One of the phrases that you will hear over and over again as you start in the business of making money online is “Take Action”. If your chosen guru has had any experience of training others to succeed, they will probably repeat the phrase many times as you listen to them.

Why is that? Simply because the vast majority of people stepping out into a new life are feeling ever so slightly as if they are out of their comfort zone. That feeling of being adrift in a sea of possibilities allows our natural, human inertia to take over and as a result NOTHING HAPPENS!

I am as guilty of this as everyone else. I dithered over sorting out my first domain name, I tiptoed around the idea of having my own hosting account and even now, I am prevaricating over setting up a proper public company (here in the UK), to get all my legal and financial steps in order.

Now, as I was thinking about this post, I was reminded of what you might call a “life-situation” that happened to me just last week. The year has been pretty harsh so far, with a period of being out of work and my mother dying all at the same time. However, I am finally getting her house sorted out for sale and that is where my blinding insight comes from – well, maybe not blinding, see what you think!

As I was sorting out the flooring in the rather small kitchen, I had to put down some new floor covering (lino as we used to call it back in the Twentieth century).  The trouble was, that I had to buy a wider, longer piece than I needed and then cut it to size, around all of the cupboard and pipes that were already there. Imagine, if you will, a tiny space where the roll could stick out through two doors at one end of the room and then everything getting narrower and narrower towards the other end of the kitchen.

This left me with a strange origami-type problem, with folds and curves in every bit of the new covering (while trying not to crease it).

As I sat there in dismay, I realised that I had to make the first cut with my knife to just make it fit the length of the room. Not so bad to start with, as I could drag a bit down to cover my mistakes if it all went wrong, but as I got to the cupboards, cutting in and out of the shapes around them, I reached a point where there was no way out. I looked at it twice, then folded and cut (and swore slightly as it wasn’t 100% perfect!) and I was committed.

From that point on, I couldn’t turn back without buying a whole new piece of covering and I put everything I had into making it as good a fit as an amateur flooring expert could manage. Now, if I look at it and ask myself if it is a perfect solution to my potential customer’s flooring needs, I would have to say it’s probably only 95% there. However, if I ask myself if it provides a new, clean platform for them to work with when they first move in and if it is better then the existing solution then I have a real success on my hands.

And there in a nutshell is the reality of what we do when we take risks. Try to create something that helps your customers and is better than anything they have ever seen and they will be grateful for your assistance. They may help you to spot holes in your work and potentially your next attempt will be even better as a result…..that’s just called practice.

My next step here is to get you the materials you need to get started as a “newbie” IM expert and my commitment is that I will be out of my comfort zone with a new UK Ltd company before my next post.

So, your turn, get out out there and cut that lino!  Get involved, comment, join me on twitter or facebook, whatever, but make a start today.

The third main route to internet cash is intimately tied in with the last. Affiliate marketing flips the idea of product selling on its head.

Rather than creating your own product and making it available through Clickbank with all the perceived difficulty of making your own material, you could take the products already created by someone else and sell them for a cut of the profit.

Now, Clickbank is not the only game in town here. Amazon is a company that most are familiar with and they run an affiliate program of their own. Interestingly, they will credit you with a share of any sale made whenever you send someone in their direction. So, for example, your link may target a very specific product on Amazon but if the customer then browses the shop and buys other items, you share in the commission for those products as well.

At this point you can also get involved with other affiliate programs that “drop-ship” real, physical items to customers. The main marketplace for finding this kind of program is Commission Junction, where you will find campaigns run by end vendors for hundreds of different kinds of product. Commisssion Junction have a rating system, so be careful to stick  with those with a good reputation here. In fact, the products here are so varied, that you may find exactly what you need to become a full-time online vendor of one particular kind of goods – effectively creating a standard e-commerce website. If that is your passion, CJ may be just what you need.

The biggest complaint about affiliate marketing is not that you can’t make any money, many affiliates prove that wrong every day. No, it is the idea that you do all the hard work of generating traffic and then you give your potential customers names and email addresses straight to the final vendor. For some people this is acceptable, but for others, the idea of building a list of real buyers is the main reason for generating traffic. In this case, going back to having your own products is really the way forwards.

The second main way of making money online is to start to sell your own product. Well, that’s all very well, but what if you don’t have a product to sell?

If you are new to the online world, there is a real temptation here to assume that you need some kind of world-beating physical product. That you need, in some way, to become the next big inventor that makes money from solving a problem that has troubled mankind since the dawn of time.

That is certainly one way to go, but if you are going to get started with this fairly quickly, you probably need to give up that idea and start looking at the world of digital products. The beauty of going digital is the speed of creation and the ease of delivery for your new product and there are several ways that you can get to market with this approach.

