Making $5000 Per Month Online

Recently, I posted a rather interesting question in a DigitalPoint thread. I asked the outstanding people at DP how I could make $5000/mo online.

Currently, I am making around $3.50/day so I explained that I would need to increase that up by around $164 for a nice $5025/mo. I also explained that I have PHP/MySQL skill and that I'd created websites like BlogFlare.com. Here are some of the ideas that they came up with that I'd like to share with you:

• Multiply Success
  
  Essentially this idea means that if you're making $3.50/day with your current websites, multiply your ideas enough times so that you start getting up to that amount. So if you need $167/day to make $5000/mo, just divide $167 by whatever you're currently making per day. That's the formula, and for me it comes out to about 48X which means I'd need to multiply my ideas out 50 times to bring in that kind of income.
  
  Not only that but I would have to keep them updated somewhat frequently.
  


• Create Your Own Product & Market Using Affiliate Sales
  
  The idea here is to create your own eBook, software, online software, etc. and market it online. For eBooks, you can use something like ClickBank.com to get other people to sell it for you.
  
  Any of these things can be marketed using affiliate-based sales. This way other people can sell it for you and if it's a great topic, perhaps a LOT of other people will sell it for you. They usually take a bigger percentage for profit but you aren't doing much to sell this way.
  
  So any way you can do affiliate driven sales, do it. You won't be upset you did.
  
  Personally, I'm going to write an eBook on how to get traffic to your websites since I am reasonably knowledgeable on the subject. You could write an eBook on anything you're good at. Just make sure to research what you're talking about so people spread the word without you paying them to! ;)
  


• Sell Affiliate Products
  
  You can also be the middle man, as discussed on the previous topic and make a ton of money just selling other peoples' eBooks and such. ClickBank.com is a great way to find eBooks you can sell on your website or blog!
  


• Write Hosted Scripts in PHP/MySQL
  
  If you're proficient with PHP and MySQL like I am, then a great idea is to create a script that many people can use and then put it in a hosted environment for them.
  
  This way, you can charge for the product, the support and the hosting and group it into several packages if you'd like. Or you can just offer one package and make things simple.
  
  You can charge anywhere up to $200/mo+ for something like this. If you can get 25 customers, your $5K/mo mark has been met and you can continue the business just offering support. You could even outsource support for around $150 to an online company and only take care of the big support requests, thus freeing up your time.
  
  And if you know me, I'm all about freeing up time while maximizing income! :)
  


• Freelance Programming & Contract-Based Work
  
  You can find plenty of freelance work on the internet if you take up jobs that pay $500 at a time that take a few days. Just do 10+/month and you have your income.
  
  A great idea, I will admit but not one I am comfortable with. For me, I'd rather create something that brings me money residually and increases in profit as it continues.
  


• Sell A Kidney
  
  Someone did joke about selling a kidney as they go for $5K or more, but I replied saying I only had two and the cost of living without kidneys would far outweigh the benefits of the two month's income I'd get from selling them. :)
  


• Sculpt Your Content/Ads Around Your Traffic
  
  Not the other way around! So the idea here is to tweak your content/ads to increase income on content you already have.
  
  This is a great idea because it's something I can test on projects I already have and doesn't require me to manage as many websites if I were to use the multiplying theory.
  
  If I can get my current income up to $10/day for instance, I only need to multiply my efforts by 17X to get the desired outcome.
  


• Don't Use Just AdSense
  
  If you rely on one ad agency to provide you with all of your income, it's kind of like putting all of your internet eggs in one basket. If you spread yourself over a few networks, you might do much better than if you go with just one.
  
  A great testament to this is John Chow's article from January 1st, 2007 on using a bunch of different revenue sources which brought him a total of $2790.05. This isn't $5000.00 but it's a start in the right direction.
  
  Read the article here.
  


• Use Email Autoresponders To Generate Cash
  
  At first, I was thinking the author meant just using the kind of email auto responders you see when you email someone and they're on vacation. Although this is a great way to get advertising to people as well, the idea behind this is to use a service like Aweber.com to set up a mailing list that goes out at intervals you can specify.
  
  For instance, you can set up a 5-day course on getting internet traffic and people can get one email per day over five days about getting internet traffic to their website or blog.
  
