There are countless ways to earn a living online. The following is a list of steps that I refer to as the “Shampoo of Online Success”. What do you hopefully do in the shower regularly? Wash, rinse, repeat, wash rinse, repeat, etc. Repeating digital products or duplicating success on the Internet can be surprisingly easy. Here’s a great list of steps that I found scouring the forums.
1 Find a niche
Check out some forums, usergroups, and places like yahoo answers. See what kind of questions people are asking. Look for popular topics.
2 Keyword research
You can use the free tool over at digitalpoint.
Suppose you type in ‘any keyword’;
It will return to you a list of related key words and how often they are searched a day. Then go to Google and search the keyword (with ” ” around it) and see how many sites it will return. The fewer the better for now. Once you get the hang of online marketing I wouldn’t really worry about competition. Just build the better mouse trap.
3 Get a web hosting account
They are pretty cheap. Around 10 bucks a month for a good shared host. Stay away for free web hosts. They are not worth it. I strongly recommend hostgator.com. You can host unlimited domains there, and there price is under $10 a month. If money is an issue, do a search for hostgator coupons enter the code when you signup and the first month is only 1 penny.
4 Find or create your product
You can write your own info product or you can go to clickbank.com and chose a product for there. You will get a commission for each sale. (There are novels I could write about in this step, but to keep this post readable I’m assuming you have a product in mind.)
5 Create your site
Now you will want to create a content site. This only needs to be a few pages. You will want to put 10 articles on the site. Make good use of the keywords you researched. Also put out product on the site.
6 Set up an auto responder
This is optional if you REALLY don’t have the money, but it’s something you will need to do eventually. This will collect peoples emails on your website. You write a small report (you can base it off of your articles to save time) Have your visitors sign up to get the free report. Make sure you include a link to you product in the report.
7 Marketing
Remember those forums you looked up to find a good niche? You should start posting (not spamming) on them. Help people out, become an expert in your niche. You don’t really have to be an expert…but you should look like one. Share and help as many people as you can. Include a link you your site in you signature. Also places like yahoo answers. You can answer peoples questions and include a link in your resource box.
You will also want to submit articles to article directories such as EzineArticles.com.
Another good marketing tip is to exchange links with site in the same niche as you.
There are a lot of different marketing techniques you can use (too many to go into here, but this should get you started) Just search around the forums here.
8 Wash, Rinse, Repeat
Do this with several different niches. The more sites you have going, the more money you have coming in.
Give it a try! 
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Your last sentence could just as easy read: Do this with several different niches. The more sites you have going, the more money you have going OUT.
$10 for the URL, $5/month hosting, $10/month for the autoresponder, hundreds of hours invested in unique content…and sometimes for no return.
John Carlton gave me a bit of advice that I will always treasure. He said, and I paraphrase, 80% of the people trying to make money on the Internet make one huge mistake, they choose the wrong niche. Just because people are looking for information about a topic doesn’t mean they’re spending money on it.
Consequently, I think you should add a very, VERY important step. Before you do all this work, you should test your niche idea. This can easily be done with Google Adwords, or even Adsense. And even though you’ll invest a few dollars up front for the ads, you’ll know immediately if there’s a hungry market willing to spend money on your niche.
Ralphs last blog post..Link Building with Bing
I used to receive lots of emails in my inbox regarding making money online. I considered all of them as spam till my sister forwarded a link of a wonderful websitehttp://the1kaday.com in which she was making good money online.
Neel, I do agree with you his new haircut does looks great
Till then, Jean…
I believe that it is not the type of niche that causes a lack of sales but the way we do marketing is the cause. The most important thing is to give many benefits to our potential customers with our product so that they were happy to buy products that we offer.
Ralph,
You missed the point here. What is the Easter Egg hidden in this advice is somehow different, as you will see soon.
The poster of these advices told us very clear : when you Google the keyword and find results, don’t worry if there are others there already. (Another mouse trap, bla bla, right ?)
But also : as less websites there, as better. Because that means small niche, but also HIGH POSITION in Google search results.
How that sounds to you ???
Instead of being number 470 in 35 million results, better be number 15 or 3 in 128 results ( second page or first page in Google results ).
Did you get the image ? People don’t care about 35 millions or 128 results, they care who is in 1-20 positions, just that !
