Friday, February 19, 2010

How to Make Money Online

You can increase your personal cash flow two ways. You can either spend less or make more. Most people would rather make more money than sacrifice their current standard of living. Fortunately, the internet has provided the average person a variety of ways to make money. Here are my top 10 ways to make money online.

1. Affiliate Marketing: If you do not have your own product to sell you can always sell someone else's products. This is called affiliate marketing. When you recommend another person's product and someone clicks on your affiliate link to buy to product you will earn a commission. The best affiliate products to market are products that you already use. This is because you are already a believer in the products or services, and they should not be hard for you to recommend. There are 3 cons that stand out in my mind when it comes to affiliate marketing: *You only earn a percentage of the profits. This is especially true when the percentage that you earn per sale is 5% or less, but you can also earn up to 75% on some affiliate products. On thing to keep in mind is the total sale price of the product. One percent of a $1,000 product is much better than 75% of an $8.00 product. *There is a learning curve to go through to make a lot of money selling affiliate products. When you do get good at selling affiliate products and you make a lot of sales, you become a super affiliate. Super affiliates make 95% of the money in affiliate marketing while all of the other affiliates fight over scraps. *The third con is that you have the FTC breathing down your neck. The FTC rules and regulations are beyond the scope of this article but all I can say is that they seem to be making it tougher to make money as an affiliate marketer. Thank goodness there are other ways to make money online.

2. Selling Information Products: You can either create your own products, buy the rights to resell Private Label Rights (PLR) products, or you can hire someone to create a product for you. You can create information products to sell online by writing an e-book, recording an audio or a video, or creating a course that teaches people how to do something. The best thing about selling your own products is that you keep all of the profits. A con is that it can be time consuming to create your own products.

3. Freelancing: If you do freelance work of any kind there are a bunch of different freelance sites where you can go bid on jobs to get more work. Some of the most popular freelance sites are elance.com, guru.com, and freelancer.com. If you feel like you do not have any skills that you can freelance, then here is a bonus tip. Once you check out a few freelance sites to see what skills are in demand, go to lynda.com to learn that new skill. Then go back and bid on jobs under your new skill at several of the freelance sites. The biggest con with freelancing is trading your time for dollars.

4. Auctions: Online auctions have been popular for as long as I can remember, and they are still just as popular. Two of the biggest online auctions are ebay.com and amazon.com. You can make make a lot of money selling products through the online auction format but they have two big cons. Shipping costs and fees. You have to ship every package that you sell to your customer, but you can always hire someone to help you with this task. Also be sure to factor in your shipping costs in the sale price. Amazon's shipping fees are fixed but ebay's fees vary based on what you are selling and how you are selling it. These fees can cut into your profits.

5. Buying and selling. If you can find good deals on stuff you can turn around and sell it for a profit through free classified ad sites like craigslist.org. If you have a big enough profit margin to cover shipping costs you can post ads in other cities. I like Craigslist because you can often make quick cash as opposed to waiting on a check or direct deposit. There are plenty of other ways to make money online, but hopefully these 5 ways got your wheels turning and thinking of different possibilities. I will post part two this article soon. Much Success,

By Jeremiah Carstarphen

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