Learning How To Make Money Online

 Learning How To Make Money Online

    After five years of learning online marketing and teaching newbies to start their online businesses, I’ve developed a habit of delivering information efficiently, without fluff. On paper, that sounds great. But in reality, it can read kind of dry, and it doesn’t really get your blood pumping with excitement.

    I will admit, that when it comes to the finesse of motivation, I am not very talented. So expect what you read in the following pages to be very practical, straightforward advice and instructions on how to start your business. However, I wanted to take a few short paragraphs to really explain to you the incredible potential of making money online. Most of us work a “normal” job. We get up in the morning, go to work, come home at the end of the day, and collect a paycheck at the end of the week or month. We get paid by the hour, and if we work the same job for a decade, we might see our financial situation improve only slightly over time.

   The world of owning an online business is something completely different, and very unique opportunity.

   While a typical brick and mortar business will cost you a few hundred thousand dollars to start up, and require the knowhow of hiring staff, dealing with permits, and whatever else goes along with that, starting an online business requires none of that.

    You can start your business on an $11 domain name and run it 100% by yourself in your free time.

   If you start coffee shop and don’t open up shop one day, you make $0. If you don’t log into your website one day, it still makes the same amount of money as yesterday. Since you’re not paying rent, and not paying staff, your expenses are going to be extremely low. $100 earned is $100 in your pocket.

With regards to income, growth can be exponential in a short period of time. 

    I made $4000 in my first year of starting an online business. No, that’s not a full time income, and not enough to support anybody for a full year, let alone an entire family. But break that down month by month, and you may see $200 earned in June, $500 earned in July, $1000 earned in August, and so on. That kind of income growth in the offline business world is unheard of. Even if you do experience massive growth offline, you have to expand to new facilities, hire more staff, or pay people to work longer.

   Even if your website quadruples income over a year, it’s basically still a single unit that you can manage yourself. So what we have is a type of business that is low cost, easy to manage, and has massive income potential. There are many methods of earning money online, and in this book you are going to learn the one that has produced incredible results for me. Getting profitable won’t be a cakewalk, but being successful online is possible for anyone.

I hope you enjoy learning how to start your first online business!

If I’ve learned anything over the past 4 years building profitable websites it’s

that you need to define your audience. So let me tell you who this book was

written for, who is going to benefit most from reading it, and how.

For The Complete Newbie, Motivated Learner

  If you have never attempted to build a website before, and don’t have any idea how someone could actually make money online, then this book is going to open your eyes some amazing possibilities. I’ve written it with newbies in mind, and will try to explain everything in detail, along with analogies and even some links to videos to SHOW you how to do some of the things I talk about.

   However, keep this in mind: there are limitations to what I can do in an ebook. I can’t reach out through these pages and move your hands for you or fix the problems you’ll run into. The path to making money is long and winding, and you will probably need to reach out to other resources to fill in some of the blanks along the way. Still, I’ll do my best to give you everything you need right here in these pages.

   For The Jaded Marketer Still Not Earning

   There are many marketers out there that have been following gurus and false prophets for YEARS and still haven’t found a way to “go full time”. For you guys, it’s time to simplify. Get rid of that SEO software and backlink generating plugin. Unsubscribe from the serial Click bank promoter and WSO hype-man.

    True, you can earn money in 100 different ways online. Chances are, you’ve tried a few and failed. I won’t speculate on your reason for failure, but this book is about getting back to the basics.

    Learn how ONE guy earns money online through WordPress blogs, without any fancy cheats or loopholes. You will be surprised at how little I do in terms of SEO, and how I try to play within Google’s rules, rather than break them with sneaky tricks. If you un-learn some of the SEO voodoo and start trying to help people, you’ll be on your way to starting a strong foundation to your online business.

  Some of you will scoff at these methods and say that the system is rigged. “Yeah yeah, I’ve already tried that and didn’t make anything!” Please read with an open mind and understand that these methods can work if you make them work. I think by cutting the fat, and following a philosophy of less-is-more, you can get your business moving in the right direction.

   Not for Someone Looking for a Job or Quick Money Sorry bro or bro-ette. Money is not going to come quickly using this method.

    It took me 3 months to make my first $5, and 6 months to start making regular sales. But that’s after building 10+ failed websites over that period of time.

    Yeah, I’m kind of a dummy, but for what I lack in brains, I make up for with persistence.

   But even if you work hard, are you willing to grind for 6 months while earning $0 from your effort? This is not a job where you work 6 hours and get paid for 6 hours!

    I worked on my most recent affiliate website from Feb 2012 to June 2012 without making a single sale. I struggled with traffic, rank, and getting people to actually care about what I was writing. It was frustrating, and resulted in earning no money from hundreds of man-hours building.

    This morning, March 24, 2015 that same website has already earned me over $500 and it’s not even 10:00AM. It took a long time to reach this point, but I’m glad I put in those non-profit months in the beginning. If you aren’t willing to put in the work despite no guarantee of profit, then you are in the wrong business.

   Not For Someone That “just wants” Some Passive Income The idea of passive income has been warped by hyped product advertising feeding into the desire of everyone for easy money. I get emails weekly from folks that are “just looking for some passive income”, as if it could be found and acquired by asking around.

  Anyone who enjoys money in the bank with without trading hours of work for an hourly wage has put a ton of work in the back-end to build it up that far.

   Do I wake up to an extra $1000 in the bank some mornings? Yeah, but I have been grinding away at my business for almost 5 years now, spending countless hours trying to build, grow, and expand.

