How Do I Get Started Making Money Online?

Nicola Cairncross was the first British women to be invited to speak at the World Internet Summit in the UK and was also invited onto CNN Breakfast News (broadcast worldwide) to talk about surviving the dot com implosion in 2000/2001.

Nicola bought her first domain name in 1995, has been making a passive income online since 1997 and built her wealth coaching company into a six figure turnover using just a five page website and a weekly ezine.

Being a work at home mum of two small kids, Phoebe & Nelson, she didn't moved out of Worthing, West Sussex for years, but now speaks and writes internationally about wealth creation and harnessing the power of the internet to explode your existing business or just create an extra second income.

How Do You Get Started Making Money Online?

Into my inbox this week have come several interesting emails, broadly speaking covering three main questions

1. how do you get started making money online?

2. How do you evaluate an existing website, to see how well it's working

3. If you were starting again now, which of the many things you could do, would you do, and in which order?

So here we go! Making money online is a bit like becoming a millionaire - simple but not easy!

You can make money online by:

1. Promoting your real world business more effectively using the internet - using an EFFECTIVE website to generate more leads, building an ezine mailing list, Search Engine Optimisation, and Google Adwords to explode your traffic.

2. Creating spin off automated products from your real world business - like Paula Gardner did with www.DoYourOwnPR.com. See the section below for ideas.

3. Creating a series of one page websites, each to sell one ebook (or other product) - either your own, or as an affiliate. Some great ebooks even GIVE you the sales page and thank you page to upload - see http://viralurl.com/moneygym/affiliateprojectx which not only tells how make money via affiliate marketing, but does just that - gives you a sales page etc. ready built.

4. Creating traffic (using adwords/blogging/MySpace/Facebook/YouTube) and a community (mailing list/google group/blog) and then recommending good products and service to them via affiliate links and an ezine.

Other instant income sources for this business model include Google Adsense links. See Judith's http://www.LonelyEntrepreneur.com or Alison Grimston's http://www.holisticdoctor.typepad.com/

5. Creating a free/paid level membership site (just think.....17,000 people paying you £5 a month is £1.02 million PER YEAR) - see http://www.TheMoneyGymClub.com

Which of these you decide on will depend on whether you have a real world business or expertise or not.

I like to recommend people work through these in order, starting from the quick and simple routes to more income immediately and building up to the bigger projects.

However, and this is the most important element for synergy and focus between all your projects, and the part that many novice (and even more experienced!!) internet entrepreneurs get wrong.

Always choose and then working around a niche topic/subject - hobbies, leisure activities such as rowing, rock-climbing, obscure cuisines or knitting for example.

Or choose a broad topic (business building for example) ideally one in which you have some expertise, but offer it for a really tight niche of people (reiki healers as opposed to holistic therapists) or female accountants, for example.

So in conclusion, choose a niche or a broad appeal topic but tailor it for a niche of people.

IS MY WEBSITE WORKING?

As soon as someone asks me this, we ask them to find out the following:

1. Number of unique visitors to this page per week 2. Number of unique visitors to the sales page per week 3. Number of sales if any 4. Number of new additions to existing database / mailing list per week 5. Average value of sale (so if you sell a t-shirt for $20 and one for $10, the average value of sale would be $15) 6. Average profit per sale

These figures will enable us to work out

1. Conversion of unique visitors to leads in % 2. Conversion of unique visitors to sales in % 3. The value of each subscriber 4. The Value of each visitor

We would also be asking you to look up the main referring key words that people are using to find your page. Most website stats packages give this info.

Then I would be asking you how much (i.e. what percentage) of your income do you want to come from which potential income producing activity around your niche.

Potential other income streams include:

101 tips free ebook £17.50 - £27.50 but do it in dollars one-off teleclasses £27.50 - £27.50 but record it and resell later membership site 17,000 people giving you £5 a month = £1.02 million per year one day workshops sell for £147 discounted to £97 for early birds group coaching programme £79.50 a month - how many can you handle? 1:2:1 premium coaching programme £279.50 - 379.50 per month - how many can you handle? associate fees say 5 new associates per year paying £XX each to become your associate physical product £xx - dropshipped ideall from manufacturer/supplier to customer any other ideas?

NOW WHAT?

Ok. so we have chosen our business model, decided on our products / services and honed down our topics and even decided which niche of people we are aiming at. Even when you are affiliate marketing with other people's products and services, it's made easier by knowing who you want to attract to your internet business.

Phew - Well done! Let me reiterate - that was the toughest bit and if you are there, you are STREETS AHEAD of most people. Now all you have to do is not get distracted.....LOL

SO WHAT DO YOU NEED, AND IN WHAT ORDER?

I have seen many types of websites come and go, many tools and bits of software, and we have finally honed the Money Gym site into a finely tuned money making and client attracting machine. This is our business model for The Money Gym for new (cold) traffic.

1. Blog gets us indexed in search engines and attracts new visitors. We Also use PR/SEO/Google Adwords

2. Welcome / Squeeze page to convert visitors to mailing list.

3. Offered chance to win good value prizes by referring friends - choose yes or no

4. If yes, refer friends, get prize, jumped to ebook sales page. If no, jumped to ebook sales page

5. Ebook sales page, bundled with free month at Silver level of membership site

6. Decide to buy ebook / trial membership and click "buy now" button

7. Offered chance to buy ebook / paperback version / 3 months free trial of site

8. Decide yes (click to buy) or no (just buy ebook) or join mailing list

9. If just click to close page, popunder box offers free Wealth Tips (101 x tips & ezine)

The most exciting thing of all is that, since putting in the above system and getting all the elements right, we are now looking at a systematic conversion of traffic to subscribers, to sales of the ebook, of sales of the upsell offer, to trial memberships, to retention of memberships. We have just done the figures for the last quarter of 2007 and worked out which percentage of visitors will do what, at every stage.

