12 Highly Effective Ways to Make Money Online

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Click on the R to check out 12 Highly Effective Ways to Make Money Online!

1. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a fantastic way to get started making money online. You can get started with it right away. Essentially, affiliate marketing works like this:

● You promote an online product or service created by someone else.
● If some purchases a product or service through your promotion, you get a commission or portion of the sale. Typically, you promote the online product through a unique link that is connected to you. That way, the company knows that the sale came through your promotion.

You might be thinking, This sounds great, but how exactly do I promote these products? There are numerous ways to promote the products. Your imagination only limits you.

You can:

● Write reviews of products on your blog and include affiliate links
● Have banner ads on your website promoting the products
● Post affiliate links on social media
● Promote products to your email list

For example, you could write a blog post about the top 10 hiking shoes.
Or you could have a banner ad featuring hiking shoes on your website.
Or you could post links to deals on hiking shoes on Facebook or Twitter. Or you could let your email list know about a great deal on hiking shoes.

If you have an audience, whether that be on social media or through a website, you have the opportunity to make money through affiliate marketing. One of the reasons affiliate marketing is such a great way to make money online is that you don’t have to create any products.

You’re simply selling what someone else already created. You’re a promoter, and if someone purchases through your promotion, you make money. Creating your own products can be tremendously difficult, and affiliate marketing removes that difficulty from the equation.

The best affiliate marketers can make thousands of dollars each month through their efforts.

2. Sell Products Online

There are numerous ways to sell products online (even if you don’t manufacture one yourself). Before you can sell products online, you’ll need a website on which to sell them. If you don’t want to set up your eCommerce store, you can easily sell products on:

● eBay
● Amazon
● Etsy
● Poshmark
● Craigslist
● And many others

If you want to sell products on your website, you’ll need to go one step further and create an eCommerce website on which you can list your products and accept payments.

3. Sell Your Services on a Freelance Basis

There’s a good chance that you have
certain skills that you can sell online on a
freelance basis.
For example, are you a…
● Designer
● Writer
● Translator
● Assistant
● Bookkeeper
SEO Expert
● Voiceover Artist
● Audio Engineer
● And more
If so, then you can sell your services
online. There are literally hundreds of
thousands of businesses that need these
services and you can make good money
working for them. 

4. Become an Online Coach

This is somewhat similar to freelancing but with a bit of a different flavor. If you have significant knowledge in a particular industry or area of expertise, you can package your knowledge and sell it.

In other words, you’re selling your expertise as opposed to a product or service.

What sort of coach could you become? The options are endless.
You could be a:
● Health coach
● Life coach
● Music/vocal coach
● Finances coach
● Executive coach
● Sales coach

There are also several ways to package coaching services. You can offer:

1-on-1 coaching
Group coaching
● A course with accompanying coaching support
● Or other formats that would work for your field

5. Create Online Courses

Online courses are a fantastic way to monetize knowledge that you already have. And unlike coaching, which requires regular meetings with a small number of clients, you can sell your course to hundreds, if not thousands of people. The good news is that you can create a course around almost any subject and find people to purchase it.

For example, you can find courses on many topics, such as:

● Losing weight
● Learning to play the piano
● Painting
● Singing
● Creating a budget
● Investing in stocks
● Running
● Tennis

The list goes on and on.

To create a course, you need a platform to distribute it. There are many ways to create and distribute a course:

● You can create an email course in which all the lessons are delivered via email.
● You can build a course that’s primarily text-based and involves more reading.
● You can create a video course where you film yourself teaching.
● You can create a hybrid text/video course that features a variety of resources. You need a method for getting your lessons into the hands of your eager students.

Several platforms make it very easy to create courses, enroll students, and accept payments, such as:

● Teachable
Thinkific
● Kajabi
● TalentLMS

These platforms allow you to upload a variety of materials, including video, audio, and text.

One way to get an excellent feel for what a course should look like is to take a few courses yourself. Udemy offers thousands of classes for relatively low prices. Consider taking a few lessons in your niche for ideas about what to include in your course.

 

6. Create YouTube Videos

7. Write and Sell a Book

8. Start a Blog

9. Become a Virtual Assistant

10. Tutor People in English

11. Sell Stock Photos

12. Do Odd Jobs on TaskRabbit

Systems over Goals

You’ve probably been told that to be productive; you should set goals. Big goals. S.M.A.R.T. goals. Stretch goals. The thinking goes that to achieve anything meaningful, you need to turn it into a goal. Well… maybe. While goals can be beneficial, they aren’t always ideal.

