What are the best courses on making money online?

I have been perusing and trying a few different ways for the last couple of years.

What I have learned the biggest key to making money online is choosing one strategy, doing better than everyone else and sticking to it long enough to see success.

It’s very easy to give up on something after it didn’t return immediate results. But, if you are persistently prioritising important tasks, it will eventually snowball into success.

Trouble is many of us don’t have the patience, specially in this high pace content consuming world we live in.

If your anything like me, content is like a drug, we rampage through so much content to find gratification it is easy forget the world around us. Even if we do find the information we are looking for, we are often on to the next thing before we even gave it a chance. The next cat video or something like that.

The key is to learn something and give it a fair go. The question I learned I needed to ask was not “how to make money online”.

It was, “how to make money online with as little time and money input as possible”.

Because after trying so many things I learn’t that to make money online you need to be unique and provide value. In order to do that, certain strategies are more effort than others. So if you are just starting out, you are usually time poor, and resources poor.

Generally speaking, building a business always requires an investment of time and money, some more than others.

8 Ways To Learn To Make Money Online

What I learned is you have to be clear on what you want your lifestyle to be like. Because each of the following methods have pro’s and con’s depending on what your hoping to achieve.

It took me a while to figure out that I wanted a business that was lean (more value for customers with fewer resources). And it’s not until the 8th attempt that I found it. Here is what I learned for each strategy:

1. Ecommerceselling your own products (huge investment of time and money to acquire stock, sort out fulfilment perhaps a premises + advertising costs).

   I’ve never tried this personally, but I have built a few sites for customers. They typically have several employees and are defiantly not lean.

   No-resources for this, as I wouldn’t recommend this route for a beginner at all. But on the ecommerce side, you’d use the same platforms recommended in number 2.

2. Ecommerce dropshippingSelling other peoples products. Basically you list products which full-filled directly by the manufacturer, so you don’t need to store any products yourself. (time investment to setup branding, store, build relationships with vendors, finding quality, organising unique packaging etc, but once setup you can run it from anywhere in the world, it’s not completely automated, usually someone has to update order status on the ecommerce backend. And you’ll have to spend 60–70% of your time and money on getting traffic to your store).

   I have tried this, I think I chose the wrong niche, but I was generating a couple of hundred a month. I would like to give it another shot in the future. It required allot of facebook group participation initially to build up traffic and a reputation. But all dooable. I’d say it would take about 1–2 years to establish yourself if you are focusing your efforts on getting traffic, doing something everyday to help promote your store.

   Amazon FBA falls under this blanket as well, along with drop shipping on ebay. Only difference is, the search engine is different.

   In my experience a wordpress.org+ woo commerce is the most flexible and economical tech solution. But Shopify is the simplest most user-friendly solution, but a bit more expensive overall. I have tried both for myself. And have several clients on both platforms.

   You can access the jack-review website to purchase many plugins, courses and software that support your online business.

3. Blogging
   
   If you are great at writing or willing to pay for outsourcing without seeing a ROI for up to 12 month. (Big time/ project management investment to write high quality content – minimum 4 evergreen posts a month – assuming you are relying on SEO traffic), you can expedite the process with paid marketing and content upgrades.

   I do this for a couple of clients, it is working well, but it does take 4–12 months of outputting minimum 4 high quality, in-depth articles a month to start seeing traffic snowball. Once you have organic traffic, you can stack different methods of making money. Adsense, Amazon affiliates, Your own products etc.

   Training: Hands down the best training is Authority Hacker, they do a stack of Free training and an advanced course:

4. Write a book or sell music – This is a great method if you love writing or making music, you can easily self publish, make videos and promote your content. Just make sure it is high quality and unique, because there is SOO much competition out there. And unless you hit the charts, you’ll need to create quite a bit of material for a decent passive income.I self published a few audio tracks with CD Baby, earns me about $50 a month. (Note I am not a musician).

   Training: Definitely immerse yourself in the writing or composing community to find support and learn from others. There are quite a few courses out there.

5. Selling royalty free music, videos, imagesThis is a very attractive option for creatives. Film something once, sell it forever. Unfortunately it is super competitive now, I make about $100 a month with some videos, pictures and audio tracks. But I have a friend who makes about $1000 a month with 4–5 high quality corporate audio tracks on Pond5.com.

   In this game, effort is not proportional to revenue. So be careful what you spend your time on, it needs to be well researched and composed to increase your chances of earning more. You can fall into the trap of the numbers game, produce more content = more sales. That is only true if the content is what people want. So if there is a disconnect between what you want and what the people want, you’ll likely not make many sales. But it is also a bit of a guessing game.