  In the e-mail, you're smart to include links to your own blogs as well as affiliate links and things of that nature. This way you aren't only helping people but you're also generating income from people that actually ask for what you're offering.
  
  I say this because the way you get people to sign up is through a sign-up form on your website. This way it isn't like you're spamming. I hate spam.
  


• Create An Adult Website
  
  Believe it or not, someone did suggest this idea. And why not? If it doesn't negatively impact your sense of morality and no one is getting hurt, I don't see the problem with it.
  
  I personally wouldn't do it, but it is an idea, nonetheless so don't discount it right away.
  
  The cool thing about this is that you can use Turnkey Adult Sites that cost you about $500 upfront. They provide you with all the content and you own everything else. They update the content every day so people don't get bored and they also handle the credit card transactions.
  
  The adult industry is definitely going to make anyone money that jumps into it. You can probably make much more than the $5000/month that is the goal of this post. :)
  
  Just check out what's available in this google search.
  


• Start A Retail Business Online
  
  Someone also suggested earning money the good old fashioned way. Start up a retail business for something you're interested in and after about 8 months, you can be making $5000/mo online if you work full time.
  
  I agree with this notion and I would not mind going that direction. The trouble is that there are sometimes high up-front costs for creating the business as well as buying the inventory so for someone with a small budget, creating a retail business isn't always the best option.
  
  I just thought I'd mention it because it's a great idea.
  


• Focus On Subscriptions Rather Than Ads
  
  I think this ties into the creating your own product section of this post, but I thought I'd give this one its own area.
  
  A great idea is to get rid of ads altogether and go with a subscription based service, as ads only bring you one-time income but subscriptions are recurring and therefore, you aren't losing money.
  
  If you can come up with a service where you can charge $25/mo, you only need 200 sign-ups over 6 months and you can meet your $5000/mo goal. That's an average of 33 sign-ups per month over a six month period, which isn't bad at all.
  
  The problem here is coming up with something people will pay $25/mo for. ;)
  
  A great idea nonetheless.
  

How to Make Money From Your Blog

Now, there he goes again. I'm really liking this Steve guy. His writing is inspirational.

For instance, I'm already planning on buying a full-on domain name to write my posts in instead of using this blogger thing. Also, on one of my websites I'm re-building, I plan to put up a pixel wall (much like the one on milliondollarhomepage.com) for the community. This way, instead of donations, people can actually get something out of contributing money to the website -- they get traffic to their blog or website or whatever. Great stuff!

Of course, as I get more ideas from this guy and any other place (including my brain), I will pass them on to you.

Anyway, check out Steve's post on How to Make Money From Your Blog and let me know what you think of his ideas.

More later!

How I Make Money Online

How I make money online is not very complicated at all. In fact, I'd like to tell you how you can make a killing by just working a couple of hours every day.

One of the methods is, of course, blogging. You might think that just because there are millions of blogs, you can't jump in and still profit. I'm here to tell you that the water is still warm, my friends.

Blogging For Money

Most people think blogging is all about what you write, but I would have to disagree. A very important part is how you blog. What I mean by this is that you can't just start writing and expect people to come to your blog automatically. There are ways to advertise and ways to organize your posts that will not only draw in more of your intended audience but also get more search engines to index your blog and faster. Just think, the faster and easier people can find what you're writing, the faster your blog will become popular and people will link to it.

First and foremost, a surefire way of getting search engines to pick your blog up in their spidering is to make your posts keyword friendly. Notice how I titled this section 'Blogging For Money' and I put it in bold. Search engines target key phrases like these and use them as matches to search queries. So if a random bloke goes to Google, MSN or Yahoo! and types in "Blogging For Money," my chances of getting a click have just increased because I used that specific keyword in my post. It's also not a bad idea to use specific keywords throughout your entries in general, either.

Now here's a rarely discussed little secret. If you want search engines to pick your blogs up quickly, you might want to try a little thing called "my." Haha. No, I'm serious. I'm talking specifically about things like Google's "personal page", MSN's "my.msn.com" and Yahoo's "my.yahoo.com." Each of these areas have something valuable in common-- you can add syndicated content (a.k.a RSS) to each one of them. All of them have a place where you can "Add Content" to your personal page, and typically you want to point them to your RSS feed. In fact, for each of my blogs I've done so on all three of them. If you have a Blogger blog, you would just type in http://yourbloggerblog.blogger.com/atom.xml and it should fetch your feed automatically for you. Leave it there for a couple of days and you should be in business. MSN is typically the fastest to spider web pages, so check for changes there the soonest.

