I often end up talking to people about the various ways to make money online and usually people end up asking me how to find out more information about these various ideas. Rather than just directing someone to my website, I thought I’d store all the best bits and useful information in one place so here we go…..
Affiliate Websites
The Idea
Create a website, ideally about something you are interested in. On your website you promote or review products (usually from Amazon). When a visitor clicks on your link and goes to Amazon, then you receive a commission (4 – 8%) of anything they purchase in the next 24 hours.
Recommended Reading
I wrote a guide to making money with websites when I first started, and I think this is still relevant today. I also wrote about setting my websites up in this section
Choosing the right niche is key as well, so this article I wrote provides some good tips
In my opinion the guys at Authority Hacker are the go to resource for getting started in the Internet Marketing world. They have a great course that you can take called ‘The Authority Site System’, their blog is awash with information and the podcast is also a must listen to. They are strictly white hat SEOs and give practical straight talking advice
Niche Site Project is another website for internet marketers, which gives clear instructions on how to set up and run affiliate sites in a way that is not going to get you banned from google. Doug also runs an active Youtube channel which is well worth a visit.
Internet Marketing Tools
Keyword Tool: The goto resource for researching niches, keywords, backlinks and pretty much everything internet marketing related is ahrefs.com it’s not cheap but you should be able to get a free trial from them.
Hosting: I tried a number of different hosting companies but have found the Siteground have the best deal, great support and consistent service.
Writers: You won’t be able to write all of the content for you site yourself so I’d recommend using upwork.com – simply upload a job description, set a price then review the candidates
My Verdict
PROS: Once your site is set up and you have found a niche there is great potential. The beauty is that this can become semi-passive, at least you don’t need to be constantly working on your site. Websites are also selling for multiples of 25x their monthly income, so if you get bored with your niche, you can sell up and move on
CONS: You will need to heavily invest your time up front and rewards won’t be seen for 6 months to a year later at a minimum, which is why a lot of people give up on their sites.
Merch by Amazon
The Idea
You create a design for a Tshirt, upload it into Merch by Amazon, which creates a product listing for you on amazon.com. If your T Shirt sells then you receive a royalty for it, usually between $5 – 10 depending on how you price your Tshirt
Recommended Reading
I gave an overview on this Merch by Amazon article but there is tons of good reading material out there:
www.merchentrepreneur.com – I’d recommend listening to the Elaine’s podcasts to start with
merchinformer.com– is another awesome resource for learning about Merch, and has probably the best tool on the market
Rj Martinez Youtube Channel – Full of great videos to get you started
The best of the Facebook Groups are Merch Life, Merch by Amazon Mastermind and Merch Empire as well as the Merch Minds podcast
Sign up here if you want to get started
Merch by Amazon Tools
At the moment I use:
- upwork.com for my designers
- Chrome extensions:
- Merch Momentum is a weekly newsletter that you can subscribe to for $10 a month and is packed full of useful info
My Verdict
PROS:
- Once you’ve created your T shirt designs the rest is passive as Amazon handles everything for you.
- You can outsource the design work and even the keyword research so this is very scaleable. In the future Amazon will expand to more products and into other countries other than the US.
- This is still really young so I would really recommend that you sign up for an account and get in whilst you still can as people are making good money from this without being an amazing designer
CONS:
- It can take a while to get accepted (although this is improving now) and initially you are limited to the number of slots (different designs) that you can sell, which is frustrating.
- Amazon have recently reduced the royalties as well so you make less each Tshirt sold.
- The market is also fairly saturated with lots and lots of competition, so you really need to niche down to make sales.
- You can not outsource the uploading of your designs as Amazon will likely close your account
- Amazon can close your account and your entire business at any time, as they are very hot on Trademark infringements
eBay Dropshipping
The Idea
List products on eBay with a 40% markup on the retailers price, but optimise the titles so people buy the products. When someone buys the product from you on eBay, you buy the product from the retailer and they send it to the customer…. you never even touch the product
Recommended Reading
I wrote this blog post on eBay dropshipping which gives you a good overview to the techinque and then here are my learnings after 12 months dropshipping
There’s not a huge amount of info about this particular stream of dropshipping on the internet, however, the best thing to get started is take David Wu’s eBay Drop Shipping Guide with No Inventory This was a best selling course a couple of years ago, but the key info is still relevant
This Youtube channel is also a fantastic resource to get you started
Dropshipping Tools
If you’re serious about dropshipping then you’ll need to use a couple of these tools at least:
- SKUgrid which is software to detect when the products you are dropshipping go out of stock at the retailer or change price. It automatically updates your eBay listings. Without this software then you’ll be in a world of pain and find lots of your sales will be for out of stock products, which in turn will lead to negative feedback.
