There’s a few ways to generate an income from the internet and over the years I’ve tried a few. In the first instance, I tried Forex marketing. Forex marketing, is trading on the Foreign Exchange markets. I used Forex pairs and jumped in an out of the markets speculating on the small market shifts. Despite spending a couple of years learning a strategy for this, I eventually gave up on it. Around 95% of new traders blow their trading bank in the first year of trading, never to trade again.
Trading Forex can work if you stick with it and are very disciplined. But for me it wasn’t to be. I then tried a bit of buying and selling on eBay. I started off buying from charity shops in the 90’s and then found a strategy where I found bargain items on eBay itself and sold them on. You can read about the strategy I used here.
After a while of buying and selling from eBay I decided it wasn’t working out. I seemed to be spending a huge amount of time finding items and re-listing them, not to mention the time I spend queueing in the post office. So I looked for something else, which might have more potential.
How To Generate An Income From The Internet – Selling Online
I had learned the eBay strategy I mentioned through the purchase of an ebook, which I bought off eBay. The transaction seemed pretty simple: it was a digital book which I could buy and download instantly. This seemed to me like the perfect business model – nothing to physically post, and no stock gathering dust in my spare room!
So I decided to write my own ebook and sell it from a website. The trouble I found was in attracting traffic to my website. I couldn’t find any buyers, despite having figured out how to automate the sale from my website. So I put myself on a marketing course with the idea to sell my own ebook. (More on selling your own ebook here).
The course I joined was about affiliate marketing and I realised that I could easily sell existing products (which were worth much more than my ebook) in the same way as selling my own product (my ebook). My ebook was up for $10 but I could earn more by selling the course I purchased – even though I only took around 40% of the sale price! So I set up a website through the course and started selling a course.
How To Generate An Income From The Internet – Advertising
After a few setbacks, including the course creator taking the course off the market (this was back in the early 2000’s) and having my advertising platform suspended, I changed tact. I couldn’t use Google Adwords (the paid advertising platform used to sell the product). So I switched to another strategy. I started trying to earn income from advertising on a website. This is another strategy you can use to earn online. By earning income through advertising clicks, you can effectively earn a passive income online. However, the clicks are only worth tiny amounts. So you need a lot of them in order to be profitable.
After a lot of blogging, I was still only earning a few pennies a day (cents in the US). So I decided that this strategy wasn’t the best! Looking back now I now realise how much time I was spending jumping from one idea to the next! This is known as “shiny object syndrome”! Do yourself a favour and learn from this mistake of mine! Don’t look for the “quick route to online riches”. Instead, study affiliate marketing – one of the fastest ways to make a real online income and replace your employment income.
Why Affiliate Marketing Is The “Best”
Whatever works is what I believe is genuinely the best. However, in my personal experience, I’ve definitely found affiliate marketing to be the best. In the early years of my experimenting with online earning methods, I made trickles from advertising revenue (Google Adsense) and I made gains and losses from Forex marketing and ebay strategies. However, the best gains for the least amount of work and hassle definitely came from affiliate marketing.
This is of course why I pursued affiliate marketing with a passion. I did of course come up against a number of obstacles. Google algorithm changes, ad platforms disallowing and disapproving (and even suspending my account) and massive drops of my ranking content on the search engines are just a few of them.
But with affiliate marketing you can find and sell the best products online. You don’t need to create a product yourself. So if you can find high value products which already sell, half the battle is already won. You then need to focus on a marketing strategy you can stick with for at least 6 months to a year; whether this is paid marketing, or a cheaper alternative, such as blogging or v’logging.
Getting Started
You might be thinking this is all too much hard work? But if that’s the case, you’re probably not in the right space to start learning affiliate marketing. Those who succeed at affiliate marketing have a big reason to succeed. It’s not easy for sure, but once you understand how to use the leverage of selling online, you will have learned a skill for life which is life changing.
Get started here with a step by step system. It gives you all the products and software you need to set the infrastructure for a solid online business from scratch. Once set up, you only need to learn how to market your sales system and generate leads. It’s one of the simplest selling systems online.