How To Become FINANCIALLY FREE And Stay That Way

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The Stay-At-Home Guide To Freelancing Online

In this article, we will first learn about Freelancing websites. Second, we will dive into what running your own Blogging site takes. Finally, we will discover the ease and accessibility of taking Paid Surveys.

Freelance Websites

This is the method most employed by workers in developing countries. They know there is plenty of skilled labor needed to be done online pertaining to coding, design, and SEO. If you are well-versed in any of these, you can find a great supply of work, but be careful because it's extremely competitive and the wages often become too low to successfully make a living online in the United States. If you can't compete with the lowest-bid-wins mentality on these sites, then Freelancing websites may not be the solution for you.

Running A Blog

Whether you are a vet of the net, or a fresh face online, you surely know about blogging. Many people are becoming full-time bloggers, and make money just writing on their own websites. This is the method which takes longest to get up-and-running, however, but if you have a few months to build a website, and write high-quality content for, this may be a viable option for you. There are a few limitations on blogging; you generally must stick to one topic per website in order to maximize the monetizing ability of any one site. You will need a new website if you want to switch from perhaps, Personal-Growth to Car Repairs. This is the most attempted, and yet has the lowest success rate.

Finding Well-Reputed Paid Survey Sites

This is something many successful stay-at-home freelancers have accomplished, regardless of their past web experiences. A study was done, where it was found that anyone who can fill out 3 surveys per day can make over $30,000 per year-- and that's only about an hour a day. Imagine if you were to go full-time? There are always going to be surveys ready and available to you because there are thousands, if not more, companies who need people like you to give them their honest opinions on the products and services they offer every day. If you're lucky, you may even get to keep a few gifts as a thank-you just for testing them out!

Ultra-Competitive Freelance websites, Big-Risk Blog networks, and Paid Survey "money-taps" are just three of the most common methods of making full-time money online. The easiest way to get started making online though has got to be taking paid surveys.

Take Care

Don’t Just Be Good, Be Good and Rich

What’s the root of all evil? Money, right? Wrong!

You’d be amazed how many people think being rich will make their lives worse, like they won’t be judged for who they are but for their money. So even though they want to be rich, they shirk it at the same time.

This subtle yet profound fear keeps people from the truth: it’s good to be rich! Not just for the lifestyle, but because in the end, being rich makes us into better people.

I can hear someone screaming, “What about the rich jerk who doesn’t tip even though the service was great? How’s money made him a better person?” Here’s a clue: whoever you are, money will make you more of that. If you are a kind, generous person who attracted like-minded people before being rich, you’ll continue to do so after because now you’ll be able to be even more generous on a larger scale.

It’s our duty to become rich if we can. We have an obligation to grow to our greatest potential, developing the character that can achieve and care about other people at the same time. This is the growth that will ultimately make us into better people.

So what is the root of all evil? It’s not stacks of paper. Fear is at the root of our thoughts that tell us becoming rich will make things worse and take us away from being loved, accepted, and well-thought of.

If we don’t accept that being rich can be a good thing for ourselves and for others, fear and doubt creates envy. Envy says, “I can’t have that, and I resent those that do.” Acceptance of what you really want says, “I can have that, and I will be a better person because of it.”

So instead of secretly despising rich people, we should affirm them, even if they’re frickin jerks. We’re not affirming who they are as people—we’re affirming the idea that it’s okay to be rich. You can make a choice not to be selfish, arrogant, and thoughtless. Fear and envy negate thoughts of wealth and result in feelings and actions that take you away from it, even when you’re not aware of it.

Here’s a simple exercise in overcoming fear. Think of something that you’ve always wanted to do but never got around to, and just do it (Don’t break any laws, though!). Even if you end up not wanting to do it again, at least you know instead of just holding back for whatever reason. You’ve broken through something, and other breakthroughs become easier. It’s the only way we’ll ever grow.

This is not just about being rich, although that is one of the goals. This is about growing ourselves to become bigger than the obstacles we’ll face in life. The more wonder we experience and challenges we face, the more we expand to be able to take in more; the good and the bad; the money and the problems that come with it. In the end, striving toward becoming rich can only serve you, and if you choose it, serve others as well. How’s that a bad thing?

