Knowing the answer to the question “How to make a lot of money online” will undoubtedly change your life forever. I will give you several answers but in my experience, 99% of people will do nothing with this information. What will you do?
These are the most profitable ways of making money online today:
- Affiliate marketing for sweepstake offers
- Affiliate marketing for digital products
- Affiliate marketing for eCommerce products
- Lead generation
- Dropshipping
- T-shirts on demand
- Social media marketing agency (SMMA)
- Create a niche blog to make money online
- Amazon FBA
There are many ways to make money online and I am familiar with a lot of them because I struggled for years trying to figure it out. But I will give you the blueprint to making real money online. I am not going to talk about becoming a freelancer on Fiverr.com or Upwork.com to get paid $25 an hour if you are lucky. We will be talking about how to make money online and live the life that you really want to live.
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Every day there are 1,700 people who become new millionaires and many are making their money online. After years of trying to break the code, I discovered the secrets to making money online. I have been shown the secrets of how to make money online and this blueprint has changed my life. Source
Further down in this post we will review the following topics (skip down by clicking):
- Your mindset to making money online
- Do you need a mentor to help you make money online?
- Different ways to make money online with affiliate marketing:
- Affiliate marketing for sweepstake offers
- Affiliate marketing for digital products
- Affiliate marketing for eCommerce products
- Lead generation
- Dropshipping
- How much money can you make with dropshipping?
- T-shirts on demand
- Social media marketing agency (SMMA)
- Create a niche blog to make money online
- Amazon FBA
- The easiest way to make money online
- The hardest way to make money online
- How long does affiliate marketing take?
- Affiliate marketing mentor
- Can you do affiliate marketing without a website?
Your mindset to making money online
One mentor mentioned that the difference between someone who has become successful with any business whether it is online or not and someone who goes to work every day is that the successful person was able to take mental pain and the other was not able to handle the mental pain.
To be able to endure the mental stress of building a successful business is not for anyone who is lazy or who wants the easy road to riches. I have not found out how to make a lot of money fast and or easy.
This is hard to understand if you have never started a business. An online business has the same stresses as any other business.
I have owned physical businesses in 2018, what you would call a brick and mortar business. Back in 2006, I was in the real estate business. Today I am in the online business. So I have had a taste of a few different business types and they all have stresses that make you stay up at night.
For every business that I owned, I experienced restless nights. When money is coming in you sleep like a baby but when something happens and you are not making the money anymore the stress of the situation is pure pain inside that hurts to your core.
To build a business from nothing and to have it in a state of profitability and then to see it start to crumble right in front of you is almost like losing a close family member.
Not only are you hurt because you have put in so much time and effort into growing the business but now you are trying to figure out how to pay rent and employees.
This type of stress hurt me to my soul and I spent many nights awake thinking about the business.
Failing at a business makes you stress out like you would not believe. Having to let go of someone who was one of your best employees right when she id about to close on her first home is not any fun. This haunts me to this day.
You will have to figure things out on the fly. Stay up late hours and you will have to sacrifice a lot. For years I did not watch a single television show. I was a mad man focussed on business and making something happen.
You will have to do something similar if you are going to be successful in making money online. It is not easy and those mentors that preach that it is are straight-up lying to you because I know first hand that it is not easy and you will need all the help that you can get.
This is why I decided to write this post.
Are you ready to change your life?
Do you need a mentor to help you make money online?
Becoming an entrepreneur is like walking through the jungle for 7 days. You have a starting point and a finish line.
It is a 7-day trip and you will have to figure out things along the way. If you start your trip and after a few hours you get hot or you get stung by a wasp and run back to safety you lose.
But if you are strong and think things through and are strong mentally you possibly can make it. You also can prepare for your trip with information from other people who have done the trip before.
A mentor that can tell you about things to watch out for and what to expect can go a long way.
This is what a mentor will do for you so be prepared with as much information as possible.
After I had a few failed businesses under my belt, one successful businessman told me “Why in the hell did you not ask me about what to look out for when you started this business”? I responded with “I did not think that anyone would give me information on how to be successful”.
This conversation changed me forever. He told me that he would have helped me by telling me what he had learned in the years of him running his business. He explained that if I am successful that would make me another rich friend and that a network of like-minded people could help each other grow.
All the rich business owners from an area or within an industry all know each other and it is because of this. I began to understand how the 1% live.
So no matter what strategy you choose to become successful try to consume all the content you possibly can on the subject. The more information you have the better your chances at success will be.
Finding the best affiliate marketing mentor that can help you succeed in this industry will make the difference between success or being a slave to your 9-5.
Different ways to make money online with affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is difficult to figure out. Most people who are doing affiliate marketing do not make over 20k a year. But the average income for an affiliate marketer is a lot more.
Super affiliates make over $10,000 a day! source
In my experience, you can find success in making money online in different ways.
Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Once you find you grove in a vertical you can hit the gas and scale your income to the moon.
Be realistic with yourself and do a self-examination of yourself. I love SEO and analyzing data is my crack. Test as many different affiliate strategies and then focus down on the one you enjoy most. Doing this will help you avoid burn out.
My wife thinks I’m crazy and she can not understand how I can sit in front of a computer screen for hours analyzing data and pumping out content.
