legit way to make money online Archives - Affiliate Marketing Mentors

So what’s the fastest legit way to make money online? I wanted the answer to this question several years ago and tried all sorts: Forex trading, affiliate marketing, buying and selling, ebook creation and earning from website advertising too. All in all it took me years before I found (what I think) is the fastest legit way to making money online.

If I had the knowledge back then, I could’ve saved myself years and a lot of money too! But it’s about the journey and not just the destination. I’m still on that journey too, and haven’t “made” it yet, whatever that means! This is my journey…

Fastest Legit Way To Make Money Online – Forex

Forex marketing is a great way to use leverage. My father had taken an interest and I borrowed his Forex trading course. I thought this was “it” and studied for a couple of years. The main problem with trading Forex is that it’ll take at least a couple of years before you know what you’re doing. Most will blow their trading bank long before this of course.

I didn’t really have a “bank” of cash which I wasn’t emotionally attached to back then either. I mostly lost money and realised I really needed an income and trading bank. So I put a “pin” in it and decided I would return some time in the future when I had money to invest. It didn’t happen.

Some people can make trading Forex work for them but it didn’t for me. It’s certainly not fast and takes a lot of time and patience. After the Forex outing I switched to an eBay business after finding an eBook about how to make money from eBay.

Fastest Legit Way To Make Money Online – eBay

I bought and downloaded an ebook about making money from eBay. The ebook was also from eBook – I’ll come back to that in a minute. The basic premise for the eBay strategy I used was to find cheap items which sold for less than their worth. There’s lots of ways to earn from eBay and I looked at a few strategies. But the main one I got working for me was the misspell items one.

Find items on eBay using a misspell tool which had a low starting bid
Wait until the last possible minute (second) and bid snipe (using an auction sniper tool) to get the lowest possible price and avoid pushing the price up
Re-list the item with a better title (spelt correctly), pictures and listing.
Make a profit on the difference.

This is a pretty fast strategy really and you can find items of various prices and value. However, I got fed up with this eventually because I was spending a lot of time searching eBay and there was others doing the same thing. This made it more difficult to find those “gems” which were selling for stupidly low prices. I made a profit on many items though, but it wasn’t automated or scalable. I was convinced that the internet offered a better strategy.

Fastest Legit Way To Make Money Online – Selling eBooks

I looked back to the ebook I had purchased originally which had taught me the eBay strategy. It seemed so simple; here was an automated sale. The eBook owner had created the ebook himself and set up a listing on eBay. He could sell the same book over and over since it was a digital product. I knew this was the future of earning online – automation and digital products (more on this later). So I set about creating my own ebook and tried selling it from a website.

At the time I was a struggling stunt performer in the UK. I had qualified to join what was then the Equity Stunt Register in 2002. So I thought I’d create an ebook explaining how to be a stuntman! I created a sales page, landing page and the ebook itself. See how to sell ebooks on your own website.

I had more than a few problems with this and the politics of the stunt business raised its ugly head. Long story short I abandoned the ebook strategy as I had also found something else. While struggling to make sales of my own ebook I had purchased several courses which offered to teach how to make money online. Read about the courses I took in my digital profit course review. Although I still like the ebook idea, I found something better.

Selling ebooks most definitely isn’t the fastest legit way to make money online. Firstly you need to spend time creating the books, listing them, building websites, sales pages and then of course marketing your website. This was the biggest struggle for me and led me on to learn more about online marketing. This in turn led me down the affiliate marketing route.

Fastest Legit Way To Make Money Online – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing does get a reaction out of people sometimes if they’ve tried and failed or “knew someone else who tried and failed”. I tried and failed too with affiliate marketing. But I kept failing and failing until I made an online sale. When this happened, I knew it was something worth pursuing.

My ebook was listed for $10 – (dollars because the internet is a global marketing even though I was in the UK). But how many people were interested in becoming a stuntman – seriously?! It was far less than the number of people wanting to make a living online.

