Earn Money Online

How I Earn Money Online

In this post I will explain how I actually earn money online. Now, before I get into that I want to say something that I feel is very important you know: the website you are reading this on is not a site that I actually make any real money from.

The websites that I earn money online from have nothing to do with Internet marketing. This site that you’re on right now, and another site that I have that deal with Internet marketing both have a lot of good information but I do not promote the sites as of yet simply because the Internet marketing niche is just too damn difficult to compete in.

So all the information that I’m about to give you should not be compared to how this site is set up as I haven’t had time to redo this site like I have some of my others.

Keep that in mind as you read.

To Earn Money Online You Must Work

There is no “magic button” software out there that is going to make you money online.

Making money online requires that you do so actual work. Anyone who tells you differently is a liar. There are many tools that I use to make the work easier and some of those tools save me thousands of hours of work, but I still work at my business virtually every day.

That is not to say that you can’t do the work upfront and then sit back and collect money from your websites without doing any additional work. I actually have many income generating websites that I do not touch, ever, but once you’re in this business you still need to keep an eye on it, and you will also want to continually add to your empire.

But in order to create that kind of income you are going to have to do some work, or pay others to do it for you. There is no escaping it.

The Importance of Traffic To Earning Money Online

The absolute most important thing that you need to know to make money online is this: if you don’t get traffic to your website nothing else matters. And the most important thing to getting traffic if this: you must rank high on Google.

No matter what anyone else tells you, and no matter what else you read, if you don’t rank high on Google your chances of making money are very slim. There are only two ways to rank high on Google: have good content and have solid back links.

I use a three step formula for creating websites that make me money:
1. Create Good Original Content
2. Create Good Back Links to That Content
3. Collect E-Mail Addresses for an Auto Responder Series

These things must be done in this order. If you don’t have content that is original and of high quality on your website don’t bother creating back links. If you don’t have traffic to your website don’t waste your time on an e-mail list yet, you need to get the traffic first which comes from creating good content and creating good back links.

It took me years to be successful at making money online mainly for one reason: I tried to avoid paying for products that I needed to do the work that had to be done. Now, there are literally thousands of Internet marketing products out there that claim they’re going to help you make money online.

I have not used them all, obviously, but I have bought quite a few over the years that did not solve all my problems, and at the same time I avoided paying for ones that ultimately were of the most benefit to me. In this post I’m going to tell you the exact products that I pay for that I use today to generate income online.

If you don’t want to pay for these products, then I cannot guarantee that you will earn money online. There’s a good chance that without these products you could create some income for yourself but the time it takes to scale up and do the work necessary to create multiple income earning websites is so long that you will surely give up before being successful without using some paid products.

This is the absolute truth. This was the mistake I made for years. I tried to do it all on my own and generated some income but until I cracked my wallet open and paid for a few these necessary tools, the real money did not come.

You would not expect to start an off-line business without investing some capital. You cannot treat an online business any differently. The big difference is for your online business you only need to shell out about $500-$1000 your first year. After that you can probably get by with expenses that are less then $1000 a year for the rest of your online career. There is no off-line business that you can run with expenses that low.

You must take your online business seriously. That means you must be willing to invest some capital to get it started. I have wasted a lot of my money finding out what does and doesn’t work. Part of the reason for this post is so that instead of wasting your money you only spend it on the actual products that actually work. These are the products that I actually use.

Keywords and Content

I’m not going to spend a lot of time discussing how to pick keywords for your website, as there is ample information on this online. Also if you choose to use one of the products that I recommend it will contain all the information you need for selecting keywords.

The first product that I bought that actually helped make me money was George Brown’s Google Sniper. George Brown was the first successful Internet marketer that I was exposed to who actually told the truth about how he made money. I bought Google Sniper and within two months had put up websites that were not only making me money but were also on page one of Google.

Google got wise to the Sniper method, did one sweeping update and most of my sniper sites fell off of page 1 and ended up somewhere between page 3 and 5. Since that time George has come out with a new version of Google sniper. Since I have not bought the product I am not going to make a recommendation one way or the other whether you should or not.

If you’re interested here is a link: Google Sniper

The problem with the original Google Sniper system was that the keywords you targeted were actually too specific; for example instead of targeting something like “women’s shoes” you would target the keyword phrase like “women’s red high-heeled shoes”. And it worked great until Google decided it didn’t like these sites.