I truly enjoy it and everyone has strengths and usually, their strengths are related to things they like or it is closely related to what matches well with their personality.
We are going to analyze different ways to make money online as an affiliate marketer. This research can save you tons of time and money.
If you read about what it is like to work on SEO for your website and if you know that you hate writing then this strategy probably is not the right one for you. Skip whatever affiliate strategy seems to be painful for you to do.
These are not the only ways to make money online. These are just the ones that I personally have experience with. (Some more than others)
1. Affiliate marketing for sweepstakes offers
Affiliate marketing in the sweepstakes vertical is the easiest way to make money online. These are offers that require people to input their information into a form and you get paid for it. They are incentivized by a chance to win free items or money.
| Pro | Con | |
| Affiliate Sweepstakes offers | Easy conversions because you get paid for lead to fill out a form & are incentivized with a gift. | Low payouts that will translate into the affiliate having to have many conversions to make substantial money. |
Typically the way it works is that the viewer clicks the ad. They land on a landing page and this landing page warms them up for the offer.
From the landing page, they click through to the offer and they input their email address into an email collection form and you get paid.
Since they do not have to input their credit card information it is an easy conversion. Just an email submit and you get paid. Higher payouts will require email verification or credit information submit. There is also software download offers that pay really well.
The commissions are not high but your conversion rate will be higher.
You have what is called single opt-in. Single opt-in means that you get paid once they input their contact information.
You also have what is called double opt-in and with double opt-in, you get paid when the second piece of information is sent (email verification).
This second piece of information is typically a confirmation of the person’s email. Once the person submits their email an automatic reply is sent out to that email address and the viewer needs to confirm their email before you can get paid.
This is going to lower your conversion rates but the payouts a higher. I would say about 30%-50% higher.
So if an offer had both single opt-in and double opt-in options you could expect to see payouts at about $1 for the single opt-in and a $1.50 for the double opt-in.
That same exact offer may have a third payout option, Credit card submit!
Credit card submit pays the highest rate in sweepstakes but obviously a lot harder to get. That same exact offer may pay $9 for a credit card submit.
Where you can find affiliate sweepstakes offers?
My favorite affiliate network for sweepstake offers is MaxBounty.com because it is not difficult to get approved and they have a lot of sweepstakes offers to choose from. Mobidea is another source for sweepstakes affiliate offers.
They have tons of verticals and countries. If you want to run sweepstakes offers in Spain or in the UK you will not have an issue. They also have bitcoin offers that pay over $100 but they are paid after the lead buys $500 of digital currency.
Example of a sweepstakes offer
This is what the Ad would look like for a sweepstakes offer. Actual ad I ran!
Step 1: The AD
The ad can be placed in a number of different traffic platforms. Facebook, Instagram, Propeller ads, Zero Park ads.
The job of step 1 (the ad) is to get the person’s attention. That is why I use loud colors and big letters. I also will use a border if I feel that it is necessary.
Once the colors get the person’s attention the picture is what they will look at next.
The objective is to keep them moving from step to step. Keep them curious and engaged. Do not give them too much of the story from the beginning.
You have to get them to click on that ad. So keep your ad copy short and engaging.
In the picture, we have the baby stuff in the background and the mom is holding up money. We targeted moms with small children on social media and so we used the angle of being able to make money and take care of your kids without having to leave your house.
Once they clicked it takes them to step 2.
Step 2: Landing Page
I delete my old landing pages so I do not have one to show but it would look something like this:
Sample Landing Page
This is an example of what the lander would look like. You have different strategies that you can use.
Test as many angles as you can because one may have a 30% ROI and another 150% ROI.
You have long and short-form advertorial landing page strategies. You can also use quizzes as a landing page.
For this offer, we used a quiz. A short 3-4 question quiz can really warm up the visitor.
Questions that we asked in our landing pages are usually yes and no answers.
If we do use a question and have multiple answers we choose option A to be the one that they most likely choose.
You want to make everything as easy and mindless as possible. Get the person thinking about them winning.
The questions we asked for this offer were:
- Are you a mom?
- Do you live in Orlando, F.L.
- Would you buy things for your kids with the extra money?
Once they answer the 3rd question they are sent to the offer page. This is where they would have to enter an email address.
The landing page software that I use is Landerize.com
Landing pages built on Landerize can be hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and because of Amazon’s servers infrastructure the landing pages will load ultra fast from anywhere around the globe.
This is important because the longer it takes to load the more people will click the back button and bounce off your landing page.
People expect websites to load within 2 seconds and if it does not they are going to bounce.
Losing 7% of your conversions can make the difference between a profitable campaign and a campaign that losses money.
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This is the fastest landing page software I know of and the one I use.
Step 3: Offer Page
After they put in their email address they would get the rest of the information about getting paid to take surveys and you would get paid.
You do not have control over the offer page. This is why I recommend choosing 2 similar offers and split test them against each other.
Doing this will maximize your ROI.
I also wanted to mention another strategy that I find to be effective.
When using a quiz landing page try and use a question where they have to envision them winning the prize.
For example, we ran an offer for a 150 euro IKEA gift card. All they had to do was fill out their email address and they would have a chance to win this IKEA gift card.