How to Properly do Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of the most important determinants for the success of an internet marketing campaign. This is because it determines the quality of visitors a sales page gets and therefore the conversion rates. That being said, the following is the proper way to do proper keyword research with Google keyword tool.

1. Brainstorm

Proper Google keyword search involves a lot of brainstorming to find out what keywords people would type out to find the product or service you are selling. All these should be buying Google search keywords i.e. keywords that people type when they are looking to buy a product. For instance, if you are selling a computer game, brainstorm a list of Google search keywords like “used laptop computer games for sale in Bristol” etc.

It also helps to be very specific so as to find effective keywords with very little competition. You should also gravitate towards long tail Google search keywords because they tend to be a lot cheaper and more effective. This stage usually involves independent thinking but using the Google keyword research tool can help in refining the list.

2. Google keyword research tool

After all the Google search keywords ideas are all written down, start up the Google keyword research tool. Take a few keywords and inject them into the Google keyword research tool in order to get more ideas from what people are actually typing out. At this point, you should also look for location specific, branded buying Google search keywords, those in question form, synonyms etc. since they tend to have a higher conversion rate. If this is done right, the new Google search keywords should be in the thousands.

The next step in your Google keyword search is grouping them according to similarity. For instance, group all location based Google search keywords together. You can also arrange them according to competition levels (low, medium and high), local monthly searches and global monthly searches. This will help in developing better targeted creatives and ad groups. Download all these Google search keywords into an excel sheet to make your work easier.

It should be added that this stage of keyword research with Google keyword tool is the most important and time consuming. You must take your time in order to be completely thorough

3. Delete unwanted keywords

After injecting most or all of your initial keywords into the Google keyword research tool and getting many others. Start sifting through your new list and delete all unrelated and generic keywords. For instance, if you are selling tablet computers, delete all keywords that talk of medical tablets. You could also use these unrelated keywords to form a list of negative Google search keywords that then is used to prevent unwanted clicks on your creatives.

You should also remove keywords with trademarked words in them, Google search keywords with little or no search volume, extremely expensive keywords and all those you feel will not fit into your campaign. All the remaining Google search keywords can then be imported into respective ad groups in a given campaign.

In a nutshell, keyword research with Google keyword research tool is one of the best ways to ensure success for any online campaign,

What is news?

When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is news.

Charles Anderson Dana, American journalist, 1819-1897
News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.

Lord Northcliffe, British publisher 1865-1922
Well, news is anything that's interesting, that relates to what's happening in the world, what's happening in areas of the culture that would be of interest to your audience.

Kurt Loder, American journalist, b. 1945
Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.

Joseph Pulitzer, American publisher, 1847-1911
News is anything that makes a reader say, `Gee Whiz'!
Arthur MacEwen, American editor,

No one says "Gee Whiz!" very much these days, of course, not even in America — both because that expression has long since been supplanted by others more colourful and less printable, and because our capacity for surprise has long since been dulled by a surfeit of sources.
Shashi Tharoor, Indian writer and diplomat, b. 1956

What you see is news, what you know is background, what you feel is opinion.
Lester Markel, American journalist, 1894-1977
It is hard news that catches readers. Features hold them.
Lord Northcliffe, British publisher 1865-1922

To a journalist, good news is often not news at all.
Phil Donahue, American entertainer, b. 1935

No news is good news.
Ludovic Halevy, French author, 1834-1908

[News is] a first rough draft of history.
Philip L. Graham, American publisher, 1915-1963

For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news.
Gloria Borger, American journalist, b. 1952

The real news is bad news.
Marshall Mcluhan, Canadian communications theorist, 1911-1980

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.
Evelyn Waugh, British author, 1903-1966

Good stories flow like honey but bad stories stick in the craw [gullet]. What is a bad story? It's a story that cannot be absorbed in the first time of reading. It's a story that leaves questions unanswered.
Arthur Christiansen, British newspaper editor, 1904-1963

Hard news really is hard. It sticks not in the craw but in the mind. It has an almost physical effect, causing fear, interest, laughter or shock.
Andrew Marr, British journalist, b. 1959

