How Much Money Can I Make Online?
You need to ask; “how much money can I make online” before you jump in. There is no point in starting with an online business if there is no hope of supporting yourself, and your family in a reasonable amount of time. This is an important question.
However, the answers depends on which type of business you work on. Even then, those who work harder and wiser will succeed faster and better than others. You will have to settle for ballpark figures. But then, that is true for any offline job or business too.
I have five distinct types of online businesses to offer. I’ll list them here, and describe your financial possibilities in more detail in the next five sections;
How Much Money Can I Make Online by:
1. Promoting Affiliate Products – Advertising & Commissions
2. Promoting MLM products and Company – Recruiting
3. eCommerce – Drop-shipping
4. Virtual Assistant Services
5. Making Products to Sell
This is a long article, describing each types of business in more detail. When you get to the end you will agree with me that the possibilities are enormous! Endless!
It is a matter of deciding where you fit in, learning some basic skills and getting to work. Some multi-taskers will likely take on more than one business idea. Some will try one, drop it, try another, and so on - until they find their niche. Your niche is the work that is just your size and shape, where you feel happy and productive.
Fortunately these business types are fairly fluid and you can easily slip from one into another. You may even find that your past experiences give you extra wisdom and insights for the next one you take on.
Scenario 1: Promoting Affiliate Products - Advertising & Commissions
If you plan to promote and market affiliate products, and if you do this only in the conventional way of building a website or blog, and plastering affiliate banners and links over it - then you can expect peanuts. Occasionally, you will get a commission check but they will come as little surprises to you.
On the other hand, if you learn some good marketing skills, particularly attraction marketing with a good social media component, you can do very well. Especially, if you become bold enough to ASK for a sale.
I know of a couple who were as good as dead-broke when they learned about attraction marketing. They choose blogging and social media as their methods. About a year later they were making 5 and 6 figure incomes each month, and they are now able to travel and go where they please. But they take both their affiliate marketing and their mentoring work seriously.
If you should choose to do this through the SBI Solo web business system, you will find many helps provided, and excellent coaching to develop your long-term web business. Here, there are people who have worked full-time at their site for a year or so, and then begin to make $10,000 to $30,000 per year. Then they go up from there. But it is NOT a handout; you need to work hard especially in the beginning.
Now-a-days a true affiliate site is not doing as well as it did 10-15 years ago. So I would recommend including some of your own products on the site, especially if your products are unique and appeal to your target market. These could be more detailed e-books about an aspect of your niche market’s key interest, a summary of what you already have on your site - so free info just repackaged. Your product could be software, an app for their mobile device (you might want to sub-contract that), it might be a block of your time for mentoring, or some other service. Maybe a series of training videos? There are so many options here!
One thing the SBI Action Guide stresses is to research your niche topic very carefully and not make it too broad. I have many interests, so thought I could easily handle a broader topic; however, I’ve discovered the tighter the niche the faster and better you can succeed. The broader field will take much longer to become viable.
Scenario 2: Promoting MLM products and Company - Recruiting
If you will be promoting a Multi-Level-Marketing company’s products and business opportunity you will need to win over people, help them to trust you, and do as you train and guide them to do. Then, after a while you can relax because you get a percentage of the business volume and recruits of your downline. Again, you will need to be diligent and work at this full-time to reach such a level of success.
Your question, How much money can I make online?” is most hard to answer in this arena, Some charm their way to the top fast. Others conscientiously follow all the training and still fall on their faces. Some have blamed how the MLMs are set up so the company gains wealth, and only a few rise to the top. Some have discretely applied unique online techniques and done well, but struggle with badly designed compensation plans.
I am signed up with one health company that says that on average distributors who take their opportunity seriously, become millionaires in five years. It is considered one of the best in the world. I really like some of their products! But I have not had the time to invest to reach that goal. At least not yet. Since they do not charge for joining, I feel I can maintain my membership and gradually grow to that level, even if it takes me quite a bit more than five years.
But this should reinforce my point; how much money can I earn online? The more diligently I work at this online business the more income I (or you) will make.
I discovered an amazing number of people who were shooting to the top of their MLM’s success ladder by using the ideas a company provides training for. Some of them are all about using social media to send people to your link and get them interested in your company and it’s products. Some train in highly effective blogging and presentations of videos and webinars to show you know your marketing skills. Others are excited about mailing lists as THE KEY ingredient to every method! There are dozens of training videos and there are the weekly webinars where the top marketers share their tips and secret methods.
MLM does not need to be the dirty word some have come to think it to be. It’s all a matter of finding the right market for those products and opportunity. Then show them how you are succeeding.Scenario 3: eCommerce - Drop-shipping
You don’t HAVE to focus on advertising or recruiting others. Some people find that so hard they turn away from online businesses totally thinking that’s all there is. No, there is a business model that depends only on your skill in detailed actions like choosing products, listing them, and raking in your sales money. Well, some promotion could help.