One of the questions was, What piece of furniture will you buy with your IKEA gift card?
Questions like this will have the person envisioning winning and they will be more likely to fill out the form.
My strategy is to have 2 questions that are A or B answers and 1 question be the envision winning question.
This offer ran in Spain and when starting out you may want to target other countries besides the United States because traffic is cheaper in other countries.
How much can you make from affiliate sweepstake offers?
It will take you testing a few offers before you find one that is profitable. I would say that by the time you test 20 offers you should have found at least one that has an ROI.
After that initial learning phase you will be able to pick up on what is a winning campaign a lot faster.
Once you find a winning campaign you will be able to scale it up. Every winning campaign will be different but you should be able to get at least a 30% ROAS on your winning ad campaigns. (return on ad spend)
If you only have one winning campaign I would invest 80%-90% of your marketing budget into the winner until it drys up. Use the rest of your budget to test for new winnings offers.
Answering the question “how much you can make with sweepstake affiliate offers” depends on how much money you have available when you find that winning offer.
But at a conservative $100 a day and at a 30% ROAS you would be profiting $30 a day. Some offers can yield a 100% ROI but for your first winner you will probably be at about 30% ROI.
The campaign can run a month before you squeeze everything out of it. So at $30 a day profite for a month you will have made $900 profit for that month.
But if you build your bankroll up you will be able to scale your campaigns a lot faster and higher.
Once you get a system in place you will be testing and scaling campaigns fast. Your bankroll will increase and you should pass $1,000 a day after a year or two, this depends on your skill and time dedicated to your online business. That is with a mentor guiding you along the way.
Double the time if you do it on your own and have no one helping you.
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2. Affiliate marketing for digital products
| Pro | Con | |
| Affiliate for digital products | The margins for the product owner are a lot higher because it does not cost them much to deliver a digital product. This makes the commission rate to be about 40%-90% | High refund rate. Harder to convert because it is not a physical product |
Affiliate marketing for digital products is everyone’s favorite type of offer because the margins are high. The reason is that once someone creates a digital product they have no more overhead to keep producing this product.
Digital products like software, training content, how to lose weight program, motivational content, etc. all have the best payout percentages. You can get paid a commission anywhere from 40%- 90%.
The cost for who produced the digital product is upfront and once it is created they no longer have to invest any more money into the product because it is already created. Digital software is a little different because that will have to be updated but it still is minimal compared to a physical product.
The best affiliate network to find digital products is Clickbank.com.
Clickbank has hundreds of digital product offers that have good commission payouts. They have products in many different verticals and money can be made in every single one of them.
Clickbank has products that teach you how to jump higher, lose weight, diabetes help, stop ED, how to win your partner back, how to make love to a woman, how to make money online, etc.
The highest payout offer that I run is on Clickbank.com.
It is the offer for John Crestani’s affiliate training. The payout is $575 for each signup. That is a big payout and what is crazy is that they have offers that pay more money than that. I have never run any of those but maybe I will.
A new tab will open to John Crestani’s FREE affiliate training
Clickbank as I mentioned has many offers and what is great about this affiliate network is that they actually teach you how to sell their products. It is a win-win for everyone because they make more money when you sell more and you obviously make more when you sell more.
The program that ClickBank uses to teach the secrets behind affiliate marketing is called Click Bank University.
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*I have a post that I talk about affiliate marketing mentors: Click here to open a new tap to the post.
If you are serious about making money online you will need some guidance.
How much money can you make from digital affiliate offers?
Since you will have to invest in more expensive traffic and your testing budget needs to be higher than the norm I first want to say that you will need more starting capital.
You will be wasting your money if you start with under $2,000. I would wait until I had double that amount.
The testing should be about 3x CPA and the CPA’s are higher on digital products. You can find a decent offer for about $40 CPA.
This means each placement should spend about $120. To fully test the offer you should look at 50x CPA, which is a campaign budget of $2,000. That is just for one product.
With that being said the bonus is that the profits are a lot higher.
You can get about 40% ROI for a good campaign. At first you should be testing with a budget of $500 a day.
A 40% ROI on $500 a day is $200 a day. But after scaling a daily budget of 5k a day will get you a profit of 2k a day.
James Van Elswick is probably one of the biggest native ad media buyers and he is making much more than that a day.
Take a look at this video of him talking about media buying budgets
I want to be him when I grow up!
3. Affiliate marketing for eCommerce products (Amazon)
Affiliate marketing for eCommerce is when you are promoting any physical item. This can be anything from a smartphone to skin cream. Within eCommerce, there are many verticals so this niche is extremely broad. Amazon by far has the most eCommerce offers to choose from.
| Pro | Con | |
| Affiliate Marketing for eCommerce Products | After the brand has been established, long-lasting recognition that can not be competed with. LTV increase as customers repeat buy. Exit option. | Difficult to start and takes time to build customer trust. Risky and could fail after high investment. |
If you are interested in eCommerce you can start out with Amazon’s affiliate network.
Once you are approved (you will need a website to be approved) you will be able to get a link for most of the items that are on Amazon.com.
Amazon has thousands of products to choose from and this is a great start. Just to get your feet wet.
But unfortunately, the payouts for Amazon are pretty low.
