10 Strategies for Making Money Online

Yesterday I posted my high paying niche experiment update and reported that out of six pages I had created, only two were indexed by Google. This morning, all six have dropped out of the index! Today I have been on a quest to pick some new strategies for making money online. I’ve found many ideas and whittled down the list to just 10.

More Ideas Than I Can Handle!

It all started with a post from Sean of WarriorBlog about making money with Torrent Sites. He later went on to publish another post in which he uses article marketing to drive traffic to simple adsense based niche sites.

There’s been a lot of talk about making money with Facebook and Dan is currently creating an app for the Immediate Edge to test this out. Then, whilst chilling out with StumbleUpon, I found an old post from BlueHat SEO for making $100 a day from screensavers. Now that method looks somewhat dubious (read the comments) but it got me thinking.

The Goal of $100 A Day

$100 a day is my most important short term goal - that will provide me with enough money to live on. I wonder how many other ways there are to make this amount? It was late Friday night so I put an action in my GTD tool to do a Google search for “$100 a day” on Monday (today). Now a weird thing happened last night…

I wasn’t tired so I stayed up to read some more blogs and then whilst looking around Carl Ocab (it boggles me that this kid is just 14 years old!) I saw on his site an ad that read “20 Ways to Make $100 a day online“. I laughed. The ad read my mind. I am always wary of ebooks because there is just so much crap out there but I googled it to see if I could find more information.

It’s put together by a guy called Willie Crawford who is very active on the Warrior Forum so that convinced me of his credibility. I don’t like buying books without knowing what’s inside but I found the table of contents which convinced me it wasn’t just fluff or stuff that I already knew. It was $27 so I bought it.

Digesting and making Sense of all These Ideas

I’ve spent a long time today skimming through that ebook for ideas that I could put to use. Some of them I just didn’t like, eg, Ghostwriting & Consultancy. Some were long term solutions, others needed certain skills such as Graphics. I was interested to see two chapters based on software development. I’ll come back to those when I start developing software in the new year.

I picked the ideas from the book that appealed to me, combined these with the ones I already had, and put them all together. I had too many so I whittled it down to the top 10 ideas that I like, that I think can be started fairly quickly and don’t need too much expertise. Most ventures need a combination of content, monetization and traffic. Put those three things together and you have a workable strategy that you can implement.

Here’s a my shortlist on a spreadsheet:

Taking a Closer Look at These 10 Strategies

One thing to notice is that several of the monetization and traffic cells have an asterisk. That’s just a wild card. You can monetize with anything (direct advertising, Adsense, affiliate sales, your own product etc), and you can drive traffic in any way you like. First I’ll quickly explain what these 10 strategies are, or least, what I understand them to be from what I have read so far.

1) Blogging - By blogging I mean, a blog like this, that is regularly updated with real information. Not spam blogs, throwaway blogs etc.

2) Maximum Edge - This is what I have been doing so far that I have been calling (perhaps incorrectly), niche marketing. The monetization doesn’t matter. The key aspect is the use of trusted domains such as Squidoo, Wordpress etc to host content that will rank well. Generally, you own the web property so you can do what you want with it, such as monetizing it directly with Adsense / affiliate sales etc or directing traffic elsewhere.

3) Article (Bum) Marketing - This is another traffic driver, very similar to Maximum Edge except that the focus is on hosting your content on article directories. You do not own these - once you have submitted an article you (usually) cannot monetize it directly. Instead, this method is used to drive traffic elsewhere. The key factor seems to be churning out a LOT of articles targeted towards good keywords for your niche.

4) Email Marketing - You build an email list (get the traffic to it any way you can), and then sell to that list. Monetization is limited here - you can’t use Adsense but you can of course promote affiliate products or sell your own.

5) Niche Marketing - I’ve tweaked my definition of what this is. I now consider Niche Marketing to be the process of building an authority site in your niche that has internal pages that naturally rank well for the chosen keywords. This is a fairly medium-long term strategy because an authority site takes time to develop.

6) Ebook Marketing - until recently I had no idea that there were a whole bunch of ebook directories which you can submit to. So you create your (free) ebook that contains affiliate links or upsells embedded in it and you distribute it via these directories.

7) YouTube Marketing - YouTube is ridiculously popular and now that Google have launched Adsense for video, if you are somebody that can create popular videos, this becomes a great money making strategy. By tagging your videos appropriately, the traffic is taken care of so you can concentrate of creating videos that will be popular.

8) Facebook Applications - This one is not for everybody, as it requires programming skills but that’s ok for me and I just think it would be a really interesting programming project. I log into Facebook several times a day now and I’m even getting hooked on some of those applications. I’ll be watching Dan’s Facebook project on the Edge with interest over the coming weeks & months.

9) Trend Marketing - When a new trend / product / story / personality / whatever becomes hot, there is money to be made. For me personally, I think this would be a difficult strategy because I don’t keep myself up to date with trends that are outside of my personal interest but there are many people who do who could cash in here.

10) eBay Selling - I used to buy a lot of stuff on eBay, I never sold much :) This is bottom of the list simply because of the cost (risk) involved. But I know so many people who make a living from eBay and there are probably a dozen different strategies within just this field.

Combining Strategies for Increased Profits

You’ll notice that some of these are flexible. For example, Article marketing is fundamentally a traffic generator that you can monetize any way you wish. On the flipside, ebook marketing is a way of making money but there is no particular traffic method attached to it.

I can see great possibilities by plugging some of these strategies together.

Consider this scenario:

1. You start out with a small mini site that you monetize with some Adsense and an affiliate product.
2. You drive traffic using Article marketing or the Maximum Edge method.
3. You might then offer a free email course and begin email marketing.
4. You could enhance the site even further by offering a free ebook which opens up another avenue for sales.
5. Add some YouTube videos into the mix and you are now providing a ton of value to the visitors and you’ve opened up multiple streams of income.
6. If you build out the content on that site, over time it could become quite an authority and now you’ve got a very nice asset that you could sell if you wanted to.

Any one of those 10 strategies can be used on their own as a starting point, and this is exactly what I intend to do. But looking longer term, I see the key to larger profits being to build up larger sites that can provide value and income in a multitude of ways. I have to walk before I can run though and I’m not there yet. So I need to pick one and just get started.

My Chosen Project

I am of course blogging but I don’t count that as I would have nothing to talk about if the blog itself was my only source of income. I started out doing Maximum Edge but this is not working very well for me. There is an update coming at the Immediate Edge but Dan has a slight issue with time keeping so I’m not too sure when I’ll see that!

I want to start right away so I’ve decided to go with Article (Bum) marketing as my first project. I like the name Bum Marketing, so I’ve put up a new page called the Bum Marketing Project.

I’ve done a little research on my three current niches on EZineArticles. I was shocked to find over 88,277 articles for one of them! That was the higher paying one! The second niche had a little over 6000 articles and my first niche has just 51. I’ll be using that one then :-)

If you've enjoyed reading this post then please subscribe to my Full Text RSS Feed.

Stumble it!