Recruiting is an option in this business model, but it is not required. You can do quite well all by yourself, selling an average of $500 to $1000 worth of products using online e-stores that are already set up, such as eBay, Amazon, Bonanza, and even set up your own shops, using software like Shopify. In this model you don’t have to handle any products, or pack or ship in anyway. There is a system whereby you can find an item at one online store for a lower price, and go sell it on another one for a higher price, and then go back to the first site, buy it and have it shipped to your customer. That is called drop-shipping.
Another way to make money online, is to buy up hot items in cheap discount stores and ship them in to amazon to sell at several times your cost price! You just need the amazon app on your smart phone.
There are many people buying online now. The numbers are doubling and tripling every few months!
Some people have been quietly doing this on their own for years, but one company has a whiz of a geek as one of the owners. He has designed software that will automate a lot of this work for you. There are people who literally spend only an hour or two a day at this work, and are drawing in incomes of $500 to $1000 a month. (Or, at the second level, you make $1000 to 5000 a month quite easily). Those that do this full-time, are new millionaires in less than a year!
(Naturally, as they show their friends and family members what they are doing, they find that recruiting comes quite easily after all, and they are welcome to add that to their income streams whenever they wish).
All the above eCommerce options are available through one company, but it has been bought by a larger company, and is now going run an even better eCommerce system, where you no longer have to buy products, or make payments on their unique software. All this makes this business much easier to run with hardly anything for investment.
Scenario 4: Virtual Assistant Services
If you have skills for doing things online and don’t mind connecting with people by email or text messages, there are plenty of people who will pay you to do things for them. Either, because they don’t have time, or they don’t know how, or they can afford to hire someone to do what they consider grunt-work.
But even in this wide field of services, you can specialize in many ways. (By the way, Virtual Assistant is the new code word for secretary or administrative assistant, except that a Virtual Assistant works from his or her own home or office, and keeps in touch with clients via the internet. Most of the services they offer are online too, such as posting ads, managing their social media accounts, designing logos and images, or editing and formatting their books that the client wants to publish.
The name changes a bit with some roles. You can be a Personal Shopper, who researches online for certain gift ideas, such as when a corporation wants to give awards or gifts to their employees. Or, you could be shopping online for clothes and even groceries, for someone who is handicapped and cannot get out, or someone who is so absorbed in their business that they do not have the time to shop.
In some cases you might even have to go out to purchase the items physically, and deliver them to your client. But online shopping has become so common-place in the last ten years that it is easier to just teach your client to do it themselves. Depending on how kindly you feel, or if they offer enough money, you may get more directly involved for some clients.
How much money can you make online with this business model? You can research to see what others are charging, and it may be a question of whether you are in a major city or out in the boon-docks, but you can set your own rates as a rule. Start a little lower when you are new at it, then raise your rates as you get good testimonials from your clients, and you are more sure of yourself.
Scenario 5: Making Products to Sell
Finally: Just one more method to make money - for now. If all this big buying and selling is happening online, who is making all the stuff that is bought and sold? There’s another income option there!
There are, and probably always will be, people who do not have a formal education. They may not be able to read or write in any language. But that does not mean they have no marketable skills at all. They may be very creative and able to make things with their hands. They may be able to create and sing songs, or play on musical instruments. They may be able to create beautiful artwork that others would gladly pay to own. Okay, useful items too.
Some of these people may have some education and ability to market their wares online, but even if they don’t, it is possible that others can step in to do that for them, as long as these creative people can get the raw materials they need and have the discipline to keep making more and more.
You are no longer limited to the traffic that comes by your door, or the marketplace that is within walking distance. Selling online has become global, and is big business. Products can now be bought and sold to any side of the world! eCommerce is now as big, or bigger, than the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.
Buyers everywhere are looking for things to buy online. Sometimes digital things, but also tangible, physical things. The people with money are thirsty for things to buy! Some people somewhere are going to have to start making more stuff to sell!
If you are reading this, you are likely interested in one of the first four scenarios for business ideas, but I venture to guess that you know some people who are not ready for those ideas - yet, they could start making things, right?
Of course, someone has to find out what the buyers want so that the designers and creators of the salable stuff will provide the things that are desired. So there is really a role for the go-between person.The one who researches what buyers are looking for online and then helping others to design and make those items, and naturally, also to ship them to those eCommerce marketplaces.
Unless they are prepared to add packaging and order fulfillment to their work. (That might happen in some cases).
Do you see how many business opportunities this creates for those who are prepared to make items by hand? Or start a workshop, or factory, and hire others to help produce things, particularly if the steps can be learned even by those not particularly creative?
The potential in so many directions just boggles my mind! There is work for everyone. Which means there is money to go around for everyone too!
The only ones left out are the lazy or the totally incapacitated. So do you see hope for incomes for yourself?
What are your preferred methods to earn it? Affiliate marketing (Commissions), MLM recruiting, eCommerce (sales), Trading money, or producing the stuff to sell on eCommerce?
Do you know what to do next?