The reason that Google doesn’t like the sniper style sites is because Google is all about the user experience.

When a user lands on the sniper site there is a very limited amount of information available to them simply because the website is so highly targeted. This does not create a very good user experience apparently as far as Google is concerned and they have actually pushed the sites down in the rankings and brought up sites that have a little more of a general appeal.

Keep that in mind when selecting keywords for your website. Don’t be too narrow.

So what products do I recommend? The first product you really want to buy is something that is going to explain to you how to set up your website and create good content. While these products may contain information on creating back links, their real value is a leading you understand the proper way to set up your site for both content purposes and for SEO.

At the moment there only two products I recommend. All of my websites are set up using one of these two products as a guideline:

Extreme Niche Empires
Matt Carter’s Rapid Profit Formula

When my Google Sniper sites dropped in the rankings I tried various methods to get them back on page 1, most notably directory submissions and article marketing. Both of these methods worked for a while but ultimately Google made additional updates that rendered both of these tactics fairly useless.

By applying the tactics from Extreme Niche Empires, I was able to put my sites back into moneymaking mode, in fact one site went from only making about $10 a month to making an average of $145 a month just on AdSense ads alone.

When I’m making sites that are selling physical products I use Matt Carter’s method and I have been very successful with it.

If you really want to make money online I highly recommend that you buy one of these products now and more importantly you follow it to the letter.

I cannot stress enough how important it is that you follow any Internet marketing course to the letter.

Number one reason that people say an Internet marketing course does not work for them is because they try to take shortcuts or skip sections altogether and end up failing and blaming the course.

If you’re not going to follow the instructions as they are written you might as well just burn your money.

Getting Revenue from Your Website

I use three methods of generating money fro my websites. The first method is to promote downloadable nonphysical products such as e-books, downloadable courses, or video courses. The majority of these products I get through Clickbank.

Second method I use for generating money is to sell physical products, the majority of which I sell through Amazon. There are also other affiliate sites I use all of which I will list later in this post.

The third method I use, which I see many people telling newbies not to use is Google AdSense ads. I use AdSense on almost every one of my sites. It is especially profitable on the sites that sell physical products, as the ad clicks pay just as much as some of the commissions I receive.

I highly recommend that you eventually put AdSense on the majority of your sites.

Joining Affiliate Programs

Before joining any affiliate program make sure that you have a website that is content rich and is of a general nature. Almost all affiliate programs will let you promote any product or service they sell once you are approved as an affiliate.

The easiest way to get approved is to point them to a website that has nothing but content on. I recommend that you join all affiliate programs you are interested in first before adding a single ad on any of your websites.

Your example website for this should be centered on a very common niche such as beauty products, weight loss, sports, etc. It should be a topic that almost every affiliate program will have a product for. That makes it much easier to get approved. Some programs will not approve you if there are other ads on your site.

Getting Ranked on Google

I have used various methods to get my sites ranked on page 1 of Google. Many of these including article marketing do not really work anymore. Article marketing can be beneficial to getting your pages indexed but for actual ranking purposes it really doesn’t work anymore.

The reason that article marketing and directory submissions no longer work is because Google knows that any Internet marketer can get links out there through these methods therefore the links really are of no value.

At the moment what Google sees value in is genuine links on other people’s websites and links that come about through social websites. Social websites are real genuine examples of what real people are sharing. Google places a lot of value on letting the users tell them which websites are good.

It’s very important that you create an element of social bookmarking to your back link building. The best way to do this is on autopilot. This is spelled out in great detail in Extreme Niche Empires. The method I use which I have found various places on the web is to use HootSuite, which is free, in conjunction with Ping FM, which is also free.

I take the RSS feed from my WordPress sites and use HootSuite to submit it to Ping FM which in turn submits it to various social websites including Twitter.

Because of the RSS feature I use WordPress to build each and every one of my websites. I only own one website at the moment that does not use WordPress, and it is generating me daily income, therefore I do not want to mess with it.

There are also many other features, including various useful plug-ins for WordPress, that make it not only easy to use to create sites but also help you to rank higher on Google.

In addition to social bookmarks and links from social websites Google places a tremendous value on video and back links from other people’s websites. I do not mean websites that anyone can force a link onto but rather sites that belong to real people who have to place the links there themselves. Links that are placed on websites by the owners are considered genuine links and given a lot of weight by Google.