The Problem with Goals

Goals have one big problem: they have a termination point. In other words, you’re not successful until you’ve reached your goal, and until you’ve reached the goal, you might feel like:

● You’re spinning your wheels, not going anywhere.
● You’re a failure.
● You haven’t achieved anything since the goal seems so distant.

Measuring success this way can make you feel defeated, especially if you have big, ambitious goals. For example, if you want to own a Fortune 500 company, nothing you do until you reach that goal will make you feel like you’re succeeding. You may be making incredible strides in your business, but they will fall flat compared to your hard-to-achieve goal.

Since goals have an “end,” you never feel like a success until you’ve achieved your goal. And even when you achieve your goal, you have to start all over again with the next goal. And the reality is, you might not even know what the “next” goal should be. So, you feel aimless. You know you should be seeking to accomplish something, but you’re not sure what that something should be. Even worse, you might feel like since you already accomplished your goal, you can go back to your old habits instead of pushing and growing. You lose all the forward progress that you made. It’s a setup to make you feel like a consistent failure.

The Power of Systems

There is another, better way. They’re called systems. Systems allow you to:
● Make progress on your goals every single day
● Guarantee your success
● Help you reach your milestones
● Avoid the feeling that you’re just spinning your wheels

 

goals-list

What are Systems?

Scott Adams, who you may know as the author of the famous Dilbert cartoons, wrote about systems in his book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. He explained the difference between systems and goals like this: “Losing ten pounds may be a goal, while the system is learning to eat right.”

Here’s another example. Suppose your goal is to clean the house from top to bottom. You’ve spent the whole day cleaning, and you momentarily feel satisfied with what you’ve done. However, if you have no system in place, your home will quickly go into disarray shortly after that. After a few days…the dishes will overwhelm the sink, the laundry will pile up, and the floors will be a mess.

A system, on the other hand, would be a cleaning routine. Instead of cleaning the entire house in one day, you train yourself to do small tasks each day. The result is a house that’s tidy for more than a few hours. Here’s a business example:

● Goal: Generate $50,000 in revenue over the next two months.
● System: Every morning, you make three cold calls (or however many is necessary) to potential new customers.

The system ensures that you reach the end result. Using a system doesn’t mean that you have no goals. It just means that you start to focus more on the process than the final destination.

So, What’s Wrong with Goals?

 

You’ve probably been told your whole life to set lofty goals and work hard to achieve them. On its face, there’s nothing wrong with having goals. Goals can inspire, motivate, and challenge us. They give us something to look forward to and a reason to continue striving. But goals can also be rigid and unmoving.

 

Let’s imagine you’ve set a firm goal for your company. You would like to make X amount of sales by a specific date. You hustle to make those sales. You push your employees to do the same. You may make a lot of sales. But what happens when you don’t reach your goal amount? Chances are… you’ll feel like a failure. All the sales that you did make won’t bring you joy because you didn’t sell enough. You’ll feel unproductive, and you may even want to quit. What’s unfortunate about this scenario is that you may have missed many opportunities along the way. Bottom line? Being overly focused on a distant goal can easily give you tunnel vision. Your determination to complete a singular goal may have kept you from taking the time to develop a new product that could be sold for twice as much.

 

Scott Adams writes, “…if you focus on one particular goal, your odds of achieving it are better than if you have no goal. But you also miss out on opportunities that might have been far better than your goal…You are less likely to miss one opportunity with a system because you were too focused on another.

 

With a system, you are constantly scanning for any opportunity.”

Goals Limit Your Threshold for Happiness

 

The big issue with goals is that you’re so narrowed in on a future time that you aren’t happy until you hit that mark. Once you reach a goal:

 

  • The feeling of happiness will likely fade quickly.
  • You’ll then feel the need to achieve the next goal and the next.
  • You’re continually chasing something that is, at its best, fleeting.

 

Productivity expert James Clear has also written extensively about systems versus goals. In his book, Atomic Habits, he explains: “When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running. And a system can be successful in many different forms, not just the one you first envision.”

What Happens When You Reach Your Goal?

 

You may also realize that you have nothing else to work towards once you’ve achieved a specific goal. For example, let’s suppose you set a personal goal to run a marathon. To achieve your goal:

 

  • You forced yourself to go to the gym four times a week.
  • You went running even though you didn’t feel like it.
  • You cut things out of your diet even though you didn’t want to.

 

You worked hard, but you didn’t enjoy the process that got you there. Once you met your goal, you couldn’t stand the thought of going back to that regimented schedule. Pretty soon, you’ve abandoned your running routine, and you’ve gone back to your former lifestyle. Your muscles soften, you put the weight back on, and you can’t stand to look at your running shoes.

