Can You Really Get Rich Online?
Photo by Armin Rimoldi from Pexels.
If it’s as easy as advertised to get rich online, be your own boss, enjoy short workdays, and travel as much as you want, why are any of us still working? Many people out there make money online, seemingly as often as not, by teaching other people how to make money online. Most of them seem to have a proprietary system that they are willing to share in a course, a member’s-only forum like a Facebook group, webinars, e-books, or other fora, for a price. Are any of these systems worth the investment? Can you, too, really make absurd amounts of money?
The short answer is, if something seems too good to be true, it usually is. See Impact Marketer’s John Crestani Review, where they make the point that none of this comes without work, though they find merit in the system. You will probably not get rich quickly if that is what you are looking for, and you will need something to live on while you work for your ship to come in.
Image by Nattanan Kanchanaprat from Pixabay.
That being said, there are legitimate ways to make money online. If you have a simple website, you can:
- Use Google Adsense to place ads on your site. They do most of the work for you,
- Use affiliate marketing to put special links to product sales pages in your posts,
- Find sponsors for your posts,
- Sell leads you develop on your site — basically gather information on your readers who are interested in, for example, a stock market broker, and then sell those leads to a broker.
You can also make money with sponsorship for a podcast or videoblog, develop sponsored posts for Facebook, Instagram, or other social media, or teach a class on Udemy or Teachable.
The thing to notice about these techniques is that you are doing a job that used to be held by newspapers. You are selling eyeballs to advertisers. And that presupposes that you have eyeballs to sell.
Image by Gerhard G. from Pixabay.
In other words, with a few exceptions like freelance writing, you need an audience to make money online. That means that before you start seeing appreciable revenue from these sources, you have to build a website, podcast, videoblog, and/or social media presence that a lot of people want to look at. Yes, content is still king.
Building that kind of site or social media presence requires creativity, persistence, skill, an engaging personality, and more than a bit of luck. You will need to understand (to the extent anyone can) social media algorithms and search engine optimization. And you will need to post appealing and compelling content relentlessly.
Image by Photo Mix from Pixabay.
It helps to have a niche — an area where you can build on your existing knowledge and share it with your audience. That’s why entrepreneurs posting about and selling systems for being entrepreneurs are such a common phenomenon. Everyone wants to be a successful entrepreneur, and their claimed successes automatically give them credentials as experts. They are building on what they know.
If you want to make money online (and who doesn’t?), your first step needs to be finding your audience online.