Social Media Revolution 2011

6 Things I Learned From Quitting My Job

About a year and a half ago, I had an epiphany.

I was in a job I enjoyed. The prospects were great. But I decided that I didn’t want it any more. I needed change. I seemingly became unemployable overnight.

Not one to do things by halves, I quickly set myself a goal of quitting my job by 23^rd May 2012 (exactly one year after I launched my first website). I knew at the time that the goal was not rooted in any logic – I had no firm plan that would get me to where I wanted to be. But I felt that any goal was better than no goal at all.

To be perfectly honest, whilst I was determined to achieve my goal, I had absolutely no idea whether or not I would. And as it turned out, what I thought I needed to achieve in order to quit my job wasn’t what I ended up doing at all.

Fast forward to present day, and I have been running my freelancing blogging business full time for nine months. My last day of employment was 23^rd December 2011. I beat my goal by exactly five months, and my blogging business currently earns me about as much as my job did in less than half the hours.

It has been a roller coaster period in my life. A time of unprecedented change. And in that time, my perspective on what it takes to quit your job and enter the world of self-employment has changed drastically.

There are six key realizations that led me to quit my job, ahead of schedule, and with confidence.

1. You Don’t Need To Replace Your “Offline” Income before Quitting

Embracing this concept was a huge step for me, and served as a catalyst to the sharp acceleration in my plans.

Most “make money online” advocates will tell you that you need to get into a position where you are matching or exceeding your “offline” income with your online endeavors before you quit your job. I blindly followed this advice for months, without realizing the sheer impracticality of it. Extremely safe advice, yes. Advice that I would pass on to anyone else? No.

For me the calculation was pretty simple. I had a couple of clients, and was being paid an equivalent hourly rate of $x (which exceeded the equivalent hourly rate at my job). I had confidence that I would be able to find more clients. Therefore, logic dictated that I would be able to earn enough money with more time. The theory was enough for me — and it could be enough for you.

I want to make a key distinction here. I am not saying that you should quit your job tomorrow with nothing to show for it. But I am saying that, given the right circumstances, you do not need to hit an income target is that not only arbitrary, but often completely unnecessary.

2. Time Is Your Most Important Asset

Why am I confident that you do not need to match or exceed your “offline” income before quitting?

Simple — time. What I call the most valuable commodity in the world.

Let’s say your job takes up 50 hours a week — 8 eight hours work per day, 1 hour for your commute, and an extra 5 hours for overtime. You sleep 8 hours a night — that’s another 40 hours gone. Before you know it, nearly 65% of your available time has been zapped away by just work and sleep. 

We haven’t even mentioned some pretty important things (like eating, for instance).

I am not saying it is impossible to build up a sizeable side income in the available spare time you have, but it is hard. And whilst launching a successful business is never easy, it doesn’t have to be so hard.

Look at it this way – you are currently being paid by your employer because they believe that they can profit from your input. Who’s to say that you couldn’t independently create as much value (or more) as you earn from your job, given those extra 50 hours per week?

Ultimately, many would-be entrepreneurs simply don’t have enough faith in their own abilities. Once I had confidence that I was capable, and that 150% more available time to pursue my business aims would result in ample grwoth, the decision to quit my job became a far easier one.

3. A Safety Net Is One of the Most Important Requirements

Quitting your job without a guaranteed income in place is a risk. But it is a risk you will ultimately have to take. No income is guaranteed – certainly not the income from your job.

You need to have faith in your theoretical ability to leverage your time effectively to grow a sufficient income. You don’t need to earn it; you need to have faith that you can earn it. Once you pass that psychological milestone, you will need something to fall back on, should things not go to plan. I will always strongly recommend that anyone quitting their job has a safety net.

Traditionally, this would be in the form of 3-6 (or more) months earnings, but it might be different for you. For instance, you might have the guarantee of a job waiting for you if you ever change your mind, or perhaps you could join the boomerang generation.

My father quit his lucrative sales job when he was 23. He had just bought a house with my pregnant mother. It was a terrifying decision. But the sales company practically begged him to stay, and told him in no uncertain terms that a job was waiting for him should he ever change his mind. That was his safety net. He didn’t go back, nor did he ever look back.

My safety net was more tangible – savings. I wouldn’t have made the leap had I not already built up a considerable nest egg. After all, I knew that I would not be making enough money at the outset, and probably not for a few months thereafter. My financial safety net was not only necessary to prevent bankruptcy, but also for me to act like I was running a profitable business. The worst thing you can do during a business’ formative months is make decisions based upon financial pressure. For those two reasons, having a safety net is a must.

4. If You Really Want It, You Have No Choice

I’m not crazy, but I am making the perhaps controversial suggestion that you take risks. Calculated risks, but risks nonetheless.