For example, I don’t care that for a small niche website started 5 years ago I only reached 50000 visitors with zero advertising costs, as time as I am continuously in 3 to 6 position in Google for 5 combinations of keywords
Fact is that in January I had 2000 uniques, and 92% were from Google only. This makes Adsense ads to pay me money, and I wrote my last post in that website last year in August last year ! What is lesson from here : when you are on the top, hardly someone can get your place, but at least the others around you can have traffic, too, even in a small niche !
Marketing is probably the only thing that I’m so lazy to do :{
Michael Aulias last blog post..Mozilla Firefox 3.5b99
Yea i think what ralph said is THE most important thing on that list.
this is exactly where I’m at i have my website now – it’s not so much for any type of marketing or work purpose – just my hobby but also my learning tool so I definitely thank you lots for all these good posts. it will help me out on my online learning curve.
Evess last blog post..1
I have never had a problem with this but i know it is common. I wonder if this is common when it comes to cheap hosting or reseller hosting accounts.
The keyword research tool at DP is awesome, a great way to find keywords.
$10 for the URL, $5/month hosting, $10/month for the autoresponder, hundreds of hours invested in unique content…and sometimes for no return.
Umm good.
Just started a website with your advices. I was wondering what monetizing techniques do you recommend for wordpress !?
I recommend the WhyDoWork Adsense plugin! You need a decent amount of traffic to earn well with AdSense but it is fairly hands off.
You could also place Clickbank or other affiliate links in the code positions if you don’t want to do AdSense. Check it out here: http://www.whydowork.com/blog/whydowork-adsense-plugin/
Wow ! that really is brilliant, cheers for this work you’ve done.
Biggest problem I would think is successfully ranking on key terms in the search engines. There is so much competition and the ever-changing google algorithms that make it so difficult.
-Jason
Thanks for the insight on this topic. I have been trying really hard to figure out how to make this work for me.
I’ve actually done Step #1 to #5, but I’m going to concentrate on the following Step right now. I think between all of these steps, Marketing will be the most critical part and the step that could brings you to success or failure.
Anyway, I enjoy doing these. Thanks for the tips.
-Davis-
Reread #3. I’ve had some bad experiences regarding free hosting sites in my time. They’re cheap ones out there.
Kudos to Ralph for bringing to light a very important factor: test test test.
When you think about it, how would you feel if you invested hours and hours only to discover that you were working with a niche that was not profitable?
Great post! Very interesting… I was kind of laughing while reading this post..but it has great potential! I have lots of interests and finding a niche site won’t be a problem. Thanks a lot!
Yep an auto responder can be a very effective tool. I think that that the points you make are well considered and having done most of them i can certainly vouch that they work.
I don’t really agree with ralph.
You can start marketing for 100% no cost apart from your time. A simple blogspot blog can become a product website and can rank perfectly well (sometimes even better than a private domain).
Just go for a weird niche, such as how to build a chicken coop (yes, that is an actual product on clickbank!).
Thanks a lot! Awesome post! You can also do affiliate markrting by advertising on your site!
I have really struggled with clickbank. It really is hard to make a buck selling stuff online nowdays because no-one wants to get out their creditcard.
I now supplement my income using paid surveys. Sure Im not going to by a yachet with my earnings, but it does pay for my weekly gas bill.
Anyway, thanks for the article!
Great tips mate… searching for accurate nich same like my weakness… is it easy?
Very good advice. One thing I would add is to be consistant and never give up. Too many people walk away if they do not make money in 24 hours. This is fun but this should be worked as a business. YOUR business.
Thanks for this article
The post came just opportunely since I also think about this matter. I hope these steps will help many to improve their well-being. But for a dummy there is not enough information. I would like something more circumstantial. And I can’t but agree with Ralph that ‘before you do all this work, you should test your niche idea.’ It is really an extremely necessary to conduct such a research in order not to go broke instead of becoming rich.
Very well summed up steps that I have also learned in the last 3 years of doing this online marketing thing. I totally agree that each step really could be a lengthy post of its own. That’s why I have a mentor/coach. It’s really taken a lot of the guess work out and made my business take off. Thanks for the insight.
Which is the best for web hosting? Hostgator or godaddy?
Most people will tell you to go with Hostgator, as well as me. I hope that helps…
Till then,
Jean
Great advice but do you really think 8th point is essentially right? Well, that might land no where. For me at least i should have 1 site that can feed me and rest i can just work on them for some money.