Never awake me when you have good news to announce, because with good news nothing presses; but when you have bad news, arouse me immediately, for then there is not an instant to be lost.
Napoleon Bonaparte, French Emperor, 1769-1821

Journalism consists largely in saying Lord Jones died to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.
G.K. Chesterton, British writer, 1874-1936

News reports stand up as people, and people wither into editorials. Clichés walk around on two legs while men are having theirs shot off.
Karl Kraus, Austrian satirist, 1874-1936

A master passion is the love of news.
George Crabbe, British poet, 1754-1832

On journalists and journalism

There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.
Walter Lippmann, American journalist, 1889-1974

People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true.
Lewis H. Lapham, American publisher and editor, b. 1935

The day you write to please everyone you no longer are in journalism. You are in show business.
[Possibly] Frank Miller, American cartoonist,

Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why most news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated - serious, bulky and blandly worthwhile, like a high-fiber diet set in type.
P. J. O'Rourke, American journalist, b. 1947

The conflict between the men who make and the men who report the news is as old as time. News may be true, but it is not truth, and reporters and officials seldom see it the same way. In the old days, the reporters or couriers of bad news were often put to the gallows; now they are given the Pulitzer Prize, but the conflict goes on.
James Reston, American journalist, 1909-1995

The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context. The pressure to compete, the fear somebody else will make the splash first, creates a frenzied environment in which a blizzard of information is presented and serious questions may not be raised.
Carl Bernstein, American journalist and writer, b. 1944

Journalism is literature in a hurry.
Matthew Arnold, British poet and critic, 1822-1888

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
Cyril Connolly, British editor, 1903-1974

The truth is, "What is a journalist?" is one of those questions for which there is no proper answer. The prehistory of modern journalism shows it has been a ragged and confusing trade all the way through.
Andrew Marr, British journalist, b. 1959

Journalism is often simply the industrialisation of gossip.
Andrew Marr, British journalist, b. 1959

We cannot make good news out of bad practice.
Edward R. Murrow, American broadcast journalist, 1908-1965

I have a motto: My job is not to make up anybody's mind but to make the agony of decision making so intense that you can escape only by thinking.
Fred Friendly, former president of CBS News, 1915–1998

Your Business Reflects You

If someone told you, right before you got out of the gate, “Sixty-three percent of all businesses fail within the first six years,” would you still want to start a business?
That’s the figure according to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics. That means most people stand a little bit better than a 50/50 chance of, at minimum, staying above water; we’re not even talking about profitability.

Given that reality, it’s good to remind ourselves of why we wanted to do this business thing in the first place. Some people want to make more money. Perhaps it’s about taking care of your family, or taking care of them in the style you’d like. Maybe you want to be a better provider, a better parent, or a better spouse. It could be about more freedom, or more quality time.

Some people start a business because they believe it will give them greater security. They realize that working for somebody else and having someone else make fundamental economic decisions in their lives just doesn’t give them the kind of control they want. So they start a business for a different lifestyle.

Whatever the reason, the same fundamental question remains: what’s so important about any of this? What’s really behind it all?

I think—just as important as taking care of loved ones, or being successful, or being in control, or even being free—we are most basically fulfilling the creative impulse to grow something, to make something that didn’t exist before, and to nurture it as best we can.

It really helps to understand this when it seems like the steam may be going out while trying to get your business up and running. This isn’t and can’t just be about money—though that is a pretty obvious goal for whatever those reasons we see above.

You also can’t ignore the “maverick,” individualistic impulse to do something different, or something completely unusual, so you build a business, go out there and you learn something. You develop a core expertise, gain some experience, and build your business around that.

There are so many basic human elements to creating a business—freedom, or accomplishment, care for others, individual expression—it makes you wonder how we could stand to live by not starting a business?

Our reasons better be more than just “success,” though, because if you make it past that 63% mark, the bigger that you get, the more the headaches come, and then it just kind of gets worse if you don’t know what you’re really getting into—if you’re not properly educated to give yourself a chance to make it well beyond that 63% mark.

This is the essence of what takes that 27% percent of successful business owners beyond those first six years. It’s knowing that success is not just measured in numbers alone—but again, when those numbers increase, it sure as hell does feel good, yes or yes?