- Title Builder – This is a free tool, that gives you great suggestions to create killer titles for your listings
- Hydralister – This software comes with a fee of about $79 a month so it isn’t cheap, but allows you to take a source URL, add it into the software and then it will automatically create the listing for you in eBay after it has scraped the information from the source listing. It also then automatically links to your SKUgrid listings and will save you heaps of time. The only issue with this software is you need to be a bit careful when adding lots of products and make sure you check your product listings after adding them as it is prone to error… which can be costly.
My Verdict
PROS: Is a great way to get started making money online and with very little investment you can make a good sideline. The nice thing about this model is that you should be able to get sales within a few weeks, and that becomes kind of addictive. This also has the potential to scale out if you have the correct processes in place
CONS:
- If you have a new eBay account you are limited to the number of listings you can add initially, which can be frustrating.
- You have to deal with the general public and customer service issues can really suck the life out of you (returns, missing orders, faulty products, unhappy customers blah blah blah)
- It isn’t particularly passive as you need to check your account daily in case you have orders to process (unless you outsource this)
Matched Betting
The Idea
Online bookmakers run promotions such as “Deposit £50 and get a free £50 bet”. Matched betting uses simple maths and differences in odds, which allow you to extract about 80% of the value of these free bets without any risk.
Recommended Reading
Start with my beginners guide to matched betting which will take you through the basic principles of this technique
I also wrote a series of blog posts on my journey through matched betting in the early days
Matched Betting Blog is a fantastic site, which is free to use, gives information on how to place bets, find offers, has a great calculator and active community
Matched Betting for Free is a Facebook Group with really helpful members who will support you on your journey
Matched Betting Tools
Oddsmonkey.com provides pretty much everything that you need in one single package. Read my review of the service here
Accumulator Generator is some additional software that you can purchase, which helps to find and track your accumulators
My Verdict
PROS: This is a nice way to get started making money online as you need very little investment up front and you can get rewards very quickly.
CONS: This is not at all passive and requires you to spend time researching the best offers and finding matches. There is no longevity in this because your accounts will be limited by bookmakers after a while (as they don’t like you making money).
Also, even this is definitely not gambling, it could lead you into the murkier world!
Social Trading
The Idea
You invest in traders, rather than investments. The idea is that by looking at things like a trader’s attitude to risk, what they are investing in and their percentage gains/loss over time it takes out a lot of the hard work. When you invest in a trader then the software will automatically make the same investments that the trader makes (albeit only a fraction of what they invest in).
Recommended Reading
My beginners guide to social trading should outline the key principles of this model and I also wrote a number of chapters detailing my social trading experience
Social Trading Tools
I didn’t go too far down the social trading path and the only platform I really used was etoro.com
My Verdict
PROS: If you’re really lucky you could make big gains in a short amount of time
CONS: Most likely is that you will lose a large portion of your investment. I wouldn’t recommend this at all as it feels like you have no control over what is happening and you are totally at the mercy of erratic traders!
The Low Hanging System (Print on Demand)
The Idea
You use a Print on Demand company called Gearbubble and create simple text-based designs, which get added to coffee mugs and then sold on Amazon, Etsy and eBay. All you need to do is create the design and Gearbubble integrates with the other platforms and does all the shipping / order fulfilment for you.
Recommended Reading
I haven’t written a huge amount about this apart from this article when I first considered the Low Hanging System but you can also find out all about it on their sales page here
Low Hanging System Tools
- Wordswag is a handy little app that you can use to make designs on your Iphone
- wordmark.it is a tool that allows you to type in a phrase and it will show how this will display using the different fonts you have installed on your phone
- relatedwords.org– is a great help for you to create the titles and descriptions for your listings if you’re struggling for ideas
- Pixabay – is the goto place to get Royalty Free Commercial use images
- Font Bundles – Worth signing up to for their free fonts that they give away
- tess2.uspto.gov – Should be in your bookmarked sites as this is where you goto check for Trademarks
My Verdict
PROS: If you’re waiting to get approved for Merch By Amazon or you are new to print on demand as a concept then I would definitely recommend taking the course
It’s a low cost way for you to get into selling products on Amazon in particular and doesn’t require you to have great design skills. You just need to focus on finding the right niches and creating funny, sweet or cool sayings that you think people will like on their mugs. The only effort on your side is uploading the products into Gearbubble and if they sell, you make about $7 – $10 per mug.
Don’t bother doing the holiday jumpstart programme but the course for $297 is well worth it
CONS:
You’ll need to be good at niche research and create a lot of designs. The approach is low hanging as you’re going for niches that don’t have many competitors, but that also means you need to create a lot of designs. The approach is more like throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks rather than any scientific approach to it. The other downside is that 80% of the sales comes during Q4 so if you’re doing this then you want to get up and running a long time before that or else it gets stressful.
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