 

What went wrong? You were focused on the goal, but the system was unbearable. You probably started training for a marathon because you wanted to be healthier and stronger. Scott Adams explains that while you can set a goal to exercise three to four times a week on a rigid schedule if you’re not enjoying the exercise, there’s a much higher risk that you’re going to give it up. You may do it for a time, but in the long run, you’ll probably lack the willpower to continue because it feels like a punishment. Instead, he suggests choosing to be active each day to a level that feels good. In this scenario:

 

  • You’re training yourself that being active is positive.
  • You’re going to get a psychological lift from the exercise.
  • You’re slowly training your body and mind to enjoy being active as opposed to hating it.

 

You’ll naturally want to challenge yourself as you continue to enjoy being active more. Your original activity level may start with short, slow walks, but you may eventually find that you like running as well. You’ll do so because you want to and not because you’re forcing yourself.

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How Do Systems Help Entrepreneurs?

 

First and foremost, systems are much more flexible than goals. If you have a type-A personality, this shift may make you feel a little uncomfortable at first. It may feel like you’re giving up control by not focusing so much energy on a future outcome. The big question you have to ask yourself is: What happens when you shift your focus from a concrete goal to the process that gets you there? If you’re focused on the system, does that mean you’re abandoning your goals and wandering?

 

The short answer is: no. Here’s why. Suppose a sports coach chooses to focus on picking great players, developing incredible plays, and creating effective practice routines instead of winning. What would be the result? They’ll probably have a winning team. James Clear writes: “Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers…The goal had always been there.

 

It was when they implemented a system of continuous minor improvements that they achieved a different outcome.” To be successful, it’s vital to understand what is working and what isn’t working in your process. Think about the things in your system that are working and the things that are not.

What does your hiring process look like?

 

  • Do you have strong employees that fit your vision?
  • If not, what practices can you change to hire better employees?

 

Think about your marketing campaign and the system that drives it.

 

  • Is it working?
  • What changes can you implement in your system to reach more customers and drive more business? Now think about your products or services and the systems you have in place to support them.
  • What can you do to improve your product?
  • How can you streamline the process and make things more efficient?
  • Are your products or services testing well?
  • If not, what can you do to improve them?

 

These minor, day-to-day improvements will make you feel successful, fulfilled, and productive. Learning how to push through daily struggles will bring you confidence and happiness in a way that hard-to-reach goals never will. A system teaches you how to become better at what you do, and it dramatically develops your skill level. If something isn’t working well, you have the flexibility to change it and move on. You still have the skills you developed, but you can now use them in a new direction. That’s the gift of a system.

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Top 10 Best Practices for SEO Success

 

You can do plenty of things to get higher search engine rankings, from page optimization on your website to keyword research, building backlinks, and more. Even though the search engine algorithms that determine rankings change often, there are still tried and true SEO methods proven to help you rise higher in the rankings throughout these changes. Here are the Top 10 best practices for SEO success:

1. Ensure that your website is secure.

Most people today are concerned with the privacy and security of the websites that they visit. Consequently, this is also a crucial ranking factor in search engines. A secure website will consistently rank higher than one that isn’t secure.

Talk with your web host or web manager about the type of security that is most appropriate for your website. A security certificate will ensure that your content is delivered by SSL (secure socket layer). With SSL, your website will start with an “https://” instead of “http://,” and the little lock icon will show up next to the web address in many browsers.

2. Add your primary keyword early into the content.

Including your keyword early on lets the search engines know what your content is about.

Additionally, sprinkle the main keyword throughout the rest of your content too. This will tell the search engines that this term is essential, which will help you rank well for this term.

3. Use unique titles, descriptions, and content.

This lets the search engines know that your content is original material and can add further knowledge to the other information that can already be found on the internet about your topic.

4. Optimize your title tag for SEO.

Always include your main keyword in the title tag for your website, and if possible, put it at the start of the title. This will give priority to your keyword.

5. Ensure that your website loads quickly.

It would be best if you made your website load as quickly as possible. Especially with the advent of smartphones, loading time is an essential ranking factor in search engines.

Compress the size of images, remove any unneeded code, and consider using a content delivery network (CDN). If you use a CDN, your website will serve images and other media from servers that are close to your audience, thus cutting down on the loading time. Many web hosts now use CDNs to deliver content for their clients’ websites.

Talk with your web host or your web manager about this priority. If you have a WordPress site, many plugins help you speed up the loading time for your website.