What ultimately tipped me over the edge and made it clear to me that I could no longer simply wait for a “safer” time to quit was the realization that I simply wasn’t happy. I was treading water. I was no longer enjoying my work. To be perfectly honest with you, I was miserable.

Your own personal happiness should be one of the most important things in your life. That may sound selfish, and perhaps it is. But if you are not happy, you will not be well-equipped to help those around you, so you could consider such a prioritization as both selfish and selfless.

Perhaps you’re not sure that quitting your job is the right thing to do. Perhaps you will never be sure. With that to one side, perhaps your burning desire for change is too great to refuse any more. Life is too short to be miserable.

That was certainly the attitude I adopted in making the decision to quit my job. I was walking away from fantastic prospects, job security, autonomy, flexible hours, and a number of other perks. My friends and family thought I was crazy for quitting (I think they still do). But all of those benefits paled in comparison to a simple assessment of my happiness.

Regardless of how beneficial staying in that job may have been to my career, it was not something I wanted to do for the rest of my life (or for another week). Therefore, I had no choice but to leave.

5. Sacrifice Will Be Necessary (or Preferred?)

Now we get to practical considerations. Here’s a thought – maybe you don’t need to earn as much as you do from your job in the short term, or even in the long term. Maybe you throw your money away on a huge number of unnecessary creature comforts and material items.

Just perhaps, happiness in doing what you want with those 50 hours of your life every single week is more important than that deluxe satellite package, or your shiny new car. I managed to knock 30% (that’s right, nearly a third) off my monthly outgoings just through a reevaluation of what was really important to me. The sacrifice I made in order to quit my job was remarkably easy, because I could see the bigger picture.

Even if you are set on replacing your “offline” income before taking the plunge, you could be a lot closer to your target than you think if you make some bearable cuts. And what if you don’t want to make those material sacrifices? Simple – it just means that you don’t want freedom as much as you might. There is nothing at all wrong with that, but it can help to put things in perspective for you.

6. Nothing Galvanizes You More Than Fear

This is perhaps my most controversial point.

I have a firm belief — regardless of how seriously you treat your side hustle, you would treat it a damn sight more seriously if it became your main source of income.

Don’t get me wrong – you shouldn’t be terrified of leaving your job. If you are, perhaps it isn’t time to quit yet. But you should be scared. I’m not sure how on earth you couldn’t be. But that fear is what will drive you to do more than you thought you were capable of.

I had what I would call a healthy level of fear when I quit my job. I wasn’t earning enough to cover my outgoings. If my business wasn’t successful, the mere passing of time would see me approach bankruptcy before long. If I didn’t succeed, I would have to go out and look for a job — probably a job that was far worse than the one that had made me miserable. If that kind of scenario hadn’t galvanized me into action, I don’t know what would have.

Embrace the fear, and use it to your advantage.

What Is Stopping You?

If you dream of leaving your job one day, I want you to ask yourself what is stopping you. With all of the above points in mind, the answer might now surprise you.

http://www.thechangeblog.com/quitting-my-job/

My Top 10 Methods To Make Money Online

The following article details my personal top 10 methods to make money from the Internet.

What makes this list unique is it’s based entirely on the methods I have personally used, so I can reveal to you what I did and what my results were. Bear in mind these methods represent ten years of working online, so I do not do all of them presently. At one point in my career however they were an income stream, and are still viable options for you.

This is not an all inclusive list, which means there are plenty of other ways you can make money, no doubt many of which are potentially much more profitable or better choices for your own situation. As a result you shouldn’t base your decisions on what methods you use solely on this list. Do your research and include this article as one resource.

This list isn’t strictly ordered based on my preferences from top to bottom. What I’ve done is listed the different things I did in a chronology of time of when I did them. It’s no coincidence however that as we get closer to the present (the end of the list), the more I personally like the method, and hence still use it. Over the years I made changes to how I made money in order to get closer to what I really wanted from my business.

What Is My Ideal Way To Make Money Online?

To help you understand what I was striving for, here are my main criteria when deciding what methods I use to make money online with. Bear in mind certain options only became available as a result of previous experience. Some things you can only do once you’ve done other things because you build on what you have done before.

In a nutshell, this is the criteria I concluded are important to me -

Can you make a solid profit margin?

As you will see in a moment when I reveal my top ten methods, some income streams have very slim margins, which means you must push through a lot of volume in order to make significant income. While not always the case, in most situations to sell more requires more work, more resources and generally more of everything, which results in violation of my next rule…

Can you maintain the income with minimal labour and/or is it easy to outsource?

I look for income streams that do not require significant amounts of work to maintain. If I need to drastically increase the amount of product I sell or customers I attract to make good money, and that requires more of my own time to achieve, or cannot be easily outsourced to others (it often increases your labor just to organize outsourcers, so don’t assume outsourcing is a magic solution), that’s not the method for me.

Is there potential to scale?