There is one product, and only one that I use at the moment to get my sites ranked on Google. It is a product that I avoided buying for very long time because I did not want to spend the money. To date it is the most valuable asset that I have for ranking my websites.

The product is so valuable that it is actually not for sale all of the time. They open the doors for brief periods of time to allow new members and then close off until they are ready to reopen.

This is not some kind of marketing scheme on their behalf. This is a necessary process for the success of this product. Once you have a website with some decent content on it using this product is the absolute easiest way that you can get ranked on Google.

The name of this product is Traffic Kaboom.

I know the price tag for Traffic Kaboom is going to scare you off. You must trust me; is the absolute best money you will ever spend. It actually took me a long time to even figure out that this was what other successful marketers were using. It is so powerful that most Internet marketers will not even tell you they’re using it.

If the doors to Traffic Kaboom are not open at the moment give them your e-mail address and as soon as you get an e-mail saying they’re opening the doors join. I’m not kidding; if you can join today join right now even if you haven’t built your website yet just in case they close the doors tomorrow. If the doors are closed join the first chance you get.

Using Traffic Kaboom

As I stated when discussing Internet marketing courses is absolutely essential that you follow the instructions in Traffic Kaboom to the letter. This product requires you to make both videos and write articles and combine the two to create a powerful back linking strategy.

If you do not use both video and article marketing in Traffic Kaboom you will not get the results you’re looking for.

I realize that I just got done telling you that article marketing doesn’t work. The articles that you’re going to be writing for Traffic Kaboom are not being posted on article directories, instead they end up being blog posts on real blogs belonging to real people. These types of back links are exactly what Google is looking for.

Don’t Get Google Ranking Anxiety

As I build backlinks to my sites I notice a couple of trends: first of which is that Google will sometimes just drop you out of their rankings. Do not panic when this happens. Anytime you build links too fast you run this risk. Do not be alarmed; if your links of of high quality your website will eventually surface to it’s proper position in the rankings.

As I write this I have a site that keeps bouncing on and off of page one. I know from experience that it will eventually stay there. Most of the time when your site disappears from the search results in ends up coming back and a higher postion, especially if you have good backlinks.

Another problem people often face is that they can not seem to get their site to go any higher for a particular keyword. The solution to this is not as obvious: start building back links using another keyword.

Diversity in anchor text is an important element in natural looking links. Anytime I start adding different anchor text to my backlinks my rankings for other keywords goes up.

Lastly it is important, very important, to build backlinks to individual pages on your site, not just your domain name. This is a lesson that I took way to long to learn myself.

Don’t be me: start building links to multiple pages on your site using multiple keywords. Believe it or not my experience is that the more pages I build links too, the higher my rankings go for all of my pages. My theory is that it looks more natural, and Google likes natural link building.

Why Auto Blogging Is Not Dead

At one time the way a lot of successful, and I mean very highly successful, Internet marketers were making their money was through what’s called autoblogs. An Autoblog is basically a WordPress blog where content, usually scraped from other websites, is automatically posted on a regular basis.

At one time you could set one of these up, throw some AdSense ads on it and have an instant cash machine. Google updates have changed this. That does not mean that auto posting no longer works, it just has to be done the right way.

I use auto posting on almost every one of my sites. The reason Google does not penalize me for it is because my sites also have a large volume of original content. Not only does Google not penalize me for my scraped content but a lot of it ranks in Google for keywords that I wouldn’t have targeted and it is responsible for a large portion of not only my traffic but also my AdSense revenue.

The value of auto blogging content is that it keeps your site fresh and as I stated previously you can end up getting a lot of traffic for a lot of keywords that you are not actually actively targeting. Traffic equals money plain and simple.

If you buy Extreme Niche Empires you will see that auto posting is a large component to this course. Sean Donahoe provides an auto posting script as part of the package but I highly, highly, highly recommend that instead of using his free script that you go ahead and buy WP Robot.

WordPress Robot is the only thing I use to add scraped content to my website. I have seen absolutely zero negative effect to using WP Robot.

You can get it here: WP Robot.

Using an Autoresponder

Once your site is ranking well, once you have decent traffic to your site, once you know what it is you want to promote, you are then ready to add an e-mail list to your site.