6. Optimize any images.

You can do this by giving the filenames descriptive names. Using image alt text is also recommended so that the search engines can understand what images are present on your website. Properly optimized images can boost your website rank.

7. Use internal linking.

The key here is to link to your main pages. So, any smaller pages can link to a larger, authoritative piece. This will help to increase the rank of the more important page.

Try to use the main keyword, or a variation of it, in your internal links to ensure that the search engines know what the page is about.

8.Create amazing content.

Write high-quality content that answers questions that your readers might have about your topic. If you can answer a question in less than 1,000 words, that is fine. However, it’s worth noting that it’s essential to be thorough with any answer, so you may want to write considerably more than this amount. Many of the highest-ranking pages include longer, authoritative content.

9.Build backlinks to your website.

Despite what you may have read online that backlinks are no longer necessary, please note that backlinks, when done correctly, are still vital. They show the search engines that your content is valuable enough for other web admins to link to. When you first start your website, you may want to go slow when building backlinks.

After a few months, you’ll be able to ramp up your efforts. With this strategy, you want to obtain links from other important websites in this field. Links from low-quality websites that accept advertising from anyone to any website are likely to hurt your search engine rankings.

10. Look at the user experience.

If you find that visitors are struggling to navigate your website or have a high bounce rate, when people leave your website after just a short time, take a close look at your user experience. Perhaps your visitors aren’t finding the answers they’re looking for, or maybe your website is broken somehow. See what you can do to improve the overall experience of your visitors.

Following these Top 10 SEO best practices will enable you to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. The higher you rank, the more traffic you should be able to achieve, and ultimately the more sales you will make.

17. Beginner’s Guides

These posts are “how-to” posts but explicitly geared toward beginners. They teach newbies in your industry valuable insights and skills that they
need to learn anyway.

Examples of this type of post include:

● A Beginner’s Guide To Lead Generation
● A Newbie’s Guide To Running A Marathon
● A Beginner’s Guide To Email Marketing
● A Beginner’s Guide To Social Media

Consider these important items when writing these guides:

1. Make your guide in-depth but not overly technical. You want to cover the subject thoroughly without overwhelming the beginner with a lot of technical terms or industry jargon. Try to keep the posts straightforward, to the point, and relatively easy to understand.

2. Use a variety of media, like screenshots and videos, to clarify your points. Remember, you’re writing to beginners, and people learn in a variety of ways. Some are more visual learners, while others learn better from the text. Try to cater to all types of learners in your posts.

When done well, beginner’s guides can be an incredibly valuable resource to those just getting started in your industry. They can also establish you as an expert in your industry – someone that beginners can look to for advice.

In some ways, these beginner’s guides allow you to mentor newbies from a distance, which can be incredibly rewarding.

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16. Top Takeaways

Top takeaways posts are blog posts where you write about your top takeaways from something, such as a book, podcast, conference, movie, or other items.

These posts allow you to both recommend resources to your readers and show them why you recommend them.

For example, let’s say you read a great biography about Steve Jobs:

● You could write a blog post entitled “9 Things I Learned From The Life Of Steve Jobs”.

● In this post, you would not only recommend the biography itself, but you would also highlight poignant lessons you learned while reading the book.

● You could talk about all the different ways that Steve Jobs inspired you to be a better person.

You’re providing a valuable resource to your readers by creating this sort of blog post. First, you’re introducing them to outstanding resources that can truly benefit their lives. This, in and of itself, is an excellent service. With so many resources to choose from, it can be hard to know where to get started.

But that’s not all. You’re also helping them learn important lessons from those resources that they might not learn otherwise.

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15. Frequently Asked Questions

There are probably specific questions that come up again and again in your business. These are the questions that people email you or that consistently come up when you host live events. Inevitably, you end up repeating yourself as you answer these questions again and again.

Instead of answering the same questions over and over, why not create a Frequently Asked Questions blog post in which you give in-depth, definitive answers to the questions?

When creating your FAQ blog post, try to be thorough and answer as many questions as possible.

Your goal is to create a resource to which you can send people again and again. A document that will stand the test of time. When they email you with a question, you want to say, “Here’s a document I created in which I answer that question.”

If you don’t feel like creating one long FAQ document, you could write a series of blog posts to answer one commonly asked question in each post. That way, when someone asks a specific problem, you can point them to a particular post.

However you do it, be sure to answer the questions in as much detail possible. You don’t want people sending you follow up emails with more questions after they read your post. You want to try to answer each question in as much depth as possible.

Over time, you can add to your FAQ post as people ask more questions. It can be a “living document” of sorts, which continues to grow, change, and evolve.

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