You can see from the picture that Amazon has been lowering their commission rates and now the commission rates are so low that you really have to sell a lot of merchandise to make any real money.
This is why I recommend starting here but not to stay long term. Learn while you are there and move one passed them.
A good eCommerce affiliate network is shareasale.com, commissionjunkies.com, matrix.networl.com.
You also have other big brand stores that pay higher commissions. Home Depot, Wallmart, target. You can click on any of these links and a new tab will open to their affiliate sign up page.
These are all huge retailers that make billions of dollars. All you need is a tiny portion and you are set!
They have so many different offers between these 3 networks. I run campaigns for workout equipment, mask, male enhancement, CBD oil, lose weight pills.
The trick to creating ads for eCommerce is to test at least one creative with someone holding the product up. Use a female model and have her smile. Typically if she is holding up the product in the picture, that creative will convert better.
A picture like this can make someone curious. They may ask themselves “Why did people have to wear masks back then”? Then they click because they want to know more about the picture.
Another creative to test is a weird picture that provokes curiosity.
This was the winning creative for my diabetes offer. The click-through rate on this picture was a lot higher than the rest and it was because it is a weird picture. People wanted to find out what was in this picture and how can it help with diabetes.
If your offer has a video sales letter on it place a play symbol on your creative and this trick always increases the CTR on my ads.
Affiliate marketing for eCommerce is tricky and it takes some skill but once you figure out the buying pattern and what makes people click and buy you will be printing money.
A helpful tip for eCommerce is that in my experience long-form advertorial, converts best for your landing pages. This paired with a video sales letter on the offer page should convert well.
Seems like people want to hear a story before buying. So after they click on this picture take them to a landing page that you created and put in a long-form advertorial for a higher conversion rate.
However, test-test-test and do not take my word for it. Things change and every offer is different.
This is just what I would do to start. If the campaign shows promise I would test a few different angles and landing pages.
4. Lead generation affiliate marketing
Lead generation affiliate marketing is another great way to make money online. I am getting into this vertical and I think that it is the most stable. The margins are not as high as digital products but it’s a solid vertical to be in.
| Pro | Con | |
| Lead Generation | Get paid for just a lead and not a sale. Stable vertical that campaigns can last months. | Social media does not like lead gen campaigns. Native traffic needs to be high end sources to convert. |
You can do lead generation for just about anything.
The most common lead gen offers are:
- Auto insurance
- Health insurance
- Life insurance
I also like lead gen for local businesses but this takes more time and effort because now you are dealing with customers and we want to discuss the easiest ways to make money online.
I run a marketing agency so that is why I want to give an honorable mention to local business lead generation but it is a lot more work.
If this sounds like something that you want to get into I would recommend starting out with offering Allstate products because they cover home, renters, and car insurance.
You will be triple-dipping with one company. Allstate’s affiliate program is run through a company called impact.com and you can apply to their affiliate program by clicking the button below.
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Another lead generation vertical that is extremely profitable is solar. You can promote solar and the leads commissions are high because of the profits that the company generates from these leads.
The leads are about $40 each and I prefer to run these types of offers on native ads (outbrain or Taboola). These traffic sources are more of a high-end traffic source and the targeted audience should be exactly that.
You can find solar affiliate offers at:
- Sunjack.com
- Gogreensolar.com
- Inergy.com
- Outdoorlamps.com
- Overlandsolar.com https://overlandsolar.com/pages/affiliate-program
- Goalzero.com
- Avantlink.com
5. Drop-shipping
Dropshipping is when you promote a product from another country usually China and when someone buys the product you have the manufacturer ship it to the customer directly. You do not handle the product but are responsible for customer service.
| Pro | Con | |
| Drop-shipping | Ability to turn winning items into brands for huge revenue. Exit option. | Dealing with customers directly. Charge backs and dealing with Pay Pal account holds. |
My very first online business was dropshipping. I did not enjoy dealing with customers and with drop-shipping, the delivery times are long and be prepared to deal with upset customers.
I was shipping from China and the shipping times were out and at times even longer. Talk about issue after issue. I would not recommend this business strategy but if you are into logistics and you are a people person and can deal with upset customers then this is the business model for you.
Hire a virtual assistant ASAP!
You will have to promote your products just like you would as an affiliate marketer but then unlike an affiliate marketer, you will have to handle the shipping and the customer service calls.
You will have to hire a virtual assistant because you will not be able to manage the business and find and test products and handle the calls and fulfill the shipments.
I recommend hiring a virtual assistant from the Philippines because they speak English well and you can pay them $4 an hour and they will be happy.
There are different strategies you can use when drop shipping but I would recommend a general store.
Create a website that has different types of products. They do not have to be related to one another. Once you find a winning product it is time to create a stand-alone website for the winning product.
You can use Shopify.com to create your dropshipping website. I used them when I was dropshipping and I have no complaints about their software.
If you are on a budget and are a little more tech-savvy you can try Woocommerce on a WordPress site.
To download WordPress and get your website started for a few bucks I recommend getting BlueHost as your websites host and it will automatically download WordPress for you.
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Once you have done this you can look for a product to sell on your website.
The best place when starting out to do this is on alibaba.com.