It’s also understanding that success as a business owner entails reaching down into yourself, your creative spirit, and bringing that out into the world meaningfully. It’s as spiritual as it is material, and we’d all do better for ourselves and our impact on the world to honor that.

What’s your opinion? We want to hear from you!!!

Characteristics That Constitute The World's Most Ideal Business

Here are 15 characteristics that
constitute the world's most ideal business.

1. Enjoys low overhead

2. Products can be sold internationally in every
country throughout the world

3. It's portable. The business can be relocated
and operated from any country in the world

4. Requires little capital or investment

5. Enjoys a high profit margin

6. Has minimal labor requirements. Can be
operated with few or even no employees

7. Can be operated without a formal office,
even as a home-based business

8. Is relatively free of government regulation
and control

9. Is highly respected in the business
community

10. Products can be sold on a cash basis instead
of offering terms or extended credit

11. Competitors cannot duplicate products.
Products are protected by copyright laws

12. Is a fun and challenging business that will
satisfy your intellectual needs

13. No matter what your favorite subjects or
hobbies may be, you can usually come up with a
publishing product which includes them

14. Can be started or operated on a part-time
basis

15. Can help to make the world a better place

I submit that there is only one business in all
the world which meets all these characteristics.
It's information publishing.

Speak later Henk

Service and Presentation Equals Millions

Writer’s get writers block. Baseball hitters have slumps. Markets have down days.

The idea behind “funks” is that we’ll eventually come out of them, yes? But what we can we say for those people who aren’t making excuses about lack of financial growth; who have a burning desire to get off the treadmill and take control of their financial life by deciding to start a business, but have no idea what they’d do?

We can start drawing parameters around the question by realizing that in business, you either have a product, a service or an idea that you’re selling. Some potential business people might think, “Great, I don’t have a product. I don’t have two thousand of something sitting on a shelf somewhere in a warehouse ready to be shipped out and sold.”

Or they might be saying to themselves, “I don’t have a product but, but I do have an idea for a service, but how they heck do I do that enough to make a lot of money?”

As a matter of fact, every year there are over 375,000 different patents submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. A fraction of those patents turn into something lucrative. The vast majority don’t because they are lacking a crucial element: Presentation!

You can have the greatest product, service, or idea in the world, but if you can’t communicate it in a way that gets others to want what you have—or if you can’t create the need for what you have—then nothing’s going to happen.

Before we can truly understand how to effectively make our presentation, we have to first understand why people buy anything in the first place. If we understand that, then we’re in a much better position to come up with that product, service, or idea and present it.

There’s only one reason why people buy; whether it be from television, from across a desk, in a department store, or on the telephone. People buy based on emotion and they justify it with the facts later!

Not that the facts aren’t important. Facts are very, very important, but they provide the information while emotion provides the interpretation.

When we’re buying a car, sure gas mileage matters, but there’re plenty of cars that have that covered. You’re gauging how you feel in that seat, the new car smell, and the compliments you’ll get. How those car payments will be made you figure out later. It’s primarily about how you feel about the purchase.

When you’re sending out your message about your product, service or idea on the informational level, you’re not doing anything wrong but you’re never going to make a real connection. You’re always going to miss making that strong, important, effective, emotional association.

We’re not talking about manipulation, either. I think it’s a basic instinct of all human beings to want to help other people. So when we’re thinking of what we’re going to do to make millions, whatever it is you have to be thinking, “How do I effectively help others with what I have?” Not just how you’re going to make your car payments or mortgage.

When you are selling something you are doing something to somebody, but when you’re helping you’re doing something for somebody. Service and presentation will keep you in business.

What do you think? We want to hear from you!!!

Speak to you soon again, Henk

The Top 10 Methods To Make Money Online

The Top 10 Methods To Make Money Online

The following article details my personal top 10 methods to make money from the Internet.

What makes this list unique is it’s based entirely on the methods I have personally used, so I can reveal to you what I did and what my results were. Bear in mind these methods represent ten years of working online, so I do not do all of them presently. At one point in my career however they were an income stream, and are still viable options for you.