   Training: – Selling Stock Music

• Selling Stock Video For Beginners

6. Making an app / game
   
   Strangely this is now an option for almost anyone. Ideal for graphics designers, animators or creatives in general. You don’t have to be a techie anymore. It is HUGELY competitive, but there are now drag and drop tools that make it very easy to create games. But you need to have a clear business model, well researched topic and awesome graphics skills to pull it off. We live in the world of FREEMIUM games, so you only make money off in-app ads or purchases. You have to be very savvy. And ensure that the 7days after launch the app get’s heaps of glowing reviews while it is in the “Recent” release chart, but after that if it doesn’t it will fall into the abyss.
7. Starting a digital marketing agency.This can be very lucrative, specially when you know how to setup sales funnels, autoresponders and drive traffic through Facebook or Google Adwords. Although this is not for the faint hearted. It is great if you love people, and you are good at navigating difficult situations should they arise. But there is plenty of business out there, the majority of local business owners are warming up to the concept of digital marketing.

   The difficulty here is, you will need to employ or outsource to people to maintain growth and get the client work done, otherwise you’ll quickly become your own bottleneck. It can very quickly turn into a fulltime job, but setup costs are low. Just have to build a website, a funnel with complementary discovery session (phone meeting booking system) and an autoresponder + plus insurance and other business admin expenses. Then drive targeted traffic to it.

   Great for businesses like:
   – Plumbers
   – Electricians
   – Lawyers
   – Realestate agents
   – Etc.

   Most services based businesses.

   I do this currently for a few clients, and within 3 months I was easily turning over 10k+ a month.

   I would say this is by far the easiest to get started and replacing your income. Because many businesses need more business, and if you can help them do that, it is huge!

   Training:
   
   Perhaps the best training I have participated in is the Local Marketing Vault. These guys have heaps of Done For You marketing funnels, ads and scripts. They help you get clients and their community online has over 2000 entrepreneurs all supporting each other. There is SOO much social proof of success, me included. It works if you just follow the steps and take action.

   Having this training upfront pointed me in the quickest path to profit, well worth the investment and paid it’s self off within 2 months.

8. Affiliate marketing
   
   This is my new favourite way to make money online. You don’t need a product or a service or allot of time. Basically all you earn commissions on sales by promoting other peoples products.All you need is:

   1. Somones elses product that have an affiliate program
   2. An email auto responder
   3. Landing page builder
   4. Some time to learn the tools and setup an e-mail capture page
   5. Some time to put together an enticing freebie to exchange someones e-mail address.
   6. And some time to learn free + paid ways to get traffic to your landing page

   The BEST part about this business is

   1. No product or fullfillment
   2. No product support
   3. No Service or customer support
   4. Can be 90–100% automated with free traffic sources
   5. Easily scalable without employing others

   The goal is to capture as many high quality, targeted e-mail addresses of people who give you concent to send them useful e-mails such as a newsletter or a courses which promote other peoples products and you earn a commission.

   But keep in mind, THIS IS NOT SPAM. So if it isn’t a email that you are genuinely providing value. People will quickly begin to ignore you.

   Getting started can be a bit tough. But when done well, you can make a decent living off a relatively small subscriber list. (3000 – 10000).

   I haven’t “replaced” my agency income yet, but well on the way.

   There is a bit of a new trend emerging where other affiliate marketers are helping each other by implementing the Passive Affiliate Side Hustle (PASH) funnel, sometimes called the ASH funnel. This is how I got started.

   It’s basically a free affiliate business in a box, where the landing page and freebie (often called a lead magnet) is given to you. It comes in the form of a FREE 8 step course which teaches you how to set it up and get traffic. You can then whitelabel it, customise it and start your own business within a matter of days teaching other affiliates using the same course.

   It’s free and easy to digest, you just need to invest in the tools to get the landing page and auto responder setup. And traffic sources can be from free and paid. Once set up, you can expect to spend 50%+ of your time getting more traffic to your optin page, while everything else is fairly automated.

   Once you are up and running, you can then pivot to creating an online course or your own digital products to make more profit.

   You can get your own Passive Affiliate Side Hustle (PASH) funnel here.

The Truth About Running A Business Online

People often get caught up on what business to start. Once they start, they feel like they have finally built the business but quickly realise they aren’t making sales.

Ultimately, to see success you need to learn about digital marketing. And your most important task to focus on each day as the founder, is to focus on activities that create sales. You don’t need a marketing degree, but you do need to know your way around PPC (Pay Per Click) and creating value upfront.

Conclusion

I hope that helps. Took me a few tries to figure out exactly what I wanted and believe I found it in the end. Keep trying, don’t give up and be persistent and you’ll find it!