You will have thousands of products that are all made in China and for pennies compared to what you would expect to pay for them here.
Once you have found a good product you can place it on your website and then you promote the product on any platform of your choice.
The biggest issue with dropshipping is that you will have customers complaining about the long shipping times. Amazon has made it impossible for people to be patient for their goods. Because of this, I recommend setting up a distribution center that is located in the United States.
This will lower shipping times by a lot and this will also lower your chargebacks. After enough chargebacks, PayPal or Stripe will place your account on hold and then you will not be able to process any more payments.
This will also increase your product cost.
Drop-shipping tip 1:
Have a backup plan for your payment processor because of the nature of the business you run the risk of getting your payment processing placed on hold. You will want to avoid this at all costs!
This will bring your revenue to a halt and this headache will make you go crazy so have your contingency plan ready!
Drop-shipping tip 2:
When choosing a product to test make sure that it solves a problem. This rule is also one that you should follow when you are an affiliate marketer for eCommerce products.
If you try to sell woman clothing you will fail because you do not have brand recognition and you are not solving a real problem for the customer.
Women spend billions of dollars on clothing but it is on brands and until you have the capital to build a clothing brand up I recommend to stick to what will give you the highest percentage of success. Do not sell shoes because the return will eat away at your margins.
I remember when the avocado pit remover gadget was selling like hotcakes. This was because it solves a problem. The product needs to solve a problem and if it takes away the pain you definitely have a good shot at success.
Another great product is the on the go blenders. This item targeted to people who work out or who want to have healthy shakes while at work will work great.
The blender solves a problem of not being able to make a shake at the gym and not being able to make a shake at work.
It is convenient and solves a problem and because of that, it is a great dropshipping product.
A portable massager that you target people who sit for long periods of time can do well. Angle the campaign in a way that shows the product relieving stress and back pain.
Test different angles and creatives and scale the best-performing ones. The fact that this item relives pain and solves a problem will mean that it can convert well if marketed correctly.
Test an ad that shows someone sitting at a desk all day to then, later on, they have to spend a lot of money on chiropractor visits and show how their quality of life lowers because of the back pain.
Doing these types of tests with your ad campaign angles is where you turn a 15% ROI into a 40% ROI.
With dropshipping test as many products as possible and once you find one that converts and has profits you optimize the campaign and website and then you scale it up hard.
Drop-shipping tip 3:
Never buy in bulk before getting a sample sent to you. The very first thing that you should do is order the item for yourself. Get a feel for the product and use the product as a source of ad creative content.
Pictures with the product in use or being held will have a higher click-through rate and swiping pictures from the internet are going to come with ad diminishing returns and your conversions will suffer.
Use the product to create your ads yourself and the campaign will have better results.
Drop-shipping tip 4:
Once you see that you find a winning product you should brand it as soon as possible. Contact the manufacturer in China and they can set this up for you. The cost per unit will go up but you should be upping your order unit amount and that will lower the cost per unit.
With a branded product people will not be able to go on Amazon and buy it there because you are the only person in the world who is selling that product.
Drop-shipping tip 5:
Keep testing new products even after you have found a good converting one. You never know when the product is going to die out and if this happens and you have stopped testing products all your revenue is gone.
Keep testing and you will find more products that generate profits and this will be your insurance for when the product slows up. Eventually, your ads will experience diminishing returns, this is when your ad has been seen by most of the people on the platform and people no longer click on your ads.
Your click-through rate goes down and so your cost per click goes up, this is signs that the product is reaching the end of its life cycle.
6. How much money can you make from Dropshipping?
With drop-shipping you should have a markup of at least 3x your cost. Then you have to pay for marketing and shipping.
If you can turn your winning product into a brand you can really make crazy money and eventually cash out and exit if you wanted too.
I have never done that but if you can build a brand it will generate money month after month.
A drop-shipping business can make $500 a day after you have built up the brand and starts to build traction. The product can be scaled up after that.
You should have the manufacturing done from somewhere where the shipping time will not be more than 5 days. This will give the customer a good buying experience and you will have repeat customers and that is where you make the big money.
You must have email marketing for your product’s main website. The conversion rate for your email campaigns is going to be MUCH higher with your email campaign.
You have already paid the money to get them on your platform, why not own them and re-market other product to them via email. Best part is that you do not have to pay for marketing. This step is a must to scale your business.
7. T-shirts on demand
Starting a T-shirt business has not been so easy. All you have to do is join a print on demand website and start creating your T-Shirts. Get the link for your design and start promoting your T-shirt.
| Pro | Con | |
| T-shirt on demand | Easy to start and low initial investment | Difficult to find winning products. Low margins. Small niches are impossible to scale. |
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The print on demand T-shirt business has opportunities because of the fact that you do not have to own any equipment. You can do this from your home and not deal with paying for tons of overhead.
I personally think that this is a good business if you do not have a lot of capital. I started a T-shirt and hat on-demand business. All the designs were on my website and I would run social media campaigns to my website.
T-shirts that are niche-specific would sell better than just broad t-shirts. We had video game T-shirts that sold well but funny ones did not.
I did not make much money doing this but it may be because I did not focus on finding niche-specific slogans to print on the T-shirts.
