There are two things that I have realized over the last few months. One is that making money a bit of money online is not very hard at all. The other thing is that to make a living online i.e enough to replace the job that you work at every day is a whole different story altogether. It would be interesting to be able to say take 3 or 4 months off work and actually see where you could take it given the time to work on building your sites and systems.
The biggest thing holding most people back I believe is the state of mind that you can just start up a blog about making money, place a few adverts on it, and then sit back and watch the money come rolling in. Unfortunately that is just not going to happen. A site needs to have something of value first and foremost, i.e you really need to have something that a potential visitor to your site requires, whether that is great content – or alternatively some kind of product or service.
Great Content
Choosing to provide great content for the readers/visitors to your site is not as easy as it sounds, firstly you need to be original, you can’t just cut and paste articles from around the web and call them your own. Secondly you need to constantly provide great content – this means posting well informed and researched articles several times a week. This sounds easy enough in theory however if you work full time, have a family and try and have some resemblance of a normal life it becomes extremely difficult.
Products/Services
Again, not as easy as it sounds. There are an amazing amount of great products and services on the internet and if you would like to get a share of the pie then you need to do it better than most. The only other alternative is to provide something unique – however remember as soon as you start to make a little bit of progress there will be sites popping up all over the place trying to cash in on your idea.
Once you have decided which path you want to follow, you need to start planning how you are going to do it, then put a website together (or a blog). Fill the site with content and then begin theĀ building regularĀ traffic to your new site. Along the journey you need to network alot, take a lot of time seeing how others are achieving the things you would like to achieve and hopefully learning a tonne of stuff along the way.
The key factor that you may have on your side if you can stick it out is endurance. A lot of your competitors will drop off as you progress and this will be for a variety of reasons – however if you stick it out and continue to build quality content that will interest your visitors eventually you will succeed.
Good luck! – enjoy the journey.
Rob