As per the previous point, often the logistics of growth makes a method unappealing to me, however I do want the income streams I go after to have the potential to scale, and scale big. This means if you do discover something that makes you money, the possibility to grow it to a life changing amount of moneyis a reality, and you understand how this can happen.

Is there passive income potential?

In most cases I prefer something that is more potentially passive than potentially scalable. Obviously it’s great to have everything, but given the choice I prefer income streams that just work and can be automated so you can do other things. You have to be careful to manage your desire to scale something with your desire to make it passive. Sometimes less is more because less gives you freedom.

Can you create a sellable asset?

The final point is really important to me because I know that my interest tends to fluctuate. Every five years or so I feel like moving on to something new and leaving my main project. In the case of business, I want to ensure that there is a profitableexit strategy. The better you meet the previous criteria (profit margin, automated, scaleable and passive), the more money you can make when it is time to sell.

I Look For The “Holy Trinity” Income Method

I’ve written before about my quest for the holy trinity of a business model, one that delivers what I consider the three most important outcomes from a business –

1. You make significant PROFIT
2. The income can be made as close to PASSIVE as possible
3. You have PASSION about some aspect of the business

Or phrased another way, my business should enable the following -

1. Consistent Income
2. Free Time (thanks to income automation, business model simplicity or large capital gain)
3. Meaning and Purpose (development of your passion and reason for being on this planet)

So now you know my main criteria that has driven me to test different income streams over the past decade. Now let me introduce you to exactly what those income streams are…

My Top 10 Ways To Make Money Online

1. Sell On Ebay

During my pre-teen and early teenage years I went from playing with Transformers, GI-Joe and LEGO, to playing Nintendo, Sega and Gameboy. Eventually I added the card game Magic: The Gathering to the mix at about 16 years of age. All of these things were passions for me at various stages of growing up, but one thing remained consistent throughout each stage; I traded and sold toys and games I no longer wanted to make extra cash.

In Brisbane where I live, before the Internet there was a newspaper called theTrading Post that was published every two weeks. It was an aftermarket for pretty much everything. Whenever I grew tired of a game or a toy I’d sell it via the Trading Post, usually in an effort to make enough money to buy the new toy or game I had in my sights.

Eventually the Internet came along and the Trading Post no longer commanded the secondhand market like it once did (though it did successfully transition online). It quickly became clear that eBay was the winner when it came to secondhand commerce online. As a result my first experience making any money from the Internet was selling old games, toys and electronics on eBay.

EBay is still I believe the best way to gain experience making money from the Internet for two reasons -

1. You are pretty much guaranteed to make some kind of sale and thus experience a transaction
2. EBay has the traffic, so you don’t have to worry about marketing your product beyond creating a good listing, the eye-balls are already there

These two reasons make eBay a great first stop because you will learn how to list something for sale online, how to take money (possibly your first experience with PayPal) and about the importance of things like titles and copywriting, if you spend the time to study how to make your eBay listings convert better.

The best thing about eBay – the abundant traffic – is also the worst thing. Barriers to entry are low on eBay, meaning competition is fierce. When competition is fierce, profit margin is slim. Unless you can find some form of competitive advantage through your supply chain, how you create listings, or you have a means to increase volume, you’re not going retire rich thanks to eBay.

I spent quite a bit of time studying eBay, both as a business model and as a means to capture new customers because of how much buying traffic is there. There is no doubt that eBay is a fantastic website that represents a huge potential to make money, but in my case I wasn’t keen to build my business there, it didn’t match enough of my criteria.

However eBay is a fantastic way to make quick money, even just as a way to turn your old items into cash to start a new online venture. If you’re brand new to Internet marketing and you don’t know your PayPal’s from your Clickbanks, or your PPC from your SEO, eBay is definitely a great place to learn some basics.

2. Sell products in forums, bulletin boards, classifieds and other community type sites

The card game Magic: The Gathering was a big part of my life from the end of highschool to the beginning of university. Although initially I was just a casual player and then tournament player, I quickly became a card trader and really enjoyed the wheeling and dealing. Although my interest in playing the game wained, most of my early projects online were connected with the game.

Before having my own website, I spent time reading websites, newsgroups, bulletin boards and forums about the game, and eventually started trading online. Back before search engines were any good most of my time was spent in particular Magic newsgroups, some that talked strategy, and some that were focused specifically on trading and/or buying and selling cards.

I managed to make spare change selling my cards through these sites. The main reason I could make any money was because I would win cards in tournaments, hence I had a supply source that would result in a good profit margin. Of course this wasn’t sustainable unless I kept placing well in tournaments, nor was it really scalable unless I started buying in cards from other sources.

I stopped using this method once I started my own card game site (more on this below), however I still believe niche collectables, particularly in a market that you really love, is a fantastic starting point to gain experience making money online. Like eBay you can make money selling secondhand items in community sites if you can find a way to source product at cost or below. It’s not a model that has much margin so again the challenge is to scale if you want to make significant profit.

