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Posts Tagged ‘make money online’

I have been having problems recently with my motivation, I need to work harder on this blog and I also need to find a real job in the meantime. I have been struggling recently with both these tasks, but my cash flow is running low and I need to start soon. This got me thinking about why so many bloggers fail in what they set out to achieve.

I do have my excuses, I am currently traveling, which means I have better thing to do than go job hunting or sitting in front of a computer. I also do not have the constant affordable internet access that I used to take for granted. But this is not why most bloggers fail.

It is a fact that the majority of blogs do not make any money. While some do not try, there are many bloggers who try to make money and fail. The main reasons why many bloggers will quit after a few months is because they get bored and impatient, or they run out of things to say. Personally I am not trying to make any money yet, but I’ve made no secret that I plan to do so in the future.

My lack of motivation and internet access lately has made me feel like I’m failing already in what I set out to do. But I don’t want to quit, instead I thought I’d look at why so many other bloggers fail:

• Not taking blogging seriously: blogging for money is not like other blogs, you need to work hard and fill it with content, as well as promote and monetize your blog. Blogging for money is not as easy as some make it out to be, you need to treat blogging as a business that requires work. This has probably been my biggest blogging sin lately.

• Low start-up costs: This is one of the big pluses of blogging or making money online in general. It is also one of the reasons why so many people quit. It is easy to get into the ‘make money online’ business, but because it requires very little investment, it’s also very easy to walk away.

• Blogging and Internet Marketing Problems: There are many blogs out there with great content, but unfortunately not all bloggers know about internet marketing. Blogging and marketing is a fine art (that I’m still learning) and there is more involved that just writing a post and slapping some ads/affiliate links over it. A lot of bloggers are simply not very good marketers, and this is why so many bloggers fail to make any money.

• Blogging for Money and not for Passion: Have you seen how many make money online blogs there are? People are starting them up every day expecting to stand out from the crowd, but nearly all of them will fail. A lot of people make this mistake because they find out about blogging and making money online through reading blogs and then decide to try and follow the crowd. If you are not passionate about your topic or do not possess the expertise you pretend to have, it will show. You may also run out of things to say if you are not passionate about your chosen niche.

I have tried to avoid this last point by blogging about travel and living abroad as well as blogging, because this is what I am doing right now and have plenty to say about the subjects. However I am probably guilty of the first point, I haven’t worked on this blog as much as I had planned.

Hopefully I will settle down somewhere soon and find a real job to keep me going while I work on this blog. I have given myself two years to get this blog to where I want it to be, so I do have time. I’ll keep you posted on what I’m up too, but just recently to be honest I’ve been playing too much and not working enough. Lack of work and effort is probably the main reason why most bloggers fail.

After speaking about blogging, I thought I would write a brief introduction to internet marketing. You have probably come across the term internet marketing before, but may not necessarily know much about it. Word is slowly spreading about the potential to make money online, but too many people still seem put off by the idea. Many believe that internet marketing and affiliate marketing are for the computer geeks and the tech heads, but I want to make it clear that anyone can get into this game if they are willing to take the time to learn a few basics.

Imagine I was to offer you your own shop for a few dollars a month in rent. This shop was in a special location that could be visited by anyone in the world. Imagine I then offered you unlimited stock, and said this stock would be free, however much you need, just sell as much as you can. You would probably either bite my arm off, or dismiss me as a nutter. But this is the kind of business on offer with affiliate marketing.

If you are not familiar with the term affiliate marketing, it simply means selling other peoples stuff. As an affiliate you find a product that has an affiliate program, and more and more companies are starting to use these. Clickbank.com is one of the biggest affiliate networks with thousands of digital products to promote. The great thing about promoting digital products is that there is no real cost involved with the sale, so the commission you receive can be very high. 50% seems to be quite common, however there are programs that even offer 70-80% commission.

You do not have to sell digital products, Amazon Affiliates is growing rapidly and allows you to promote their products too. The commission may not be so high, but there is still good money to be made if you are promoting the right products in the right places.

The best place to do this is through your own website. Now please don’t be put off by this, creating a website is easier than ever and programmers are continuously coming up with new ideas to make creating a website even easier. I’m not going to go into how to do this right now, but I do want to make one thing very clear:

YOU DO NOT NEED MAJOR TECH SKILLS AND YOU DO NOT NEED TO LEARN HTML TO CREATE A WEBSITE

I hope that’s clear enough. There are lots of guides around on internet marketing and a lot of them are a little dated from a time when you would have needed to learn the HTML basics to get a website set up, but I am writing this in 2010 on my website and guess what, I know hardly anything about HTML.

I do know how to copy and paste, and if there is the odd bit of HTML I need to incorporate into my site, I simply look it up, copy/paste it into my site and follow any instructions to make sure any changes I need to make are done correctly. There is heaps of information on HTML online but personally I’m too lazy to learn it all, I prefer to just copy the bits that I need.

It isn’t essential to get your own website if you want to get into internet marketing, you can promote using certain forms of social media, and there are certain forums that allow you to promote affiliate links, but your options would be limited and I would highly recommend getting your own site.

This is a very basic introduction to internet marketing, there are whole courses and ebooks that tell you a lot more about how to make money online, but the main point I want to get across in this post is that internet marketing is something that anyone can get into. There are bored housewives and weird nomadic twenty somethings like myself with little or no computer experience all over the world making money online, so it is not just for the techies and the gurus.