    I have more than a few failed projects. Some were simply wasted money on outsourcing jobs it turns out I didn’t need (details in later on), and some are just wasting my own man hours doing things that I didn’t really need to do.

   The point I’m trying to make is that my “passive income” didn’t come from being passive. If you take a casual approach to your business, you are going to get a casual ROI, which usually means $0.

    You can make big money in the blogging and affiliate marketing world, but you need to be willing to work for it.

    OK, rant over, so let’s move on.

My Story 

Just a little background on me first, then we’ll move into how I got started and found success online.

I grew up in California, in a little redneck town called Atwater. After high school, I was fed up with school and wanted to do some traveling in Europe.

A Czech foreign exchange student offered to allow me and my other buddy to use her house as “home base” while we traveled for the next year. We could earn money as private English tutors in our downtime.

Surprisingly, an 18 year old with a scraggly young-man’s goatee and a dirty set of dreadlocks was able to find plenty of English teaching jobs in Prague, and even became a preschool teacher. In fact, I “taught” preschool for about 4 years, which mostly included playing guitar for the morning songs and telling everyone how great their pictures were.

After 5 years living in Prague I wanted to challenge myself and possibly open up some job opportunities by moving to China and learning Mandarin. So that’s what I did.

I kept teaching English, though to older kids, for the next two years. I planned on being in China for a while, and possibly settling down there. English teaching jobs paid alright, but provided no kind of savings that I could take back to the US if I was ever forced to move out. The communist government there controls everything, and loves to use foreigners as a scapegoat for all their societal ills.

So as part of a backup plan, I wanted to look into how I could earn money online and create a nest egg of US dollars in case the **** hit the fan and I had to come back to the US.

I almost bought into an MLM scam called PeopleString (now defunct), and attempted to buy one other product, but my credit card was declined. I’m a cautious buyer, but spent many nights sucked into those 20 minute videos talking about how financial freedom was just a click away.

Eventually I found my way to a legitimate affiliate marketing training center and started building my first website. I built a few free blogs on Wordpress.com and Blogger, and eventually bought a .info domain.

More than twenty incomplete and failed .info domains later, one rose out of the ashes as my first success. Being in China, I had inside knowledge into the VPN scene and started making some sales with my website unblockfacebookinchina.info. It’s still making money to this day despite all the abuse I’ve put it through during the last five years.

A few months later I wanted to broaden my reach in the VPN scene and started mrvpn.com. Back when article directories and backlinks were “legit”, I pushed that sucker up to 1000 visits a day in just a few months, and started earning over $10,000 per month in VPN sales alone. NOTE: That was net income, not gross sales.

Then came the massive Penguin update in April 2012, and it bombed my site down to fewer than 100 visits per day. My income was cut in half over just a few weeks, and I entered a period of deep depression. It was tough being on top of the world, then feeling like I had the rug pulled from under me.

I had no one to blame but myself.

Though it started out as a pity party, feeling like I’d been cheated, I eventually realized that if I did it once, I could do it again. After spending the next 12 months cleaning up the content and links for ALL of my websites, and recovering most of my previous income, I started onemorecupof-coffee.com, a blog about making money online through affiliate marketing, as I do it.

Most recently, I’ve started a website about craft beer and homebrewing which is a passion of mine. It’s not hugely profitable yet, and has only earned a little over $800 since its inception last year, but is more of a slow-cooking project for me.

For ANY websites I build now, I no longer invest time in backlinks or complicated SEO strategies. I focus on content creation and user engagement, and it’s working for me.

I currently work from home, whatever “full time” means. People are curious I’m sure, to know how much I make, but I don’t like to talk about how much exactly.

I support myself, my hobbies, and have money to save and invest. Any more detail than that isn’t really necessary to understand that I actually know how to make money with the methods I’m showing you here.

I own about 40 websites, but only about 20 of them make money, with the majority of earnings coming from 3-5 sites. You do not need to have a huge portfolio of websites to earn an income that can support the typical American family. You only need one website to achieve that. I just happened to have that many websites because I’ve done a lot of failed projects over the years, and had time to build more than one successful business, then set it on ‘maintenance mode’ rather than ‘growth mode’.

With this book I hope to help you avoid the mistakes of my past and benefit from the things I’ve learned with my new business ventures. I hope you enjoy the book and are able to implement what you learn to start your own profitable website on something that you are passionate about!

Why Write A Book?

If you are following my website, or have seen some of my training modules on YouTube, you might be asking yourself, “Why write it all over again in a book?”

To be honest, there are three main things I hope to accomplish here.

1. I hope to reach a new audience. Expanding away from the typical blog and YouTube channel means I get to reach out to a completely new group of people that might not have otherwise found me.

2. I hope to challenge myself. Venturing into the world of ebooks and self publishing is something I’ve never done before. Whether or not it’s a profitable venture, I’ll still learn a lot that I know I can use to grow my business and possibly help someone else down the road. A lot of people who are interested in making money online want to do it by publishing ebooks or digital info products, and having personal experience means I can give rock-solid advice.

3. I want to create a resource that is going to be a way cheaper, way better alternative to anything else out there. For any kind of mentorship or membership you are going to pay between $30-$200 per month. Most legit training courses (without support) are going to cost $50-$100.

Actually, some courses can cost you $2000-$25,000 dollars (not even exaggerating).

Plus, frankly, the majority of people writing Kindle books are doing either outsourcing the content or regurgitating what they “heard” rather than what they’ve actually done. This is going to be book about techniques that I have personally used to make money – not just something I read about and think has some good potential!

So I hope to find a balance of creating an inexpensive product with good information that someone can actually use as the first building block to the foundation of their affiliate website.