples help? Here are a few:

Paid Webinar – You can charge people to attend a one-time webinar, or series of webinars, where you teach on the subject. And, you can record that webinar and sell the recording to people for as long afterward as you want. Work once, get paid over and over…that’s the goal! I once walked through some leadership and personal development training, recorded it, put the replay up on a page someone had to have a password to get into, and then promoted that to my email list…when they paid me $97, I gave them access to that webinar! Easy as pie!

eBook – If you know a lot about something, write an eBook on it and sell it yourself, or publish it on Amazon’s Kindle Marketplace. Publishing your ebook on Amazon takes away a lot of the marketing work for you because millions of people are already searching on Amazon and may search for a solution to the problem you can solve.

I know a lot about remodeling and renovations since I used to work in residential construction. So, I used that knowledge to my advantage and wrote an eBook about a certain Do-It-Yourself topic to help those DIYer’s finish that big home project. I made that ebook available both on Amazon and on my own website I created just for that Do-It-Yourself task niche.

Membership Site – Record a series of videos and place them all inside of a membership site where customers have access to them at any time. The membership site can also include webinar recordings, conference call replays, helpful documents and resources, and more. I have a membership site at TallgrassTrading.com where I teach what I’ve learned in the world of day trading through recorded videos all archived inside the membership site. One big advantage to having a membership site is recurring income…people subscribe for $10, $20, $49, $99 per month to be a member of your community and, as long as you deliver valuable content they don’t want to miss out on, they’ll keep paying you that payment month after month. This makes it very easy to compound your income every month.

And there are so many more ways that you can create a product based around a skill or passion you have. You really are only limited by the extent of your creativity. Something to know, however, is that creating your own product can take a good amount of time investment to make it good before you ever get to the point of actually earning money. So, if you need to make money right away, the best thing you can do is begin marketing online by promoting somebody else’s product that you can endorse and feel good about promoting, that pays you a commission whenever you refer people to buy that product/training/course/system.

Which leads me to my next way to make money online…

3. Build A Personal Brand & Following Via YouTube Or Podcasting

The power of the Internet allows you to reach into tens of millions of people’s daily lives, and with that there is more opportunity than ever before for you to monetize just about any skill or talent you have.

If you have a good voice or a little creative ability, you can amass a huge following of like-minded people around your podcast or your YouTube channel. Now, there are a lot of misconceptions regarding how much money can be made by simply uploading videos to YouTube, getting views, and getting paid for ads that run on your channel.

“Even if advertisers are paying a decent amount to promote their products through video ads, only a portion of their expenditures ever make it into content creators’ pockets,” says YouTube monetizing expert, Michael Johnston. “For example, if advertisers are paying an average of $20 per 1,000 ad impressions, the videos where those ads are being shown may only generate $2 or $3 per 1,000 views.”

..and the same can be said about podcasts. It takes a very large subscriber base to garner significant advertising offers from sponsors.

So, if that’s the real picture, why do I recommend it? …Because that doesn’t take away the opportunity entirely. While many people only think about making money through ads revenue or sponsorships, if you think outside the box, you can find some ways to make a substantial income from something you love doing. If you utilize other methods I have listed here, YouTube & Podcasting can be the perfect platform for you to express your thoughts, ideas, creative abilities, and interests, build a following, and then direct your listeners/viewers’ attention to something that will make you much more money than ads revenue.

For instance, you could promote a live event, workshop, or retreat that your most die-hard fans will pay a premium price for. Or you can recommend products your use yourself and that you highly recommend, sending them to a place to buy them where you earn a commission for every sale you generate for that company (affiliate marketing, point #5 below).

Long story short, if creating videos or podcasts sounds fun to you, do it! …and know that there are MANY ways to monetize the fan base you build on those platforms.

 

4. Create A Niche Website

Just like creating your own product based around a topic you’re knowledgeable with, building a niche site is a way to profit from knowledge, skills, or a passion you have. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a “niche” is simply a narrowly focused topic or a segment of a population. The niche you have experience with and want to focus on could be as varied as the number of people on Earth: dogs, archery, baking, public speaking, building a deck, hot new movies…you get the idea, it could be anything you are interested it or know a lot about.

Something to keep in mind when determining the niche you’re going to focus on is, the smaller and more narrowly focused, the better! If you go too broad or too big, you will get lost in a sea of giant, established websites that you’ll never have a chance of ranking in search engines over them. Larger sites with bigger audiences have more pull, more clout, with Google and other search engines…without getting too complicated, when someone searches for entertainment news, big sites like TMZ and Huffington Post are going to fill the first page of results every time, and you have no hope of showing up next to them. However, if you were to write about just one segment of the entertainment industry and focus all of your efforts on it, like a certain genre of films, you could show up when people search for those topics…and that’s primarily how you’ll get traffic to your website, from people searching on Google for the topic you write about.

