When I first started I had ambitious goals. I wanted to make money online free. Well actually, let me clarify. It wasn’t that I was unwilling to invest any money into an online business. Oh, I certainly was willing to do that. It was more a factor of I didn’t want to get scammed. I came from a long line of failed business opportunities earlier in life. In these business opportunities I was always required to buy something in order to make much more.
For instance, I remember in the late 1990s I signed up with a MLM called Streamline. The pitch was basically that if you bought $60 of vitamins a month, you could turn around and recruit others to buy $60 of vitamins each month. And those people who recruit still others and pretty soon, with all these $60 a month flying around, someone would start to make money. It sounded like a great idea at the time, though I was only a teenager and none too experienced in running a business. But I looked at the diagrams which showed how a tremendous downline could be achieved whereby I would be getting a piece of thousands even hundreds of thousands of people’s $60. I signed up and immediately began receiving vitamins. Of course, I never convinced another person that they should buy overpriced vitamins to get rich and over a few months I lost a few hundred dollars before I gave it up.
When I first started looking into making money online I was determined not to repeat this mistake. This was a mixed blessing. The fact of the matter is that there was not anyone that I trusted who could tell me how to make money online for free. I tried the some forums where they proclaimed that they could teach you how to make money online, but I never really learned anything. And the fact of the matter was that nearly everyone there had a product that they wanted me to buy. So, I had no idea what to do.
But, I was determined to make money with the internet. Finally I bought some ebooks on affiliate marketing and blogging and sat down and read. The lesson I learned was that I had been ripped off yet again. My experience with buying products designed to make you money is that they are terrible. Most of them are, in fact, just funnels to get you to buy more of the author’s products or products he is an affiliate for. So, if you are looking to buy a make money ebook, I would just advise you to save your money.
There are multiple ways to make money and, the fact of the matter is that nearly all of them require some start up capital. There are a couple of exceptions to this rule, but they will not make you money quickly. And they probably will not make you very much money.
The first exception to this rule is Project Payday. With Project Payday you can make money by earning other people affiliate commissions for trying products. These people will then pay you. But, even this is not free. For instance, if you sign up for $50 worth of trials with your credit card you might make $100. So, you need to be willing to spend that $50. As most people would be willing to spend $50 to make $100 you may not have a problem with this. But the problem is that those trials that you signed up for then cost you more money in monthly subscriptions unless you call each vendor and cancel your subscription. Trust me when I say that this then becomes a huge hassle.
The other exception is to write for a site that pays you for drawing visitors to their site. For instance there are sites like Associated Content and even hubpages.com that will pay you for providing them with the content. The way that this works is that you submit articles and then when visitors find your articles and view advertising then you get paid. Actually, in some cases the visitors need to take action such as clicking on an adsense ad. You can make money through a site like this, but very, very few make enough money to live on by doing so. If you want to read up on why it is even harder than it used to be to make money with hubpages you can read through Ben’s archives.
The fact remains that you will almost surely not make money quickly by writing content for other sites. Some people, like Ben, who I mentioned above, were making decent money with such sites. But this was in the heyday of these sites and they were only did so after they had written hundreds of articles. And the people who were making a couple of grand a month knew what they were doing. They knew how to write and promote content that would rank on the search engines. They knew about search engine optimization.
The fact of the matter is that you are going to need to spend some money if you want to make a living online. You do not need to spend tons. In fact you can start by just buying a single domain and hosting. But, trust me here, you are probably going to need to spend considerably before you start seeing any returns. The fact is that making money online requires money. If you want to be a success without spending money you are going to have to invest a lot of time in order to make up for you cheapness.
One of the things that I want to do on this blog is talk about ways to make a good return on your money and time. Because, if you want to be an internet marketer (which is just a fancy name for people who make money online) you are going to learn that time is your most precious commodity.
Still, my advice about ebooks stands. Don’t buy any ebooks (the one exception to this the Griz Ebook compiled by one of his students.) Yeah, actually if you are just starting out and are willing to put in the work to make money online you should just buy this ebook. I recommend it because I know that the strategies work and you will be making decent coin in six months. Grizzly is an asset to the make money online community and I do not make any money by promoting this compilation of his methods.
Ok, so maybe I have given you something to think about and you are thinking about ways to make money online free. I would simply echo my statement that you have to spend money and invest time to make money on the internet. Remember that.
I’m out.