I will add to your post that you can also use blogspot.com to deliver your posts. Thanks for this. It helped me again some time ago
Hi,
Right steps in right and workable order.
I think step no. 8 is the key to riches. A lot of people miss that it that kinda commitment we have to make it big. I like to emphasize it heavily instead of misguiding them into something they are not prepared to commit for. Lets hope that
Nice info friend but i don’t believe only that to make money 50$/day. because need more program to earn money 50 $/day like PTR,PTC, PPC and many more.
I have problem with finding niche. I think, that it is the biggest problem;/
In my experience, #7 is by far the hardest to do right. I’ve created product after product and never made any real money.
What sort of products have you created ?
I have created a new product, but it is very hard to get it noticed because it is new. And we have a low budget.
this post tutorial on making money online is very basic but very very effective. $50/day income online is not that easy. you need to learn more on SEO, article marketing, forum marketing, video marketing and many more. but $50/day is possible
whether this means that marketing is the exchange rate link
thank a lot, very useful
I actually find the marketing side of things very interesting. It is like a game seeing which experiments work and which ones do not.
Hi,
Yes! Marketing is fun, what else would you want to do?
Matt
These are all such good “tried-and-tested” methods, but I agree that the “wash, rinse and repeat” one is especially important – it makes it so much easier to make money quickly online. I think it makes so much sense because if you were making a product, you’d produce as many of them as people would keep buying, so why not create as many sites as you can generate business for? The best part is that all the businesses can end up helping each other out through links between them – if you’re creating a product, for instance, you could ask your buyers to be on a mailing list for all your other sites.
I agree with most of what you are posting with the exception of recommending Hostgator as a “good” host.
Their biggest problems are their servers are incredibly slow — meaning your website pages take forever to load.
This is because your site is on one of their many, many shared servers. If another site on the server is using too much bandwidth, it will slow down your site as well.
I just had to move my sites off of their servers because of this reason.
Good reseller hosting that I found is: mddhosting.com (excellent cs) & spherewebhosting.com (super fast) — Cost is $24.95 for beg. reseller account with WHM & cPanel for both.
i’ll try it. yes i want 50 dollar per day. i know it is hard but does not impossible
Before you do all this work, you should test your niche idea. This can easily be done with Google Adwords, or even Adsense. And even though you’ll invest a few dollars up front for the ads, you’ll know immediately if there’s a hungry market willing to spend money on your niche.
Useful article but everything not easy
thanks, this help us understanding what a niche is hehehe
thanks
wow..this would really help me..thanks a lot for this…
Thanks this information very-very usefull,,nice post bro..now I have to bookmark this page
why not try affilliate marketing and that may be a good source f income.
Maybe the author is talking about affiliate marketing.
another good article, can’t wate to read another. Good tips.
I have found that marketing is the hardest to accomplish. With so many techniques being scrutinized by search engines, it is getting harder to find creative ways to market your site. You ahve to be patient, too. Money won’t come overnight.
You sound like a veteran writing this post , with that Compete Rank of 26k, Ill take the advice.
I always struggle with how long to work on one site before moving to another site or niche. Should one keeping focusing on one site until maximum exposure/traffic/money is achieved, or should you get one up and running and off the ground and move to another.
I’ve seen bloggers say you should get a site up and going and then let it age a little before you can really reap the full benefits of links, ads, etc.
What are your thoughts?
I think it’s best to get comfortable with your first site before moving on. If you have a ton of experience there’s no stopping juggling a few sites at once.
Jan. 14, 2010
Dear People:
I have read all of your useful advice; and I am going to try really hard to get into some type of advertisement on line for a Spanish Tutoring business that I would like to offer to the public.
Sincerely yours,
hotmama987
I would be a customer. I want to learn Spanish so bad I dream of it at nights… daytime too! Why do we Americans not realize that we should speak more than one language? Today with the global economy we need that. In the Western Hemisphere Spanish is the one.
Infact its not that easy to make USD 1 per day with a website, We may read great books and articles on these topic. It takes time and if you are a bit lucky you can do that…
Great tips. The auto responder is something that I need to get. One of the hardest things for me is getting the email address from my customers. Thanks again, great read.
well, i will try to follow your tips.
I believe there is no express way to make money, except by robbing a bank. Haha. It’s need time and effort.
thanks for sharing this post