"How To Make Money Online"
The Secrets to Proper Monetization

 

If you are like me you've received a lot of misinformation about how to make money online. I've long ago lost count of the number of e-mails I've received on the subject. In one way or another they all seem to say, "'Throw up' (gaaah!) a website (or buy one ready-made), put a bunch of banner ads on it, and/or buy a little online advertising, and start hauling the money to the bank – or words to that effect.

Don't you believe it!! That strategy – no matter how attractive the offering – is a sure-fire loser, at best a trap for the unwise and unwary. As this website grows, I'll be putting up links to a number of information sources that explain this fact in great detail. Such get rich quick (GRQ) methods don't work. They are poor performers in the short-run and drop-dead non-performers in the long run. They are NOT valid answers to the 'how to make money online' question.

The following material is a proven valid prescription for how to make money online. Its validity has been proven thousands of times by successful online entrepreneurs. It takes more time and effort than the GRQ formula above – but it has one BIG advantage – it works! And it keeps on working – making more and more money as time passes.

Are you ready?
One serious mistake that most aspiring online entrepreneurs make (at least 97% of them at the best estimate) is to monetize the website before it is ready. Oh! Didn't those GRQ fellows tell you your website had to be ready? Of course not! They either don't know this – or they don't care that they are misleading you.

So what must you do before monetizing your website – if you really know how to make money online?  To answer this question properly, you have to understand why people visit your website. 99% of the time it is not to read a sales pitch.

Consider how you got here. If you were looking for advertisements, you were sadly disappointed. But that probably isn't how you got here. More likely than not, you used a search engine in hopes of finding valuable true information about how to make money online.

Scientists, like me, consider information to be true if the belief that it is true increases your intelligence – which is to say, your ability to predict and control events in your environment. Conversely, if you believe in the truth of false information, that belief decreases your intelligence. Ouch! That's not what you came here for.

So if you really want to know how to make money online, your first duty is to provide your website visitor with an abundance of useful true information. "How much", you ask? My suggestion, based on the way search engine spiders and human visitors really function, is to create at least twenty web pages averaging more than five hundred words each – before you even attempt to create traffic to your website.

Next, you need to begin building traffic to your website – while you continue to add to its relevant high-quality content. I will cover the traffic-building strategies that work in a separate article. But before you monetize the website, you should have at least twenty visitors a day showing up at your site – preferably a bit more. And by then you should have at least thirty well done pages, each devoted to a separate carefully chosen relevant keyword, properly placed in the page's title meta-tag, description meta-tag, keyword meta-tag, URL, and within the text of the page.

Whew! That sounds like a lot of work – and it is. But if you don't do it, your project is very likely to fail. Which is worse – do it the hard way and succeed – or do it the easy way and fail? You decide.

OK. Let's suppose you accepted my advice that this is how to make money online, and you girded your loins (what ever that means) and did the work. You have thirty pages online that over-deliver what your human and spider visitors are looking for, and you are getting twenty or more visitors a day. NOW your website is ready to be monetized – so we'll talk about the "how" next.

The mechanics of receiving payment
Before you can monetize your website, you will need to set up some accounts. Although it can be done without one, with some difficulty, you should first set up a bank account. This could be a personal account, but this has some disadvantages. You will have to give the bank your social security number, thereby giving the government almost unlimited freedom to access all the financial information in your bank's records.

If you have no objection to this, go ahead and do it. But if you value a certain degree of privacy, you might want to consider going about things differently. For instance, you could, at modest cost, set up a corporation or LLC to receive and disburse funds for you. This can even be done anonymously if you know how.

Since this web page is about how to make money online, rather than about financial privacy, which I discuss elsewhere in this site, I'll just say here that there are many steps that you can take for the sake of that kind of privacy – and let it go at that for now.

Next, in order to have money transferred from your customer's bank account to yours; you will need to be able to receive credit card payments. You could use a merchant account for this purpose, but I prefer using a PayPal account instead. It costs less, is much simpler to set up once you have a bank account, and again affords you a little more privacy than a merchant account.

Does it go without saying that the more ways you can monetize your website the better? This said, you would probably do well to include among your strategies the ability to sell other people's products at the click of a mouse. One good way to do this is with affiliate accounts.

An affiliate account lets you sell other suppliers' information, goods, and services by creating a link on your site that not only takes your visitor to your supplier's sales page, but also tells that supplier that the prospective customer was referred by you. Then if the visitor buys something on that site, you get a commission that can run as high as 75% of the sale price. This can amount to significant money!

One good source of suppliers with whom you can easily affiliate is Clickbank. Here you will find thousands of products that you can sell just by creating a link on your webpage. I should mention too that many suppliers handle their own affiliate accounts without using Clickbank. A Google search for "affiliate account" will lead you to many good sources for you to consider.

While considering how to make money online you should also ask yourself if the theme of your website lends itself to referring visitors to merchants and service providers. If so, you can probably find some that will pay you a commission for referrals acquired from your website. These suppliers are less likely to have affiliate accounts set up (though some will), so you will usually have to approach them individually to negotiate the arrangement.

A form on your website can easily generate an e-mail message to the merchant while simultaneously notifying you of the referral and sending a confirmation message to the person you have referred..

If you plan to sell tangible goods via your website, and you can't, or don't want to, handle the orders yourself, you will need to set up one or more accounts with companies that specialize in order fulfillment. A Google search on the Internet will quickly locate such "fulfillment houses" for you.

Summary
We've covered a lot of ground here – avoiding GRQ scams, getting the website ready to monetize, the mechanics of receiving payment, and setting up various accounts – but we still have a ways to go. While keeping "how to make money online" much in mind, let's move on to discuss what to sell and how.

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