How Long Have You Been Trying to Make Money Online?

[Miguelito203]

One of my subscribers (from my list) started e-mailing me at the beginning of the year complaining about the fact that she hasn't made any money online, yet. Her name looked familiar, so I looked her up in my e-mail system (Aweber). As it turned out, she has been on my list for more than 2 years! Even though I don't mail out too much (a few times per month when I have something of value to offer), she should have made money by now (if she bothered to actually implement anything).

She goes on to tell me that she doesn't like to write (and doesn't have the money for outsourcing). I told her that writing is a big part of this gig -- regardless of the business model -- and that she needed to find something she liked about it (finding a niche she liked, helping people, making money in an unconventional manner, etc). She also seems to have this thing where she doesn't really want to learn new stuff and is looking for an "easy button." Even though I told her no such thing exist (and she agreed), she keeps e-mailing me asking me to look at all of these crap programs!

She e-mails me at least two or three times a week. It's really sad. If you're a newbie and reading this, don't be this woman. While I think making money online is pretty awesome, it may not be for you -- if you have this woman's mentality.

Joey

 

[mackrodd]

Well. there are successful people online who make passive income. and many people who never earned a dime online like this woman you are talking about.

My answer. you have to remain consistent and work on your business and expect to fail all the time. there is no success without sacrifice. stay consistent and never give up. learn the basics before you learn advanced skills about affiliate marketing.

and the most important advice i can give you is ...... You will see success after 3 years of work. and when focus on one thing.
don't expect success in 6 months.

Hope that helps

 

[michaelswengel]

This isn't an industry for lazy people. I'm not saying that woman is lazy, don't get me wrong. But often people expect to make money doing something really simple, without putting much work into it, and then they figure this whole online thing just doesn't work.

People! Wrong! Just like any J.O.B. we have to be willing to work hard, do research, fail, and get back on our feet.

Working online is a lot of fun - or rather, it can be - if done with the right mindset and determination. When I first got started making money online, I had the wrong mindset. I wanted to make a lot of money really fast without having to work hard. That's not how it works!

I got back into it a few years ago with the RIGHT mindset and have been doing pretty well. Plus, I love teaching others about my failures and how to get started making their own incomes online.

 

[EpicGlobalWeb]

EpicGlobalWeb

Right. The reality is you'll probably work 10x harder at your own business than working for someone else. The sheer amount of content you have to post alone to rank effectively enough to make money is staggering. 30 - 60 articles / month is a good starter goal. Then repurpose all that content into social media snippets, then go on link-building campaigns.

It's a ton of work. And it can take a long time.

 

[wrcato2]

Making money online is simple today. Everything is pretty much done for you, Product creation is dfy, website design & integration is dfy, almost everything and the rest can be outsourced and completed by other people.

What some don't realize is the awesome power the internet has provided that can make you millions without breaking a sweat. When I started online it cost thousands to create a product and stick it up online. Today if you have 30 bucks you can do the same thing.

But the easiest way to make a few extra bucks, or what I call seed money, is to sell something that you own. I started out with eBay, but today you can use facebook/yardsales, craiglist, and if the psychical has a bar code Amazon.

In the last 3 months I have made over $4,000 flipping furniture part time.

 

[reCharge]

reCharge

That's right, the technology aspects were much more difficult to process but when you had the right know how (like me back in 2001) you had a realistic possibility to create something great do a little spam (like ICQ and Facebook in their beginnings did) and you had your first users and the stone began to roll.


But at these days ... it simply doesn't matter how good your content, products are or your own community around that is. Since about 2013 I was unable to establish just one single breakthrough project and I did 4 in different niches. The main reason is that you simply don't get to your audience any more. You just have two giant monopolists globally to purchase traffic from, spamming doesn't work, just like SEO. Social marketing, could work but don't let you snatched by the anti-spam teams + social networks like facebook are closed for google => no synergies.

Especially the SE-Algo updates since 2013 did their job pretty well to make the rich guys richer, I'm talking about the domain-trust and page-trust signals ([URLnofo]https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/[/URLnofo]). Both of them require backlinks which are targeted AND from well-known/high traffic web-sites. This rule divided the net into the high 5% and the 95% low traffic-pages. As a beginner you will never get a chance unless one of the 5%ers is building a backlink to you. But why should somebody share his cake with a stranger?

I read an article about startups some weeks ago where 57% of all startups failed caused by lack of customers.

Some years back somebody asked this question to Matt Cutts:

and compared the G-System to a vicious circle.
Today we know Matt Cutts was wrong.

 

[samimnoorzaitgc]

I earned $36 in my first three months. It has been two years since I'm doing internet marketing and indie game development. In total, I have earned over $500 so far. I spent most of it on my Weebly hosting packages. Their business package took $259 from me for a year, since the trust on traffic selling services got ruined (a little bit), now I'm back to the starter plan that worth $29 per year. Still working to attract more customers.
Thanks for the provided story, it motivates people to keep going.