Eventually, I teamed up with someone who owned a printing company and we started to sell political T-shirts and hats. It went well until the FaceBook and Instagram accounts were banned.
This is going to happen to anyone who is going to use Facebook as a marketing platform to promote affiliate offers.
The terms of service rules are strict and they shut down the account for any infraction. No warning and if you want to appeal you have to do it online. There is no customer service contact number.
If you are spending big money on Facebook ads you can get a rep but for a beginner, you will have to settle for email customer service.
All in all the T-Shirt printing business is ok and there are people making a killing with it but I stopped when I lost the social media accounts. My margins were low and shipping costs were eating into my margin. I was not able to sell enough to make it worth it for me.
If you have insider knowledge on a few different niches you could make a lot of money with this business model. If you can come up with cool catchy quotes for different niches you will be able to scale up the business but no matter how much I researched I could not really find any winners outside of what I already knew and I was not able to scale.
8. Social media marketing agency (SMMA)
Social media marketing agency (SMMA) is closer to owning a traditional business because you will be providing a service directly to the customer. SMMA is a great business model but at times dealing with customer service can be challenging.
| Pro | Con | |
| Social Media Marketing Agency | Traditional type of business and can be sold. Huge amounts of money to be made. | Big learning curve. Dealing with customers. You have to hire employees to scale business. Dealing with employees. |
You will be responsible for whatever services you offer. You can offer a few different services and a few of them are:
- Website design
- Google & Bing ad managing
- FaceBook ad managing
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Native ad campaigns
I strongly recommend choosing one or two different services when you are starting out. These services are important to a business and should be focused on and when you are just starting out you probably will not have a virtual assistant or in house staff to help manage different clients that all want different services.
This is a recipe for disaster and once you have a bad reputation your business will fail. Focus on just a few and work your way to adding more services to your business.
Website Design
Designing websites for customers is not as difficult as it once was. You do not have to know much code anymore because you can use website design software. If the customer wants a simple website you can use WordPress and get the job done.
If they want a big website designed you can outsource this to a big website design company or hire someone from Fiverr.com or Upwork.com.
You would not have to do a thing besides hiring someone to do the job for you. Rates on these outsourcing websites are reasonable because you can hire people from all around the globe.
After you have learned a marketing skill that business owners could benefit from you would start to offer your services. At first, you would have to have low rates but as you grow you could charge a premium for your services.
You can use BlueHost.com as your hosting company and their fees are extremely inexpensive. Once you have a few websites that are taking up a lot of bandwidth you may want to move from BlueHost.com because their servers are not very fast when compared to other options.
If you are hosting a few websites that are for local businesses that are not bogged down with a lot of traffic BlueHost will do the job and only for a few dollars. But when you are ready for more server power I would recommend WPX.
- BlueHost will cost you $5 a month for the basic plan
- WPX will cost you $25 a month for the basic plan
For comparison check out this in-depth video review on common hosting services:
If you choose to design websites for businesses I would recommend BlueHost to start then once you have between 150k-200k total sessions I would make the move because your website’s traffic speeds will start to slow down.
If your clients see these slow load speeds for their website they will be looking for a new web developer.
Other important software I use is:
NameCheap.com – For domain names
aWeber.com – For email marketing
Elementor.com – For webpage themes and design
Google & Bing Ad Management
This can get your client’s customers fast and they will love you for it. Start out slow with their campaigns. Only target a few keywords and make sure that you have their budget limit set.
A mistake here can cost tons of money and it will not go over well with your client. I prefer to collect the money upfront and I take control of the ads.
I prefer to have several cards on hand with different spending limits. If you have different credit cards for ads you can manage the spend easier and if the budget goes over it will not go over by much.
An extra tip is to use credit cards with any kind of bonus (airline-travel bonuses are my favorite). This way you get the marketing budget paid to you directly from the client and then you use that money minus your fee on their marketing campaign, using your credit card.
The bill comes in and you already have the money so you pay the card off every month and you keep the credit card bonuses. You will be flying first class before you know it.
Make sure to place a geo-fence for any local business. You do not want to launch a run on network campaign for a local business because they will be paying for ads to be shown in places that they can not service.
Doing this is a great way to lose a client.
The above video has some great insider tips but also if you follow Maor on YouTube you will discover all that you need to know about Google ads. He is the absolute best at it!
Facebook ad managing
Facebook ad management is great until you have an ad account banned. I no longer run social media campaigns for clients. I have had many account bans and I had to get creative with my methods to run ads on their platform but I decided to focus my attention on search engine and native ads.
But if you want to offer social media ad management services I totally get why. It is a fantastic way to make money and build a business.
This is a great option for anyone who already knows their way around social media platforms and understands the difference in types of audiences on each platform.
Facebook has an older audience and Instagram has a younger audience and Tik Tok has an even younger audience. Pinterest is a great platform if you want to target women because 80% of their audience is women between the age of 30-49.
Twitter should not be ignored either because you can have great results from that marketing platform.
Use the audience insights tool for Facebook ads because that is the strength of running ads on Facebook or Instagram.
Your targeting on Facebook can look like this:
- Sex: Woman
- Age: 35-55
- Location: Miami, F.L.
