I have been thinking recently about this business of making money online and why so many people seem to fail. Personally speaking I spent more time and money on trying to find the next big thing than I care to admit to (especially to my partner!) There are several reasons we fail to make any money online, lack of focus, lack of direction, lack of proper knowledge… the list goes on but one of the biggest problems we face is we all seem to be in such a hurry and therefore don’t put proper plans in place. For example, Amazon is a massive affiliate goldmine but I dismissed it when starting out because I found out it would take up to 3 months to get paid, looking back if I had invested a little time in setting up basic Amazon product review blogs I would still be getting monthly commissions to this day but I was in too much of a hurry to make money immediately.
Now consider how much time we spend at the screen making absolutely no progress or money whatsoever but believing we are working, watching video reviews, reading blogs, commenting on forums and buying the next big thing and trying to get it to work for a week before realising its just the same old rehashed rubbish with a clever sales letter and this sums up the problem, I know this because I did exactly the same thing for too long before the penny finally dropped.
I mentioned earlier that too many of us do not have a proper plan of action in place that if followed will produce results. It is vitally important to understand the part plans make, I have plans for daily, weekly, monthly tasks etc. and the end game which is my ultimate goal. It is amazing what you can get done once you have a plan to follow, no distractions, just do this. this and this and get that result sure is a lot easier way to work compared to the way I used to try to get things done.
I always make a point of spending the last 10 mins of each day to plan out the following days work, this makes a massive difference and you will be amazed at how different you will feel just being in that much control, give it a try and let me know if it works for you anyway.
Getting Your Mindset Right
The first thing you need to do is accept is you are not going to earn a six figure income working 2 hours per week sat on the beach in a couple of months from now! I personally have never worked longer hours than I do now, the good thing now is I enjoy every minute and most mornings I cant wait to open up my laptop. The second thing is to believe it is a business like any other, it requires skill, commitment, courage at times and a will to win, you will get a lot of knocks along the way and being prepared can make the difference between success and failure.
Lets Make Our First $ Online Now
We are all at different levels of experience so its difficult to provide just 1 plan going forward, I talked about plans earlier, this is the entry level plan to focus on if you have yet to make any real money online or have yet to make any money at all.
It is very distracting and disheartening to constantly read about people making thousands and thousands online working 1 hour per day bla bla bla. I am going to highlight a few things you can do today to make money today, not millions but make some money which is a good place to start.
The first thing to consider is what skills or expertise you have and how these skills might be harnessed to make money online. You may be good at writing articles, have a knowledge of SEO or have some basic design abilities. Outsourcing is very big business and the majority of online marketers outsource all sorts of tasks to get the job done quicker. If you have a talent go and register at www.elance.com or www.vworker.com for free, you can set up an account and list the tasks you wish to bid on and within minutes you can be sending bids to complete all sorts of projects, go and browse around and look at the variety of skills on offer. Article writing for instance is extremely popular on these outsourcing sites and whilst it is possible to get articles written for next to nothing using writers with English as a second language, the quality can be questionable and it is still possible to find clients looking for quality and therefore willing to pay the going rates.
For those of you who may not have a recognised skill suited to this type of work just visit www.fivvr.com this is one of my favourite websites and I always spend too much time just marvelling at what people will do for $5! I will point out though that there are plenty of marketers making a very good living from fivvr gigs and if you think about it, find some thing that can take you just 5 – 10 mins to provide which can be easily replicated and you can be earning $20-$30 per hour for as many hours as you wish which is not to be sniffed at when starting out.
I made a post recently about local business marketing and the massive potential. Now why not offer your services for a small fee to set up a basic listing in google places which is essentially free to the customer so a no brain-er decision to get an online listing for $20 or £30 to cover your time. Once you have the client introduced to online listings explore the possibilities of creating a word press blog website and getting this indexed on the first page of google for his keywords and you have a potential client on a monthly retainer, as I pointed out in my previous post, this is a massive business potential.
All of these options require no investment other than your own time, consider how long you currently spend sitting at your PC and then consider what you could be earning if you just applied yourself more efficiently. Suppose you have 3 hours per day 5 day per week which can quite easily be the case ( more like 10 hours per day for me when I was in this position ) If you only earn $15 per hour you will have a monthly income of $900! which is not too shabby for a part time job! Now I don’t expect you for 1 minute to think this is what making money online is all about, this is a means to an end, it allows you to continue your online marketing education and allows you to invest into “must have” information, tools and products to gain the knowledge needed to make it full time.
Now all you have to do is sit down and write your plan for tomorrow, follow it through step by step and you will have your first pay-pal payment in no time and be much closer to getting to the real money making possibilites of online marketing.
If you want a helping hand in getting started and think you need that extra bit of help in setting up your first blog or your very own squeeze page system to collect subscribers on auto pilot, take a look at Stuart Sterlings Start Up Guide, its highly recommended and has helped thousands of new marketers get thier first sale.