Additionally, grasp the marketing concept that if you try to appeal to everyone, you’ll appeal to no one. What I mean by that is if you like jogging, for example, and you attempt to appeal to all people in the jogging arena: those who have jogged once in their life, people who jog once a week or so, daily joggers, and also ultra-marathon runners who routinely run 50 to 60 miles at a time, you won’t connect with any of them. Your content will be so broad and unfocused that ultra marathon runners won’t hang out to read articles about how to get in shape by trying to jog 2 or 3 miles once per week…they’ll go over to a website community dedicated to people just like them who love to torture their bodies running 100 mile races. Likewise, write about the trials and pain of running a 100 mile race and those who only jog a mile or two at a time will think it so absurd that they won’t be able to click out of your website fast enough!

So, once you have your niche determined, you need only set up a quick website and get to work. It’s simple really. I have a blog post here that can help you get started if you’ve never created a website before.

Start Your Blog In 5 Minutes

…Once you have your site set up, just take some time making it look good and getting content posted to the site that is relevant to your niche. Your first goal will be filling the site with good content people in your niche want to read and learn about.

Once you have a following and decent amount of visitors coming to your site each day, you’ll want to find a way to “monetize the traffic”, aka Make some Moolah! Here are some good ways to make money from your niche website:

• Adsense – place Google Ads on your site, and when visitors click on the ads you get paid a few cents each time. The cons? It won’t provide a significant amount of income unless you have a lot of traffic, and also that you lose those people once they click the ad and leave your site
• Advertise Relevant Products – Most companies that sell products online, whether they’re digital products (ebooks, training, membership sites) or physical products shipped to customers, offer some sort of affiliate program where they will pay you a commission for every sale you generate for them. So, if you have a niche website about ultra-marathon running, you could refer your visitors to websites that sell running-related products. Amazon is a great place to start, as they have just about every product on the planet, and they’ll pay you a 4-10% commission per sale. The downside is that’s really not a large commission, when there are other places that will pay much higher commissions. Also, when sending people to buy from these sites, just like with Adsense ads, you’re losing them from your website.
• Rent out Banner Ad Space – If you have one of the most popular websites in your niche, companies that sell to your website visitors will want to pay to have some advertising on your site. You can easily rent out ad space on your site for $50, $100, or more per month. Having an advertisement/banner ad on your website from a reputable company in your niche can really add to your credibility as well.
• Endorsements & Reviews – Much like being paid to have banner advertisements on your site for companies, you could be paid to endorse them or write reviews about their new products or services.
• Build a List – I learned early on, but not early enough, that your #1 goal at all times in building a business online should be in building a list of subscribers who you can email and connect with at any time – to stay in touch with them, provide more valuable content, increase your “brand” awareness, and to sell to. Most of your visitors will come to your website once and never return. That’s just the facts. But if you can get some of them to subscribe to your e-mailing list, then you have them as a potential future customer you can connect with anytime you like. If you have an offer, a product, a service, or anything your niche would be interested in, you can simply email that list, telling them to buy, and make money on demand.

…So, to wrap up this quick way to make money online, build a website based around something you’re passionate about and add content to it every day with info and entertainment the people interested in that topic would enjoy. And as it grows, find ways to make money from it through the ways I explained. But above all, focus on building a list, which you can do using GetResponse.

And once you have that growing list of subscribers, you can take advantage of my fifth way to make money online…

5. Affiliate Marketing

I briefly mentioned the definition of affiliate marketing above in telling you that you can get paid referring customers to buy products from companies like Amazon. But that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. Your options are nearly limitless today with the variety of things you can get paid a commission for selling online.

Once you realize your goal is to always be building your subscribers list, and you begin doing so, you’ll have leads that you can promote anything to (relevant to what they’re interested in and what solves their problems, of course).

It’s an awesome feeling to be able to send an email to your list promoting a product that they will enjoy and that will help them…then go off and do your thing: maybe visit the beach, go exploring the outdoors, or whatever kind of thing you love to do – just LIVE LIFE – and come back home later, log on to the computer, and check the stats to see how much money you earned while you were away!

That’s my ultimate goal, to show you a whole new way to earn income…disconnecting yourself from the concept of earning dollars based on the number of hours you work. I want to help you revolutionize the way you understand money, knowing you can earn an income, as big as you want, based on the influence you have and leveraging the power of the Internet and systems that can work on your behalf, earning you an income whether you’re working or not!