- Marital Status: Divorced
- Children: Yes
- Interest: Drinks Wine
This is the secret power that Facebook ads have and you need to be using it because it will get your ROAS increased. (Return On Ad Spend)
After you have over 100 calls to action conversions you can start a lookalike audience for the people who have converted.
Just make sure that you read and follow the Facebook policy for running ads on their platform because if not you will be burning through a lot of accounts and eventually they will ban your IP address.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization services are not for everyone. This service can be outsourced but if you do not completely understand how to do SEO then you will not know if the who you outsource this task too is actually doing a good job.
SEO is when you optimize a website or specifically a page on the website to rank on search engines. Since Google has the majority of the search volume we can just say Google.
For example, if you are an affiliate marketer and you run offers in the fitness vertical, you could create a website that ranks for terms like “Best protein powder”.
The keyword phrase “Best protein powder has an estimated search volume of 60,500. Source
It will cost $1.91 per click for that keyword if you were to create a Google ad for it. With SEO you do not pay a single penny for Google to show your website as one of the results.
This is why it is important to do. You could make a lot of money because you are not paying for Google ads. If you can rank on page 1 on Googles for a search term like this, you would make a lot of money selling protein powder.
I feel that if you do not know how to do SEO that you should not be offering this service. This task needs to be done right because if it is not you can run into issues.
Manuel penalties can wipe your client’s work from Google’s search engine results. This would mean that anyone using Google would not ever see that website. Google has a hold of the majority of the internet’s search traffic so the website would be nonexistent.
You could spend months and thousands of dollars working on an SEO strategy to later find out that it will never rank.
If you do the SEO yourself you will have to dedicate a lot of time to this task. You will definitely need help so the best way to do this when starting out is to hire writers to create the content and you edit and post the content.
Many affiliate marketers will create review websites and they will rank them for a term like “Best new Sony flat-screen TV” and when someone visits their website and sees the review they can click on the affiliate link and buy the TV.
The power of SEO should not be ignored and if you can offer this as a service or do it for your own websites so you can make affiliate commissions then you will be able to write your own checks.
I could go into detail about SEO but I want to leave that for another blog post. This post is just the different ways you can make money online and a brief description of what it is.
After you decide on the best way for you personally to make money online you can dive deep into that strategy.
Native ads
Native ads are what you see on your typical news website or blog post. It is called native because it blends into the website’s natural content and you do not realize that there is an ad right there.
You click on it and it takes you off the website and onto a landing page of some sort.
Here is a picture of what native ads look like:
The best part about native ads is that they are not as strict as social media platforms about the ad rules.
You can get away with a lot more with your ad creatives and content. Once I left social media marketing I found native ads and I have never looked back.
Unfortunately, you do not have the super-specific ad targeting that social has but you can get it to work for you just the same.
If you have a client that wants ads run on native you can analyze what kind of product it is or service and match it up with websites that are available to choose from. There are different publishing companies and they all have different websites that you can run content on.
Running ads on native can be a service that you offer but you can also run ads for your affiliate offers.
So if you are running a campaign for weight loss you probably will have more success with a woman that is into beauty. I would try to find a white list of websites that are in the health and beauty verticals.
So you can target the audience down but it takes more work and you will never be able to get it as specific as a Facebook campaign.
Because of the cost of the traffic, I only run offers with $25 or above payout. Many people have found a lot of success targeting tier 2 countries but not me.
Because I find that the cost of the traffic on natives is high I run offers for more expensive affiliate offers. I do not find success in tier 2 or 3 countries.
I stick to tier 1 countries and offers with payouts above $25. When starting I would stay away from the United States because that traffic is on the higher end for just starting out.
Tier 1 Countries:
- Australia
- Austria
- Belgium
- Canada
- Denmark
- Finland
- France
- Germany
- Ireland
- Italy
- Luxembourg
- Netherlands
- New Zealand
- Norway
- Spain 24k
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- United Kingdom
- United States of America
*The only tier 2 country I would target with a native ad is Singapore
You can find offers for native ads here:
Steps to creating a native campaign for your affiliate offer:
Choose an offer from one of the above affiliate networks ($25 or above)
Get traffic (I use Voluum DSP to buy my Native traffic) Click here for Voluum DSP
Create ads (I use Anstrex.com to spy on other native ads)
After the campaign is up and running you need to watch the data as it comes in. Any placements that are not getting at least a .50% CTR after 1,000-5,000 impressions I kill. Any placements with 1,000 impressions without a click I kill.
Those are just the first 2 pieces of data I look for. There are a lot more rules I have set in place. Having a system of rules in place for your campaign will help you kill and scale campaigns.
9. Create a niche blog to make money online
Creating a blog to make money is one of my favorite ways to make money online. It is not the sexiest way but if done right it can become a steady stream of income every month. This strategy takes time and you must be patient.
| Pro | Con | |
| Niche Blog Website | Create a website on topic that you a patient about. Sell traffic to you site with ad widgets. You own a piece of property on the internet that can be sold | Takes time to rank. Takes a lot of work to create content and to keep up the content. Big learning curve. |
Steps to creating a blog that will earn money:
- Pick a niche
- Create the website
- Keyword research
- Start writing content
If you create good helpful content that people will read and find value in it you will be able to generate traffic. Google will notice that people like your content and Google will rank it.