Having a list is a key element to generating long-term income from a website. Not only can you use a series of e-mails to convince your website visitor to buy the product that you are promoting, but you can also send out e-mails promoting products that are related.

On some of my niche websites over half of my sales come from my auto responder. The truth is a lot of products, especially the types that are sold through Clickbank need to be put in front of your customer five or six times before they are willing to buy. This is where the real value of an autoresponder becomes evident.

For some reason almost every Internet marketer recommends using either Aweber or GetResponse for your autoresponder. I really do not understand why. I myself use Traffic Wave for one simple reason: it’s the cheapest.

It has the same features and costs a lot less money. An autoresponder is an expense that might not pay off for some of your websites. Therefore I think you should go with the cheapest alternative.

Here is a link: Traffic Wave

To successfully use an autoresponder you must create a series of e-mails that you will send out every 3 to 7 days over the course of a year. I highly recommend that any autoresponder series you create lasts at least a year. You will be surprised at how long it takes some people to buy your product.

Your e-mails can not, must not, shall not be simply a series of e-mails promoting the product. Quite the opposite. What your e-mail should be is a series of helpful hints which will create two results: your subscriber will feel that they are being helped and they will also be developing a trust in you. That trust is going to turn into sales.

I recommend that you first build at least five sites, get them ranked on Google, get a decent amount of traffic to them before you implement any type of autoresponder on any of them. There is no reason to pay a monthly fee for an autoresponder until you get enough traffic to your websites. Not every visitor obviously is going to subscribe.

One nice thing about using auto responders is that once you have an account you can generally add as many mailing lists to your account as you like without increasing your costs. That is one reason why I recommend waiting until you have multiple websites up before taking on the expense of an autoresponder.

Summary

So the bottom line is this you need to create a high-quality content rich website. You need to create solid back links. You need to get traffic to your site in order to make money.

While it is possible to do this without spending money on any products, it is going to take a very, very long time. If you want to treat this like a business you need to copy what other successful people do. Every successful Internet marketer pays money for products that either automate things for them or saves them a lot of time.

To recap, below are the actual products that I use and that I recommend that you use.

The biggest mistake I made was thinking that I could be successful without spending money on some of these products. I am sure there are other products out there that do the same thing as the ones I recommend but since I have no experience with them I am not going to tell you to buy them. I can only tell you what is working for me.

My recommendations: buy one of these two internet marketing courses:

Extreme Niche Empires
Matt Carter’s Rapid Profit Formula

Buy this product as soon as you are able, even if you’re not ready to use it yet:

Traffic Kaboom

After you are successful at creating sites and getting some traffic sign up for this auto responder:

Traffic Wave

Earn Money Online -Beware Of Bright Shiny Objects

It is very easy to become distracted by all of the internet marketing products that will come your way especially once you’ve given out your email address to a few sites. Each new offer looks more enticing. Do not fall for this. Once you have system that you plan to use, do not vary. You will only fail miserably by jumping from one method to the next.

Every system takes time to work. Most people quit just before they’re successful. And then they continue that pattern. The reason that I only recommend these products is because it’s what I use and they work. If you don’t finish the work involved you will never find that out.

One of the reasons that I have not created a program of my own is because I see the tongue lashings that some of these product creators get from people who failed to properly execute the program and then blamed the creator.

Sean Donahue is a prime example of that. His program is the first one that I followed to the letter and it continues to work for me to this day. I still build every new site using his methods. So I know that  Extreme Niche Empires works. Yet I continue to read complaints from users who did not get the results they wanted.

Many times these complaints are posted on forums and if you follow the thread you will eventually find out that the complainer did follow all of the instructions or modified them or just plain skipped entire parts of the program. Don’t be that guy.

I know that Traffic Kaboom will increase your rankings dramatically if you follow it and stick with it.But if you go chasing every bright shiny object in front of you, you will get distracted and never find that out.

I know many of you reading this post are going to do exactly what I have warned you not to do. I get it. Some people just have to learn for them selves the hard way. I was one of you.

But for the rest of you who are looking for a simple solution to earn money online, I hope you take what I’ve told you seriously. Making money online is not complicated or some big mystery: it merely requires you to have a plan and stick with it.

You have the plan. I have told you exactly how I make money online, now you just have to choose whether you want to do what I do or not.