3. Sell products from your own website

My first successful website was about the card game Magic: The Gathering. At first the site was just a hobby with articles written by me and a few friends. Eventually as traffic grew I began making some money with the site.

Since I was already a card trader it made sense that my Magic site have a Magic card store. At first I stocked the website with my own cards, and eventually added retail “sealed” (unopened packs of cards) by buying product at wholesale from a company in Sydney.

It was a very simple card shop made up of text listings of the cards I had for sale, the quantity available and the cost per card or per pack. I maintained the inventory myself from my room, sorting and listing cards online by hand using plain text. I didn’t use any software and most of the payments I received back then was via check or money order in the mail. Some kids would even send money and even coins (!) in the mail to pay for their purchase.

My business did well enough, although the manual labor was intense. Maintaining inventory lists, packing cards into envelopes and daily trips to the post office was not always the most fun way to spend my time, though I did enjoy having my own little business while in university.

Unfortunately my store was hit by credit card fraud when I foolishly sold a significant amount of product to an unknown person in Thailand. This experience was enough for me to decide that I had had enough of running a Magic shop and it was time to move on. You can read about the credit card fraud experience here – Yaro Starak Timeline – Part 2

Selling Products Online Is A Big Opportunity

My first three experiences of making money from the Internet all involve some kind of physical product. Online commerce obviously represents a huge opportunity to make money online, and having your own product or a passion for a product that you can source can lead to big profits.

You can sell product from your own website store, via community sites and classifieds (like Craigslist) and of course eBay and collectively make good money. The challenge, like with any business, is defining what is your competitive advantage and can you come up with a model that meets your needs. For me selling physical product was a great proving ground, but I eventually learned that profiting from information was a preferable model if I wanted to meet my aforementioned business goals.

I’ll leave it in your hands to decide whether physical commerce is the way to go for your situation.

4. Sponsorship advertising on a content site

Once my card game site was successful I began researching how to make money from it. I sold cards initially because I already knew there was a market for that and I had the cards, but I was also aware that if I had an audience I could charge sponsors money to advertise to them.

Thus began my love affair with banner advertising.

Although challenging at times to find sponsors, I was quickly able to bring in several hundred dollars per month in advertising revenue by directly approaching online companies who I considered good targets for my readership. I emailed them and asked if they would like to pay a monthly fee to place a banner on my site. Most said no, but some said yes and eventually I had a couple of loyal sponsors.

Banner income would prove very reliable over time as long as I continued to do whatever I did to maintain and build a readership. This has continued today, where several sponsors pay a fee to advertise their products and services to you, the reader of this website.

Banner advertising, when set up using a system like I presently use, can be very hands off – in fact for me it’s entirely passive – assuming there is an audience that the sponsors benefit from advertising to. It’s difficult to make loads and loads of money just from banners unless you have significant traffic, but it is easy enough to make some money from it and once you do, it generally proves very reliable unless you stop updating your website.

I’d recommend this method to you if you have some kind of content based site or a community site that attracts enough traffic to make it worthwhile for sponsors. The best thing about banners is that they don’t have to replace any other income method you use, you can use this income stream in tandem with others.

5. Sell services you provide personally

At one stage early in my career when my online income wasn’t consistent, I was part of a business grant program run by the Australian government designed to assist entrepreneurs with money to pay for life’s necessities so you can focus on growing your business. The idea is that when your business is successful you will eventually hire people and pay taxes, thus the government reaps a return on the investment.

The grant ran for 12 months and I was under the assumption (incorrectly) that I had to show consistent income growth in order to maintain my qualification for the program. My income at the time always suffered a downturn around Christmas/Summer in Australia. To combat this problem I decided to teach English face-to-face with people in Brisbane to hopefully boost my reportable income.

To advertise my tutoring service I marketed using posters offline and eventually set up a website and marketed on classified sites as well. I charged $15 an hour and eventually had a few Korean clients. This idea eventually ballooned into a full on English school with a real world premises that I managed for eight months before closing down. It turned out to be an experiment that taught me I much preferred online business to bricks and mortar.

My English tutoring days were short lived, but that doesn’t mean selling some kind of service that you personally deliver isn’t still a viable option. The Internet is a fantastic place to market your services for free. Similar to what I talked about in the first three points, you can use online community sites, classified, forums and your own website to market your service.

The downside with this model is that you are still trading hours for dollars, which is a violation of my holy trinity concept. It’s not necessarily the worst option – and many people enjoy the life of a high-paid consultant very much – but it does have the inherent limitation that a service is not replicable unless you personally do it yourself or hire people to do it for you, both activities that take time and/or resources.

If you are good at something and enjoy helping/teaching/working on other people’s projects, selling what you do online is worth considering.

