What is the best method to make money online? Since there are so many methods this is kind of a subjective question. For some it’s one method and for others another method is more suitable.
Forex marketing works for some. But you’ll need a lot of patience and available funds for your trading bank. Blogging works for some but not others. With blogging you’ll need to be persistent and patient and have a topic which you can write a lot of content about. Then there’s drop shipping and affiliate marketing; both models where you can earn by being a third party referrer for products/services online.
You can earn from online content through using video too. Upload videos to YouTube and join their partner program. Bloggers can earn through using ads too, although they’ll need a huge volume of traffic to make it pay, and a lot of creativity and persistence to make it work. Having tried several methods of earning online over several years, one method stood out to me from the first few years I spent attempting to make money online.
Best Method To Make Money Online: Affiliate Marketing
Yes it’s affiliate marketing! Surprise surprise! This site is after all an affiliate site and I earn my revenue through affiliate products and services I recommend on this and other websites. Not everyone will agree with this opinion however and really it’s whichever method you can get to work for you.
But despite spending years trying out other strategies including Forex marketing, Google Adsense, buying and selling, blogging, niche website building and the rest, the best successes I had were with affiliate marketing. I was making peanuts from Adsense but an early affiliate sale brought in more than I would make in a whole month of advertising revenue on my websites. So I decided quite early to pursue affiliate marketing.
To me affiliate marketing seemed very neat. After years of filling my house up with stuff to sell on eBay, I wanted rid of it all! I wanted my laptop and that’s it! With affiliate marketing you don’t need to hoard goods, deal with customers or even own your own products. You simply learn marketing method whereby you can refer customers to products and services online. If you’re successful, your strategy works. If you’re unsuccessful, you need to find a new strategy, not quit!
This is a major caveat to earning online however you do it. None of the aforementioned tactics will magically put money in your bank account. You need to apply yourself and figure out how to make any strategy work for you!
Best Method To Make Money Online: Why Affiliate Marketing?
With any online earning strategy you need to spend some time figuring out how to make it work. This applies to freelancing, Forex marketing, Google Adsense, blogging, affiliate marketing or whatever! Despite my cheery outlook of affiliate marketing it wasn’t always easy for me as an affiliate. I struggled for a long time before making a consistent income from it.
Over the years I realised I could have shortened my journey considerably if I had found and taken the advice of a mentor! In the early years of my affiliate journey I bought a couple of courses and spent heaps of time and effort following the advice of the “gurus” dutifully. Guess what, most of that advice didn’t work! I build hundreds of websites which were “supposed” to simply float to the top of Google and make me money quickly and easily. They didn’t! Most of them failed completely!
But eventually I would have a small success and make a sale here and there. It was only for tiny amounts initially, but through perseverance and finding a better way of doing things it eventually came in bigger amounts.
Types Of Affiliate Product
There’s various types of affiliate products you can promote and various ways you can promote them. Just because one strategy hasn’t worked for someone (or one particular product) doesn’t mean they should “throw the baby out with the bathwater” and discard affiliate marketing altogether.
Quite the opposite, they have gained some knowledge which is incredibly valuable just by trying something. The affiliates who make it work for them keep going. Most newbie affiliates will quit only after a short amount of time. But this time isn’t long enough! Affiliate marketing works, but it takes a few months at least to find your feet.
The type of affiliate product you choose to promote and the way in which you promote them is a major key to success. When I started out affiliate marketing, I promoted low value products from a website, hoping to get a visitor for free who would immediately purchase my product directly from the website. I now can see how naive I was! But for the new affiliate, there’s a lot of information they don’t know, which can result in a long, disappointing journey!
I did get free traffic to my websites but it wasn’t nearly enough traffic. And since most website visitors will take several touch points of a product to make a buying decision, I failed miserably at getting them to buy from me.
Use A List, Pay For Traffic, Scale Up
I wasn’t using an email list, I wasn’t paying for traffic, I wasn’t using the right products. All tragic errors which cost me a lot of time and effort (and pain). Learn from my mistakes:
- Build an email list – an email list puts you in control of your traffic and lets you communicate with a growing number of subscribers simultaneously and over a long period of time
- Get help – I joined an online program which put me in touch with mentors and coaches. I have an accountability “buddy” and many coaches/mentors who have helped me.
- Use paid marketing – paid marketing is fast and scalable. If it doesn’t work, turn it off, when it works scale up! With content marketing, there’s a whole lot of work involved. It can take months. With paid marketing, it’s fast and you can go big very quickly!
- Use high ticket and subscription products – I wasted years selling low value products from the likes of Amazon and Clickbank. With high ticket and recurring income products you can earn a stable income quite quickly.
- Don’t quit – most affiliates will quit. Use small term “failures” as experiences to learn from and spring boards to your online success. Learn from your online experiences and “fail forwards” to get more of them until you hit a winner!
The Chinese Bamboo Tree
The Chinese bamboo tree gestates underground for several years before eventually bursting through the soil. After it does it can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks.
Affiliate marketing is like the Chinese bamboo tree in that there’s a gestation period of learning and growing your online business. Initially this can be frustrating and it seems slow as though nothing will happen.
But if you use the right methods and strategies, you can grow an affiliate marketing business very quickly once you have put the right foundations in.
Remember this analogy when it seems as though nothing is working. When you break through with an affiliate business, you can generate sales in your sleep from the work you’ve already done!
