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My Easiest Money Making Ideas

March 13th, 2008 | by Scott

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After my last few posts of basically saying the biggest obstacle most people face is themselves when it comes to making money online I’ve received a few messages from folks asking for my best money making ideas for someone just starting out.

Normally I’d take that question and break it apart, then turn it into more questions you should ask yourself to determine what’s best for you because that’s ultimately the way to launch something that has a chance to be successful and personally rewarding for you.

However, I remember when I was first starting out a dozen years ago and I realize how great it would have been if anyone would have just said “do this or this and you’ll make some money” in plain English. I remember how the hardest hurdle seemed to be finding that first working method so that you can justify the efforts to keep going forward.

I’m going to do that here, and I’m going to do it in 2 different ways because there’s really 2 approaches to making money online for anyone who doesn’t have their own product or service (which I’m assuming you don’t at this point). The first is to create content and support it with advertising revenue, and the second is via affiliate marketing. So, I’m going to lay out the easiest ways to do both of these that I know of.

The Advertising Supported Content Method

By far the easiest way to make money online is to build a web site or blog with interesting content so that people will come to visit, and then put contextual advertising (like Google AdSense or Yahoo! Publisher Network ads) on your pages.

Even if you create poorly written content and place the advertising blocks in the worst positions on your pages you’ll still get a few clicks from visitors and those clicks are money in your pocket.

If you create good content and position the advertising wisely you can get a lot of clicks from your visitors and earn a decent amount of money from them.

Like everything else there are lots of nuanced things you can do to improve your earnings from this method once you have it up and running, and I’m not going into those in this posting, but the key point is that if you just do it…just get some pages online with the advertising blocks in them and then build traffic to the pages you will make money.

That will be something you can easily start and build from.

The Easiest Affiliate Marketing

While advertising supported content will make you money, and despite the fact that some people make really good money with that method (they usually deal in bulk quantities of web sites with tens of thousands of pages each), in my opinion it is easier to make more money from affiliate marketing.

However, not everybody is able to promote and pre-sell affiliate products, especially when first starting out. Still, there are some affiliate programs that don’t require any selling at all to make money with.

How about this, instead of selling (or pre-selling) some product or service, do you think you could give stuff away for free to people?

Among the various affiliate networks (like Commission Junction as one example) there are always companies who are trying to build their brand and customer leads base, and those companies run affiliate offers that let you promote free trial or sample offers.

Sometimes the customer has to order the free sample and pay just the shipping for you to earn a commission, and sometimes its just a matter of the customer has to submit and verify their email address for you to earn the commission.

I’ve seen these types of offers paying anywhere from $1 per lead (for email submissions and verifications) up to $50 per lead (for free sample with shipping orders).

Granted there’s always a ton of affiliate competition with these programs. That makes sense since it’s easier than selling or pre-selling products. But even still, I don’t care how much competition there is, if you can’t give stuff away for free then you don’t belong in affiliate marketing. Stick with advertising supported content or resign yourself to not making money online.

I don’t mean for that to sound as harsh as it does. The truth is I believe you (or anyone) can give stuff away for free. Just figure out who would need the free product you’re promoting, find out where large groups of those people congregate online, and get your free offer out in-front of them.

Be just a little bit creative and you can do really well with affiliate marketing, and you don’t need to buy any $7 eBook Reports or thousand dollar training courses to get started.

Here’s an example of being creative to give you an idea of what I mean. Heather–an associate I often work with–was promoting an offer for some skin cream a while back. It was one of the free sample deals where the customer had to pay just for the shipping to get a month supply of the cream for free, and Heather would earn a commission (I don’t know how much but I’m guessing a few dollars per) from each order.

Anyway, Heather knew the target market for the offer would be women so she began visiting shopping web sites aimed towards women, like online Lingerie stores for example. Whenever she found one with an email list or newsletter for customers to sign up for she would contact the site owner and ask if she could purchase a small advertisement in their next mailing.

Some said “no”, and some wanted too much money for the ads, but several agreed at reasonable rates. So Heather was able to get her free sample offer in-front of thousands of targeted consumers with just a little effort and cost.

The important part of this was that these weren’t just women, they were consumers. They belonged to the email lists of shopping web sites, so it was safe to assume the majority of them were willing to make purchases online. That alone justified paying a fair price for the advertising spots because it’s a safe bet that targeted consumers will investigate a deal offered to them, especially when it’s from a trusted source such as an email list they already belong to.

I spoke with Heather about this promotion after she had finished it, and I want to recap exactly what she did for you so it’s clear:
1. She found an offer that paid her a commission for free give aways
2. She researched online shopping sites that targeted the market her offering would appeal to
3. She paid reasonable rates to advertise to the email lists of some of those sites

And equally important, here’s what Heather didn’t do:
1. Create a web site of her own for the promotion (she sent consumers straight to the order page of the offer)
2. Anything SPAMMY or black-hat
3. Waste time

And I mean it when I say she didn’t waste time. I’ve said it over and over here on this blog, you have to just take action.

When I spoke to Heather after the promotion she told me from start to finish she had invested about 30 hours into the whole thing. Most of that on finding targeted sites with email lists and in communications with those site owners. That’s less than 4 days of work, and her total earnings from it were over $2,000.00

I didn’t get an exact dollar amount of what she spent on the advertising, all she told me was “a few hundred bucks”. But lets say she actually spent a thousand dollars on it. That would mean she doubled her money, or if you break it down as a salary she made at-least a thousand dollars profit for less than 4 days of work time. Not too bad if you ask me.

That’s being wisely creative with affiliate marketing, and when you can couple creative marketing with an attractive offering (such as free give aways, because who doesn’t like free stuff?) it’s very easy to make money from.

This post is already longer than I had intended, but I hope it gives you some ideas and motivates you to stop procrastinating and take action. Whether you just want to earn a little extra “beer money” each week, or want to build an online business it’s going to start with taking the first step and earning your first profits.

I’ve just given you a couple of the easiest money making ideas I know of, the rest is up to you.

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