6. Sell services provided by other people

My next big success after my card game site was an online proofreading business. For this business I wanted to focus on selling something that did not require either my own labor or sourcing some kind of physical product.

The business began in very simple fashion. I created the website personally myself and advertised two services – English proofreading and language translationservices. I knew how to find contract proofreaders and also had access to an online database of language translators. When a job came through I’d organize a quote, slap on a margin for myself and then return the quote to the client.

Over the years I heavily refined this business. I brought on an assistant, simplified the services, cemented a pricing model and learned what methods of marketing brought in the best type of client. The end result was a full time income for me and barely a few hours of work to maintain it.

This was the first time I found a business that met all my major criteria – except one – I really wasn’t that passionate about the industry. Initially I enjoyed being the entrepreneur, the thrill of making money and automating the business as much as I could, but after a few years my passion wained. I eventually sold the business, earning a nice payday in the process, making this one of my most personally gratifying projects.

Selling a service is a real option for making money online. The challenge is sourcing good people to do the work, learning what specific offer to make to the market, how to differentiate yourself so you earn good margins, how to market what you offer and how to automate the entire process so it becomes a passive income stream.

7. Paid reviews

For a brief period on my blog I invited people to submit their product, service or website for a paid review. This means they pay a fee (for my site it was $250) and I would write an article about whatever they submitted. I would not accept just anything for review, I had to see an angle that made for relevant content for my audience. Nor was a paid review a promise that I would write positively about the subject – I would highlight both good and bad points.

Initially I didn’t mind writing paid reviews as the income was pretty good in terms of how long it would take and how much I earned. I could make as much as $250 an hour, which was great at first, but as my motivation focused more on freedom and less on money, even this became a poor incentive. Plus I never did like that I was told what to write about rather than choosing subjects I enjoyed.

The challenge for you, if this method is relevant to your growth stage, is to create a website where you can command a price for paid reviews that makes it worth your time. Until your traffic is significant, charging more than $50 for a review is not realistic, so you need to build your website asset first.

8. Affiliate marketing

As my blog audience grew I began to test a method of making money I was very interested in – affiliate marketing. My first test proved positive, though initially I was disappointed that of my readership of 500 or so people (at the time), I could only sell one or two products, making $20 commission each. It wasn’t retirement money, but it was a start.

Affiliate income has gone on to become my second highest source of income in recent years, thanks in part to the increase in my audience reach. By combining my blog and email newsletter I can reach thousands of people with just one piece of content. By testing different products and recommending things I personally use myself, I’ve been able to earn as much as $50,000 in commissions selling just one product.

Affiliate marketing is possibly the single best way to make a living online because it is so hands off, can be automated easily enough and can deliver some incredible profit margins. It’s especially good when you can use affiliate marketing to recommend things in areas you are personally interested in – for example you can make money simply writing a review of a book you really wanted to read anyway and you get paid for doing what you love.

The challenge for you is figuring out what market(s) to enter, building an audience and maintaining relationships with your readers so they trust what you tell them. If you know something that other people want to know and you are prepared to share that information, you could be looking at a fairly lucrative affiliate opportunity.

9. Sell your own information products

The single most profitable income stream I have ever developed is selling my owninformation products. If you are a long time follower of my work you know I have created courses on how to make money with blogs and membership sites. I also have several reports, an ebook and new products on the way.

The profit margins on information products is significant, especially as you can earn money for content you created years ago. Technology makes selling information online relatively easy to automate, once you get through the learning curve. If you focus on areas you are passionate about you can build expertise and leverage that trust and credibility to make sales of your products. Best of all, all of this can happen while you sleep, once you have built the machine to do it for you.

I personally enjoy teaching, so creating my products like Blog Mastermind though hard work, was an enjoyable process. Once the course was created I continued to sell it year after year to people new to the industry who want to learn how to make money with blogs.

Like with affiliate marketing, your potential to succeed selling information products rests on your ability to identify market needs, tap into audiences looking for this information and then give them what they want. There are plenty of subtleties and things to learn about, but thankfully there is plenty of guidance out there too. Digging into the archives of this blog you are reading now and downloading my free reports – The Blog Profits Blueprint and Membership Site Masterplan are fantastic starting points if you want more help.

10. High end private coaching

I’ll end this article with something I only recently did – offer high end coaching to a select group of clients who had to apply to work with me. My program cost between$5,000 and $10,000 and I turned away more people than I accepted. This was deliberate as I knew working one-on-one with people is not something I can do with many people or I will use up all my time. However I was keen to help certain people who were in the right position so I could learn more about the challenges they face.

Private coaching, like consulting, is another situation where you trade time for dollars, but in terms of your hourly pay rate it is hard to find a higher paying “job”. Of course you don’t have to start off charging thousands of dollars. Depending on your expertise and what kind of outcome you help people achieve, will determine how much you can charge. Offering coaching for $100 per session is not out of reach for most people, and that’s not a bad starting rate if you are looking to build up your experience through helping others closely.

