Retirement is now seen as more of a fluid concept than a permanent state.

More than 50% of retirees aged 50 and over said they would return to work for the right opportunity. And, 39% of workers over the age of 65 said they had retired at some point in the past.

Income is one reason why seniors return to work after retirement.

But, being able to do more meaningful work is considered a key reason for delaying retirement. In fact, more than two-thirds of older workers report greater satisfaction in the workplace as a result of doing useful work.

If you’re considering “unretiring” too, here are four great jobs for seniors and retirees.

1. Online Marketer

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2. College Instructor

Roles in education make great retirement jobs. These positions give you a chance to share your knowledge and skills. And, they also offer a great way to connect with younger generations.

With an advanced degree and years of work experience in your field, you might like to work as a college instructor at a university, community college, or trade school.

And, with a predicted 15% increase in post-secondary teaching positions by 2026, there’s a good chance that your skills will be in high demand.

3. Financial Services

Through excellent retirement planning, financial motivation might not be a factor in wanting to continue working in finance after retirement. But, you might find it fulfilling to take on a new position as an accountant or auditor to “keep your hand in.”

If you have sufficient qualifications, you could even work as a financial consultant on a freelance basis. This is a great way to use your financial experience and skills while enjoying the flexibility of part-time jobs for seniors.

If you’re interested in financial work but aren’t qualified, you could do a course to become a tax preparer. This is one of the best jobs for older people who prefer to work seasonally on an annual basis.

4. Blogging

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5. Freelance Writer

Why not follow Jessica Fletcher’s lead and become a writer after retirement?

In all seriousness, whether it’s exploring your creative side or sharing your work experience through technical writing, there are many writing jobs for retirees.

Full-time jobs often require a bachelor’s degree. But, there are many opportunities to work on a freelance basis or contribute to single projects.

You might consider working on a book, completing assignments for print or online publications, or even starting your own blog.

6. House Sitter

The freedom of retirement means that jobs for 60-year-olds can also be great opportunities to fulfill lifelong dreams.

If you’ve always wanted to see the world, caretaker and house sitter roles offer you the possibility to travel without all the expenses. There are short-term and long-term options in this area.

And, if you’re part of a couple and are both flexible about when and where you go, you may both be able to get hired as a way to travel the world together.

7. Sell Stuff Online

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The Best Jobs for Seniors

As these jobs for seniors show, there are a variety of different employment sectors and roles that offer opportunities after retirement.

Whether you want to enter a new field or explore a different position within your area of expertise, many jobs for retirees can help you combine fulfillment and flexibility.

Or, if you’re ready to take on a whole new challenge after retirement, check out these articles on entrepreneurship for more inspiration.

As we all know, there are many different ways to make money online — whether that be through starting a new business, focusing on affiliate marketing and blogging, or even putting your existing finances to work for you through good investments or stock/forex trading. With so much focus on each of these methods, today we are going to take a look at what the world of forex holds for those willing to put in the time and effort.

Forex is one of those activities that is very easy to learn, but hard to master. Even though it is not a good idea to get into forex with the preconception that profits are guaranteed, it is no secret that money is a key motivating factor for many traders. Whether it is to create a steady, additional source of income or build a primary source of money, the financial aspect always takes precedence over others.

However, traders are as diverse as the combinations of currencies, and the money-making process varies from one person to another. Therefore, we have decided to make a list of actionable tips that will help you make a profit out of your trading efforts. Here are five ways to maximize your forex profits.

Prepare Before You Begin Trading

Because the Forex market is based mainly on leverage – with some brokers offering leverages as high as 50 to 1, 100 to 1 or even 200 to 1 -, some traders might fall into the temptation of taking them for granted. Admittedly, even professional forex traders might experience this cognitive dissonance from time to time, because the willingness of the brokers to offer high leverages will make some traders believe that the risk is manageable, triggering what most experts call ‘’the gambler’s fallacy’’.

So, the best approach before entering the forex market is to create a detailed and comprehensive plan. Beginning with a practice account is recommended here, because it offers the freedom to experiment with lots of strategies without assuming any risks.

Another thing that forex traders should consider doing while practicing is reading a few forex trading books. Some of the best Forex books are the following:

• Forex Strategies: Best Forex Strategies for High Profits and Reduced Risks. Written by Matthew Maybury, this book is an excellent reading material both for beginners who want to step into the forex market with the right foot, or veterans who want to refresh their knowledge.
• The Little Book of Currency Trading: How to Make Big Profits In The World of Forex. Written by Kathy Lien, this book can act as an excellent auxiliary material for the previous title.
• Currency Forecasting: A Guide To Fundamental And Technical Models of Exchange Rate Determination, Michael R. Rosenberg. This book is great for people who want a short, concise introduction into the art of making forex profits and do not have the time to read longer titles.

These books are a good starting point if you want to learn how to maximize your profits. However, do keep in mind that they are pricey – but the price of the books are totally worth it on the long term.

Do Not Set Excessive Goals

If you hope to have any chances at profiting from forex in the near future, one of the best approaches is setting your expectations as low as possible. Unfortunately, most traders become nearly obsessed achieving a ‘’professional’’ level right from the get-go, as soon as they advance from demo accounts to handling real money.

As good as being ambitious is, the main problem is that having a big goal with no realistic plan to achieve it is essentially worthless to long-term growth. Instead, a wiser (and more recommended) approach for beginners who just got their feet wet in the forest market is building a realistic short-term goal and sticking to it for a while, preferably a month or two. As soon as you achieve that short-term goal, you can steadily advance to more and more ambitious goals until you reach the high tier of forex trading.

To conclude, if you are serious about achieving long-term goals, you should start with the little stuff first, and devise a comprehensive plan that will help you achieve those smaller milestones.

Practice Patience

Many forex traders, particularly rookies, are more likely to get impatient or panic if a trade does not go their way as soon as they launch it. On the opposite side of the spectrum, if a trade goes better than expected, they get cocky and either rush to pull the plug right away on a trade that could have rendered a significant profit, or get greedy and spread their finances too thin in order to grow their revenue.

However, patience is a quality that requires a lot of persistence and effort to build. Using specialized tools, such as the Forex and CFD trading calculator, a pattern spotting and confirmation tool and so on can help you achieve a more methodical approach when it comes to trading.

The one thing you have to remember is that you are going to win some trades, or lose others. Do not stress too much about winning or losing – you will lose money at some point, and there is no way around that. Take satisfaction in the small things and on the accumulation of experience, as this attitude will pay on the long-term.

Understand the Tax Implications and Treatment

When it comes to forex, it is important to understand the tax implications and the legislation regarding the forex activity in order to be prepared when the dreaded tax day comes. Forex can already be a full-time occupation, so the best approach here is to consult a qualified accountant or tax specialist that knows the ins and outs of tax law.

A qualified professional can help you avoid any surprises and take advantage of various tax laws – the market-to-market accounting law, for example, which involves recording the value of an asset to reflect its real market traction. Another reason which makes hiring a qualified accountant the wise idea is that tax laws have a tendency of changing regularly, and keeping up with all the legal matters is quite hard for someone who has not had an education in this sense.

Diversify and Limit Your Risks

Another good approach to maximize your profits is diversifying, and at the same time limiting your risks. Here is what these two strategies involve:

• Diversification is key in maximizing your profits as much as possible. Traders who extend their portfolios across multiple markets have a better chance of making a profit. By applying this strategy and investing small to medium amounts in multiple currencies, you minimize your chances of suffering terrible losses – because, essentially, one loss is mitigated by a win on another. Even if you are absolutely sure that a particular trade has a chance of paying off, it is still a bad idea to put all of your money in a single basket.
• Familiarize yourself with ways to guarantee a profit on an already profitable order. Good tactics in this sense involve trailing stops, or limiting losses using limit orders or stop. As important as it might be to concentrate on winning, limit losses is more vital to your long term success as a trader.

Conclusion

The forex market is an attractive proposition for many ambitious entrepreneurs thanks to its decentralized nature, round the clock schedule and high leverage – which can be both an advantage and disadvantage, depending on how one approaches the issue, and very low requirements. Maximizing profits comes down to keeping up with tax laws, doing as much research as possible, setting realistic goals and, last but not least, practicing patience. Make sure to follow the advice listed in this article, and you will learn how to maximize profits in no time flat.

Imagine buying a brand new domain name for $10, then holding onto it for a few years and selling it for millions! The scenario is extremely unlikely, but it does happen. More often than not, the domain is sold for thousands, but the individual ROI on that initial $10 can be huge! Welcome to the world of domain name buying and selling.

Having been making money online since the mid-90s, I’m always kicking myself at the thought of being able to get my hands on some of the best generic domains back before they were registered. Oh, well 🙂 I think it all ended up for the best so far anyway.

With the discussion of domain names and high-valued tech companies always in the news, the dream of selling a domain name for a ton of money isn’t that far off — especially if you know what to look for, or are currently sitting on a nice portfolio of domains. To help with this process, we’ve created an excellent reference guide that covers everything you need to know domain names, values, and registering some great ones of your own.

Most expensive domain names publicly reported

When it comes to looking up the most expensive domain names ever purchased, it’s an ongoing process. With more than 100,000+ new domains being registered daily, it’s a full-time job to keep the list of most active and highest-priced domain names updated. Thanks to GoDaddy, we don’t have to compile this type of information ourselves, as they are one of the largest domain registrars in the world today, and publicly post this data on their site.

At the same time, there are many different ways to list and sell domain names — both publicly, privately, and through domain brokers. GoDaddy also reports that most domain names sell for thousands of dollars when being purchased from someone else.

With all of that in mind, let’s take a look at the top 20 highest selling domains names to date — courtesy of GoDaddy.

1. Insurance.com — $35.6 million
2. VacationRentals.com — $35 million
3. PrivateJet.com — $30.18 million
4. Internet.com — $18 million
5. 360.com — $17 million
6. Insure.com — $16 million
7. Fund.com — £9.99 million
8. Sex.com — $13 million
9. Hotels.com — $11 million
10. Porn.com — $9.5 million
11. Porno.com — $8,888,888
12. Fb.com — $8.5 million
13. Business.com — $7.5 million
14. Diamond.com — $7.5 million
15. Beer.com — $7 million
16. iCloud.com — $6 million
17. Israel.com — $5.88 million
18. Casino.com — $5.5 million
19. Slots.com — $5.5 million
20. Toys.com — $5.1 million

The common theme across nearly all of these multi-million dollar domain sales is that they are super generic one-word domain names, that are also .com. The only two exceptions are VacationRentals.com and PrivateJet.com, which both sold for more than $30 million each! The fifth highest selling domain isn’t even a word at all — it’s a number (360.com)!

How to Pick a Great Domain Name

Obviously, the most expensive and valuable domain names are going to be one-word generics that are .com names. What’s also obvious, is that these type of names are no longer around and if you ever wanted to buy and sell domains for profit, you either need to get your hands on a great name, have an existing portfolio, or be really good at coming up with new names that people might want (which happens all the time).

Some simple tips to keep in mind when trying to pick a good domain name.

• Stick with the main TLDs of .com, .net, and .org
• Stay away from using dashes and numbers in domains
• The more generic the better, two words are better than three
• Make sure the domain is easy to remember and spell
• Don’t use numbers in place of letters/words (ie: “8” instead of “ate”)
• Always register your personal name if it’s available

By following these tips, you will have a much better chance at not only registering a great domain name for personal use, business, or for selling — but also making sure it’s the highest value possible.

Using Name Generators to Find New Names

There are two ways to register/buy a domain name. The first is to go through a broker or online site where a domain is already registered and up for sale. The other is going to a domain registrar and simply registering it for the first time. Heading to a site like NameCheap or GoDaddy and getting a new domain name for around $10 is ideal, but also very tough since nearly all the good names are already taken.

