Monday, June 12, 2006

Make Money Online: The Small Business Side (Part I)

Blogspot royally annoyed me last week! For some stupid reason, the website would be down or it would come up with a bunch of broken links or it would just freeze on me! By Thursday, I gave up with posts for the week. I'm back now!...

One big point that everyone seems to miss about making money online is that is really and truly is, by definition, a small business. When I first started doing paid surveys, I approached it as a "hobby". Then I got more adventageous and started making money through affiliate marketing and Adsense. At the beginning, I continued to approach it as a "hobby", like the paid surveys. I was not willing to invest the time or money into building my affiliate marketing campaigns. Not much really came from it, either. I did not know what I was doing nor was I ready to put any money into it. I became frustrated and finally bought my first eBook on how to do it. That cost about $40.

This taught me to focus on Blogging and SEO at first (because they were CHEAP!). Believe it or not, I actually DID get some sales. Not many and nothing reliable at all, but it was something. That prompted me to start spending money all over the place: PPC's, Domain Names, Web Hosting, Autoresponders, Ads, more eBooks, etc. Now here is where my warning to everyone comes into place:

I started throwing money around (a few $100 in this case) and it gained me absolutely NOTHING!

But the problem was not what I was buying, but rather, what I was trying to do. All of the things listed above, in my opinion, ARE NEEDED if you really want to play this game. The problem was that I did not have a good PLAN. And this ties back into the original point of the article:

Affiliate Marketing IS a small business that requires both resources and planning to be successful.

Once I figured this out, things began falling into place and my negative income was slowly becoming positive once again. You do not need a marketing or economics degree to figure this out, either. How much are you willing to pay per Sale? Per Click? Per Lead? And prior to even figuring this out, are you really ready and educated on affiliate marketing and Adsense to play this game? My first recommendation is to buy an eBook to learn the ropes and play with blogging and free traffic until you understand how online marketing works. We'll talk about planning and resources another day!