It’s pretty obvious that misinformation and false claims, have been hindering a lot of people for a long time to build real online businesses. By focusing on the right things, almost anybody can make money online. Unfortunately a fundamental understanding of business building is lacking in general with people.
Skilled marketers and business owners have been selling people dreams, dreams and promises of 2 Minute Work Weeks, Push Button Gazillionaire Systems, Avalanche Traffic Software’s. Every cool catchy name you can ever come up with, has already been used in these products.
These marketers(or whatever we choose to call them) are very keen on making the readers believe that the magic bullet they’re selling, has contributed to their business success, and that it’s responsible for the major part of their wealth.
Using high converting sales pages, these people keep on selling their million dollar systems to their humongous mailing list over and over again.
They remind me of the Loreal commercials, always a new formula that’s developed in some secret hiding place, far from the rest of the world. It’s probably been kept a secret for years, and now we’ve been hand picked as one of the lucky few to buy this magical creation, at a huge discount of course. Because we’re worth it . . .
The only ones making millions of dollars with these systems are the product owners, so in that case they’re actually right, it is a million dollar system! Unfortunately not for us but for the one selling the darn thing.
Don’t get me wrong, there are extremely good ways to make money online. But It’s very likely it doesn’t involve buying some gurus latest Gazillion Dollar Product!!!
The fact is that making money online is pretty simple, but somewhere along the way it seems that everyone is making it more complex than it has to be.
Keeping Focus
This is extremely hard for most people, I don’t think there’s one single reason that’s crushed the making money online dream more than this, very much due to the information overload. This is simply because of all the information available to consume, this in turn causes the fear of not knowing enough to proceed with work. This causes many people to get stuck in reading and learning.
Focus can also be hard to keep when no money is coming in, this causes a stressful situation that paralyzes many people. This makes it very hard, if not impossible to move forward.
Working Without Getting Paid By The Hour, Week or Month
This is a new situation for many people and far from everyone is cut out for dealing with this “delayed gratification” and uncertainty in a good way. This can cause stress and anxiety for a person that’s used to having an employer writing paychecks on time.
Paying For Very Much Needed Digital Products and Services
I don’t think this is a career breaker for most people, but still many are used to get something in the bag when they purchase an item. In the digital world, everything kind of smells the same.
This tend to make some people buy a lot more than necessary, while others want everything for free. It’s important to invest where necessary and the reverse of course.
The Loneliness Many “Stay at Home” Internet Marketers Experience
This has shown to be a problem among many online marketers that I’ve spoken to, many spend to much of their time in front of the computer, they tend to neglect both family and friends unfortunately.
Smart Marketers are Experts in Capitalizing on Weakness
The smart and sneaky marketer knows that weakness is something to capitalize on, and this is exactly what they are using to sell their new Push Button Gazillion Dollar system. They know that so many are fed up, tired, lonely feeling like a failure sitting alone at home.
They know that the person sitting in front of their computer are just waiting for this push button money maker machine that can take them out of their misery, unfortunately it doesn’t exist.
They also know that scammed people, rarely complain. They don’t want to feel more stupid than necessary and rather tries to forget this whole incident.
For everyone that’s buying to much Guru products I’ve got something that you can memorize and use when the next magic bullet arrives in your inbox.
There will never be a push button million dollar system that will make me wealthy!
If such a system exists, no one will ever let me know and certainly not offer me to buy it for $47.
I understand and accept this harsh reality.
I know this is true because if I found a system like that, I would never tell anyone nor would anyone tell me about it for the cost of a WordPress theme.
This is very good to remember whenever the urge of buying that flashy traffic system comes along. Remember this and you’ll be able to close down that window and all of the 200 exit pop ups without even giving your email address to them!
In this world of excess information, it’s extremely important to know what NOT to, almost as important as to know what to do. Mainly because someone is constantly trying to make us do something we shouldn’t, pretty much all the time without exaggeration.
This is the first step towards maximizing the chances of success, plain and simple!
It’s very important to put real work into the business, that creates high quality unique value. Yes, this takes work to produce, but by focusing on getting the product right, (could be anything really, an article, video, audio or software) the chances of succeeding with it increases dramatically.
Again, this will involve real work or money expenses if outsourced, but high quality work has to be produced in order to build a sustainable business. At first this might appear as “the hard way to go”, and many probably prefer to keep on searching for some “easier” way to make money online, but the real hard way to go is trying to win against the competition by doing exactly the same lousy quality work as them, that takes skill!
Provide Real Value To Real People
There are many ways to provide value to people, but the most common, and a very low entry barrier way, is to write articles. This article will focus on writing articles,for a couple of reasons.
- Anyone can learn how to write and publish an article somewhere! If you don’t like writing, I suggest you outsource it, here
- An article is the perfect manuscript for creating a video or audio. I will not go into details about that here, but always start with an article.