If this is the case, you might need to get a bit creative with your domain name, or coming up with a new name for your brand or business. For times like these, I recommend you take a look at these domain name generators. If you are looking for a unique name for blog, business, or products, check out these useful name generators as well.

Something else to keep in mind when registering a new domain name, is that if it’s available, it might not be that great after all. Always consider the domain name you are registering, and also follow the recommended tips that were pointed out above.

Why You Must Register Your Personal Name as a Domain

Your name is unique, and there is no one else in the world like you! However, there are probably hundreds (if not thousands) of other people that share the same name as you. With this in mind, there is a very good chance that someone has already registered your name as a domain if you haven’t secured it already.

Here are two steps everyone needs to follow right now:

1. See if your personal name as a domain is available
   (get a free domain name with a new hosting account)
2. If it is, register it! If not, register it as a .net or .org.

If you currently share the name with a famous celebrity, senator, or online marketer, it’s likely your name is already taken as a domain name and there is little chance you will be able to acquire it. This has happened to some of the world’s biggest celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and politicians — Justin Beiber (domain name site shown below), Bill Clinton, Johnny Depp, and many others. 

Don’t miss out on registering your personal name as your domain name, as once it’s gone — it’s likely gone forever! If you currently have close friends and family, you might want to check for their names as well.

If your domain name is already taken, it’s not a complete dead end. Here are a few options you have:

1. Use a domain name expiration service like NameJet or Pool
2. Hire a domain broker to try and get the domain for you
3. If there is a website, contact the domain owner

Want to get even more creative? Start registering the names of anyone else you know, or who might be an up and coming star, and keep them safe until they are famous and world renown!

Get a Free Domain Name with All Hosting Accounts

Now that you’ve seen some of the most expensive domain names in the world today, and why it’s so important to register your name as a domain, it’s time for you to take action.

We are currently partnered with Bluehost — one of the world’s most trusted and well-known hosting companies — and they are giving away a free domain name to all hosting sign-ups made through our blog. At the same time, users will also save 60% off their hosting plans, while getting a free SSL certificate, WordPress Install, and 24/7 support.

Click here to perform a free search for your domain name.

After setting up your new domain name and hosting account through the link above, be sure to shoot me an email. I’d love to provide you with full access to some of my best online training courses and video guides, valued at over $1997. I’m looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Side hustling is perfect for when your main income is not being as reliable as you’d thought, or if you need extra pocket money for a large purchase or unexpected bill. Maybe you just want to earn more money? In today’s ‘gig economy’ there are lots of apps that allow you to make extra money doing everyday tasks as people are finding it so easy to outsource what they need help with or would rather not do themselves. Take a look at some of these apps and websites to see how you could get started with a side hustle.

Task Rabbit

This is an app where people can outsource tasks that they cannot/will not do themselves, which could be anything from assembling flat pack furniture to event planning. Just register as a ‘tasker’, add the tasks that you’d like to do for others and set your rates. With Task Rabitt, you can scroll through tasks and accept tasks that work around your schedule. If you have a car, this could give you access to extra tasks like collecting people’s shopping or making deliveries.

Shiply

If you’re already a courier and are often driving around with surplus space in your vehicle, take a look on Shiply for deliveries that are along your existing booked routes. By adding extra cargo to routes you are already traveling along will make your journeys more efficient and will earn you some extra money, too. Take a look at the delivery jobs on offer and make a few bids depending on the space you’ll have in your vehicle on those dates. Others will be bidding too, so don’t be put off if your quotes don’t get accepted straight away – others may have already built up feedback so give it some time to earn a good reputation on your Shiply profile.

Fiverr

Way too many people are focused on the big goal of making millions of dollars online, and missing out on the many opportunities around them. With billions of people now online, it’s more about how to make a few dollars from a lot of people, versus going for a big win and cashing in overnight. Fiverr is an online marketplace with micro-jobs that start off at just $5 each, and scale all the way up to $995 for more advanced gigs. Selling your own expertise and service through Fiverr can definitely make you a lot of money online when done right. For example, a couple years ago I interviewed Joel Young because I loved his video work and knew he was onto something big. Just recently he was profiled on Inc. for generating over a million in sales through Fiverr!

Dog Vacay

If you’ve had pets before, looking after people’s animals while they are away is a great way to earn some extra cash in an enjoyable way. Through the use of Dog Vacay, anyone with a passion for animals and looking to make some money, can do exactly that. Find the app that works for you (or all of them if you like!) get your profile filled out as much as you can, and make sure you put details of your experience with animals and your trustworthiness. Don’t be disappointed if you don’t hear from anyone for a while, the bookings tend to be more popular around national holidays so it might not necessarily be a side hustle you can rely on a regular basis, BUT has the potential for you to become a regular sitter for several homes in the long term. If your clients say you did a good job, encourage them to leave good feedback on your profile to attract more clients.

Capterra

You’ve likely heard of getting paid for taking online surveys and submitting user reviews, however, most of the sites out there are junk and will sell your personal information way before you ever get a payment. One of the best-incentivized review sites out there (that I’ve seen), is Capterra. I was actually using the site to leave a genuine review for a company that I use, then I received an email a few weeks later from Capterra offering a gift card if I was to continue reviewing difference products and services on their site. I ended up taking them up and got a $100 gift card for my time — all through email and was super easy to complete. Definitely one of the best compensation-based review sites out there.

How to Find the Best Way to Make Money with a Side Hustle Online

As you can see, there are plenty of legitimate ways to make money online with a side hustle. Each of the sites above are real and have paid out millions of users on their platforms.

Of all the many different ways to make money online, I highly recommend starting out with a blog and growing it out with your own content and using affiliate marketing to generate revenue in the process. Blogs are also great for anyone with an expert or skills they are trying to sell — especially freelancers.

To get started with a blog of your own, be sure to sign up for my free video series at 7DayBlogChallenge.com.

Every day I get a ton of emails asking me how to make money online. Thanks to the power of the internet, anyone anywhere can start making money if they are willing to just put in the time, work, and effort. In addition to the generic question of how to make money online, another common question is how much money you need to get started with.

The truth is, there are plenty of ways to make money online — especially when you have some money to start with, but don’t expect to get rich overnight in any scenario. Building an online empire takes time, and this is something I’ve been doing for over 20 years now.

With all of that being said, here are some ideas for responsible ways to invest or make money online when starting with just $100.

Start a Blog and Build a Business Online

I can’t stress the importance of this one enough. Blogging is one of the easiest, cheapest and most effective ways to make money online — when you put in the work.

With $100, you can get three years of web hosting and a free domain name through Bluehost. This comes out to less than .10 per day.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, many of these methods will take time — and blogging is definitely one of them. Creating content, ranking in the search results and running a site using the WordPress platform are all free things, but you should also figure out a business model for your site as well.

Also, if you don’t think blogging can make you money or change your life for the better, just take a look at this list. I can completely relate, as starting my blog back in 2007 was definitely one of the best decisions I ever made.

However, when it comes to blogging, not many people know where or how to get started. The good news is that I created a free blogging course that anyone can sign up to, which will provide them with all of the training and guidance they need to start a blog and find success online.

Get Active in the Stock Market or Penny Stocks

For investors who don’t mind taking on some risk, the stock market is open to investors with low capital volumes. Technically speaking, you can buy stocks for as cheap as less than a penny per share — these are often referred to ask “Over the Counter” (OTC), or penny stocks. You usually won’t hear about these stocks on CNBC or in the news, as they are often more volatile and not super huge companies with thriving businesses. It’s not typically recommended to buy such stock unless you are willing to accept above-average risk for a very unlikely award.

However, there are promising opportunities, like medical marijuana stocks, which budget investors can partake in. As with any type of investing, it’s often best to buy stocks with the intention to hold on to them for some time, but there are many investors and day-traders who have done very well with jumping in and out of stocks for quick gains.

Thanks to online trading platforms like Etrade, Ameritrade, and others, it’s easy for anyone to get started with online trading — whether you are looking to invest for the longer or simply jump in out and for quick gains/loss. This is something Tim Sykes and I talked about in our interview on Rise of the Entrepreneur.

This is something we continually see whenever something new comes into the industry, or new regulations come into play like GDPR and sports betting. Both of these examples are completely different, but new businesses and services will be applied to each — while generating a lot of money in the process.

Affiliate Marketing Earnings Can Scale Quickly

Affiliate marketing is still one of the best ways to make money online — especially when you are focusing on media buying and have some money to work with.

Blogging and affiliate marketing is a powerful combination, but without the necessary money aspect, it can definitely take time to build out an active website or blog that has enough traffic to make decent money. When jumping into affiliate marketing with a nice budget, you can start setting up new ad campaigns and focusing your efforts on media buying, Facebook Ads, pay per click marketing, popup ads and much more.

Granted… $100 isn’t much to work with when it comes to affiliate marketing — but it’s a great place to start if you are looking to make money online. If you decide to go this route and have only a small budget to work with, start with email/zip submit offers and media buying. This will allow you to limit your daily budget, understand your audience, improve conversions and not blow your budget without seeing any leads or activity to learn from.

Either way, make sure you put in the time and effort to learn the basics of affiliate marketing before getting started.

Selling with Amazon/eBay

When it comes to buying or selling anything online, most people will end up on Amazon or eBay. The great thing about both sites is that anyone can start selling anything. This is super easy to set up through eBay, but also possible with Amazon if you are going to join their selling program. In both cases, eBay and Amazon will take a percentage of the sale, but the traffic and branding power associated with selling on their sites is huge.

With this in mind, the business model of buying low and selling high still works extremely well. This can actually be done in two different ways:

• Buying locally and individually reselling online
  (think clearance items, stores going out of business)
• Creating your own products and selling in bulk
  (think Alibaba, white-label products)
• Getting creative and selling something you personally make
  (think crafts, drawing, art, personalized gifts)

Having only a $100 budget, it’s most likely that you would get started with eBay to maximize your profits and not lock up too much money all at once. Fulfillment by Amazon and dropshipping is great, but this will often require a much larger initial purchase than $100 — however, if this is something you get into, you should definitely consider your options with this method.

What if you don’t even have a dollar to start with?

Beleive it or not, I still get numerous emails per day stating that they have NO money and want to make money online. More often then not, you can tell right away that the people sending these emails are just looking to get rich quick and would never have the work ethic to build something real or profitable online… however, it is definitely possible, even if you don’t have any money to get started with.

I actually started my online business with nothing and built it into what it is today through the use of free online resources, then re-investing back into the business. This was mainly through free web hosting back in the on AOL and Geocities pages, using affiliate marketing and AOL chat rooms to connect with new audiences and site owners. Since I was a teenager back at the time, I actually used these methods for a couple of years before registering my first domain name and really having a budget to work with.

For this to happen, you need to better educate yourself, and find a way to start making money online. In addition to taking advantage of online blogs, communities, and resources, you can also find a great amount of free online courses through sites like Udemy and Skillshare. While the majority of courses on these sites costs money, there are many that are free as well.

Next, you will also need to consider your options for making your first few dollars online. Here are some free methods that work very well.

• Sell your stuff on eBay that you simply aren’t using
• Get paid for freelance writing on sites like Textbroker
• Start a Fiverr gig and see what services you can offer
• Complete online surveys and get paid for your time
• Promote affiliate offers through free traffic sources

These are all completely legitimate and effective ways to make money online, with ZERO startup costs. But again, if you aren’t willing to put in the time and effort… don’t expect to make any money or get anywhere with an online business.