 

[QueenMaa]

She sounds like she doesn't know what she really wants to do. If she doesn't like to write then blogging is something that she doesn't want to do. There are many things she can do. There is affiliate marketing, network marketing and selling things off of Ebay. She has to find out what it is she wants to do and then actually do it. Consistency is key.

Jumping from program to program is a fast way to fail.

 

[EpicGlobalWeb]

I think this woman just isn't 100% solid in her direction yet. Once she really gets going in something she can dedicate herself to, it'll get much easier.

 

[TrafficDues]

I remember when first entered the online/internet marketing and making money online things since three years, after like 5 months I made my first 60$ per day, and now i have different blogs and niche making great amount of money every month

 

[Isaiah Jackson]

It took me two weeks to make my first $70 online and I did that while deployed overseas in the military.

About your subscriber, just take her off your email list.

You can't help her because she won't bother helping herself.

I have a pretty aggressive approach for people on my list, they start complaining and invading my inbox... unsubscribe them.

Seems to work for me

 

[Rob Whisonant]

I have been making money online since the 90s. Made money on BBSs even before then. Yep I'm showing my age a little.

 

[Ron Killian]

Sadly, most every one want's more money, but FEW are willing to do what it takes to make that money.

There are SO many people like that, and there will always be people like that.

Yes, don't be "that guy".

Big reason I stopped helping friends start a business online. Tired of wasting my time.

Several months ago I have a similar email. Guy said he'd been trying for years now and hasn't made much. I asked what he had done so far. He replied back with a long list of products he had bought, actually at last 10k. I tried to say it very nicely, but he did not like my reply.

If you ever wonder why there are so many get rich products, it's because of guys like that that spend 10K or more trying to find the easy button.

 

[Mike001]

You guys hit the nail right on the head, there are quite a few people out there that just don't realize how much time and effort goes into building an on-line business. I would honestly say that I spend much more time on building my on-line training center than I do at my actual job building sites for clients.

The beauty is I have built the website design and development business to the point where my staff handles most of the grunt work. I meet with customers, respond to RFP's, prepare proposals, and develop the contracts once the customer is locked in. That gives me plenty of time to work on developing the training site and continuing to grow that business. It also helps that I teach at a local college and that draws local student to the site. By word of mouth, through students and faculty many schools in the US, Canada and now even Australia are using many of my on line tutorials in their training programs. I think that is awesome but it took me years to get to that point.

Over the last year I have begun to wind down the website development business as now I focus on maintaining the current customers and optimizing their sites so they can continue to grow. That has given me even more time to focus on the training site and my classroom training.

I started that training site over 7 years ago. It was developed as a Macromedia Flash programming site, because there were none. That kind of gives away my age Rob, as Adobe bought Macromedia many years ago. It took a couple of years before I had my first sale and I never lost focus. Growing a business takes time, especially on line where you have to build a much higher level of trust since most of your customers never meet you and only know you through the on line relationship. With an on line business you always have to go the extra mile, building that trust is an important key to that success.

Miguel, you will run into people, especially in this type of business, that truly believe that you can grab a web-host, put up a website, find a crappy product and make millions in a few months. We all know that is not the case. Anyone that has had any success at this knows how important return customers are, and having a product that meets a need and standing by that product. We have all had our ups and our downs in this business. But the ones that are really interested in developing a successful business and business model continue to grow their talents, add to their skill set, and find creative ways to grow their business. It is just like any other business.

If you take care of your customers, treat them the way that you would want to be treated, create a quality product the business will grow. I always go the extra mile for my students, both in the classroom and online.

One of the most important things to me in the training site is how many students come back and make additional purchases. That tells me I am doing something right... The last time I looked and ran the numbers I had a 72% return customer rate. Based on all the other sites that I stay in contact with that do training, not counting the mega sites, Udemy, Lynda, Total Training, etc, as they will not share data, that is a very high return customer rate. So I think I am doing pretty well there.

Will I ever get rich doing this.... probably not. But then I probably would not want to have more customers than I can maintain anyway. I have had many students tell me that the level of support I give to them once they take a course is why they come back again and again and spread the word about the site. I respond to each question on the site, myself. I try to work through solutions to their programming issues with them and guide them to understand what they are trying to learn. I can sometimes get 200 emails a day on the training, both for my online training and my classroom training, I respond to everyone.

There are some that just do not have the discipline to do this. It takes a lot of time and effort. It is NOT a get rich quick scheme. In fact, it is those that believe it is a get rich quick scheme that make it harder on the rest of us. They break down the trust that many of us take years to build with the on line community.

I treat this just like any other business. You get out, what you put in.

 

[YARTranslations]

I have been in the industry for 10 years now. It's not an easy field for working but it worth. You should start reading everything you get online. Don't buy anything that says that you will get the secret!!

It takes long time, and you should know that from the beginning.

 

[johnlimsy]

Right, I have been make money online for 1 year (product launch, niche) and I needed to work really hard. It took a lot of time and efforts.