Tip #1: The Importance of Making Money While You Sleep
Over the last 10 years, wages in Australia and America have not grown very much at all. That means that if you’re just working in a PAYG job, and not putting any money into any other investments that grow, you’ll be left behind.
The people who flourish (despite wage conditions) are the ones who have growth investments that make money while you sleep. The people who haven’t done this are getting relatively poorer.
Warren Buffet is also commenting on this right now. He says you can’t possibly get ahead on a wage. Relying on a wage means you can’t get enough leverage. Things are moving so fast now, that you must find leverage – not just on your time, but on your money as well.
Simply relying on wages won’t cut it anymore.
Tip #2: Using Your Unique Skills To Generate Extra Income
Even if you don’t think you’re creative, you have some form of knowledge that no one else in the world has. Not everyone has the same skills or experience as you do. It’s also likely you know about opportunities in industries that other people have no idea about.
With the right digital skills, you can actually take advantage of this knowledge. You can do something to turn that knowledge into extra income online.
Tip #3: Using Simple Advertising Websites To Help you Make Money Online
One of our favourite ways to make more money online is through creating a portfolio of advertising websites. It’s a great way to leverage your income and time. Especially since these are a more automated type of websites.
This type of website relies on traffic and people clicking on ads that you place throughout your site. It is a simple strategy we recommend you start looking at when creating your portfolio of online assets.
Making More Money Online with Advertising
For an advertising website, you need to provide good content. You will need content writers for this strategy, unless you’re all willing to write the content yourself. If you’re a good writer, you might want to do that yourself. But it takes time, and it’s not leveraged.
“Writing a lot of content yourself isn’t always the best use of your time.” – Matt Raad
The next tip is good ad placements. So there are better places to put your ads. Sometimes you’ll find sites on Flippa where they’re not making a lot of money because the ads aren’t in a nice obvious position.
Ideally, you want your ad placement across the top, down the right hand side. But you can play with that. On some sites, the left hand side works better. So you can just switch it over for a while, see if the income goes up. Switch it back if it doesn’t. That’s how easy it is. Just remember to keep it simple.
Picking A Niche For Your Advertising Website
Ideally, you want to pick a niche where there’s a good amount of money being spent in advertising, and the niche is “evergreen”.
This is a longer-term strategy. It’s going to take you a while if you’re building this website from scratch. It will likely take you at least 12 months to get to the point where you’re ranking to get enough traffic to start making some money out of it. So, think longer term with this one.
You want to look for niches where there’s potential for bigger advertisers. In an ideal world, you don’t always get that. But for niches such as the car niche, certain sporting niches or health niches – there’s some really good advertisers in there.
Tip #4: Using Affiliate Websites to Diversify Your Online Income
The other strategy that we recommend you start looking at is affiliate websites. These are websites that are monetized by people buying products.
For this strategy we want to have a topic that is niche and a money making topic. We couldn’t ever make an affiliate website out of kangaroos because there’s not really anything to buy. So affiliate websites are focused on buying stuff.
Here is a great article we recently posted on diversifying the income streams on your website to help increase the value of your digital assets.
What Makes a Great Affiliate Website?
The key to a great affiliate website is good product research. Make sure you go and look at all the products, and find the ones that are in a good price range.
TIP: always check Amazon bestsellers, and Google Trends
Make sure there’s a reasonable amount of people looking for these products. Go and look at the competition. Google these products yourself, and see who else is reviewing them. Is there a lot of money in that market?
You need to pick good products that you can create a whole website around. This allows you to create good quality content to help answer the buyers’ questions. If I was going to buy a fish tank, what would I want to know? What are the questions that I would ask? There’s your website, and it writes itself.
Also, provide clear links to the products. The goal for your website is click-throughs. So make sure the “Buy” and “Find Out More” buttons are really obvious. You want people clicking on that button.
Generating Steady Income From Affiliate Websites
Making money online can be very passive, or you can make it quite active if you want to. Regardless, you can make a lot of money in affiliate marketing.
If you want to be very active, then using ads (coupled with social media) might work better for you. But if you want to make it more passive, then using SEO will generate good income. It has much higher payouts than using advertising.
Usually with advertising websites, anytime someone clicks on a link, it can make you 20 cents, 50 cents, $1, etc. This can add up to a significant passive income if there is lots and lots of traffic.
With affiliate websites you earn a commission on the total sale price – so if someone clicks through to a sale page for a product or service on your affiliate link, and then they buy, you get a percentage of the sale. If its a $1,000 plus product or service your affiliate commissions can add up very quickly to a large monthly income even with relatively low traffic.
Tip # 5 Making A Lot Of Money Online Starts With the Little Ideas
If you have big dreams, and want to make a lot of money in your lifetime, then this is definitely the marketplace to be in.