The best investment is one in yourself

As you can see, investing with $100 isn’t impossible or even that difficult — especially when trying to start an online business or brand of your own. If you have more than $100 to work with, even better!

No matter what option or path you choose, don’t throw all of your money into right away. Make sure you have a good understanding of what you are getting into, have a legitimate business model or expectations, and also scale your budget so it lasts over time.

When you are more familiar with any of the practices mentioned above, you can start investing larger amounts and earn significantly more in returns.

When it comes to making money online, we all have our own story on how we first got started. For myself, it was actually back in the mid-90s in the AOL Web Diner Chat Room. I was making 46×860 graphic banners for people and their websites, and they would then send me a dollar in the mail! Keep in mind, this was way before anything like PayPal was around. After that, I found myself in the world of affiliate marketing, and that’s when things really started to scale quickly!

Now that you know my story, it’s time for you to read about how others got their start with making money online as well. Be sure to read through each of the blogger, business owner, and entrepreneur stories below to see which you relate to most!

When did you first realize you could start making ‘real money’ online, and with what method?

I earned my first “online income” when I scored a job 20 years ago working with best selling author, entrepreneur and agent of change Seth Godin at Yoyodyne, which was acquired in Q4 1998 by Yahoo! In 1997 I was looking for something exciting and new and was determined to move back to NY from South Florida and get back into the action. I decided this new thing called the “Internet” was the way to go. I read an article about Seth Godin and since he mentioned that although there were no current openings, he was always on the lookout for talent, I was determined to work with him at his start-up Yoyodyne. I sent resumes to probably 100 companies and when Yoyodyne called I knew it was meant to be (there is a bit more to the story).

I’ve had a front row seat to the evolution of online marketing from what was traditional media and commerce first experiencing the move to digital, which was nothing more than simple communication and catalog tools, to full fledged digital commerce and communication… and now scaled Social Communication which so wonderfully incorporates this Relationship component that is for me, the ultimate value. #FollowThePath #RonR… #NoLetUp!

Ted Rubin – TedRubin.com

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When people started asking me to help them get more “Likes” on their Facebook page. I realized that I could run some Like-exchange bots and give “Likes” to the Facebook pages of small businesses in my city. It was not “real money” in the sense that it was a lot of money, but it was enough to sustain me in college while I worked on my next startup.

Rafi Chowdhury – Chowdhurysdigital.com

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What I thought was real money was when I hit about $100/day back in 2010 or 2011 with Maxbounty on NoNo Hair Removal offer. There were 3 of us controlling all of the SERPs and a few other methods basically driving most of their sales for that company, other than the infomercials they were running. I was buying traffic everywhere back then, lots of Bing Ads and Faceook at the time. Those were the glory days when you could get away with anything. I feel blessed being able to make a dollar online and not having to go out and get a “real job” even though we probably all work harder and more hours than traditional folks, and have way more stress. Thanks for reading everyone! Hit me up on Twitter @pmkoom if you want to connect! 🙂

Patrick Coombe – Elite-strategies.com

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I have heard of so many ways to make money online. In fact when I started out I was so overwhelmed and didn’t know what to try to be able to make money. Two methods I zeroed in are selling my own products and selling products of others (affiliate marketing).

I made my first buck in affiliate marketing. It was close to $100. I was so new to affiliate marketing but I was not impatient with making money. So I did not publish reviews without trying out any product.

I published a review of a product after trying it out myself (with screenshots etc. as a tutorial). And that review helped me make my first affiliate sale.

That’s when I realized that it is indeed possible to make money online. Then my immediate next sale came from my e-book. I still rely on these two money making methods heavily for my business.

Jane Sheeba – Janesheeba.com

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In 1997 I was massively into a video game called Half Life which you could play online. But… Internet connections were kind of rubbish back then. Dial-up modems mostly and a few lucky folks had ISDN. So, I rented a small room in a building and promoted a LAN party. All I really had to do was talk and network with folks on the forum and we sold out the first one. You may call this inbound now but really it was just relationship marketing. At the same time I was studying computer science at university and was just really interested in the early web. Before long I was working around 1999 as a web developer and just naturally ended up helping the company out with SEO and digital marketing. The rest is history I guess.

Marcus Miller – Bowlerhat.co.uk

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It all started with a friend who introduced Blogging to me back in 2007. It was the time when I learned about making money through sharing my experiences and skills online with other peoples and discussing about the products I use on daily basis.

I quickly started a blog and made my first $100 within first 60 days. Networking was and still is the most important factor in kicking some business online. Since that day, I made more than 30 online communities and couple dozens of Affiliate Niche websites.

In 2011, I finally decided to turn my hobby into fulltime job when I received an offer to flip one of my website for more than six figures. That was the real moment when I seriously started my Digital Marketing and SEO career.

During the last 8 years, I worked on variety of projects focusing on Adsense, Amazon Affiliate, Clickbank Products, and direct marketing of products that I use on daily basis.

Hamza Sheikh – TheDigitalNerds.com

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I attended an online marketing conference in late 2009 whilst working a full-time job as GM in a photography company. I remember listening to the speakers as they explained how they made money online and being impressed by the lifestyle these businesses allowed. Several of those speakers had million-dollar plus businesses and they were no smarter than me.

The seed was planted then that an ‘online’ business was what I wanted. When things came to an end with my job I had already decided to go online. I tried affiliate marketing with minimal success before my mentor suggested selling online marketing services to offline businesses.

I got started reselling website design and SEO services, using my mentor’s team to deliver the work. As my business grew (which it did quickly) I built my own team in-house.

James Reynolds – SEOSherpa.com

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In 2005, there was one week where I slept perhaps 6 hours in an entire week. My friend Marcus Frind taught me how to run direct link AdWords campaigns to True.com and other dating sites on Azoogle. I had experience running PPC for clients, where it wasn’t my money. I got a monthly fee or salary, instead– like when I worked at Yahoo!

But this time, it was real money. So I was clicking refresh every few minutes in my AdWords Editor, watching my spend rise faster than my earnings. After a week, I was up to $1,000 a day in spend and generating $1,400 a day in earnings. I was addicted.

I figured that $400 a day was almost $150,000 a year– enough for a decent living.

Yet, it wasn’t until I got those checks from the FedEx guy that I realized I was making “real money”. I’d get these checks and deposit them at the bank, wondering it they would bounce. They were big enough to buy a nice automobile.

Dennis Yu – BlitzMetrics.com

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I made my first few pounds a very long time ago, I think it was 1997. Ecommerce was just starting, big brands didn’t understand the Internet and were very slow to move with the times. Online business was ripe for the picking.

I was one of the first affiliate marketeers and managed to build a bunch of websites within the fashion industry that were offering services that the major brands couldn’t or didn’t want to. Features like comparisons, interactive size charts, advanced search really helped to drive the websites forward and bring in a decent living.

Jon Tromans – Jtid.co.uk

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First time I realized I could make real money online is when I found that some bloggers were making over six-figures per year with affiliate marketing. I decided it was time to put away the games and start making real money. But it wasn’t something that I was able to do right away.

I started doing some research and I found some of the secrets to making a great amount of money. The method is simple, work hard on your blog, write about topics that are interesting to you, but also interesting to a broad audience, and monetize the content with affiliate relationships.

As you put in the work, build an email list and establish social authority. The way to capitalize on the content and social currency is to use affiliate relationships to start making money.

The key to making real money online is to establish a plan of action and follow it while leveraging the best available affiliate programs related to your niche.

Oscar Gonzalez – Notagrouch.com

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I make money online by blogging at ChristinaAllDay.com.

Lots of people get into blogging just to make money. I didn’t start that way. For me, my lifestyle blog was something fun to do in my free time. Then, I learned more about social media, SEO, and strategy.

That strategy part is a biggie. It means you’re not just blogging to blog, like I did at the beginning. When I started learning about SEO and how to find what people were searching word for word, how many people were searching certain keywords, and what the results were for those keywords, I started seeing more traffic. Yes, this means sometimes I wrote about things I wasn’t crazy about, but it brought in the numbers that brands like to see.

I think the secret is not to focus on working less to make more. Too many people are trying to do that in online business. It’s lazy and ignorant. If it were easy to make “real money” online, then everyone would do it. It takes work. Instead, focus on giving people what they want online.

Also, we all see a lot of bloggers and online marketers promoting how they can make money online, but I question how many of them actually are making money online through blogging or another online outlet… or if it’s just selling a course about making money online. If you want to make money online, I suggest you really vet who you learn from. Online, it’s easy to embellish facts (or just make them up), so be sure to thoroughly look at what you’re learning and who you are learning it from before investing in education if that’s the route you want to take.

Christina Nicholson – Mediamavenandmore.com
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I started my first online business about 10 years ago; I couldn’t get free time from my job to spend with my then 1-year-old daughter, and I had been thinking for a while about trying to start my own business. I didn’t start out with social media, which came a little bit later; instead, I took notice of the rising numbers of virtual assistants as well as the huge demand for them.

So, I started thinking of ways that I could get involved; in the end, I decided that I wanted to help others, so I started selling e-books, as well as toolkit for women who wanted to set up their very own Virtual Assistant business. The e-books sold for $50, and the toolkit, for $200. It went well, but at the same time, I started using Twitter and realised the potential social media had for businesses – so, I started looking for a way to get into social media marketing.

Lilach Bullock – Lilachbullock.com

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I think the first month I earned revenue made me realize I could start making ‘real’ money online. I started this journey as a freelance writer and was able to gross $805 in my first paid month of work (which was month two of my journey).

At the time it felt epically S-L-O-W, but in hindsight (over three years later), that’s not bad! And the best part, is that it’s repeatable for those that are willing to work hard, put themselves out there and give it a fair shot.

Gina Horkey – HorkeyHandbook.com

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I started as a content writer in 2013, Then move on to learning about search engine optimization (SEO) while having writing gigs on the side. Launch my own blog in late 2013 to share tactics and strategies that I’ve learned and continuously tested over time in SEO. Potential clients are coming in as they began to notice my content assets – this is where I started servicing SEO to clients as a freelancer. Four years have passed, I run my own link building (SEO) company with 15 staff members servicing 20+ international clients all over the world.

Venchito Tampon – Sharprocket.com.ph

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This is one of my fabled tales…but isn’t everybody’s first time? At the time, I had my own site in a very non-lucrative niche. I won’t go into details, but I was getting lots of great traffic, but the niche was just not a money-maker. What I was doing right was SEO.

So I wrote an article on my predictions for where search was headed, and what measures the search engines were likely to employ over the next four or five years. To give you an idea how long ago this was, back then almost nobody was looking ahead. Having a “vision” was a novelty.

I was not in the SEO business, but that article generated three SEO clients. That’s when I realized that my website would not generate a profit directly. It would prove to be the staging that would launch a career promoting other people’s websites. That career lasted several years, before I began turning more toward writing.

David Leonhardt – THGMWriters.com

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Selling my design services and affiliate marketing are my main two main sources of income online which in combination yield 6 figures of revenue a year. Creating valuable shareable content, with strong SEO and a trusty email list have been the keys to success.

Jacob Cass – JustCreative.com

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At the age of 17, I got extremely frustrated after taking a handful of jobs and quitting or getting fired from every single one of them. I was unemployable and knew I could never get a job the rest of my life. I began doing an online search hoping to find others who felt the same way I did. I came across hundreds of entrepreneurs sharing these similar concerns and I decided to launch my first business online. I launched a multimedia agency during my senior year of high school and I was able to quickly acquire paying customers after 2 weeks of launching my business. We were service based and offering digital media services for other businesses. Website design, website development, app development, social media marketing, video production and search engine optimization were all services that we offered to businesses all over the world. This was the first time I realized that I could make real money online.

