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 the
Trading 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 -
- You are pretty much guaranteed to make some kind of sale and thus experience a transaction
- 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 translation
services. 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 own
information 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.