Oh and don't forget pinging services. Where would we be without them? Make sure your blog is set up to ping at least Weblogs.com. In fact, if you go into your Blogger settings in the "Publishing" section, you should see the option to Notify Weblogs.com when you post. DO THIS! Every time you update your blog, it will get posted to several other similar services and whammo- you've just created backlinks to your blog. This is is probably the easiest way to get your blog into the search engines.

Before I forget to mention it, a great way to ping a bunch of services all at once is to use the Feedburner service. Not only are they great at making your RSS feeds easy to manage but they're also great at pinging (I think) up to ten services all at once. They also have a bunch of other great features and promotional tools, so I recommend that you check them out.

One more thing I can't stress enough for you to do to be successful is to make blogging friends. In other words, put their link on your blog and have them do the same in return. You will be helping each other out. Just make sure their content is similar and not questionable. Always make sure your content is not .. adult in nature. In fact, if your website has too many four letter words and such on it, Google may flag it as an actual adult site and you do not want that.

Speaking of Google, you gotta love Adsense.

Making Money With Google Adsense

Once you do get a lot of traffic to your website, you're going to want ads placed tastefully so that people can click on them as they please. Then you'll notice that since you've made keyword friendly posts (as mentioned earlier), Google will pay you more per click. If you don't have one already, you should go sign up for an Adsense account. You can do so by clicking on the Google Adsense button on the sidebar.

Probably the best thing about Adsense is that they pay well and then give you detailed statistics, divided by "channels." An Adsense channel is simply a category name you give to a specific group of ads you create. If you want a "Blogging" channel, you can create that and use it on all your blogs OR you can create a channel for each blog if you want to track them individually. It's really up to you how you use it, but it is powerful.

CAUTION: Under no circumstances should you ever click on your own Google Adsense ads as they will remove you in no time flat.

Making Money Using Affiliates

If you're not using Affiliates to grow your money, you should start. Websites like Clickbank (click for link) will pay you a lot of profit for selling their eBooks for them. Does that sound difficult? It's not. All you do is sign up (which is free) and then from the main page, click on the "Promote Products" tab at the top and then click on the "Marketplace" link on the subtab. All you have to do then is type in a keyword like "fish"and up come a bunch of eBooks! When you find one to your liking, just click on the "create hoplink" hyperlink next to it and type in your username. It will generate the link you need to use to sell the book and all you do is use the link in your posts to promote the material. If you're honest and give a good review, people will most likely purchase the guide. You don't have to but I like to verify that these eBooks actually work and aren't full of crap before I tell people to go buy them. Besides, it keeps people coming back when you help them out.

Speaking of reviews, it's a great idea to use whole posts to do reviews on relevant eBooks. Not only does this push you up in the search engines, but it's a great way or promoting the material. In general, you want to write like a 400-500 word post and include links to the product throughout.

Another thing you can do using Clickbank is create eBooks and have other people promote them in their blogs and websites just like you would. If you're good at writing and can export a word document to PDF, you're in business. Just make sure you read their requirements before you jump on it. I do know there is a $50 activation charge to become a publisher with them, but once you do there is big money in it if you speak the truth. Again, it's all about really helping people.

Blogging To The Bank

Now, I know I was just telling you to push products but here is one I honestly recommend. If you're serious about making money on the internet and you liked what I had to tell you here, then you will love Blogging to the Bank by Rob Benwell. I actually did a review on it a few posts ago. It tells you what I've described to you here in more detail and a bunch more. Too much to mention here, in fact. It's really a great guide. In fact, it helped me to get started here and it will help you as well.

Make Money With Good Content

And finally- I can't stress this enough. Don't write entries just to write them! Put some character into them and make them enjoyable to read. Read them out loud if you must. In fact, if you do read them out loud, you'll find it makes the reading flow much more nicely even if someone is reading silently to themselves. Make sure to help people and give them good, honest information but do keep in mind that blogs are like columns. You get paid to write your opinion and that's exactly what you should give the public.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the comment box.

Thank you,
Scott

P.S. If you like the article, don't hesitate to tell people about how I make money online!