Jeet Banerjee – JeetBanerjee.com

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When I got my first web development job at the age of 22 (~2007), I worked with a very small local web development agency with a very specific niche – entrepreneurs making money online. We built websites for these people, while I had just gotten into the “business” of making websites – I realized that people were using my skills to make their entire “business” work! I was building squeeze pages – where you had to opt in to get the goodies on the thanks page, whether it be an eBook, or teleseminar replays, whatever it might be. But I saw first hand how people would spend $10, $20, $50, even $195 just to get access to a digital good, or knowledge, from an expert. That was when it clicked, even if I wasn’t interested in using these methods and tools – it worked – people were already doing it. Even if just a few people per month were to buy in, and be pumped about your product, that was a living and breathing business right there. At the same time I started my own website and was watching the AdSense money trickle in by the pennies. So there were several clear paths to making “real money” online, and these paths had many branching paths connected to them – so I knew that the methods, the tools, and the proof of concept was all there at 22 – I just had to use it, and so I did.

Andy Sowards – AndySowards.com

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My first indication that you could start making some serious money online, is when I started to think about creating a website of my own. Part of this process was the actual sign up for a web hosting and registering a domain name. While going through all of the research and trying to find which host would be best, I found out that many of these hosting services had something called an affiliate program, which paid out a commission to site owners and partners on all referred leads and sales. This got me to start thinking about different ways I could make money online using affiliate marketing as well. I started my site and slowly began adding different affiliate programs into the mix. It took a while to get things moving, but once I started earning a few dollars per day, then the fire really started burning and I wanted to grow my earnings even more. Affiliate marketing has completely changed the way money is made in the world today along with my life and passion for entrepreneurship in the process.

Ninja Blog Master – Blogninja.com

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In 1996, I started on online hosting and marketing company making some of the first database driven websites for small business. We were using a beta version of cold fusion and working with companies of all sizes. I knew the future of commerce and marketing was online, so we were selling that vision. It was pretty early days so it took a lot of education for customers. We later expanded the copy to become a service provider. I think we got about 10,000 members paying for access before we sold the company to a larger provider.

Rick Ramos – HealthJoy.com

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I first started realizing I could make real money online when I started blogging while I was recovering in bed for months after breaking my legs in a construction accident. I had a lot of time on my hands and started exploring Internet Marketing. I could see it was possible to blog and make money through advertising. At first, this involved having ads on my blog. Then, I started to move beyond that and add affiliates and began monetizing other ways through sponsored content. This included sharing insights about various products, services, and companies. I turned my blog into a seven-figure job.

John Rampton – Calendar

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I was in middle school and my best friend just got grounded. We both wanted to buy the new Xbox 360 that was coming out and he proposed to start a business. After pouring through a host of ideas we eventually signed up for a reseller account at Hostgator. Our partnership quickly fell apart but I found that I had a passion for building and running something of my own. After posting ads on some web hosting forums I quickly got my first payment via PayPal and I was ecstatic. Realizing I could make a living from my own creation set me down on a live-changing course.

Cody McLain – SupportNinja.com

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I think the first time I ever properly realised I could make money online was using a piece of software called Build a Niche Store. This allowed users to set up eBay niche stores on domains back when you could rank with a keyword rich domain, some content and about 100 or so directory links. This got me my first success – a $40 commission from eBay. This eventually lead to me to motivate myself to try and find more ways to earn money, but that was my first success as an affiliate marketer, and as somebody who invested a little bit of time and money this was my first return on my investment. The site did eventually earn me a little bit of cash – not a huge amount but something.

Sadly the software has long since stopped, but it did provide the inspiration behind another of my plugins eBay Feeds for WordPress.

Rhys Wynne – Winwar Media

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I started my blogging journey in October 2016. I was not realizing the power of affiliate marketing. Now, I love to write on topics related to Internet Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, web Hosting etc.

In my initial months of blogging I have written a review post on a web hosting program and other WordPress products and insert my affiliate link to the review post. Within few days I had made a handful of $300+ commission. I was really amazed and this way I realized the power of affiliate marketing and now it is one of primary ways to make money online.

Affiliate Marketing helps me to monetize my blog by providing relevant products and services to my blog readers. I love to mention the pros and cons of products which I like to promote as it makes the review post more genuine and user friendly.

To become successful in affiliate marketing you have to test the products or services first. It will help you to understand the every aspect of the products and services which you want to promote. This will help you to create a killer review post which generates more sales and commission.

Vishwajeet Kumar – Imbloggingtips.com

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Affiliate marketing was always my favorite monetization method from day one when I started promoting CD’s and other music merchandise through a fan website that I created about my favorite rock band. Affiliate marketing allows anyone to start making money online quickly. You don’t need to have big resources, you don’t need to spend many months (and years) building products. You can start today and make money today. All you need is some great content that answers questions that real people are asking and a way to integrate relevant products into that content. With this, you’re ready to go and start making money online.

Marko Saric – HowToMakeMyBlog.com

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Making money online is no easy task when first starting out, but once you realize there is a need for something and that you can accomplish it better, that’s when real business ideas start to flow. This is something we saw in the email marketing and lead generation space. We knew if we could create a 100% clean and legitimate way to deliver high-quality leads to businesses and brands, it would be a success. It took longer than expected, as we are focused on quality over quantity, but this is the type of mindset you need to have when building any type of brand or trying to make money online.

Tim Bourquin – Afteroffers.com

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I realized I could make money online through freelance writing. I had made pennies through other methods but attracted a few clients and saw this could sustain my business. Being a globe-trotting island hopper, I wanted to find long term sources of income through which I could offer helpful service and be paid. Enter freelance writing. I developed my writing skills, got clearer on the value I brought to the market and made the highly uncomfortable but bold step to go into business for myself. I never looked back.

Ryan Biddulph – BloggingFromParadise.com

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As a virtual service-based business, I find huge benefits to the value of SEO in my marketing effort. There is no other effort that is quite so scalable with relatively little time investment.

The trick is consistency. Producing great content and earning back-links to that content are the substance of SEO for my company in 2017.

The results are fantastic! I have earned clients from thousands of miles away, and it is a consistent method for earning new business.

Regarding consistency, great website SEO is built over time. Results don’t come as you work — it can take months for gains to finally be realized. After all, there is really no traffic difference if you’re on page 3 or page 300 (both will give you zero web traffic). But once you hit page 1 for your main keywords, results show amazing ROI.

Typically, the process takes 6-12 months unless you’re trying to make content go viral in a faster time, but by producing great content alongside a consistent effort to acquire links to your content, you will get there!

Andrew Lowen – NextLevelWeb.com

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Now that I have my own technology and service design company, it’s funny to look back on the growth of the business and how it’s turned into what it is today. When we were first starting out, we all knew there was a great demand for logo design and visual content marketing services online, but at the same time, there are plenty of competitors out there as well. Once we started to come up with new and creative ways to reach new audiences outside of traditional marketing and paid search, that is when we realized the true potential of running a business online. Another important note to make, is that we also had the realization that we could connect with more people around the world and not be focused on just local markets. This was a huge win for our business and outreach, as logo and branding is a language we all speak.

Srish Agrawal – Srish.com

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The first time I realized I could actually make good money online was landing my first freelance writing job with a company that provided me steady work for over two years. The need for online content is great in a host of niches, and over time, I was able to get a steady flow of work from a variety of clients, primarily long-term. I was making significantly more working part-time than I ever had at any of my full-time jobs. I eventually moved away from this work as I started making more steady income from my coaching services and products.

Advances in technology have made it possible to do so many types of work remotely, from coaching and consulting to web design. The most important piece of advice I would give however, is focusing on doing something in which you are truly interested. Pursuing a particular type of business or service simply because you think it will be easy to make money online doing it will probably backfire since you might not make money right away, and if that is your goal above all else, you’ll probably get frustrated and give up really fast.

You also want to work on your mindset, and deal with fears and limiting beliefs you have about working online and earning money for yourself head on. Succeeding in this arena requires a very different way of thinking, and if this isn’t addressed, you will not get the results you are looking for, no matter how much action you might be taking.

Kelli Cooper – Life Made to Order

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I wrote a blog post on how to solve a very specific technical problem. A few days later, I had someone emailing me from another country asking how much I’d charge to simply implement that technical fix for them. I named what, to me, was an absurd price. They paid. I did the task. It was then that I realized the truly global audience that you can reach online. You are no longer limited to making money selling to the same people in your small town / city. It’s wide open.

Though my first “real money” online was decidedly not sexy – the sheer scale of the opportunity made me realize that other methods could work as well. I could run a website funded with advertising, because, again, the scale of the Internet removes geographic limitations. “Making real money online” is the same as “making real money offline” – all the methods and markets are the same. It’s the scale that is different – and exciting.

Nathan Shivar – ShivarWeb.com

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Social media and online search has been grabbing all the online attention for the ease-of-money making that they present us with. But, let me be honest with you – making money online is not an easy task with all the competition out there.

An instinct for survival in my passion for digi-related services and my realization that internet provides us with various conventions to earn online is when the thought hit me first.

My continuing surveillance of this field has helped me acquire an in-depth knowledge of the mechanisms that it withholds and using this experience, I can guide you to choose the best one for your goal accomplishments.

You need to provide meticulous attention to every minutest detail if you are really planning to adorn this for a long term. Here, are some of the most interesting journeys that you can take up to make money online:

1. Writing an e-book and then selling these
2. Creating interesting apps that provide impeccable user experience
3. Hunt for human intelligence tasks, also called as Mechanical Turks. This can earn you a whoppingly high amount of money.
4. Create your blog and market interesting content
5. Upwork and 99Designs – Selling professional services across these networks
6. Email marketing
7. Selling audio books via audible

Vipin Nayar – Acodez

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It took me a few months online to really work out that the easiest way to make money was to offer a service (at least in the beginning).

So, I took what I knew (web design) and started helping people out for free to start with. Eventually, I got a few clients and it went from there.

In parallel, I also started building my audience and website and about 6 months in I started to see some traffic and sales for affiliate products. That is not something you can expect from day 1, so plan a little time if that is your goal. Services are far easier :>

Ashley Faulkes – Madlemmings.com

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I started my tech career working in the sales department for a major web hosting company. I spent all day answering questions for people who were interested in making money online. Most of the people I spoke with were interested in building a website for their retail business or were interested in creating an online store to sell products. The job was pretty easy because we had plenty of inbound inquiries coming into our department so it was not a very “hard sell”.

When I first started I didn’t really know much about the digital marketplace, inbound marketing, affiliate marketing or the like. The pay was not bad but It certainly could have been better. After a few years working in Sales, I moved over to the Marketing department. I was in the Marketing & Business Development department and was tasked with expanding our affiliate program. I soon realized that our affiliates (the successful ones) were making quite a bit more than I was for promoting our products and it was at this point in my career that I decided to make a change.

I stepped away from my professional career and decided to jump headfirst into the affiliate marketing world. I knew very little about affiliate marketing, search engine optimization, email automation and the like. I now consider myself to know a good bit more than your average person on this subject matter but the industry is constantly evolving and there is always more to learn. Affiliate marketing is an incredibly competitive field but it’s also very rewarding, If you are considering trying to make money online I would recommend you do plenty of research prior to jumping in.

Mike Brown – The Blogging Buddha

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I discovered I could make serious money online by having a well optimized real estate blog. My site Maximum Real Estate Exposure in fact is one of the most visited real estate blogs in the country. What I discovered is that if you genuinely want to help people you will be rewarded.