Once you start having decent traffic you can make money from affiliate links for products that you use.
You also can have a company like Mediavine.com pay you for ad space. The lower your traffic the lower your CPM’s are going to be but the higher your traffic is the higher rate of CPM you will get paid.
CPM- Cost per million/mile (the amount you get paid per 1,000 visitors)
You can apply after you get about 30k-50k monthly visitors.
If you want to get ads on your website’s blog before that you can get Ezoic.com to pay you for ad space on your website but their CPM’s are much lower despite them saying that they pay the same.
I would not waste my time with Google ads on my website because they do not pay much.
I would test out creating widgets on your website yourself and run your own ads for affiliate offers that you are approved to run. If you are willing to deal with testing ads and creatives and do not mind creating landing pages for your offers you may discover that you will get more out of your CPM payout rate.
You will have to create at least 30 articles and the keyword research needs to be on point and the content needs to answer a Google search query.
Your post needs to beat the competition and you have to create it in a way that Google will read the content and rank it.
Lots of information on SEO out there and I recommend consuming all of the free SEO content that I could before starting your blog.
Nothing will be worse than writing a bunch of articles that will never rank on Google. Without proper guidance, you will be wasting your time but if done right, you can start making money from traffic, and affiliate links.
I am working on an affiliate course that will contain all the knowledge that you would need to create a successful website and blog. Join the mailing list on the right side of this page to join the newsletter and I will send you an email when it is done.
Until then I am currently a member of the P24 blogging community and you can find answers to so many questions there. They have an awesome course that is jam-packed with secret sauce.
Take a look at the free webinar:
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10. Amazon FBA
Amazon FBA stands for fulfilled by Amazon and many people are finding success with this way of making money online. FBA is when you sell a product on Amazon and they handle the logistics for a percent of the cost.
| Pro | Con | |
| Amazon FBA | Amazon fulfills orders. Amazon conversion rates are extremely high. Product will be seen by anyone who is on their platform. | Competition often translates into products racing down to the bottom of the products margin range. |
This way of making money may seem easy but it is not. I would recommend any of the other ways of making online first.
The issue with Amazon FBA is that the competition is tough. Many people have this business model and now it is saturated.
There is money to be made here but it is going to be difficult to get going. It is risky because you will have to invest in buying the units first.
Once you have invested the money into buying all the units that you want to sell you will then have to arrange the units to be prepared for shipping by Amazon.
You can have the manufacturer send you the units and then you send them over to Amazon.
The better and easier way is to have the manufacturer send it to Amazon directly. Amazon will tell you how many units they want sent where.
If you are sending a lot of units you more than likely will have to send them to different Amazon fulfillment centers.
When choosing an item to sell I would recommend making it unique from the competition.
This can be by adding a logo or adding a physical feature to the item.
For example, if you want to sell a world map that people can hang on a wall, a good way to make it unique is by adding a notes section next to countries and cities.
People who travel a lot may want to use the note section for them to add notes from their trip to this location.
Another example of making an item unique is adding a compartment to a blender. This compartment can be used to store protein powder, pieces of fruit, etc.
Since the competition is high on FBA you need to be able to have your product stand out from the rest.
At the very least a nice looking logo can make the difference. This investment to start in FBA is going to set you back a few grand and I feel that it is too risky until you have found a proven product that is selling for you.
Make sure that you have chosen a product that has a big enough margin. Shipping cost can really hurt the margins so choose a small light weight product.
If you are going to try FBA I recommend that you find a good mentor. I do not know of any that I am willing to vouch for but all I will say is to stay away from Kevin David because I have heard a lot of negative things about his FBA course.
I would love to promote an FBA course because I would get a commission but I think all the ones that I have come across are garbage.
Making money online is difficult and you will need help. Just be careful about who you choose as a mentor.
The easiest & fastest way to start making money online
To answer the question “what is the easiest and fastest way to make money online” I would need to know you personally. But to answer the question for the typical person, the answer is affiliate sweepstakes offers on push ads.
This is because push ads are very inexpensive. You can get a lot of data for $20 and that is unlike any other traffic type.
Another reason why affiliate sweepstake offers are good to start out doing is that the person who sees your offer does not have to buy anything for you to get paid.
It is a lot easier to get someone’s email versus them taking out their credit card and paying for something.
Now that you have the knowledge of how to make money online it is up to you to take action. I will make you a guarantee-if you take no action today you will not have any change in your life.
Take action now so when you look back at this moment you can say “That moment was when my life changed”. Versus looking back and saying “I hate my job and I lost all this time and I should have started back then”.
If you choose to make money with Native ads or push ads (sweepstakes) you can find me in the Dijs forum. You will find answers to many questions and there is an amazing course for Native and push ads.
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The hardest way to make money online
The hardest way to make money online is by creating an eCommerce brand and selling it online. If done right this business model can work but proper steps need to be followed in order for the brand to be successful.
You will need to figure out the strategy and people’s buying patterns for your brand to be successful.
It is similar to drop shipping because you will have to deal with customer support and deal with the logistics of shipping and ordering product units.
Manufacturing will be a pain and both dropshipping and affiliate marketing are similar.
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Good luck to you and happy money making online marketing!
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