Again the Internet is by far the easiest and most affordable tool to attract coaching clients. In many cases you can add private coaching to many of the other methods I listed above, including selling info products you create, affiliate products, sponsorship banners and physical products.

Combine What Works For You

In my case progressing through these various methods, figuring out what I actually want from a business and then combining different methods to maximize my income and personal satisfaction has worked the best.

I recommend you follow a similar path to build your own business. Figure out what you like using the options above and other resources online, begin testing to see what works and learn more about what you enjoy, and keep at it until you find what “floats your boat” and is incredibly profitable too.

http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/5292/top-10-methods-to-make-money-online

9 Ways to Monetize Your Website and Make Money Online

Monetizing your website is a great way to bring in extra revenue, whether you run a blog or a business website. Naturally, many people want to earn more money so monetization is a hot topic. Before trying out any method it's important to realize that successful monetization requires some upkeep and time put into it before you really start seeing results.

Let's take a look at 9 ways you can start monetizing your website right now.

1. Contextual Advertising
Undoubtedly, one of the most obvious and easiest ways to start earning some money from your website is to start using ads. Google AdSense offers a simple method of contextual advertising that is regularly used with great success among many blogs and websites. AdSense is very widely known but don't rule out Clicksor, AdSonar, Yahoo Publisher Network and other companies that have a good track record.

2. Display Advertising
If your website is about a fairly unique or odd topic you may have a difficult time finding enough appropriate advertisers with contextual advertising. If this is the case then using display advertising may yield better results for you. Display advertising pays you per view rather than per click. Remember to use multiple displays and networks to ensure you're making the most money possible.

3. Targeted Advertising
Targeted advertising is one of the best forms of monetization via ads. Targeted ads are created by individuals or businesses that pay you to advertise on your website. While it is more difficult to get this type of advertising, it is well worth it. The key to finding people who would want to advertise on your website is to first make sure your website is worth advertising on! If you website is well-developed, has a great accompanying blog and great traffic, put up a link on your web pages in which people can fill out an advertising form.

4. Text Link Advertising
The final method of advertising for monetization is the use of text link ads. Text link ads are fairly unobtrusive and generally flow well with most website formats. Most website owners use this style along with others since it's a "set it and forget it" method. Though it is really simple to set up and use, it doesn't offer as great of payment as the above 3 advertising methods.

5. Affiliate Links
One of the oldest methods of monetization is the use of affiliate links. Regardless of what your website may be about, there are probably companies that sell complimenting products and services. Linking products and recommending them in blog posts can really boost revenue. Amazon is the most common affiliate that is used, though may other companies are picking up on this and offer affiliate programs.

6. Selling Your Own Products
If you don't already have products available, you could easily create some such as eBooks, courses, DVDs, etc. Selling your own products means that you can get the full income from them while simultaneously boosting yourself up as an expert in your field. Selling your own products means you have to create the product and market it. This takes time but you will be very well-rewarded for your efforts. This method is one of the best for a long-term income stream.

7. Consulting
If it works with your website's topic, and you have the proper level of expertise, you can try selling your services through consultation. For example, if your website is all about dog behavior, you could offer a consultation for owners who are having a problem with their dog. Setting up a consultation service is really simple but can tarnish your reputation if you don't fully understand what you are talking about.

8. Donations
Donations used to be a really common method of monetization to keep your website up and running. It is less common but worth a shot if you have a large, dedicated reader base. It is important to not come off as greedy when asking for donations. Keep your "Donate" link or button fairly small and out of the way. Also, if you're using a lot of ads then asking for donation can seem like you're just trying to take as much money as possible.

9. Reviewing Products
If you have a well-known, respectable web presence you may be able to review products for a price. Many companies are more than willing to either send you free products or even may you a fee to honestly review a product and create a blog post about it. This can be a fun way to make extra money that can also be beneficial to your readers/visitors.

Do some research, ask yourself some questions, and get started with a couple of the above techniques soon!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7465263

How to Make Money With Google AdSense

Great video on Adsense. Old but the basics haven't changed.

Making Money through Social Media: Discussing from Expert Angles

Social media – is it a business model? No. It’s a marketing plan of action. This is the statement that has been evolved from the recent changes that we can see in the area of social media. The world seems to be head over heels when it comes to social networking, and why not? Sites like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and each one of the kind has made their way to our daily lives – big time.

Being one of the leading social media management company, Synapse Communications keep a keen eye on the recent changes of the industry. And here in this article we will discuss few thumb rules about how to make money through social media.

Is there some way to legitimatize social media?