As a Realtor in Holliston Massachusetts, my focus has been to provide information that both buyers and sellers can use to make sound decisions. The advice is based on being a top producing real estate agent for the past thirty years. With my knowledge I am able to help people solve their problems.

Quite often this has lead to people picking up the phone and asking me to either work with them as a buyer’s or seller’s real estate agent. Internet leads are great because those who are calling you are already sold on your abilities.

I would encourage anyone who likes to write to start a blog. It is a great way to show off your expertise!

Bill Gassett – MaxRealEstateExposure.com

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In 2004 I realized I could make real money online, I think I did an online survey and was paid a few dollars to do it. Whilst the payment was small it opened my eyes to making money online. I went on to make a MySpace Layouts website which generated a good amount of traffic and make me decent money. The method of making money was using Google ads and affiliate ads on the Myspace Layouts website. Myspace died out in around 2008 so I had to move onto something else which was music and entertainment focused websites.

James Norquay – ProsperityMedia.com.au

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I realized that I could start making “real money” online by upgrading my thinking. Instead of trying to turn the internet into an ATM machine, like I was deserved money – I instead asked a fundamental business question: “What value can I provide to people?” As soon as I realized that generating revenue wasn’t about me, it was about my customers the game changed. The basic business concept of “value-creation equals revenue” is when I started making “real money”. I learned a high-value service (providing AdWords Management), and the revenue followed.

Michael Erickson – SearchScientists.com

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Since 1998, I’ve been making money online. The method I used to make money then and to make money today hasn’t changed much.

When I first started online, I was young and broke, but had one strong skill that I was able to leverage for success. I had a talent for seeing patterns.

For me SEO was just a natural way to build a web site. SEO in it’s fundamental form is just speaking in the language of how people search.

When you write in this way not only does your site rank for what people are looking for but those same people are more likely to convert because you are
speaking to the way that they are thinking. It is amazing how easy SEO and making money online becomes when you realize and understand this fundamental
truth. So keep things simple do some keyword research then use that language as a means of creating your site navigation and page topics. If you do this
you’ll start making “real money” online.

Allan Pollett – AllanPollett.com

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I knew that real money could be made since 2007 when I worked for a person who was making more money selling online guitar lessons out the back of his garage than people working in corporate jobs in the city.
The second time it really hit me was when I was working with travel and mommy bloggers who were making more than many of us in corporate jobs, but had fewer business skills than us.

The main method I found was through freelance work. But I ended up expanding into different channels.
I actually detailed the experience in an annual income report on my other site.

There are so many ways to earn an income online. But I do think it is important to find and stick to one core problem that you can solve so you can scale up that niche.

Making the same income that you would get at a job for employment is definitely achievable from doing an activity online. You just need to work out what is your ‘thing’ in the online space and then carve out a slice of the income pie for yourself.

David James – BusinessGrowthDigitalMarketing.com

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I first realized money could be made online when I stumbled upon a video introducing Google Adsense. I tried it out and made a few dollars, but the truth is that Adsense is something incredibly hard to scale. It’s directly tied to your traffic, and as competition grows traffic is harder
and harder to acquire.

When I began prioritizing affiliate marketing, that’s when my eyes were truly opened to the possibilities of making real money. The opportunity to sell to the same people over and over again was incredible to me at the time and showed me that real businesses could actually be built online.

With good systems in place, affiliate marketing in the right market has everything that you could want. It’s perhaps the ideal substitute for creating an actual product if you are unable to, or do not want to for whatever reason. Between small ticket and big ticket items, recurring and non-recurring commissions, cross-sells and up-sells, you can take the same visitor and end up making quite a bit of money – far more than an Adsense click would ever give you!

James McAllister – Starlight-Baby.com
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I am a certified English teacher who loves both writing and editing. Actually, I love anything involving words, reading included!
As a word-lover who began blogging in 2013, I discovered that website owners were in need of writers for their blogs. I actually found this out through a personal experience with guest posting.
I had guest posted on Dear Blogger, and the owner, Greg Narayan, loved my writing so much that he hired me to write a blog post for him each month. Thus began my freelance writing career!

*Related read: 10 Lessons Learned from My First Freelancing Client (who was both My Worst and Best Client)

Lorraine Reguly – WordingWell.com

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The first moment I realized you could make real money online was when I was sitting in Bangkok at 11pm one night in 2010. I posted a review on my site of an online course during it’s launch period. Within 5 minutes of the launch, I’d earned about $500 in commissions. This was a huge eye opener for me, and helped me to realize there were more ways to monetize a site than just adsense ads.

Sean Ogle – LocationRebel.com

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It was late 2011. I’d had a few successful websites that did really well in terms of traffic. My first project made a loss, and the second one was doing great in terms of growth but it was really difficult to make money in that niche given the resources we had available & the level of competition.

The value of providing free content had been proven to me already. But I had my doubts as to whether I could actually make money with a blog.

So I picked a new niche that interested me and went for it. Created loads of content and decided to focus on affiliate marketing.

Then after a while, my hard work paid off. I got my first cheque through the post. It was around $200 or so. A small amount considering the time and effort I’d invested but it proved to me that it was possible to earn money with a blog and that provided the motivation to keep going.

Adam Connell – BloggingWizard.com

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I first realized I could make “real money” online when I started working with Zoe Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of ZBody Fitness. She was using influencer marketing as a vehicle to drive traffic to her website. And it was through my partnership with her that I first discovered the real power of social media influencers and influencer marketing.

Since then, I’ve branched out into other forms of digital marketing, including SEO, conversion rate optimization, content marketing and even product launch marketing. But my real passion is still working with influencers and brands to reach the right audience, with the right content, at the right time to drive conversions and maximize ROI.

Shane Barker – ShaneBarker.com

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I first made my income from AdSense way back in 2010 and even before that I know I could make money online if I can drive more traffic from search engines to my sites. I always believe search engine traffic is the KEY to making more online. You can use that traffic to put ads, sell banner ads, promote affiliate products and what not?

If you’re just starting out, make sure to focus on finding your target audience, use proper keywords and try to increase your search engine traffic in the first year. Then, figure out ways to monetize your traffic.

Anil Agarwal – BloggersPassion.com

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It was selling services or software online. It was in about 2012 when I made my first dollar selling software from the first tech startup I’ve ever started called Mailbird, you can see it here www.getmailbird.com. It started with creating a simple website with a landing page to collect information from people who were interested in what I was selling, then setting up a payment gateway to enable people to pay. Then I started experimenting with online marketing from content, inbound, SEO and Social Channels. I was very responsive to any customers that emailed me with inquiries about the product and that enabled me to also understand what was most important to Mailbird users. Then I set up different types of pricing plans and tested and adjusted them as the business developed.

Andrea Loubier – GetMailBird.com

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I first realized I could make real money online after I released a free Coming Soon Page plugin for WordPress. In the first month the plugin got over 10,000 downloads and I started receiving feature request. I put all those features in a Pro Version and started to sell it. To my surprise I sold close to 4 figures the first month. It was that moment I realized I could sell software, specifically a WordPress plugin, and eventually match and exceed my day job’s salary. That was five years ago and I’m happy to say I have exceeded my expectations.

You always hear “find something people want, build it, put a price on it and sell it”. Well that’s exactly what I did. I should mention however that I spent close to 10 years prior building products and trying to sell them. The kicker was I was building products no one wanted. With my WordPress Coming Soon Page Plugin I was able to find a niche that needed to be filled.

The good news is there are still lots of niche opportunities on the internet waiting to be filled. You could be the person to fill it!

John Turner – SeedProd.com

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I don’t mean to brag or anything (and I understand it might be hard for you to believe) but… it took me just a few minutes after I got online for the first time (back in December 31st, 1998) to realize all the hundreds of possibilities that having a website would open to me. Including making a living out of the Internet!

I started looking for how to build a website and, at the same time, found programs that were paying website owners to publicize their products.

I made my first dollars through affiliate marketing promoting online casinos. In around one to two years, I had earned around $10,000 USD and it was clear to me this was the right path to pursue.

Louie Luc – Buzznitrous.com

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This is not new by any stretch of the imagination, but I will say that E-commerce businesses are a growing industry for the every day person looking to start a new business. We have recently had a ton of success helping people with their E-Commerce sales thru Facebook and Instagram advertising. So we ended up doing a lot of research and digging and you truly can create a very successful side (or main) income by finding a product that is well received by the marketplace and setting up your own e-commerce store. You may have seen Oberlo and other companies advertising this and it truly can work. Of course, you must have a proof of concept (i.e. will people buy your stuff) and know what you are doing in setting up your E-comm storefront as well as be versed with social media advertising (of course, companies like ours can help you out 🙂 and have a modest budget to give it a go (total costs for building everything and having some money to try out will be in the $10K-$15K range). But if you have an awesome idea, you really can do this in this day and age and we are seeing more and more people and companies popping up. We have plans ourselves to give a few products a go to try out and plan to have this be a nice revenue stream for us in 2018.

David Reimherr – Magnificent.com

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I was living in Thailand on a long holiday after leaving a job at Microsoft. I was determined to figure out a way to make long-term worldwide travel possible, so I was spending every day studying anything related to digital marketing I could get my hands on (which wasn’t nearly as easy 10+ years ago).

One day, I made $0.40 sending affiliate referrals to hotels and accommodation websites, and I was over the moon. It wasn’t much, but I knew that if I could make $0.40, I could make as much as I wanted because the internet is infinitely scalable. The next day, I made $400+ using the same techniques, and although I’ve since pivoted from affiliate marketing to running an international digital marketing agency, I’ve never looked back.

Aaron Agius – Louder.Online

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Back the end of 2007, I was a very new, keen, and optimistic blogger. I’d started a blog about dieting/weight loss, popped Google AdSense on, and was waiting for the money to roll in. To try to get some extra traffic to the blog, I pitched a (much larger) dieting blog with a guest post.

They loved it — so much, they offered me a paid gig. And I made my first $20 from blogging.

This first $20 was swiftly followed by more, and then a payrise from that editor … within a couple of months, I’d secured another regular freelancing gig with a different blog. I’d honestly no idea when I pitched that first guest post that freelance blogging existed!

It took me eleven months to make my first $100 from AdSense … by which point I’d quit my day job to freelance for a bunch of blogs (and to follow my fiction writing dreams too, by taking a part time Masters in Creative Writing). Nine years on, I’m still making a living online, and I still do a bit of freelance blogging as part of that. Along the way, I spoke at blogging conferences and universities, and wrote Publishing E-Books For Dummies, published by Wiley in their iconic series.

Ali Luke – Aliventures.com

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As a sports writer and blogger, I first realized I could start making ‘real money’ when my blog began to grow and started receiving quality targeted traffic.

For too long, my web traffic numbers showed some promise but it was only when I focused on answering people’s questions and help solving their problems that that traffic became more targeted.

From reading a few internet marketing blogs and getting inspiration from people like Zac Johnson, Spencer Haws and my good friend Louie Luc, I decided to run some experiments with Google AdSense ads and, later on, affiliate links.

My AdSense earnings were nice but I couldn’t really rely on them as they weren’t that very much consistent. When I added a few affiliate links to some specific articles, though, I was blown away with the results!!

I remember one morning checking my inbox and finding dozens of new affiliate earnings notifications. It was right there that I realized I could push it up to the next level!

Mike Martyns – SoccerGearHQ.com

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For me, I realized it when we scaled our FB ads from $3k a month to $10k a month to $100k a month. We kept increasing the budget and couldn’t find a plateau for diminishing returns. This was in 2014 when I was with a VC backed startup. My life hasn’t been the same since.

William Harris – Elumynt

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It was more than 10 years ago but I still remember that “this it it” moment vividly.