- It’s the least techie task to perform, which makes it easier to get going real fast
This of course, requires real work that takes both time and energy, but by focusing on writing high quality, well researched articles that’s monetized properly, you can in some cases create good income sources for years to come.
I’ve got articles published on websites that pulls in all the way up to $700 every month! Some of them I’ve written myself and others have been written by my outsourcers. In order for an article to pull in that kind of money on a regular basis, there are a few important ingredients such an article publishing campaign has to be made up of.
- Good Keyword Research- learn keyword research
- A Headline With a Hook
- Good On-Page SEO
- Well Researched Content
- Preferably Include Valid Statistics or Figures
- The Content must have the ambition of being a Link Bait
- Good Monetization of course . . .
- Promotion of the Content
Down below we walk through these points in detail:
Proper Keyword Research
This is crucial for assessing the competition as well as the estimating the profitability of keyword(s). If your new to keyword research or just feel you don’t really know how to do proper keyword research, here is a couple of guys that knows how to do this well, learning from the best is something that I always try to do. They also have a tool that you can try out for free, here it is: learn keyword research and the 3 golden rules here
Your Article Needs a Headline With a Hook
Any quality article needs something very persuasive to hook or draw the reader in that makes this person want to read more. Important: Remember this, people reading your articles are probably not in a buying state-of-mind, they don’t have any intention of reading a sales-pitch and are likely to bail-out at the first sign of one.
So what we need is something that doesn’t resembles a sales pitch, but triggers the curiosity of the reader. There’s no precise way to do this but there are ways to get inspired by looking at what others have done.
Here’s an example of some of the the most effective hooks:
- Think and Grow Rich
- Eat and Grow Thin
- How to Win Friends and Influence People
For the best result, use a shocking or controversial headline,something that will provoke an immediate reaction, for example criticizing governments will always attract attention.
Look at headlines in magazines,books and movies to get inspiration for your next attention grabbing headline. Here’s a good list of 10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work – By Brian Clark at Copyblogger.com.
On-Page SEO
This is of course very important to get right. I suggest you to follow Google SEO Guidelines to make sure the search engines understand what search phrase you’re targeting.
Write a Well Researched Article
This is very important as well, it has to contain information that presents yourself as a leading expert in the field, an authority. You’re writing valuable content that readers will appreciate. It will inform them, tell them something new, make them think and maybe entertain them.
This part makes the real difference between an article that pulls in some real money and an article that just pulls in pennies. Readers don’t like B.S and will catch you if you attempt to give them bogus information, a common mistake many businesses make.
Include Statistics
It’s often a very good idea to include facts and figures here to support your case and back up your point of view in the rest of the article. Everyone likes facts, figures and statistical data.
www.nationmaster.com and www.fedstats.gov are two great resources to find stats that you can use in your article.
Link bait potential
“Link bait is any content or feature, within a website, designed specifically to gain attention or encourage others to link to the website. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”Link bait can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature.”
Source: Wikipedia©
As stated above, this is a very powerful form of marketing and in my opinion, every article shall have the ambition to become link bait. This doesn’t always work of course, as this is less of a mechanic form of marketing when compared to e.g SEO, but when it works it produces awesome results.
Monetization
This is of course very important. There are many ways to monetize a piece of content, with CPA, affiliating, Adsense, etc . . . I’ll choose not to go into to much detail about this here, but I would like to say one thing that’s important! Don’t feel ashamed to monetize your work, not even with Adsense, just make it look very good!
Promoting the article
When I’ve put in a lot of work into an article and it’s done, I always outsource the promotion of the article just to get that initial boost. If the article is good enough to get a viral spread, the rest usually takes care of itself.
I use what I like to call “Push Button Outsourcing”, by using this outsourcing company that’s specialized in internet marketing. They make it so easy to get common SEO and social media promotion done it doesn’t get any easier.
I can spend anywhere from $50 to a $100 on promoting my article, I know it’s worth it when I’ve reached the high quality I’m always aiming for.
Here are tasks I usually outsource
- Submission of Angela’s Backlinks
- Digg Voting – It’s good to get that initial boost
- Linkwheel building
- Article Marketing
An article like this could sometimes take a working day to write, but considering the payoff for such an article, it’s well worth it. Another thing with real high quality articles is that I’ve never ever gotten punished by Google or any weird things that other people are experiencing with their lousy content. Quality content rocks and pays off for a long time!
Summary and Actionlist
Lets recap and make this information into a series of steps that you can put into action.
- Perform keyword research in the niche you’re operating in, if you need to learn more about keyword research go here: learn keyword research and the 3 golden rules here
- Write a well researched article to present yourself as an expert in the area
- Make sure the on-page SEO is done so that you can get search engine traffic that’s so valuable it can’t be ignored
- Do your absolute best to create a piece of work that has the potential to become link bait, this will make wonders for your income when it works
- Publish this creation on your website, blog, web 2.0 property or maybe as a guest post at some blog that’s got a lot of readers
- I recommend you to outsource the off-page SEO and some social networking promotion here here