Well,, the answer is – “yes”, you can! If your business set up outlines precisely how you’ll generate revenue from specific social media related activities and you implement these revenue generating activities on an identical basis; you will be ready to legitimatize your social media operations.

Many business owners often find them in a two-mind concerning the concept of substantiation once it involves social media. Pertaining to this phenomenon let’s take a glance at where this disarray is coming from and break it down here.

How many folks on Twitter have you ever seen with the words  “social media expert” or “social media marketer”, or “certified social media expert” in their bio? Well, of-course, plenty, isn’t it? And you must be thinking are these folks help you churn cash benefits by doing this? How are they experts in something that is in a state of perpetual evolution?

So, here the social media experts from Synapse Communications have shared a few tips what a SMM executive should need to do to help their clients to churn cash benefits from these activities.

Being Specific about  the Endeavors:

Be specific about all the activities concerning what you are doing in your social media activities. If you’re a marketing consultant and aim to help businesses to develop a lasting relationship with their audience through social media; it will set you with the exception of the remainder of the social media “gurus” out there. The bio you intend to popularize about your expertise, should have a tag-line that specifically tells about your area of specification. Your bio should let your target market apprehend what kind of works you are doing and the way it’ll create their life higher.

Social platforms open up a range of ways to the promotional activities. It’s an excellent means to strike up conversations with people who  share common interests. These platforms also help in getting some exposure or from brands. Such platforms are also considered to be the quickest means to build your international name.

Making People Understand and Pushing them to Go for Your Products:

If you would like to create cash through your social media efforts, you have got to make it clear to your target group they can churn profit if they pay you for your products or services. Simply posting Tweets or Facebook updates and gathering followers, likes and RTs – aren’t enough to pay the bills. If you would like to show a profit, you need to have a concept for creating sales whereas building relationships with the related people to help it work out better.

Be Skilled In & Out:

According to the SMM experts from Synapse Communications, if you would like to achieve success at social media marketing, be skilled and respectful – on-line and off. Search for ways that are higher than the competition. Not by having a title that says therefore, however by being it. Keep a keep eye on the current events on social media promoting news, trends and events and share this info together with your shoppers so they apprehend, like and trust you and your work. Go higher on your marketing skills and on the far side the scope of labor and see how briskly word travels on social media and awe-inspiring you’re.

http://scpli.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/making-money-through-social-media-discussing-from-expert-angles/

Make Money Online (Without Spending a Dime)

Making money online used to pretty much require you to have your own Web site, products to sell and some marketing savvy. But a new generation of dot-coms have arisen that will pay you for what you know and who you know without you having to be a web designer or a marketing genius.

But it's hard to tell hype from the real deal. I did a search on "make money online" and "making money online", and much of the information out there is just promoting various infoproducts, mostly about Internet marketing. I see why people sometimes ask, "Is anyone making money online besides Internet marketing experts?"

So I put together a list of business opportunities with legitimate companies that:

• Pay cash, not just points towards rewards or a chance to win money
• Don't require you to have your own Web domain or your own products
• Don't involve any hard-selling
• Aren't just promoting more Internet marketing
• Give a good return on your time investment

In the interest of objectivity, none of the links below are affiliate links, and none of them have paid or provided any other consideration for their presence here. These are legitimate companies with business models that allow you to get paid for a wide range of activities.

Help friends find better jobs.

Sites like ReferEarns, Zyoin, Who Do You Know For Dough?, and WiseStepp connect employers with prospective employees, many of whom are already employed and not actively job-hunting, via networking - the people who know these qualified candidates. Rewards for referring a candidate who gets hired range from $50 on up to several thousand dollars - not chump change. If you know a lot of job-seekers (and who doesn't these days?), this is a great way to break into the recruiting business with no overhead.

Connect suppliers with buyers.

Referral fees are a common practice in business, but they haven't been used much in online networking sites because there was no way to track them. Sites like Salesconx, InnerSell anduRefer now provide that. Vendors set the referral fees they're willing to pay (and for what), and when the transaction happens, you get paid. uRefer also allows merchants to set up referral programs for introductions and meetings, as well as transactions.

Write.

A growing number of sites will pay for your articles or blog posts. Associated Content andHelium will "pay for performance" based on page views for just about anything you want to write about. Articles on specific topics they're looking for can earn direct payments up to about $200. The rates are probably low for established writers, but if you're trying to break into the field and have time on your hands, they're a great way to start. Also, a lot of companies are looking for part-time bloggers. They may pay per post or on a steady contract. Our Weblogs Guide posts blogging jobs weekly in the forum.

Start your own blog.

You don't have to have your own Web site, or install blogging software, or even figure out how to set up the advertising. At Blogger you can set up a blog for free in less than five minutes without knowing a thing about web design, and Blogger even automates setting up Google AdSense so you can make money off your blog by displaying ads and getting paid when people click on the ads. To make even more money from it, set up an affiliate program (see below) for books, music, etc., and insert your affiliate links whenever you refer to those items. You'll have to get a lot of traffic to become a six-figure blogger, but pick an interesting topic, write well, tell all your friends, and you're off to a good start.