Back in the 2000’s era – Google rolled out updates every few months. Webmasters would wait for the new search results to go live and study the latest changes. In one of those updates, after months of hard work, my sites jumped into Google first page for almost all targeted keywords overnight. I was getting 2 – 3x traffic and affiliate sales. That was the moment I realized that I am in something big and might go full time into affiliate marketing.

The key to my success in the early days was SEO. I was a SEO nerd. I did a lot of studies and testing to understand how search engine algorithm works.

Jerry Low – Web Hosting Secret Revealed (WHSR)

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It’s a funny yet poignant story actually:

I blog about blogging tips. My reader had a friend who was always criticizing his blog. Therefore, he decided to hire me as a blogging coach. Consultations are pretty lucrative. Getting hired for one-on-one coaching made me realize I could make “real” money blogging.

At any rate, the person who hired me had his friend tell me what to do to help him. We had a 3-way arrangement in that respect.

The man who hired me has since passed away but he ended becoming one of the best blogging friends I’ve ever had.

When I think of my late friend. I remember him fondly. Before he left, he gave me the confidence that I could make real money online. Happily, I have continued to do so ever since.

Janice Wald – MostlyBlogging.com

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The time I realized I could actually make money online was when I generated my first sale and commission from a baby product review website I’d created. I had no previous experience in affiliate marketing when I created the site, but I did have a core competency doing SEO and content strategy so I knew I could get organic traffic to the site. But I had no clue if I could figure out how to make it profitable. The content that earned me my first commission was this really in-depth organic baby mattress buying guide that I actually wrote myself. My wife and I just had our first baby and we’d been mattress shopping, so I had fresh, first hand knowledge to draw from for the guide. Before I monetized it, I conducted outreach for the guide first and it earned links from a bunch of mom blogs, which helped it rank. After I’d finished outreach, I added Amazon Affiliate links and Google Adsense. Within a few weeks, I made my first Amazon sale of an organic baby mattress. It was only a few dollars commission, but it was really exciting and incentivized me to keep going. I think the key learning from that first site was doing outreach before I monetized, so it didn’t look like my motivation was an affiliate marketing play.

Ken Lyons – Measured SEM

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My first contact with running a business online was in 2012 when I chatted with a good friend in Las Vegas. He and I come from the same city in Germany and I knew he started making money online at the age of 14. I was frustrated in my job and had a nervous breakdown at the age of 23. Clearly, something had to change. He advised I follow bloggers like Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income and study how they make money online. Being a web developer already, I quickly realized that I could sell my WordPress skills through a blog. At that time, my ultimate goal was to quit my job as a consultant. I started my first blog and within seven months I made enough money to quit my job.

I used the blog (and still do) as a platform to sell my WordPress skills. Over time the business grew into an agency with three full-time designers, a project manager, a development team, two co-founders, and me being the CTO. Blogging has become less important for my business, as we built seriously powerful relationships with companies all over the world. They keep us busy and we rely on networking and over-delivering to grow our agency.

For 2018 however, we plan to implement a new blogging strategy and to somewhat “revive” all of our corporate blogs.

Jan Koch – WP Mastery

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When I saw the first coaching client’s first payment…that’s when the lights really went on in my head. The case studies I had seen were suddenly relatable—not just aspirational. Sure, I was far from being worth my own case study. But seeing those first few hundred dollars meant a lot.

In some ways, an even more important turning point happened months later when I got my first payment of thousands of dollars from a well-respected marketing expert. Having a world-class expert pay for me to help them with marketing—and pay as much I used to make in four months at my last job—that, to me, meant I wasn’t just dreaming of making a living off helping people get better results with marketing.

Peter Sandeen – PeterSandeen.com

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I always wanted to start my own blog when I got into internet. On the other hand, I knew it that we can make money online but wasn’t sure which is the right way. I started All Blogging Tips in the last month of 2011. It quickly gain popularity and within 3-4 month I was able to generate my first income which was from a WordPress theme affiliate program. I started getting more into affiliate marketing by signing up with different programs which my readers would love. Within a year of starting my blog I realized that YES I can actually make pretty good amount of money from my blog. Meanwhile, I also worked on few web development project in earlier months of starting blog and they were able to increase the income. In short, you can actually make pretty good amount of money from blogging, if you do your homework properly and have some patience.

Ammar Ali – All Blogging Tips

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I was invited to speak at a large real estate conference in 2010, and while on the flight home from Atlanta GA I was freaking out on the inside. You see, I was completely broke at that time in my life and I had spent every dollar I had to get to that event so I could speak …but with rent due in 3 days and no money in my bank I was stressed out.

It must have been noticeable, because I’ll never forget the moment when the person sitting next to me leaned across the aisle and asked … “Drew, are you ok?

Scott had been a speaker at the conference also, and we had become pretty good friends during the event. When he asked me that question I guess the severity of my situation became real because I immediately grabbed my notebook and outlined a strategy for making money online.

Within 15-20 minutes I had outlined a training course for realtors: 90 Day Blog Blueprint.

I leaned over to Scott and showed him the outline and asked; “do you think Realtors would pay to get access to this course?” He replied enthusiastically “Yes 100% I do!”

When I arrived home, I tested the strategy and was shocked …it worked! Within 2 days of being home I had made a little over $4,400 which was more than enough to pay my rent.

From that, the Mailbox Money System was born.

Drew Burks – EscapeTheJobLife.com

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In TimeCamp, we had felt that we can make real money when the number of paid customers started to increase. It forced us to analyze the way we deal with the clients and understand better how to encourage them to use time tracking software in their companies. There is a stereotype that this kind of tool is used by bosses to invigilate the employees, but according to our users, it’s just a myth. Most of the employers decide to implement time trackers because they want to show the workers that it is the best solution to improve their time management skills based on the productivity reports they get every day, week or month.

But how it resulted in our online money success? We started promoting an appropriate culture of improvement among our current and potential users. It straightforwardly increased the level of trust to our software and caused the revenue growth.

Ola Rybacka – TimeCamp.com

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I tried a number of small affiliate programs through the years but never saw much in the way of return. It wasn’t until I started creating useful content to go along with desirable affiliate programs (Amazon Affiliates for example) that the monthly revenue became worth the investment.

People search the internet to get the answers to questions they have. Frequently, we’re looking to learn from the experience of others before buying a product. This is where high-quality product reviews can be key to driving big affiliate sales. By being a trusted source of information on a product people are considering buying, they’re highly likely to click your affiliate links, once you’ve put their mind at ease by providing an informed review and built their trust.

High-quality, detailed content is key to being found in search results where quality has become key to rank. Become a trusted source of information and people will trust what you’re selling.

Ben Brausen – BenBrausen.com

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Back in 2006 I have already been acquainted with blogging but I didn’t know that time that you can actually earn online. My first blog was built out of passion but who would have thought that it would become my doorway to online marketing.

Fast forward a bit, in 2010 someone in my connection taught me SEO and opened up more ideas about freelancing. During that time, it wasn’t as rampant as now and people would distrust online jobs fearing they may fall to scams online. More often than not, elder ones would tell me to ‘find a real job in the real world’ even tough I’m consistently getting paid via remote work. And it was totally OK! 😛

Basically, for me making ‘real money’ was synonymous to finding ‘career online’ which I took step during that year. I have started working as a freelance search engine marketing guy in 2010 up until present.

Apart from the SEM services I offer, I also maintain series of passive income generating sites I regularly maintain. They have served as my guinea pigs in testing digital marketing strategies especially for SEO and PPC.

Fervil Von Tripoli – FervilVon.com

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I had two “aha” moments early on in my online career. The first was when I had a brick and mortar professional services business. I was new to the profession and needed more clients. It was 2006 which was relatively early days for small business online marketing. I didn’t have much of a marketing budget so I started a blog and learned SEO. Within 6 months I had more work than I could handle. That was when I realized the potential of the internet for building a business.

My second “aha” moment was when I hit $5,000 per month in affiliate commissions via blogging. I leveraged my SEO knowledge and started two websites on the side. Within 18 months those two sites were earning approximately $5,000 per month. It didn’t take long after that to hit five figures.

Those were two very significant milestones in my online career that I’ll never forget.

Jon Dykstra – FatStacksBlog.com

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Google AdSense is the first method through which I tried to earn money online. Though not a quick money generating method, AdSense was nevertheless a tried & tested and trusted method. Also, since it was a free platform and the required eligibility criteria were easy, I found this method to be the best from the rest.

Another thing that I absolutely loved about AdSense is that it allowed me full control as to which ads appear on my website, which ensured that the value proposition of my site was not compromised.

Since then I have moved on to Affiliate marketing which has helped me increase my earnings substantially. This method has a lot more scope, thanks to the rise of numerous online merchants, Amazon, being my favourite. In addition, although affiliate marketing is challenging, once you gain a firm foothold in this space, it could prove to be quite rewarding.

Nirav Dave – Capsicum Mediaworks

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I first realized I can make real money online, when I receive my first payment from the affiliate link on my online dating blog, it hundreds of pounds. The affiliate links eventually evolved into own brand white label dating sites, which was even more lucrative than affiliate links.

But to get this real money I had to do some good promotion. In the old days of SEO web directories worked very well. And it was enough to submit your site to few quality directories and wait for result.

Evgeniy Garkaviy – Hope Spring Ecards

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The moment I realized I could make ‘real money’ online was when I received my first referred client. As a freelance writer with a small portfolio to work with, and not a lot of experience, I was working with a few clients and making some decent side money. Which is exactly what I set out to do initially.

However, when I received a cold email from an interested client, that had not only mentioned seeing my work on other, prominent WordPress websites, but also had received high praise from a client I was already working with, I knew that there was really something to this freelance writing business and the networking that comes along with it.

And that’s the main method I used to build my freelance business. – networking. However, I also continue touse my byline to direct traffic to my website, cold pitch clients I am interested in writing for, and make sure that those I already write for are always aware that I am available.

Lindsay Liedke – WPKube.com

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I first starting making real money online while consulting for a small eCommerce company while getting my degree in Internet Marketing. It was a great way to test out the things I was learning, and it was the first time ever acquiring customers over the internet. It was fun and exciting, and it got me hooked!

Harris Schachter – OptimizePri.me

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I first started realizing that I could make good money when I started making more than my full-time job. I quit my full-time job back in 2008. In fact, it was a factory job, and there was a lot of unwanted drama. I resigned from there because the headache there wasn’t worth it. Doing my own thing worked, and I didn’t have to have someone else telling me what to do all the time.

However, anyone that decides to go into their own business should never quit their “daytime job” or full-time until they can prove to have at least enough made that they can survive and have extra for emergencies and for my son. I never would’ve resigned my factory job if I hadn’t been making enough to support myself or my family. It’s a risk to to leave a job for your own business if you don’t make goals and keep them. You never want to be here “starving artist.”

Nile Flores – Blondish.net

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To be honest, in the beginning I had no idea that there was an online world that could give us so much money and freedom in life. It was after I read the book The Laptop Entrepreneur which opened up a new world of ideas and opportunities for me.

After that, I started my own blog and through the blog, I got a lot of freelance writing clients and that helped me to grow my knowledge, learn about industry SOP and earn a living online. In fact, the luckiest moment in my life was the time when I could give a sum of $15,000 to renovate his shop. And the credit to all these goes to my decision to step into the online world of freelance writing and blogging

Swadhin Agrawal – DigitalGYD.com

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After getting rejected to work as a barista at Starbucks 10 years ago, I decided to browse the bookstore and stumbled upon a book on making money blogging by Problogger. I didn’t know much about blogging then, but I thought it was going to be fun learning about it.

I started a blog and wrote about my passion, which was coffee, a month later, I made my first dollar online through Adsense. It was the happiest moment of my entire life.

