In this article, you’ll discover the ways in which you can use your existing skills to make money online while you’re jobless. You’ll also learn about the various ways in which you can make extra money online without any previous experience.
The Basics Of Online Businesses
To start an online business, you’ll need a domain name for your site, online software such as a web server or content management system (CMS), as well as a phone line or Wi-Fi connection.
You can use your existing skills to develop a successful online business. If you’re an expert web developer, you can create custom websites for others or develop apps for mobile phones.
However, to be able to monetize your work, you’ll need to understand how affiliate marketing and digital marketing work. If you’re not familiar with these terms, here’s a short explanation.
An affiliate is a person or company that earns a commission by promoting a product or service. For example, Best Buy pays its affiliates if someone clicks on a link that leads them to make a purchase at Best Buy.com.
A product or service promoted via an affiliate link must meet the following criteria:
- Be relevant to the audience
- Be relatively easy to purchase
- Offer reasonable value for the price
- Have a good reputation
- Be high quality
- Be in demand
- Be able to provide continuous service
- Be in a reliable and safe condition
- Contain useful information
In other words, the product or service you promote must be something your audience is already interested in, and it should be something they can easily acquire. You can use various methods to find products that fall within these criteria, including:
- Reading through review websites
- Checking out trending topics on social media sites
- Finding products that are popular among your social circles
- Perusing through online stores that sell physical products
- Looking at forums or blogs where users discuss products they love or hate
- Checking out what others have said about products on social media sites
Once you’ve found a product that fits the bill, you’ll need to decide how you’re going to promote it. There are four main ways to do this:
Product Reviews
If you’ve been to online shops in the past, then you’ll know that they often sell other products alongside the one you’re promoting. If a product reviewer websites, they may give you an affiliate commission based on a purchase that was made from visiting their site.
By creating a product review website that’s relevant to your product’s niche, you can use a tool like Google Adsense to display ads on your site when users are browsing relevant content. For example, if you’re an avid reader of tech blogs, you could review products related to technology.
Product reviews are a great way to promote a product. If a user finds a review helpful, they’re more likely to be interested in the product being reviewed and are also more likely to make a purchase after reading the review. Never, ever, under any circumstances, write a review that’s going to be helpful to someone else while being relevant to your own product. This is called “self-serving reviews” and they can get you banned from many review sites. As a general rule, a good review should be:
- Helpful to the audience
- Helpful to the respondent
- Comprehensive
- Unique (never been done for this product before)
- Neutral (never attributed to someone or something)
- Valuable to respondents
- Honest (never made up or exaggerated to make it sound better)
- Transparent (always shown how/where it was donated)
- Educational (always used appropriate words and provided enough information)
- Entertaining (made you want to read more)
- Thought provoking (challenged your thoughts)
If you’re reviewing books or music, you may want to consider whether you should be writing a review or simply posting a comment. While nearly any piece of content can be turned into a review, if you’re commenting on a blog post, you should consider whether you should be doing so anonymously or using a pseudonym.
Regardless of the type of content you’re creating, whether it’s a product review, comment, or otherwise, make sure that you keep your reviews objective and honest. If a product reviewer states that a product is worth purchasing, but you feel that it’s not, you should be able to comment on the review without feeling attacked.
Product Comparisons
If you believe that your product is better than the one being reviewed, you can always use this as a way to promote it. To do so, you can create a side-by-side comparison of the two products in your review. For example, if you’re reviewing a book and you feel that the overall experience is better with a CD, you can easily compare them both and explain why.
If a user clicks on the link within your review and makes a purchase at the destination, you’ll earn a commission.
As with product reviews, make sure that your product comparisons are “helpful” to the user reading the review. If you’re completely unable to compare your product to the one being reviewed, or if you believe that the reviewed product is not representative of your own, you should not include the comparison.
Affiliate Marketing
This type of marketing earns you a commission when someone clicks a link or buys a product that’s promoted on your site. To start, you’ll need to have a product or service that you believe is valuable and that others will be interested in. Once you’ve established that your product is “valuable”, the next step is to find a way to “interest” others in buying it. To do this, you can create affiliate marketing pages on your site.
The goal of affiliate marketing is to connect users with products and services that they might be interested in. To do this, you’ll want to create dedicated landing pages on your site where you can promote specific products. In other words, if you want to promote a game, you could create a page where you can link to all the platforms it supports (XBOX, PS4, PC, and so on).
To be able to generate revenue from affiliate marketing, your product or service must be relevant to a user’s interest area. If you’re promoting shoes, you might create a page that focuses on fashion or style. If you’re promoting a food product, you could create a page that focuses on recipes or food preparation. This ensures that your product is going to be valuable to at least a part of your audience.
When a user finds a product relevant to their interests, they’re more likely to be interested in learning more about it. If you can get a user to click on a link or make a purchase after finding the relevant content on your site, you’ll earn a commission.
Digital Marketing (Google AdWords)
If you’ve got a marketing budget, you may want to consider investing in digital marketing. With this strategy, you’ll want to use various platforms to “market” your product or service, often paying for each click or acquisition (what Google calls “Pricing Models”).
There are four ways in which you can use online marketing to generate revenue:
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
This is simply paying for each click on your ad (what Google calls “Cost-Per-Click”). The more you spend on PPC, the more you’ll earn. However, keep in mind that this is a “pay-now, profit-later” type of investment. If you don’t already have an active account with Google AdWords, you can create one for free.
To get started, visit this website and click on the “Get Started” button to create an account.
As a general rule of thumb, you should always strive to spend less than you earn. Therefore, if you’re making $500 per month, you should aim to spend no more than $500 on advertising while learning how to convert that into profit. Once you’ve got your advertising budget down, then you can look into other ways to generate income from your website.