Related: Monetizing Your Blog

Create topical resource hubs.

Are you an expert on a particular niche topic? Can you put together an overview of the topic and assemble some of the best resources on the topic from around the web? Then you can create topical hubs and get paid through sites like Squidoo, HugPages and Google Knol. Payments are based on a combination of ad revenue and affiliate fees. You'll get higher rates doing it on your own, but these sites have a built-in supply of traffic and tools to make content creation easier.

Advertise other people's products.

If you already have a Web site or a blog, look for vendors that offer related but non-competing products and see if they have an affiliate program. Stick to familiar products and brands - they're easier to sell. To promote those products:

• Place simple text or graphical ads in appropriate places on your site
• Include links to purchase products you review or recommend in a blog, discussion forum or mailing list you control
• Create a dedicated sales page or Web site to promote a particular product

They all work - it just depends on how much time you have to spend on it and your level of expertise with Web design and marketing.

Related: How to Really Make Money on the Internet With an Amazon.com Affiliate Site

Microstock photography.

You don't have to be a professional photographer to sell your photos for money. People are constantly in need of stock photography for websites, presentations, brochures and so on, and are willing to pay for the right image. People generally search for images on stock photography sites by keywords, not by photographer, so you have the same chance as anyone else of having your image picked. Just be careful that you don't have images of trademarked brands, copyrighted art or people's faces that are readily identifiable (unless you have a model release), but just about anything else is fair game, and I promise - you'd be amazed what people need pictures of, so don't make any assumptions. If it's a decent photo, upload it. Some sites to get you started include Fotolia, ShutterStock, Dreamstime andiStockphoto. The great thing about this is that it's truly "set it and forget it".

The above list is by no means comprehensive, but it highlights some of the new and interesting ways to make money online without investing any money, without having a product of your own, and without having expert sales and marketing skills. Most of all, unlike taking surveys or getting paid to read e-mail, the potential return on your time investment is substantial.

http://entrepreneurs.about.com/od/homebasedbusiness/a/makemoneyonline.htm

Can you really make money online?

The Creative Collective director Yvette Adams.

IT sounds like an idyllic life - you set up an online business, put your feet up on the desk and wait for the dollars to roll in. So is it really that easy to make money online?

Well yes. And no. Really, 'it depends' would have to be my answer.

Having created online businesses for myself and hundreds of business owners in New Zealand, the UK and Australia since 2000, and having had the pleasure of interviewing many highly successful online business owners via our bi-monthly Web Wednesday events, I've seen and experienced first hand that it is indeed possible to make money online. The question should actually be how much money, how soon, and how easily?

The importance of R n D

It still amazes me how many people I meet who set out to make money online before doing any real research other than a bit of 'Googling around'. One should also consider whether they could simply 'buy' a similar online business from an off the shelf place such as flippa.com.

If you've established that there is indeed a gap in the market (and there may be some need for some professional assistance here), it is then wise to investigate how much traffic your website is likely to get. You can do this by using simple tools like Google's keyword tool athttps://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool or more complex professional paid software.

A game of percentages

Once you have some indications of how many people may search words related to the proposed product or service you will offer on your site, you need to work out how to strategically prepare a website/online business with the research very much in mind that will give the site the best chance of attracting the traffic.

Whilst you will have key marketing messages to get across, search engines index pages, not websites, so it is important to prepare pages specifically aimed at reeling in keyword searchers to your website lair.

Once you are getting traffic, it becomes a game of percentages. Within the industry we generally say that if 1-2% of all traffic on your website are purchasing the product on offer, this is a good conversion rate. Naturally some websites perform better and others perform worse, but knowing this figure may help you with some forecasting before you even get going.

But how do you actually make money online?

Well just like offline, there are many ways to make money in business online.

You could sell advertising on your website; be it display ads or affiliate ads whereby you make a commission on each item sold as a result of traffic generated via your website. But you have to have serious traffic going through your site for this to work.

You could sell products online. It could be stuff you've created or you can of course sell other people stuff. You can stock it, or you can even do what is known as drop-shipping, which is where you sell an item that is warehoused elsewhere, and if a sale is generated it triggers the warehouse to post the item. Great if you are doing serious volume or selling large items.

You could come up with a new idea, a new way of doing things. Something that solves people's problems. And people may be prepared to pay a subscription for the service.

Whatever your way of making money is online, just like offline business, no matter how good your product or service is, you need to market it well, or no one will even know you exist. And marketing well online, my friend, is a whole new chapter in this ongoing digital story.

http://www.sunshinecoastdaily.com.au/news/can-you-really-make-money-online/1644947/