Lesson 6 – Which Way Is For You?

In this lesson I want to talk about making money online.

On the face of it, especially if you’re new to the world of Internet Marketing, it may seem like the term ‘making money online’ refers to one thing – one activity.

The reality is very, very different. In this lesson I’m going to dig deeper into that subject and hopefully provide some valuable insights into making money online.

I think a good place to start this discussion is to identify what we mean by the term Internet marketing.

At its most basic Internet marketing simply means using the power of the Internet in some way to help market something.

It doesn’t always mean we are involving the Internet in some way to ultimately sell something. It could also mean we are using the Internet to raise awareness for something that gets sold offline. However, in most cases we are thinking of selling online when we talk about Internet marketing.

OK, that being the case it opens up the possibilities to lots of options and indeed there are lots of ways that people use the Internet to sell something – to make money.

In the next few lessons I’m going to cover the main ways of making money online in much more detail but for I’d like to list out what those main ways are and provide a brief explanation that I can expand on in future lessons.

Affiliate Marketing

This is probably the most well known and certainly the most popular way of making money online. Affiliate marketing is simply selling someone else’s product or service for a commission. Affiliates are commission only sales people.

The reason that it is so popular is because it’s easy to get started. There’s little or no cost to get started and no shortage of companies looking for affiliates.

All of the customer service issues are taken care of by the company – all you have to do is send visitors to the companies offers to get paid a share of the profits.

Product developer/owner

Having discussed affiliates, they need a company or merchant to be an affiliate for so the next way of making money that I want to talk about is the product owner/developer.

Many people online make money selling their own products or services and often use affiliates to help them sell.

They pay the affiliates a fee to sell their products and/or services but also sell themselves and keep all of the profits. Clearly, using affiliates helps them sell far more of the products and/or services than they could on their own which is why they are happy to pay a fee (sometimes a very large fee) to affiliates.

There are many other benefits to be gained by being the product owner which I’ll cover in the relevant lesson.

Kindle or Paperback Publisher

This is one area of making money online that not many people consider. This is probably because not many people understand the concept or the potential of becoming an online publisher.

You’ll notice that I said ‘publisher’ and not ‘author’. There is a very good reason for that. To create and sell books online doesn’t mean that you have to write them all yourself.

You can, and should, get someone else to write your books under your direction and you just publish them.

This can be a very lucrative way of making money online which I’ll explain all about in the lesson about it.

Service provider

As I explained in my free book ‘Online Income Fast-Track’, one of the ways of making money online is by providing a service which you sell through one of the online channels like Fiverr.

People marketing online are always looking for ways of streamlining their operations and outsourcing is one of the ways of doing that.

To be successful in business you need to be working ON the business not IN it for the bulk of your time. Outsourcing the things that you are not good at rather than taking time to learn how to do it yourself will massively help your business grow.

If you have a skill that other people will pay for you could make money providing a service.

Arbitrage

Arbitrage, as I’m using it here, is the term used to describe a middleman or middlewoman I guess we should say these days. (I don’t know if there is such an expression as middlewoman but I’m sure you get my meaning).

This is really the sort of next step up from service provider in a way. It involves you offering a service at a fee that is less than you can get someone else to provide it to you for.

For example, You could place an advert to create website header banners for web developers. Then when someone buys your banner creation service, you could get it created by someone on Fiverr or elsewhere for less than you are getting paid by your customer and pocket the difference.

There’s an endless range of services that could fall within the arbitrage model.

Hosting and Domain Names

The majority of people marketing online need website hosting and domain names. Creating your own hosting and domain name company, while requiring a level of technical expertise, is reasonably easy to do these days and could build into a very profitable business that would have a resale value when you decide you want to retire.

I ran a successful hosting arm to my business some years ago so I have personal experience with it (as I do with most of these models). I’ll explain this model in detail in a later lesson.

eCommerce

eCommerce is growing exponentially these days and providing excellent opportunities to build successful online businesses that also have a sale value when you decide to cash in.

There are several models in the eCommerce area that I’ll explain in that lesson.

OK, that’s a brief explanation of the main models for making money online. Possibly there are some things there that are new to you, some ways that you hadn’t considered as ways that you could possibly use to make money online.

If there are, that’s great – that’s why I put these tips lessons together. To help you find a way to make money online that works for you.

We all have different strengths and personalities and not everything will suit us. The good news is that there are so many different aspects to marketing online that almost everyone can find a way to suit them.

OK, I think that’s all I have to say for this lesson. In the next lesson I’ll go into more detail about Affiliate marketing.

Until then,

Kindest regards,