This is not an all inclusive list, which means there are plenty of other ways you can make money, no doubt many of which are potentially much more profitable or better choices for your own situation. As a result you shouldn’t base your decisions on what methods you use solely on this list. Do your research and include this article as one resource.

This list isn’t strictly ordered based on my preferences from top to bottom. What I’ve done is listed the different things I did in a chronology of time of when I did them. It’s no coincidence however that as we get closer to the present (the end of the list), the more I personally like the method, and hence still use it. Over the years I made changes to how I made money in order to get closer to what I really wanted from my business.

What Is My Ideal Way To Make Money Online?

To help you understand what I was striving for, here are my main criteria when deciding what methods I use to make money online with. Bear in mind certain options only became available as a result of previous experience. Some things you can only do once you’ve done other things because you build on what you have done before.

In a nutshell, this is the criteria I concluded are important to me -

Can you make a solid profit margin?

As you will see in a moment when I reveal my top ten methods, some income streams have very slim margins, which means you must push through a lot of volume in order to make significant income. While not always the case, in most situations to sell more requires more work, more resources and generally more of everything, which results in violation of my next rule…

Can you maintain the income with minimal labour and/or is it easy to outsource?

I look for income streams that do not require significant amounts of work to maintain. If I need to drastically increase the amount of product I sell or customers I attract to make good money, and that requires more of my own time to achieve, or cannot be easily outsourced to others (it often increases your labor just to organize outsourcers, so don’t assume outsourcing is a magic solution), that’s not the method for me.

Is there potential to scale?

As per the previous point, often the logistics of growth makes a method unappealing to me, however I do want the income streams I go after to have the potential to scale, and scale big. This means if you do discover something that makes you money, the possibility to grow it to a life changing amount of money is a reality, and you understand how this can happen.

Is there passive income potential?

In most cases I prefer something that is more potentially passive than potentially scalable. Obviously it’s great to have everything, but given the choice I prefer income streams that just work and can be automated so you can do other things. You have to be careful to manage your desire to scale something with your desire to make it passive. Sometimes less is more because less gives you freedom.

Can you create a sellable asset?

The final point is really important to me because I know that my interest tends to fluctuate. Every five years or so I feel like moving on to something new and leaving my main project. In the case of business, I want to ensure that there is a profitable exit strategy. The better you meet the previous criteria (profit margin, automated, scaleable and passive), the more money you can make when it is time to sell.

I Look For The “Holy Trinity” Income Method

I’ve written before about my quest for the holy trinity of a business model, one that delivers what I consider the three most important outcomes from a business –

· You make significant PROFIT

· The income can be made as close to PASSIVE as possible

· You have PASSION about some aspect of the business

Or phrased another way, my business should enable the following

Consistent Income
Free Time (thanks to income automation, business model simplicity or large capital gain)
Meaning and Purpose (development of your passion and reason for being on this planet)

So now you know my main criteria that has driven me to test different income streams over the past decade. Now let me introduce you to exactly what those income streams are…

My Top 10 Ways To Make Money Online

1. Sell On Ebay

During my pre-teen and early teenage years I went from playing with Transformers, GI-Joe and LEGO, to playing Nintendo, Sega and Gameboy. Eventually I added the card game Magic: The Gathering to the mix at about 16 years of age. All of these things were passions for me at various stages of growing up, but one thing remained consistent throughout each stage; I traded and sold toys and games I no longer wanted to make extra cash.

In Brisbane where I live, before the Internet there was a newspaper called the Trading Post that was published every two weeks. It was an aftermarket for pretty much everything. Whenever I grew tired of a game or a toy I’d sell it via the Trading Post, usually in an effort to make enough money to buy the new toy or game I had in my sights.

Eventually the Internet came along and the Trading Post no longer commanded the secondhand market like it once did (though it did successfully transition online). It quickly became clear that eBay was the winner when it came to secondhand commerce online. As a result my first experience making any money from the Internet was selling old games, toys and electronics on eBay.

EBay is still I believe the best way to gain experience making money from the Internet for two reasons:

You are pretty much guaranteed to make some kind of sale and thus experience a transaction
EBay has the traffic, so you don’t have to worry about marketing your product beyond creating a good listing, the eye-balls are already there

These two reasons make eBay a great first stop because you will learn how to list something for sale online, how to take money (possibly your first experience with PayPal) and about the importance of things like titles and copywriting, if you spend the time to study how to make your eBay listings convert better.