That was when I saw the potential of blogging and making real money online, so I started more blogs, optimised those blogs and monetize all of them through Adsense and later on it went into sidebar ads. I reached out to people that were advertising on other blogs and asked them if they wanted to advertise on mine. It was hard work reaching out to hundreds of blogs, but it paid the bills, and it was worth it. After a few months, I flipped them for a more significant profit.

Aaron Lee – Short of Height

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I think most people understand by now that you can make money online. The confusion for most people is how to start. What is affiliate marketing? What is drop-shipping? Do I sell services or products? This could seem overwhelming.

For me, I started with affiliate marketing and found unique ways to promote products. Not only can I drive revenue from the affiliates, but adding Adsense is a great way to supplement the revenue on my sites that receive above-average traffic.

Some of those unique ways to drive affiliate revenue are to create in-depth tutorials or create tools that hook into the affiliate products API. Being a web developer, creating tools is easy for me. For others, I recommend having a solid understanding of the niche you’re attempting to go after with and deep understanding of the audience.

Dario Zadro – ZadroWeb.com

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I’ll just take “online” as being involved in the digital aspect of the world. It was through SEO. It’s actually a funny story because I first discovered SEO through my internship for a digital marketing company where all I had to do was comment on forums, blogs, etc. and put links in my comments. Basically, I spammed every comments section that I found.

Later on, when I started my blog, God and You, I realized that the only viewers my site had were my Mom and my brother. So, I decided, then and there, to find out how to increase the traffic that comes into my site. And that’s where I realized that SEO can do so much for a website. That’s when I decided to learn about SEO through trial and error because there were no online tutorials, books, or any other knowledge-based blog about SEO, so I had to learn it all by myself.

That’s why I started a knowledge-based blog, seo-hacker.com, to write about everything that I’ve learned in my journey in teaching myself about SEO. Then, I went on a trip where I met a girl, and we talked about random things and I happen to mention SEO in passing. Coincidentally, her Uncle was actually looking for someone that can do SEO for their business. So, to make the long story short, the girl I met set-up a meeting between her Uncle and me, and I asked for payment during the meeting (of course I told the Uncle that I was not an SEO expert), and he agreed.

That’s when I realized that SEO can help me gain money through the exchange of my SEO services, and over time, I started my own SEO company.

Sean Si – SEO Hacker

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To be frank, I wasn’t aware of this fact that we can even earn money from blogs. I started my first blog to share the tips and tricks that I learned while experimenting with my laptop. I shared a few theme modifications code snippets that I personally used to tweak the look and feel of my website. I was using the Mystique WordPress theme at that time. It was quite a famous theme back in 2011-2012. This theme modifications article started getting traffic and someone on the Internet asked me if I can customize the theme according to his needs. For a one hour job, he paid me $80. Again, after a few days, he hired me for a similar job.

Rajesh Namase – TechLila.com

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I began blogging when I had lots of time to me and couldn’t return to my previous SEO job, due to my familial responsibilities. And when Google AdSense paid me the first buck, I realized that there was so much more potential earning to be made online. It was the first method that helped me generate my online income and as my blog grew, I explored more earning opportunities.

With the launch of multiple blogs, I was able to establish my footprint. I came across different online earning programs and embraced the most effective of them. like most other bloggers, I found the best methods after some hit and trials. The methods that work best also vary from one blogger to another and often the niche you are targeting. Sponsored and promotional content has also been an effective strategy. Besides, I have also embraced some programs similar to AdSense.

Nisha Pandey – SEOTechyWorld

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My first encounter with the financial side of online activities was in 1999. I published a banner on a webpage and after the weekend I called the client and told them that they had over 10.000 views. They did not believe me and we tried it out the week after. The results were even better, over 12.000 views. In 1999, we measured visitor’s trough a visit counter on the page. After this experience, the client was eager to use banners/ digital marketing and did not hesitate to use money on these activities. This also resulted in a lot of money going on testing out what kind of message and design worked. The big (luxury) problem at that time was that everything worked.

After these tests and experience, I realized that this had to be the best and most effective marketing a company can do. I was impressed with the way the marketing worked, imagining that the user is active and focused on a screen in front of them. Instead of walking next to a poster, listening to radio or watching TV.

I actually did not think about the money, I just wanted to learn more and “ride the internet wave”, and I am still riding the wave!

Slavisa Gacic – Nettrafikk.no
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I realized I could make money online in 2002. I was consulting with a DVD etailer helping them withbusiness development tools. I suggested to the CEO that we should try to get some traffic from search engines, and he said to me “Eric, great idea, go do it.” I started working on improving page content, and a year later we were doing millions of dollars per year from search.

Following that, I got involved in a small startup with one business partner, with a plan to develop the great majority of our traffic from SEO. It was an education lead gen site. The approach we used was that we created tons of content. We wrote unique descriptions of hundreds of schools, and also for different degree programs and city college pages.

It worked extremely well, and the site was very successful. Based on those early successes, I started doing a lot of SEO consulting as well, and that’s what grew into Stone Temple Consulting.

Eric Enge – StoneTemple.com

It’s Time to Start Making Even MORE Money Online!

If you are already making good money online, congrats! If not, right now is the best time to get started. With so many different ways to make money online, there is really no reason for you to be sitting on the sidelines much longer.

For anyone that wants to use the excuse they don’t have time or money, that’s all it is — an excuse. How much time are you spending watching TV every night? And how much money are you wasting on things you don’t need?

With that being said, starting a blog is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to get started with an online business or brand of your own. It literally costs pennies per day, and is something that you can build up and create in your spare time.

Don’t let 2018 be another year of “I wish I did that…” — take action today!

While many people aspire to create their own business every year, the odds of success are slim. When you look online and see success stories all over the place, this is simply because no one wants to write or read about the massive failures that happen every day. In fact, for every success story, you come across, there are probably 1,000s of failed businesses, startups, and ideas that happened behind the scenes that not many people ever heard about.

An article in Business Know How estimates based on SBA statistics that out of hundreds of thousands of businesses started each year, only about half are still in business five years later and only a third after ten years — and even these numbers still seem high for success rates.

While there are many reasons for this high failure rate, two major reasons are that businesses are underfinanced and that new business owners don’t have enough knowledge and experience to overcome the inevitable business problems they encounter. While the concept of starting a blog requires minimal-to-no investment, it still shouldn’t be something you jump into blind. Now imagine doing the same thing if you were going to start a company, pay for rent, hire staff and take out a loan in the process. For more details on this process, simply follow my how to start a blog course on Udemy, which currently has over 10,000 students and more than 100 5-star reviews!

Your chances of success increase if you know how to start a franchise rather than plan to start a business from scratch. Your odds of success increase because you are following a proven formula and get plenty of guidance from the franchisor on how to operate the business. In addition, to tapping into expert knowledge on what to do, it’s also easier to get funding for a franchise because a lender can review the franchisor’s figures to determine if a business owner will be able to repay a loan.

So, if you want to start your own business, either as a franchisee or to launch your own business idea, how do you go about raising the money that you need to be successful?

Here are 7 ways to raise the money you need to start your own business.

1. Finance yourself

The upside of financing yourself is that you don’t owe anybody anything should your business fail; and depending on how you’re self-financing, you may not have to pay interest on the money. The downside, of course, is that you could lose everything you’ve worked your whole life to slowly accumulate.
Financing yourself can be done by tapping into your personal savings, by selling your personal assets, using your credit cards, borrowing against your home, taking out a personal bank loan, or cashing in on your IRA or your 401(k) retirement accounts.

2. Borrow from family and friends

If you can’t raise enough money through self-financing, you can get some extra capital by borrowing from friends and family. Again, this, too, has obvious risks, if your business venture doesn’t succeed as well as you had hoped, you may have a difficult time paying everyone back and this could permanently destroy your close relationships.

3. Get help from Uncle Sam

The Small Business Administration (SBA) will not directly lend you money for your business, but it will offer a guaranty program for getting a loan from banks, credit unions, and other qualified lenders. You might be able to get funds from a 7(a) Loan Program or a Microloan (ranging from $10,000 to $50,000).

4. Apply for Venture Capital (VC) funding

If you can convince a VC firm that you have a brilliant business idea that they might be willing to make a direct investment in return for equity stakes in your business. These loans tend to be difficult to get because venture capitalists tend to be very selective. Even if you do happen to have invented a device that could change the world as we know it, a startup destined for explosive growth, you also have to give up more equity or control of your business operations that you feel comfortable with.

5. Talk to an Angel Investor

The idea of an angel investor sounds like a dream come true—an affluent person looking for an investment opportunity. However, like a VC loan, they will ask for a large equity stake in your business and also try to control how you run things as a way of protecting their investment.

6. Get help from an aggregate of strangers

Crowdfunding is one of the most democratic ways of getting enough money to launch a business. In crowdfunding, many people will donate a small amount of money each toward helping you reach your financial goal.

However, there are four things you need to do to be successful with crowdfunding.

1. Intrigue your audience. Usually, the more creative the idea, the more likely it will be to appeal to people looking to donate to a worthy cause. For instance, writing an unusual book, making a documentary movie about some endangered animal in a remote region of the world, researching a free-energy device, and so on.
2. Follow all the rules. You need to follow all the rules of the crowdfunding platform. If you fail to follow these rules, even if it’s out of ignorance, all the money might be returned to the donors.
3. Give donors a memento for their efforts. It could be a copy of the book they helped you research or a t-shirt or a membership to a business you’ve built.
4. Pitch a good story. You will need to be very good at marketing your idea—with lots of strong copy, great video presentations, and other forms of delivering your pitch.

Although it’s not easy to fund your business, it is possible to find the right funding for your startup. Sometimes, too, you may have to try a number of different ways to raise the capital you need.

If you’ve ever wanted to get involved in the stock market or investing in your future, you’ve likely given some thought to the various options out there. The most common method for investing is through the stock market, however, this is often a long term solution and not something active investors and younger investors are looking for. Once you’ve pushed that option to the side, then more enticing opportunities like day trading, forex trading and investing in precious metals or digital currencies might come into play.

To better explain each of these investing methods, and how they differ from typical stock market yields and investing, be sure to check out each of the summaries below.

Day Trading

There is nothing wrong with investing your money in the stock market, but it’s usually a long-term play — especially if you are referring to a 401k. However, if you have some money to play around with, day trading might be what you are looking for. With it now being easier than ever for someone to open a brokerage account with services like Etrade or Ameritrade, anyone can also start day trading from home. The concept of day trading is jumping in and out of stocks for quick gains. While this may seem easy enough, it’s just as easy to lose money as it is to gain. It’s also important to note that nearly all trading platforms also have mobile applications, which makes it easy to trade at any given point in time, and not needing to be on a laptop, computer or talk to a broker directly.

Precious Metals

We first covered the basics of investing in individual companies through the stock market, then your options with world currencies. Now it’s time to also cover investing in precious metals — which is commonly focused on gold and silver. Just like you can buy and sell shares of a company, you can do the same with gold mining stocks or through gold mining indices (some offering up to 3X multiples). Another option is to simply invest in physical gold or a Gold IRA. However, if this is something you are going to do, it’s recommended that you make this investment for the long haul. A great site for purchasing physical gold and keeping an eye on precious metal prices is GSI Exchange. Just like the stock market opens and closes in the United States, then opens again in different countries around the world, the same holds true for precious metals.

While investing in gold might not be as attractive as it once was from an investor standpoint, it’s still one of the most valued resources in the world today. Check out these resource on the top countries with gold and you will start to have a better understanding of where the finance hoarding of gold is really taking place.