We have seen countless examples of companies (well-known brands, and some not-so-well known) bought out for billions of dollars. All these companies were start-ups by individuals. There wasn’t a big corporate backing behind them, they were started by ordinary people like you and me.
A great example is Houzz. This company was started by a married couple when they were trying to renovate their house. They were looking for a resource to find ideas for rooms and different ideas of how to put things together when decorating. So they started a website where they put up images and different examples of things you can put in rooms. Houzz ended being valued at over a billion dollars.
It all started with little ideas, and you can do this too. You don’t have to be overly creative – just use your existing skills and knowledge.
Tip #6: Emulating Existing Successful Ideas
Here’s the thing – you never want to be copying other websites exactly. It’s not legal, and it’s not ethical. But a smart way if you’re looking at building a site is to emulate good ideas in the market. In other words, finding good ideas from existing sites.
So, where can you get ideas for sites and topics that would likely be successful? There’s a lot of places you can do this. But what we teach our Digital Profits students is to find these ideas on Flippa.
Look up sold websites that make a thousand dollars or more per month, and look at their niche topic. That’s one of the biggest hurdles our students face – “What Is Your Topic?”. Your topic could be anything in the world really, so we want to narrow it down a bit.
Psychologically, if you know in your mind that someone else has already done it (someone else is already making a thousand dollars a month from this), then you know it can be done. Set yourself up for success.
Tip #7: Creating an Online Product Someone Will Pay For
Here’s the key to making money from an information product site – you need to have something that you can’t just get for free. Because if people are going to pay for a product, there must be some difference to it. As an example, if I look up how to play guitar on Google, how much free stuff is out there? Tonnes!
So instead, I want to create an angle for my product. Perhaps learning to play guitar from a famous person, or maybe a flamenco guitar etc.
It’s using the knowledge that’s already in your head on how to do something, or how to start something etc. Creating a product around something that you have passion on, or something that you are really good at. Anything that you could teach a beginner how to do in a slightly different way, perhaps, than everyone else does it. There’s your gold!
Tip #8: Fast-Track Your Online Success Through Buying Websites
Buying websites is one of our favourite ways to make money online fast. Websites that make the most money are ones that provide value, are popular and are in an evergreen niche.
Once you know what you are doing we haev found the biggest advantage to buying websites is the leverage – leverage on our time!
Whilst learning how to build websites is a very effective and practical way to make money online, it does take time for the website to launch and then build up traffic or a following to the point where you make a good side income.
Buying a website on the other hand means you bypass all the hard work and time associated with building up a website to the money making stage – basically you buy the website, and you are making money straight away because its already established.
Yes, there are things you need to learn especially if you are a beginner online, and of course here at the eBusiness Institute we specialise in teaching total beginners how to buy and sell websites and make money online – you can check out our website flipping course here.
Tip #9: When Buying Websites Be Smart – Buy Simple Websites!
We’re looking for simple websites. We’re not trying to buy ourselves another job. We’re buying ourselves investments or true online businesses that don’t mean that we don’t have to work 9-5 and show up every day in order for it to make a lot of money.
We want simple sites that are easy to manage, and have simple fixes and tidy-ups that we can do ourselves. Simple things that we can renovate and improve that website.
Its like investing in a house. We look for a house that just needs a coat of paint, garden tidy up and a simple renovation. This makes our lives easier.
When we buy websites we like to look for websites with automated income from information products or advertising or affilate offers, and no physical stock.
We avoid buying e-commerce websites. Not to say they cant work or make lots of money, its just that we don’t personally want to be involved in sending physical products.
Having physical stock or inventory in any business even online businesses creates a lot of added complexity.
PLUS its a much more risky venture – you have to invest in the stock! This ties up your cash and if you run out of stock you have no income.
And whilst we are always looking to buy websites for their high cashflows its also great if we can find websites to buy that one day have the potential to turn into a BIG sellout to say a big corporate buyer.
This is why we are always thinking about the end game when we buy websites – how might this website look in 3 to 5 years time? What will it be worth then? Who might be interested in buying it later on.
Tip #10: Taking Your Job Back From The Digital Revolution
Things are changing very rapidly. What’s really important is you need to be prepared for very sudden change. We’ve got a lot of jobs changing the way things are done, a lot of jobs being lost and a lot of new jobs coming on. But these new jobs require digital knowledge.
What I believe is most important to do now is to get digitally prepared and trained, and not be afraid of it. Just step up, get yourself prepared so if it does happen, you know in your heart, “Okay, well at least I’ve got something else, I can fall back on, I can rely on. I’ve got some assets, I’ve got some online assets. I’ve got a skill.”
At eBusiness Institute, we specialise in training total beginners to transition their careers from traditional PAYG 9-5 jobs to being able to work in the digital economy and create income on their own terms either working from home or from simply having valuable digital skills that open up new money making opportunities and jobs.
To learn about our online training programs and retrain in practical money making digital skills make sure you visit our online digital courses page.