The best thing about eBay – the abundant traffic – is also the worst thing. Barriers to entry are low on eBay, meaning competition is fierce. When competition is fierce, profit margin is slim. Unless you can find some form of competitive advantage through your supply chain, how you create listings, or you have a means to increase volume, you’re not going retire rich thanks to eBay.

I spent quite a bit of time studying eBay, both as a business model and as a means to capture new customers because of how much buying traffic is there. There is no doubt that eBay is a fantastic website that represents a huge potential to make money, but in my case I wasn’t keen to build my business there, it didn’t match enough of my criteria.

However eBay is a fantastic way to make quick money, even just as a way to turn your old items into cash to start a new online venture. If you’re brand new to Internet marketing and you don’t know your PayPal’s from your Clickbanks, or your PPC from your SEO, eBay is definitely a great place to learn some basics.

2. Sell products in forums, bulletin boards, classifieds and other community type sites

The card game Magic: The Gathering was a big part of my life from the end of highschool to the beginning of university. Although initially I was just a casual player and then tournament player, I quickly became a card trader and really enjoyed the wheeling and dealing. Although my interest in playing the game wained, most of my early projects online were connected with the game.

Before having my own website, I spent time reading websites, newsgroups, bulletin boards and forums about the game, and eventually started trading online. Back before search engines were any good most of my time was spent in particular Magic newsgroups, some that talked strategy, and some that were focused specifically on trading and/or buying and selling cards.

I managed to make spare change selling my cards through these sites. The main reason I could make any money was because I would win cards in tournaments, hence I had a supply source that would result in a good profit margin. Of course this wasn’t sustainable unless I kept placing well in tournaments, nor was it really scalable unless I started buying in cards from other sources.

I stopped using this method once I started my own card game site (more on this below), however I still believe niche collectables, particularly in a market that you really love, is a fantastic starting point to gain experience making money online. Like eBay you can make money selling secondhand items in community sites if you can find a way to source product at cost or below. It’s not a model that has much margin so again the challenge is to scale if you want to make significant profit.

3. Sell products from your own website

My first successful website was about the card game Magic: The Gathering. At first the site was just a hobby with articles written by me and a few friends. Eventually as traffic grew I began making some money with the site.

Since I was already a card trader it made sense that my Magic site have a Magic card store. At first I stocked the website with my own cards, and eventually added retail “sealed” (unopened packs of cards) by buying product at wholesale from a company in Sydney.

It was a very simple card shop made up of text listings of the cards I had for sale, the quantity available and the cost per card or per pack. I maintained the inventory myself from my room, sorting and listing cards online by hand using plain text. I didn’t use any software and most of the payments I received back then was via check or money order in the mail. Some kids would even send money and even coins (!) in the mail to pay for their purchase.

My business did well enough, although the manual labor was intense. Maintaining inventory lists, packing cards into envelopes and daily trips to the post office was not always the most fun way to spend my time, though I did enjoy having my own little business while in university.

Unfortunately my store was hit by credit card fraud when I foolishly sold a significant amount of product to an unknown person in Thailand. This experience was enough for me to decide that I had had enough of running a Magic shop and it was time to move on. You can read about the credit card fraud experience here – Yaro Starak Timeline – Part 2

Selling Products Online Is A Big Opportunity

My first three experiences of making money from the Internet all involve some kind of physical product. Online commerce obviously represents a huge opportunity to make money online, and having your own product or a passion for a product that you can source can lead to big profits.

You can sell product from your own website store, via community sites and classifieds (like Craigslist) and of course eBay and collectively make good money. The challenge, like with any business, is defining what is your competitive advantage and can you come up with a model that meets your needs. For me selling physical product was a great proving ground, but I eventually learned that profiting from information was a preferable model if I wanted to meet my aforementioned business goals.

I’ll leave it in your hands to decide whether physical commerce is the way to go for your situation.