So I had put all that work into a product which had very little interest. The ebook “how to be a stuntman” was flawed because I hadn’t done my homework. Not only did I not know how to sell anything online, I had spent a lot of time and effort creating something with a tiny market.

With affiliate marketing on the other hand, here was a business with global appeal. Who doesn’t want to make their income from a laptop while either travelling the world or sitting in their pyjamas while everyone else is slugging it out in a job?

If you’re unsure what affiliate marketing is, it’s basically a business model which lets you earn by selling other people’s products online. The first course I successfully promoted was a “making money” course by a guy called Peter Lexis. He’s no longer around but I followed his course and was able to sell the course he had built. It was selling for around $100 and I made $40 out of a sale.

Types Of Affiliate Marketing

There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing too. Not every strategy offers the fastest legit way to make money online. In fact some ways are ridiculously slow. These were the strategies I used at the start when I first started affiliate marketing as a beginner. I blogged and blogged, I promoted cheap products which only paid peanuts too. I made a lot of mistakes.

I understand why so many people quit affiliate marketing. I understand why so many believe affiliate marketing doesn’t work. But I couldn’t get the idea of an automated income out of my head. I refused to quit, no matter how badly I was failing.

I came to realise that there’s many different affiliate paths. Creating content and promoting low cost physical products is the surest way to go insane. If you want to spend months and years struggling, it’s highly recommended! I did that and it’s not fun! Here’s a quick run down of different types of affiliate products and their commission structures:

Amazon’s affiliate commissions – from 0-11% commissions
Digital products – 40-101% commissions – yes some companies will pay you 101% commission on a product
High ticket products – earn up to 40% commissions on products valued up to $20,000 – that’s $8000 for a single sale.
Multi-tier sales – earn 10% on sales made by your referrals
Subscription products – earn ongoing monthly recurring commissions based on each sale you make

Choose A Strategy

Choose a strategy from the list above that you’d rather spend your time on. Then there’s a range of marketing strategies which affiliate marketers can use:

Blogging
Social media
Organic content
Video marketing
Paid marketing
Email list

Some strategies you can use as an affiliate marketer are much slower than others. But not everyone is alike. Some won’t be able to spend hours every day on their affiliate marketing businesses. If you’re time rich, blogging and creating content might be more suitable than using paid marketing. If you’re stuck in a corporate career desperate to escape, you’ll be more suited to using paid marketing in all likelihood.

This leads us nicely to the fastest legit way to make money online.

The Fastest Legit Way To Make Money Online Through Affiliate Marketing

The best strategies I’ve found online to make money legitimately are through affiliate marketing and by running paid marketing campaigns. Paid campaigns can run fast and are scalable too. With content generation, you can’t easily scale up your efforts and it’s all very time consuming. With paid marketing and a good business model, you can scale up your business very quickly given the marketing budget and a business model which offers multiple earning methods.

The SFM digital business system is the best model I’ve found online to earn from. It gives you multiple earning strategies including:

Subscription based products – earn ongoing commissions from sales you make
Multi-tier commissions – earn from sales made by your referrals
High ticket affiliate products – earn up to 40% commissions on products valued up to $20,000
A built in sales team helps close sales on your behalf too. This means you can focus solely on front end marketing.

To access The SFM Digital business system does take some financial commitment and you can tailor your business according to what you’re prepared to invest. At the top level you can earn commissions on high value products going up to $20,000, ($8000 a sale), but you’ll need to invest in the product yourself in order to earn the 40% levels of commission. You can however still earn 5% commissions on these kinds of products without a huge investment.

Fastest Legit Way To Make Money Online – Summary

I’ve tried all sorts of ways to earn money online over several years. I’ve used Forex marketing, eBay, sold my own ebooks and tried many affiliate marketing strategies and products. Here’s my own take on the fastest legit way to make money online in a nutshell: