How to Make Money Online From Scratch in 2013

More and more people have turned to the Internet to look for ways to make money online.  As the global economy continues to struggle in 2019 and beyond, it has never been more important and urgent than right now for people to have a plan B to bring extra income to their families.

The good news is that there are thousands of ways to make money online.  Some popular ways are: selling on eBay, offering your services online, affiliate marketing, building profitable websites, Google Adsense, flipping profitable domains, creating your own information products, etc.  Get a copy of my Amazon eBook “10 Powerful Ways to Build Your Online Cash machine” for more information.  For a limited time period, you can get it free + win iPad iPhone by joining our mailing list on the right sidebar.

“Which one is good for me?” and “How to start?” are common questions to people who want to make money online.  Even if you have been doing online marketing for some time, you are probably overwhelmed by the information overload.  You are buried into details and how-tos but lose the big picture.  Without a big picture and direction in your mind, you will be easily distracted and discouraged.

In this blog post, I would like to share with you this 7-step action plan that helps you make money online from scratch in 2013.  If you are serious enough to follow through the plan, you can easily double your income in 2013.

Make money online from day one on eBay, Amazon, Craigslist and Kijiji etc.

Selling physical products or information products on these well-established platforms is the easiest way to make  money online quick.  You can sell un-wanted items around your house, such as kid’s toys, clothing or un-opened gifts.  Then you can go to garage sales, moving sales, going-out-of business sales to get great deals.  The selling experience gained is invaluable.  If you use 10 hours a week to build your online business, I suggest you spend about one to two hours a week to post ads on eBay, communicate with your customers and take care of shipping and packaging if you deal with physical products.

Set up a WordPress website.

Though you can make money online without a website, your website is the foundation and asset of you online business.  You need a solid website to communicate with your customers and prospects, capture leads and build your online credibility.  Pick a niche for your website.  It can be something you are passionate about or you love to learn.  You also want to select a couple of affiliate products in that niche to promote on your website. (Read more on how to pick a niche market.)   Register a domain name with Godaddy, point your domain with domain name server and install WordPress using my WordPress checklist.

Content is King.  Create quality content that people love to read.

It is true that Google loves fresh quality content.  Remember, people love it even more.  People come to the Internet for two reasons – looking for answers and looking for solutions.  If you can produce the kind of content that meets the needs, you will easily attract a lot of readers.  It means more traffic to your website, more people joining your mailing list.  It will be much easier for you to make money online.  (Keep reading. . . )

You need to diligently write at least 1-2 blogs per week. If you do not have time to write all by yourself, you can use PLR (private label rights) articles.  I will write another blog post to explain how to use PLR without running into duplicate content issue.  Learn how to write blogs fast and easy.  In order to get your blog posts rank high on Google, it is better to use long tail keywords and follow on-page SEO.  SEOPressor is the best tool for your on-page SEO.

Build your mailing list from the very beginning.

To make money online, you need a list of customers and prospects.  It is important to keep it in mind that the money is in the list.  If you want to automate your effort to make money online and be semi-retired in the 5 years or less, you need a mailing list with a good number of subscribers.  I strongly recommend you start to build your list now.  To build a mailing list, sign up with an auto-responder service provider such as Aweber, iContact, getResponse, etc.  Make sure you place your opt-in form at the prominent position of your website.  Here are 8 simple ways to build your mailing list from scratch.

Use email marketing to follow up with your subscribers.

Building a friendly, trustworthy relationship with people on your list is critical to the success of your online business.  To be more accurate, the money is in your relationship with your list. Email marketing is the best way to communicate and build relationship with your list.  You use a series of pre-written follow-up emails to build a rapport with your list and establish yourself as an expert in your niche market.  Constantly providing valuable information to your readers is the key to successful email marketing.  To learn more about email marketing, get a copy of Yanik Silver’s Million Dollar Emails.  It has a huge collection of money-making emails for you to study.

Make money online by selling affiliate (or your own) products/services to your list.

Use your blogs and emails to educate and pre-sell to your list first.  Once you have done that, selling affiliate products to the subscribers who trust and like you can be fairly easy.  However, you don’t want to sell too much to your list.  Only promote quality products that will benefit your list.  I see too many people including big-name marketers tend to promote anything that is hot on the market.  It will make people on your list feel confused and annoyed.  People buy from you because they trust you.  So don’t take it for granted and lose it.

Drive traffic to your website

Traffic is the lifeblood of your website.  No traffic, no sales.  There are free traffic and paid traffic.  You’d better start with free traffic.  Some of the free traffic sources are SEO marketing, using social media sites to share your content, using guest blogging to bring instant traffic, emailing your list whenever you write a new blog.  Paid traffic can bring you instant targeted traffic on demand if you have enough budgets.  Some of the paid traffic sources are PPC (pay per click), PPV(pay per view), CPA (cost per action), banner ads, solo ads etc. Solo ad is the best for starters.  I will write a separate blog on solo ads. Make sure you test your ad and landing page at a smaller scale before you scale it up.

I try to keep this action plan simple and clear.  To make money online from scratch is not difficult. But you need to take action.  You also need to have a burning desire to take control of your own destiny.  Stay focused and don’t be distracted by shiny objects.  To help you stay focused, read Seth’s advices on how to make money online.    There is no get-rich-quick secret formula.  Work consistently and diligently towards your goals.  Make 2019 your best year ever.

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