And you know what that means, don't you? More traffic = more visitors = more conversions = more revenue = more profit.

We are looking at an automated, predictable money machine, and what's more all of that is just the FRONT END.

On the back end, we now have an every growing pool of people who will come on our quarterly Let's Talk Money workshops and then become Money Gym clients. We have an ever growing pool of people who visit our sites and click on our recommended products and services via affiliate links. We have an ever growing pool of people who will attend our "Experts" workshops.

Here's my guide to getting started, quickly and inexpensively. I'm going to suggest what to do, and in which order.

1. Set up a blog. Used Typepad or Wordpress (outsource the latter)

2. Attach it to a mailing list via a good shopping cart (you will need it later)

3. Use a "refer a friend" script at the point of signup

4. Set up a private Google Group, put signup box on blog

5. Blog every day, or at least once a week (and get your blog fed onto your MySpace/Facebook profiles via an RSS feed)

6. Set up profiles on MySpace, Facebook, Squidoo, Ecademy as a minimum, and link to your blog

7. Send even more traffic using Google Adwords, learn how to make video for YouTube

8. Set up Google Adsense on your blog

9. Find some GOOD products and services with affiliate schemes (sell our ebook, earn £12.50 per sale) and recommend on blog side panel, social network sites. Use a good affiliate link cloaking service.

10. Start creating a community / membership site - free membership until you get to 1000, then set up next level, under £5 / $10 a month

And my final tip, just make the decision that 2008 is the year that you will make a passive income online. If you just make enough to take two holidays a year, wouldn't that be worth turning off the TV occasionally?

Here's a link to all our most trusted suppliers and recommended resources - I constantly update this so bookmark it and come back regularly. I try everything and only recommend the things that work, and that we use.

http://www.themoneygymclub.com/categories/20070314_13

Have fun and send me your stories of success - and you can get help for your challenges on our forums here >>> http://www.themoneygymclub.com/forums

No! This is bad!!

I woke up at 5am with my heart racing with excitement about Hubpages!!

Bit of background......I've been exercising my "delete" finger on everything new coming into my in-box recently, trusting that it there is something important I need to know about, it will jump out at me OR come back again and again till I "geddit"......and so it came to pass with Hubpages.

Tim Brocklehurst (who is coming to do a Money Gym Presents day for us soon) sent it out first, then I read about them in the excellent report downloadable from the Stompernet.com website, then finally, someone else mentioned them or sent a promotion about downloading a report on how to use them properly, and I thought "Enough! Let's check this out now"

http://viralurl.com/moneygym/hubpages

Absolutely free to set up an account, great fun and very intuitive to use and almost effortless to integrate your Adsense publisher code, your eBay affiliate PID code from CJ.com and your Amazon affiliate code.

I have set up a main Money Gym hubpage, and now I am working through my key phrases, creating an original hub around each, either writing something original or using one of my previous articles, but each hubpage is being linked into a group called after my main key phrase as identified by our new SEO expert blokey (more to come about him later).

IN ONE DAY THIS IS MY SEARCH ENGINE LISTING RESULTS:

1. within one day one of my hubs has been tagged a Hot Hub with a score of 73 and is listed in the Hot Hubs Page 1 on Hubpages - viewed over 50 times so far

2. I have one "fan" and have had some "fanmail"

3. Google alert for the key phrase Money Gym has come in - the Hubpages hubs have been indexed

4. if you search on my main key phrase, our site (thanks SEO blokey) is on Page One on google, and my hubpages hubs are No 4 and No 5 on PAGE ONE on Google - in one day!!

5. If you search on another particular key phrase, our blog is Page One on Google, at positions 4 and 5, while my personal site is about Position 8 - no hubpage yet so must set one up pronto

Talking of social networking sites, some of our YouTube videos on our channel at http://www.YouTube.com/Wealthcoach have been viewed over 100 times already - since uploading 2 weeks ago.

This is proof that social networking works. And it's free apart from your time setting it up. Think leverage - if you write an article or blog post, how many places can you use it?

Next stop WikiHow - which I found when I put in "become a millionaire" in Google - http://www.wikihow.com/Become-a-Millionaire - never even heard of it till then!

NICOLA's ESSENTIAL SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES / ACTIVITY

1. Your blog - blog every week or even more if you can (doesn't have to be your stuff remember)

2. Hubpages - get over there now http://viralurl.com/moneygym/hubpages

3. Ecademy - remember the first 50 words of your profile are what Google index and then show in the results (make sure two or three of your key phrases are in there)

4. YouTube - create little videos using Camtasia, powerpoint and an audio mic, then edit in Windows Movie Maker

5. 43Things.com - still ranking highly

6. MySpace.com - 1 million people joining every week now!

Hilariously, when you log out of Hubpages whose bloomin great ad do you see?

Andy Shaw's book - as large as life!! He really has got a crack team on board now!

Cheers

Nicola

Set up your account today

http://viralurl.com/moneygym/hubpages