4. Sponsorship advertising on a content site

Once my card game site was successful I began researching how to make money from it. I sold cards initially because I already knew there was a market for that and I had the cards, but I was also aware that if I had an audience I could charge sponsors money to advertise to them.

Thus began my love affair with banner advertising.

Although challenging at times to find sponsors, I was quickly able to bring in several hundred dollars per month in advertising revenue by directly approaching online companies who I considered good targets for my readership. I emailed them and asked if they would like to pay a monthly fee to place a banner on my site. Most said no, but some said yes and eventually I had a couple of loyal sponsors.

Banner income would prove very reliable over time as long as I continued to do whatever I did to maintain and build a readership. This has continued today, where several sponsors pay a fee to advertise their products and services to you, the reader of this website.

Banner advertising, when set up using a system like I presently use, can be very hands off – in fact for me it’s entirely passive – assuming there is an audience that the sponsors benefit from advertising to. It’s difficult to make loads and loads of money just from banners unless you have significant traffic, but it is easy enough to make some money from it and once you do, it generally proves very reliable unless you stop updating your website.

I’d recommend this method to you if you have some kind of content based site or a community site that attracts enough traffic to make it worthwhile for sponsors. The best thing about banners is that they don’t have to replace any other income method you use, you can use this income stream in tandem with others.

5. Sell services you provide personally

At one stage early in my career when my online income wasn’t consistent, I was part of a business grant program run by the Australian government designed to assist entrepreneurs with money to pay for life’s necessities so you can focus on growing your business. The idea is that when your business is successful you will eventually hire people and pay taxes, thus the government reaps a return on the investment.

The grant ran for 12 months and I was under the assumption (incorrectly) that I had to show consistent income growth in order to maintain my qualification for the program. My income at the time always suffered a downturn around Christmas/Summer in Australia. To combat this problem I decided to teach English face-to-face with people in Brisbane to hopefully boost my reportable income.

To advertise my tutoring service I marketed using posters offline and eventually set up a website and marketed on classified sites as well. I charged $15 an hour and eventually had a few Korean clients. This idea eventually ballooned into a full on English school with a real world premises that I managed for eight months before closing down. It turned out to be an experiment that taught me I much preferred online business to bricks and mortar.

My English tutoring days were short lived, but that doesn’t mean selling some kind of service that you personally deliver isn’t still a viable option. The Internet is a fantastic place to market your services for free. Similar to what I talked about in the first three points, you can use online community sites, classified, forums and your own website to market your service.

The downside with this model is that you are still trading hours for dollars, which is a violation of my holy trinity concept. It’s not necessarily the worst option – and many people enjoy the life of a high-paid consultant very much – but it does have the inherent limitation that a service is not replicable unless you personally do it yourself or hire people to do it for you, both activities that take time and/or resources.

If you are good at something and enjoy helping/teaching/working on other people’s projects, selling what you do online is worth considering.

6. Sell services provided by other people

My next big success after my card game site was an online proofreading business. For this business I wanted to focus on selling something that did not require either my own labor or sourcing some kind of physical product.

The business began in very simple fashion. I created the website personally myself and advertised two services – English proofreading and language translation services. I knew how to find contract proofreaders and also had access to an online database of language translators. When a job came through I’d organize a quote, slap on a margin for myself and then return the quote to the client.

Over the years I heavily refined this business. I brought on an assistant, simplified the services, cemented a pricing model and learned what methods of marketing brought in the best type of client. The end result was a full time income for me and barely a few hours of work to maintain it.

This was the first time I found a business that met all my major criteria – except one – I really wasn’t that passionate about the industry. Initially I enjoyed being the entrepreneur, the thrill of making money and automating the business as much as I could, but after a few years my passion wained. I eventually sold the business, earning a nice payday in the process, making this one of my most personally gratifying projects.

Selling a service is a real option for making money online. The challenge is sourcing good people to do the work, learning what specific offer to make to the market, how to differentiate yourself so you earn good margins, how to market what you offer and how to automate the entire process so it becomes a passive income stream.

7. Paid reviews

For a brief period on my blog I invited people to submit their product, service or website for a paid review. This means they pay a fee (for my site it was $250) and I would write an article about whatever they submitted. I would not accept just anything for review, I had to see an angle that made for relevant content for my audience. Nor was a paid review a promise that I would write positively about the subject – I would highlight both good and bad points.

