How to Make Money Online Without Direct Selling

I like to make money online but I don’t like to sell. Some say that we’re all selling all the time – apparently in this very blog post I am selling ‘myself’ to you. Maybe, but when I think of selling I’m thinking of the word in the traditional context. Is it possible to make money online without actually turning into a snake-oil salesmen? Yes it is…

What is Selling?

Selling a product, charging money for it, copy writing, enticing customers into a back end sale, drawing them into a sales funnel, developing a relationship with that customer so that I can continue to sell to them later on. Most good business involves a sales process but many people, including myself, are uncomfortable with selling.

I don’t like to be sold to. People who try to sell to me on the phone or at my doorstep, or in the street have very little success. I’m extremely sensitive to the slightest hint of a sales pitch in any form, whether online or offline. This doesn’t mean that I don’t like to buy stuff! If something offers what I want then I’ll buy it but spare me the sales pitch – just give me the facts and I’ll make up my mind.

My Experiences With Selling

Now this attitude around selling has a lot of implications when wanting to make money online. I have had a few experiences with selling. My first two businesses were mail order companies so that was all sales, however there was no pitching involved. I had a large catalogue of software for sale and the sales came from designing a nice catalogue. I didn’t need any silly sales letters. Back then in order to make the most money with your ads (print ads in magazines) you had to fit in as many products as you could into your ad space and put an order form right in the ad.

Some online businesses are still like that. Download sites for instance – you don’t need a sales letter. Just show people all the products you have for download, the cost of each product, and make it dead easy for them to buy – a one-click order process for example.

But coming back to my online experiences with selling, I haven’t had much luck. I dislike ads on sites, so much so that I don’t even like having advertisers on my blog. I know if can make money so I put up an ad page but I don’t promote it and as a result, I don’t attract many advertisers.

The first product that had the potential to be sold was my Twitter guide but that was only a month after I had been in business, I was completely unheard of and I was incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of selling it. Many well meaning friends tried to encourage me to sell it but I don’t think it would have done very well.

The first product that I actually sold was the Traffic Rush course and if you’ve been reading the stats pages over the last couple of months you’ll notice that I have not sold many copies. When I first announced the course it was going to be completely free and only after I realised I had taken on too much work did I decide to sell part of it. Had I thought it through properly and decided from the outset to make it a paid course it might have sold it better. Even though I think the course is worth the money, I’m still uncomfortable selling it and it shows in the results.

Now this post is not here to start a debate about whether or not you should sell – that’s for you to decide if it is right for you. This post is for those of you who want to make money online but who are not yet comfortable with the idea of direct selling. The good news is that you can still make good money online without having to do any selling.

Affiliate Marketing

My biggest income generator so far in my first year of business has been a free ebook about WordPress. The ebook has always been given away free and I didn’t even ask for an email address – there was no selling whatsoever and yet it has generated thousands of dollars in revenue.

How? A simple affiliate program for my web hosting company, BlueHost. The book teaches people how to setup WordPress as a CMS to generate revenue from AdSense and I show how this is done by walking through the process myself. I begin with the hosting so throughout the book I put in my affiliate link to BlueHost. I don’t need to sell them, I don’t need to put a sales letter in the book.

Now it’s possible that if I had plugged the program more then I would get a higher ratio of BlueHost signups to ebook downloads but because I am uncomfortable with that, I am happy with the results that I have got. There are tons of opportunities to do this, all you need to do is write an ebook about about some topic and use the ebook to promote an affiliate product but you can do it in a fairly subtle way without selling as I have in my ebook. You can read more about what I did in my ebook project pages.

AdSense & Similar Ad-Programs

Now let me clarify one thing here – there is never any money made without some buying and selling going on at some point in the process. However that does not mean that YOU have to be doing the selling in order to get paid.

AdSense is a great example of this. Advertisers pay Google to advertise their products on relevant sites and you as a publisher host those ads. The advertiser will only pay for advertising if it makes him money so somewhere along the line somebody is buying their product but as a publisher, you are not the one selling it. Your job is simply to display the ad on your site.

Google pays you and the great thing about this is that you don’t have to write a sales letter for Google or provide Google with a teleseminar. You don’t have to entice Google to sign up to your list, and send them follow up emails. You don’t need to offer Google money back guarantees, or draw them into your sales funnel. You don’t have to present Google with one-time back-end offers and try to get them to buy your big ticket items.

No all you have to do to get paid is write good content that is relevant to the advertiser you want to attract, and then put a piece of code on your site. Then you get paid. Simple huh?

This is another reason why I am starting the AdSense project. I know that there is big money to be made when you sell stuff and there are things that I want to sell but I am not ready just yet so I’ll make by money in another way that doesn’t involve selling and I’ll worry about selling stuff next year.

Plus I am sure that I am not the only one who feels this way. Sure all the big-name marketers will probably balk at this post and tell me how I ‘should’ be doing this or that and that’s fine, but I’m also sure there will be lots of individuals who are just dipping their toes into the murky waters of this online world wondering if they can make some money online without turning into a sleazy salesman.

And the answer is yes! If you’re interested in making a residual, stable and scalable income from AdSense then follow me with my AdSense project and let’s see what can be done without selling.

How Else Can You Make Money Without Selling?

I have only briefly touched on two ideas and with the affiliate marketing in particular, there are many ways in which you can do it other than writing an ebook. I’d like to see what other ideas you can come up with? This might be quite a fun topic to do a follow up on so please do comment if you have some other ideas of how to make money online without direct selling and if I get enough responses I’ll follow up next week.

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