By far the most common is the ebook. If you have started looking at internet marketing then you have been exposed by now to countless ebooks on many different areas of this business but it is completely possible to take this approach in other walks of life.

Obviously this is a subject in its own right and I will go into more detail about how you get your ideas into your creation in another post (or maybe even an ebook )

Once you have started thinking about digital products, you could branch out into audio or even video and in some ways these are more highly regarded than even ebooks in their potential. Everyone has different ways of learning, but a good video walkthrough can often help to clarify subjects for anyone watching them. I posted a quick youtube video in an earlier post to show you just how easy it is to get started.

The beauty of all this, is that you don’t even need to have your own subject matter in some cases. Check out the world of PLR (or, Private Label Rights) to see how you could use someone else’s material, possibly in ebook form, and legally add your own name or rework it into audio or video to form your own product.

Once you have your product, you can obviously sell it direct from your own site (maybe controlling this through one of the integrated shopping basket services that exist) or you could opt to make it available through a service such as Clickbank, which, for a fee, will handle all the aspects of payment collection for you. It will also look after your affiliate programs where others will sell your product for you, for a share of the profits.

As always, if you want more details or if you have any comments on this subject, let me know below and use the buttons to bookmark this page. If you have found this page from somewhere else, follow the link for the rest of the articles on the subject of making money online.

We have all heard the internet marketing rallying cry “make money from home” – well I have a twist on that as we look at the first way to use you new, growing skills to make money online.

So, what do I mean by offline business. Well, as I said in my earlier post about you being an internet marketing newbie, your level of internet expertise is probably already advanced compared to those around you.

Everywhere you go in your local neighbourhood, there will be businesses with varying levels of internet presence and if they have any brains at all, they will have heard that internet-based business is still doing OK, even in a financial downturn. So, for some of them, this could make the difference between survival or failure.

What can you do to help (remember this is always about an exchange of value)? At the most basic level, you can show them how fast they can get online. You may want to take them a step further, into setting up a domain and hosting WordPress on it. This can be completely liberating to some people who are still, quite literally, terrified of that first online step!

That sounds like a small thing, but think of the value to that small company, you have turned them into a world player immediately. A morning of tuition is a valuable thing and is completely reproducible over and over again for all your nearby firms. If they have a site already, it is by no means guaranteed that the existing site-builder knows anything about SEO and analytics, so your training goes in that direction instead.

Now step back a bit and think of the consultancy side of things. How about a keyword search for them before you even grab the domain, maybe checking out their competitors as you go? What would that be, maybe a day, maybe 2 days of your time? So, we are already up to 2 or more days (potentially).

As you educate them, the next phase would be to talk through offsite optimisation, link-building etc. Now this could take some time if done properly, maybe you are starting to appear like a valuable asset to your client at this point…there is potential here to turn this deal into a retained service. Choose your monthly rate.

Can you see how this builds up. A lot of this can be outsourced – link building in particular is drudge work for many. If you get this side of your business sorted out, you can become a lot more scalable and take on more (monthly retainer) clients. Before you know it, you have a steady-ish income. Now, get in front of the local board of commerce and run a seminar for 30 people, make it free or cheap and be excellent! Then take orders for more at the end.

It might sound daunting to get in front of small businesses but we all know people in this position in some way. A friend of a friend, the company your wife (or husband) works for, just talk a bit about what you are learning and watch the faces light up. I know this to be true – it’s a story that is only a week old in my own internet marketing career

There is more to this topic, but for now I must press on with the other three methods I mentioned in my last post.

These are meant to be starter articles, to get your mind racing a bit. If you find it useful, throw me a comment or bookmark it using the buttons below. If you are confused by my rambling, leave a comment as well. I can cope!

As you start to look at Internet Marketing as a way to make money online, you will discover that there are several different approaches you can take.  I have summarized these methods here and over the course of the next few posts, I will go into each one in more detail.

• Selling Services
• Selling your own product
• Affiliate marketing
• CPA marketing

The first two look much more like traditional business models, as they rely on some kind of personal involvement as you set them up. When people first come to internet marketing, they will often have this kind of approach in mind, from preconceptions about how business should be done.

The third, Affiliate marketing, could be seen as a traditional selling role, where you get a “cut” of any money made from selling a product and there is much more to be said about this particular subject in another post.

Finally, CPA, or “Cost per Action” is usually a pure information gathering approach – with some selling at times. In this form it is highly suited to an internet-based approach as the “actions” are usually easy to carry out.