Initially I didn’t mind writing paid reviews as the income was pretty good in terms of how long it would take and how much I earned. I could make as much as $250 an hour, which was great at first, but as my motivation focused more on freedom and less on money, even this became a poor incentive. Plus I never did like that I was told what to write about rather than choosing subjects I enjoyed.

The challenge for you, if this method is relevant to your growth stage, is to create a website where you can command a price for paid reviews that makes it worth your time. Until your traffic is significant, charging more than $50 for a review is not realistic, so you need to build your website asset first.

8. Affiliate marketing

As my blog audience grew I began to test a method of making money I was very interested in – affiliate marketing. My first test proved positive, though initially I was disappointed that of my readership of 500 or so people (at the time), I could only sell one or two products, making $20 commission each. It wasn’t retirement money, but it was a start.

Affiliate income has gone on to become my second highest source of income in recent years, thanks in part to the increase in my audience reach. By combining my blog and email newsletter I can reach thousands of people with just one piece of content. By testing different products and recommending things I personally use myself, I’ve been able to earn as much as $50,000 in commissions selling just one product.

Affiliate marketing is possibly the single best way to make a living online because it is so hands off, can be automated easily enough and can deliver some incredible profit margins. It’s especially good when you can use affiliate marketing to recommend things in areas you are personally interested in – for example you can make money simply writing a review of a book you really wanted to read anyway and you get paid for doing what you love.

The challenge for you is figuring out what market(s) to enter, building an audience and maintaining relationships with your readers so they trust what you tell them. If you know something that other people want to know and you are prepared to share that information, you could be looking at a fairly lucrative affiliate opportunity.

9. Sell your own information products

The single most profitable income stream I have ever developed is selling my own information products. If you are a long time follower of my work you know I have created courses on how to make money with blogs and membership sites. I also have several reports, an ebook and new products on the way.

The profit margins on information products is significant, especially as you can earn money for content you created years ago. Technology makes selling information online relatively easy to automate, once you get through the learning curve. If you focus on areas you are passionate about you can build expertise and leverage that trust and credibility to make sales of your products. Best of all, all of this can happen while you sleep, once you have built the machine to do it for you.

I personally enjoy teaching, so creating my products like Blog Mastermind though hard work, was an enjoyable process. Once the course was created I continued to sell it year after year to people new to the industry who want to learn how to make money with blogs.

Like with affiliate marketing, your potential to succeed selling information products rests on your ability to identify market needs, tap into audiences looking for this information and then give them what they want. There are plenty of subtleties and things to learn about, but thankfully there is plenty of guidance out there too. Digging into the archives of this blog you are reading now and downloading my free reports – The Blog Profits Blueprint and Membership Site Masterplan are fantastic starting points if you want more help.

10. High end private coaching

I’ll end this article with something I only recently did – offer high end coaching to a select group of clients who had to apply to work with me. My program cost between $5,000 and $10,000 and I turned away more people than I accepted. This was deliberate as I knew working one-on-one with people is not something I can do with many people or I will use up all my time. However I was keen to help certain people who were in the right position so I could learn more about the challenges they face.

Private coaching, like consulting, is another situation where you trade time for dollars, but in terms of your hourly pay rate it is hard to find a higher paying “job”. Of course you don’t have to start off charging thousands of dollars. Depending on your expertise and what kind of outcome you help people achieve, will determine how much you can charge. Offering coaching for $100 per session is not out of reach for most people, and that’s not a bad starting rate if you are looking to build up your experience through helping others closely.

Again the Internet is by far the easiest and most affordable tool to attract coaching clients. In many cases you can add private coaching to many of the other methods I listed above, including selling info products you create, affiliate products, sponsorship banners and physical products.

Combine What Works For You

In my case progressing through these various methods, figuring out what I actually want from a business and then combining different methods to maximize my income and personal satisfaction has worked the best.

I recommend you follow a similar path to build your own business. Figure out what you like using the options above and other resources online, begin testing to see what works and learn more about what you enjoy, and keep at it until you find what “floats your boat” and is incredibly profitable too.

Good luck!