There are tons of ways to make money online. You can make money promoting Clickbank or Amazon products as affiliates, creating your own products to sell, building Adsense sites, doing website flipping, and generating leads for companies. But the problem with us, as human beings, is when we’re presented with too many options, we’ll be unable to act. That’s why most people end up not making a single buck online. I know most of you already have your own website (can be an affiliate site or just an opt-in page) or blog up and running. That’s good. If our motto is Ready, Fire, Aim, you’ve finished the first two steps. And it’s time for the third. Answer these 5 questions to propel yourself directly toward your goal.
1. How Diversified are My Traffic Sources?
I’m a big believer of having a diversified traffic sources, mainly because of how dangerous it is not to have one. If you don’t have a diversified traffic sources, your site will face a sudden death (your traffic turns zero) if anything happen your only traffic source. For example, if you rely on Google SEO as your only traffic source and Google drop you off the search engine, maybe because you’re not following one of their many new rules. What’ll happen to your site then? Died, perhaps. But, if you have multiple traffic sources, you’ll be able to survive this Google wrath. At least until you fixed your problems and be allowed to get back to their search engine. (Learn more: Web Site Traffic Sources)
2. What’s My Long Term Plan?
Without a plan, you’ll be driving with no idea of your destination. Your chance of reaching there is slim to none. Having a road map, on the other hand, allows you to see where you’re going. So, set your income goals, your traffic goals, and other related goals. After that, plan on what you have to do to obtain all of those goals. You might have to spend some money now, e.g. because you’re building a list through PPC (Pay Per Click). But if you set your long term plan skillfully, you’ll earn back all the money you’ve spent and more.
3. What’s My Short Term Income Sources?
It’s good to have a long term plan. But if we don’t start making money online now, we’ll lose the motivation and drive that we have when we first started. The only way to do that is to figure out income sources that allow you to make money even when you have a small traffic stream. You can do some website flipping (the art of buying, improving and selling websites) to start making your first couple of bucks online. Or you can start doing PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing, which allows you to have an instant traffic, and start making money with affiliate products. Think of what’s right for you and start doing it.
4. What’s My Positioning?
Brian Clark of Copyblogger positioned himself as a master copywriter. John Chow positioned himself as a make money blogging expert who love good food and automotive. Frank Kern is a humble internet marketing guru. The first step to becoming an authority in your market is to position yourself right. To do that, you need to carefully craft your online persona. Your online persona is what your prospects, readers, and visitors in your niche want to be. For example, in dating niche, your prospects will most likely want to be an alpha male surrounded by hot women. You need to radiates that exact persona in your writing or voice. Don’t lie though, just add some subtle touches that represent your persona in your writing or video.
5. How Can I Scale This Up?
The final question you need to ask yourself after starting online is, how can you scale up all the efforts that you already put in your site or blog? A lot of time, your business is limited by yourself and your ability. Maybe you’re not good at design, programming, video editing, or writing good articles. If you do the things you’re not good at yourself, you’ll end up spending more time and money than just hiring someone else. You might spend weeks to design your logo when you can ask a designer to do that in a day or two. Meanwhile you can focus on optimizing your PPC campaigns that are making you hundreds of dollars a day. So, choose the most importance tasks to do it yourself, and outsource the rest.
These are the 5 questions to ask yourself after starting online. Feel free to leave comments below or tweet it if you like it.
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This article is really awesome, and the introduction is good! very well said. i just wonder what’s your a.k.a. line..
thanks,
-Nhoel of http://keywordspeak.com
Nhoel´s last blog ..Foods You Can Eat While You’re On Your PC