3 Ways Anyone Can Make Money At Home Online
There are a lot of ways you can make money online, but I want to focus on 3 ways that are easy to understand. Almost anyone should be able to find something that they can do within these 3 opportunities. In later posts, I’ll go into these in much more detail. I’ll also talk about how you can test whether any particular area is likely to be profitable along with different tools that you can use to be successful. For now, however, I simply want to explain the different options.
I’ll present these 3 options from easiest to hardest.
1. Write Articles for InfoBarrel
The easiest way to start making money on the internet is to write for Infobarrel. Infobarrel is a website (see image below) that contains articles about anything, along with ads. People like you write the articles, and whenever someone clicks on an ad that appears on one of your article pages, you get 75% of the revenue. You simply enter your account information for Google AdSense (those little ad boxes that appear everywhere) and Amazon Affiliates (described in #2 below), and your share of the advertising revenue automagically appears in those accounts. You can sign up for an Infobarrel account in a few minutes and get started making money right now.
There have been other revenue sharing article sites, including eHow and Associated Content, however, these have become much less lucrative than InfoBarrel. No one is going to get rich writing for InfoBarrel, but it can be a fairly easy way to make a little extra money each month, especially if you write articles that are not particularly time-sensitive — such asa the article above on the uses of WD-40.
2. Promote Other People’s Products Online
The second option is to create a website, typically in a specific niche area, and then use that website to promote products in that niche. Your website will include “affiliate links” to other websites, and you are compensated anytime someone clicks on one of your links and then purchases a product on the other side of that link. You can also put ads on your site, including the super-easy to use Google Adsense.
Certain online retailers, such as Amazon.com, have affiliate programs of their own. You can sign up to become an Amazon affiliate here. Once you are in the program, Amazon will provide you will get a unique code that gets inserted in every Amazon product that you link to. Commissions with Amazon start at 4%, but can rise up to 8% as you sell more products.
You can also act as an affiliate for a whole range of products through a third-party affiliate program, such as Clickbank, Commission Junction or PayDotCom. Each participating vendor sets their own commission rate, which can often be 50% of the product price.
There are 3 keys to success in this model: value-add, trust and traffic.
First of all, your website must add value to the niche. If, for example, you are promoting certain books in your niche, you could write some book reviews of your own or assemble a list of other worthwhile reviews on the internet. Your value added gives the reader a reason to buy the product.
Here is an example of how NOT to do it. Websites that are simply a set of affiliate links or ads, with little value added, are simply going to turn people off.
Second, your readers need to trust your recommendations. This is a whole other discussion that needs to be examined separately, but, it’s just like looking for a good plumber. We tend to act on the advice of people we trust based on their experiences. But we might also go with someone we just met who is putting their heart and soul into explaining something. For example, when I was looking for a VPN service for my computer, I came across this product review from a guy called Paul Stamatiou. I had never heard of him, but after having read his article, I clicked through and bought the product.
Third, you need traffic. Most importantly, you need people to find your website through search engines. I’m happy to report that I’ve figured out how to get a high Google placement and I’ll share that strategy in another post.
3. Sell Your Own (Knowledge) Products Online
Among these 3 approaches to making money online, the most demanding is to build an area of expertise for yourself, and then sell that expertise online. You might sell that expertise in the form of an eBook or as instructional videos.
There are hundreds of examples of this approach on the web, including my own Digital Homes. Another example is diylegal.com. DIYLegal provides instructional videos that walk people through the steps involved in setting up a California-based corporation. Their model is to send you a free DVD that includes some introductory training, and then have you pay $50 to unlock the rest of the content.
The advantage to this approach is that it is potentially the most lucrative. Typically, you will do a lot of up-front work developing a product and building the web infrastructure (such as setting up a web site and establishing a means of payment). Ongoing work with this approach can involve marketing and customer service.
I’m interested to know if it’s ok to borrow part of this post to use for my presentation project.