Forex Trading

The business and trading of world currencies is something that has been going on for generations. However, as mentioned in the previous point, it’s now easier than ever for someone to get involved in forex trading thanks to online investing and training tools. Just like there are self-serve platforms for trading stocks, there are custom built solutions for tracking, monitoring and trading world currencies as well. When it comes to Forex Trading, there are plenty of solutions and platforms on the market today that offer access to advanced charting and analysis for traders when looking at different forex, commodities, and indices across the world. With world markets and currencies changing at all times, it’s crucial to have a platform and trading system in place that is also working 24/7.

Digital Currencies

One of the most exciting and fast paced methods for investing and trading as of lately is through digital currencies. While this method is still somewhat new and unknown to many, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many others are not only gaining mass attention, some of them are seeing some massive movements in pricing as well. To keep an eye on such digital currencies, you can visit Coin Market Cap, which lists 100 different digital currencies and posting their latest or live movements. While it’s easy to trade stocks, forex, and world currencies through online trading platforms, it’s still a new world for digital currency trading. There are options and market places for digital currency trading, but regulation across such networks isn’t as mainstream as it’s all still fairly new.

When it comes to any type of investing, always be sure to put in the time and due diligence. While each of the investing and trading options above is unique in their own way, they also each come with their own risks and rewards.

How much money will be spent during this Black Friday shopping stint? BILLIONS!

Instead of sitting there and saying “WOW!” — you should be planning how you can tap into this major shopping “holiday” as everyone is already in buying mode and they are just waiting to pull out their credit card and spent good money on your amazingly awesome and heavily discounted offer!

To get the most out of this years holiday shopping trends and spending spree, you must first understand what Black Friday is all about, along with how and where people are spending their money.

Special thanks to Nextopia for their awesome infographic and stats collection.

Black Friday Kicks Off the Holiday Shopping Season

Even though more brands are now kicking off their Black Friday promotions earlier and earlier each year, the key figure that you need to know is that there are only 27 days between Black Friday and Christmas. This means you have a short period of time to make a huge amount of money… so be sure to make the most of it!

Just how much money are we talk about? Well, last year we saw $1.964 BILLION in overall online sales for Thanksgiving and Black Friday, which was a 18.5% increase from the previous year. There is no doubt that we will see $2 BILLION+ in sales this year!

How to Best Target Your Potential Customers with Online Markets

1 out of 3 Americans will be shopping this Black Friday… which is roughly 140 million consumers. If your customer isn’t out at your local retailers, then there is a good chance they are already shopping online.

When it comes to shopping online, not only is it easier for customers, but it’s also a cash cow for many brands and Black Friday resource sites. The question isn’t if your audience is going to buy, it’s how you are going to entice them to buy from your site and not your competition. These are some of the methods that work best.

• 44% will offer specific deals and promotions online
• 41% will offer a one-day sale online
• 44% will use a special email campaign
• 27% will offer free shipping at a lower than usual minimum purchase level
• 20% will offer free shipping on all purchases

How Big Retailers are Cashing in on Black Friday

As mentioned, more and more brands and retailers are now offering their Black Friday promotions and deals earlier than ever before — simply in hopes to beat out their competition and bring in more customers. Black Friday is late in November, but brands like Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Khol’s released their Black Friday ads as early as November 10th — 3 weeks before the actual shopping event date!

Something you might also be surprised to know is the big differences between online sales based on actual locations throughout the country. The following cities have the highest online sales during Black Friday for last year. (Something to consider split testing with if you can sort your customer data, demographics and analytics)

1. New York City, NY
2. Atlanta, GA
3. Los Angeles, CA
4. Washington, DC
5. Chicago, IL

When Most People are Shopping During Black Friday

Black Friday events used to occur after midnight on Thanksgiving, but those days are long gone. Throw in the 24/7 world of the internet and there is simply no need to ever put a limit on when and where you can buy something… however, we still do have some great stats to backup when people are buying most during Black Friday.

While most of the big sales are “midnight” promotions for the early birds, the majority of shoppers (39%) aren’t making trek out to stores or buying online until 10AM or later.

Black Friday Online Sales from 2011-2013: Even with the economy and jobs in a sour position, the continued massive upward climb of Black Friday holiday spending continues to grow year after year. It will be no surprised when we see these numbers climb right through the $2 billion mark in 2014.

Mobile Ad Spend is Dominating Black Friday Promotions

It’s no surprise to see a ton of money being poured into the mobile and tablet advertising industry — which is currently accounted for 40% of all Black Friday advertising.

Mobile advertising is one of the best ways to get your message and advertisements instantly read and while customers are already potentially shopping within your online or offline store. Mobile is quickly passing the 40% mark for all online traffic and mobile sales are climbing passed the 20% mark as well.

Google Owns Black Friday: Whether it’s through your desktop, tablet or mobile device… everyone is going to Google to find what they are looking for. With billions of searches made, the majority of them are coming through the hours of 8AM-12PM and then peaking again during 4PM-7PM. Online sales peak around 9AM.

What are People Buying on Black Friday?

We know everyone is buying everything they can find on Black Friday, but actually knowing what types of deals and promotions relate best with your audience is key. Leading the way among all products are electronics, clothing, toys and jewelry.

Pinterest vs. Facebook: Just as important as what people are buying, is how they find your online stores and promotions. Black Friday shoppers referred from Pinterest spent 77% more money per order than those referred from Facebook! However, Facebook referrals converted into sales at nearly 4x the rate of Pinterest. Which social networking platform is best for your audience?

Black Friday 2014 – How Much Will You Make?

The question isn’t “if” you are going to make money online this year during Black Friday 2014, but instead, HOW MUCH?

Take the time to perfect your Black Friday and holiday ad campaigns and make these last 27 shopping days of the year your best marketing efforts yet!

Most of us use video on our sites or in social media at least once.  It could be a video we produce ourselves, a video we like on YouTube or even something we find and share on Facebook or Twitter. Video are an awesome way to gain interest, increase engagement and generate interest, but they aren’t always the easiest to measure in terms of ROI. You can’t always track click throughs, It’s hard to measure the actual shares and without knowing how to code or program and you don’t have a ton of functionality on standard players. This was a huge issue for many Marketers until Viewbix came around.

Viewbix is a video tool that lets you take videos from your own website, or videos from sites like YouTube, Vimeo Pro or Amazon Webservices, if the owner has given permission to share, use and embed their videos and add a customizable and interactive player to them. The skin is fully customizable and comes with a ton of functionality.

You can add multiple calls to action on the skin including a button on the top right, banners on the top left and space for a banner on the bottom. You can use direct links, Affiliate links, custom tracking urls to combine it with your Analytics package including Google Analytics and it even has it’s own analytics suite if you have a pro account or higher.

Once you have created the custom skin from the drag and drop interface you now have the option to add over 20 apps to the player. These apps take a regular video and turn it into a fully interactive experience that can drive sales, grow your newsletter list or even increase your blog or website readership. One of the coolest features with the Viewbix player is that when it is shared on many of the big social sites like Facebook and Twitter, the majority of the functionality remains intact giving you an almost unlimited reach.

Apps You Can Use to Increase Sales and Leads

Here are a few of the apps, ways that you can use them to grow your business or drive sales and leads as well as a couple of success stories of companies and Bloggers that use Viewbix.

• List App – The list app lets you create a list of products if you sell products, properties if you are in real estate, features or portions from a property if you are a hotel or whatever else you’d like.  You can add a thumbnail image, a custom description and a clickable direct, affiliate or tracking link to each listing. This lets people click through to shop, set up appointments or even make a reservation.
• Newsletter – You can combine your Aweber, MailChimp, Constant Contact or other email service provider accounts to the player with just a couple of clicks. By connecting the two you can provide viewers with a way to opt in to your newsletter without having to leave the video.
• Flickr and Picassa – You can feed images through the video player if you want to show more details about a product, property or whatever else is relevant to the video you are using.
• YouTube – If you have a YouTube video series, you can set up a channel to feed through so people can watch the rest of the series without having to leave the player.
• Social Follow – You can add your social profiles to the player so if people like the video, they can now follow you right from the video. This is especially effective for on site or as the videos are being shared on social sites.
• RSS feed – If you have a blog, you can stream your RSS feed into the player so that people can see other posts from your site.

You also have the option to have any of the apps open up after the video has finished to show products for sale, help increase your newsletter sign ups or whatever the most important goal of the video is for your campaign.

There are a ton of other apps you can use making Viewbix one of the most powerful video marketing tools out there. If you want to split test, you can clone the players so you don’t have to spend time creating each color or app individually and you can even create video galleries with copy and paste code to create a video series section within your website or blog. Viewbix provides you with a video sitemap for SEO, the ability to tag and categorize your players and will soon have the ability to add pre and post roll ads to your videos. Viewbix is always launching new functionality and you can find updates by subscribing to their newsletter. Here are a couple of examples of companies who have had success with Viewbix.

Cedar Creek Cabin Rentals brings in a 1,300% ROI.

Cedar Creek had a large video library of their properties, the area around them and what to do in the town their cabins are located in. The problem was that they had no way to actively share, track and measure their effectiveness. Tom (the owner) was able to track his success with Viewbix and has noted that his investment with:

The Viewbix player ($200) has paid him back 13 times! Each new client represents an average of $550 for cabin rentals, resulting in an increase of $2,500 and a ton of new leads which can be tracked coming in from the players.

Tom has notably increased the engagement of his users. In the last few months, across hundreds of thousands of impressions, he has seen the following results:

• More than 33% of users click on the call to action within the Viewbix player
• More than 30% of users click on the various apps in the Viewbix player

This vs That Increased Their Facebook Ad CTR by 58%

When using videos on Facebook, the image with a Viewbix video has a much more interactive and appealing look than other players or hosting sites. Here are some of the results when using different hosting companies or players and sharing direct and then sharing with a Viewbix player. The increase in click through rates and the ability to track stands out very well in these examples.

Clip #1: The YouTube Clip was seen by 9674 people and was played 115 times for a 1.2% CTR. The Viewbix clip was seen by 5398 people and was played 116 times = 2.1% The Viewbix clip was 55% more effective at getting people to click on it As you can see, it was seen by 4000 fewer people in their stream but was viewed essentially the same # of times.

Clip #2: The YouTube clip was seen by 8152 people in their stream with 87 clicks on the video for a CTR of 1.1%. The Viewbix clip was sen by 9599 people in their stream with 171 clicks on the video. This gave Viewbix a CTR of 1.8%.The Viewbix clip in this example was 58% more effective at garnering clicks on Facebook.

BroadwayReviewed.com increases newsletter signups.

BroadwayReviewed.com uses a ton of video clips from different shows when reviewing them or talking about show tunes. By plugging the videos that they shoot into the player they have been able to increase activity and engagement as well as drive newsletter sign ups and sales.

Out of 5,842 impressions, there were 542 video views, 102 click throughs, 66 social shares and 472 apps used during the launch of a few videos they shot at a concert (cameras were allowed). Almost 54% of the app usage was for the newsletter sign up where the copy encouraged signing up so that you could receive more videos and posts via email. The next highest used app was the list app where they sold tickets to the tour, vocal recordings and MP3s using Affiliate Links. Without having Viewbix they wouldn’t have been able to get the newsletter sign ups from the social media shares, sales from the social sites and would have had to hope that the people viewing the videos would click through the link or pay attention to the annotations on the video.

There are a ton of companies that are finding success by using the Viewbix player instead of embedding code directly into their site. Viewbix is also affordable with plans that start for free and range from $9.99 to $19.99 per month. Click here to try it free or to become a paid user and get all of the additional features with Viewbix.

This case study and post was written by Adam Riemer.