How to Make a Steady Income Online

Making money online is a science and once you know all the pieces of the puzzle, you will consistently and steadily make money online. Period.

Why do so many professional Internet marketers incredibly succeed, product after product after product?

I know you're thinking it's connections, vast promotion opportunity due to their powerful friends, near unlimited funds for top of the line copywriters and millions of followers.

Well, in part, you're right. And I also used to think like that. But now I know better and after reading this article, you will too.

All of the above mentioned perks didn't come overnight. Those marketers worked long and hard to achieve such status to be able to mingle among the best and have such strong connections.

They also attended many events and later even either organised them or at least gave lectures (who wouldn't want to promote a product from a guy that lectured on a $10,000 Internet marketing event?)

But the first thing they had to do was to get to their status and they did it through hard, thought out work.

Some of them were at the right place at the right time. Some were true pioneers (Mike Filsaime, for example, a former car salesmen, went online and developed what he called the "Butterfly marketing method", a viral subscriber catching and products selling machine).

Some invented whole niches that became immensely popular (Mark Joyner, for example, wrote a report on how to rank high on Google that had over one million downloads in a very short time, kick starting the whole field of Search Engine Optimization).

Some created a buying frenzy by being the first to launch a certain type of high in demand product and launched it in just the right niche (John Reese made $1 million in 1 day after launching his $1000 "One Billion Visitors Website Traffic Generation Course").

Some were very inventive (Corey Rudl - one of the first true Internet marketers, unfortunately he died in a car crash - for example, at the beginning of his career noticed that the high-end car parts, like Ferrari car emblems cost hundreds of dollars and they got stolen a lot, so he went to Italy and found perfect replicas of those emblems for a fraction of the cost. He brought a whole bunch of them them to the U.S and sold them on online car forums for much cheaper than they were sold otherwise).

And the list goes on...

What did all these marketers have in common?

They had an incredibly high quality product they sold and they had a huge list of loyal subscribers and previous customers that trusted them!

Almost none of them became rich with their first try.

Think about it. Who do you buy from?

Is it every day someone new you never saw before in your life or is it mainly people and shops you've been to before and had good experience with them?

The answer is obvious.

How can you build relationship with your subscribers?

First, you have to get subscribers.

Second, you have to give them valuable information or products that they start to trust you

Third, you have to stay in touch! This is where a lot of people go wrong. If you don't stay in touch, you won't have too many followers after a while.

I learned this the hard way. I had a list of almost 10,000 very loyal subscribers that liked to open my emails and read my articles and buy products from my recommendation (I was mainly working as an affiliate marketer back then).

But then I had so much other work that I stopped my online endeavours and started my other projects. Meanwhile my list kept growing on it's own for some time and I could still make a lot of money by sending a recommendation email every now and again, but I stopped giving.

And after a year, less and less people were opening my emails and clicking on my recommendations. People un-subscribed and my list went down to only 800 members during the course of the next three years.

I blew it. I totally blew it because I didn't stay in touch and keep on giving my subscribers what they deserved... my best.

I know better now and I'm warning you not to do the same mistake.

You can either go for constant flow of new, one-time buyers OR build a relationship with your buyers and make them your regular buyers.

The first option is much harder and comes at much greater cost as the second. Besides that, the second one is more reliable and better for bringing you a steady income online.

It is also important that you find your online niche.

Most beginner internet marketers go immediately for the "How to make money online" niche because they think that's where the easy money is at.

Well, let me set the record straight... There can rarely be such a high-demanding crowd found than the "Make money online crowd".

Sure, if you're going for the newbies and adopt the first strategy mentioned in the previous paragraph (steady flow of new, one time customers), you might make it... in theory. But in reality the make money online niche is so crowded that it's very unlikely you'll succeed in that.

Newbies also like to go for all the obvious, extremely high competition niches, like the weight loss niche, the natural health niche and so on. Sure, you can find some great niches within those still but it's much easier to find a niche in something you know and love doing.

That's how you come to the top because your work isn't a chore for you but a way to share your ideas with the world, with your subscribers and friends.

I suggest two free platforms for creating your own website.

I have used both and they are both easy to use and great to write on. I use the second one more nowadays because I mainly put the sites on my own server and buy my own domain, but in the beginning there's nothing wrong to use their free platforms.

The platforms I'm talking about are:

• www.blogger.com (belongs to Google, so some people speculate that it's giving it a bit of an advantage over other platforms, the claim I never found substantiated)
• www.wordpress.com (I use this platform more but it's a thing of opinion)

Both also integrate Adsense (Google's website ad network, where you get paid for every click your visitors make) and other ad networks easily (especially blogger).

You can either sell affiliate products or your own. Usually beginners start selling affiliate products.

As an affiliate you get a percentage of every sale that comes from you. Basically you set up a unique link to a product you want to sell and post it on your website. When the visitors click on your link, and buy, you get a cut. It's a simple system.

A few of the top sites you might want to consider to affiliate with and help sell products they offer are:

• www.clickbank.com (downloadable info products)
• www.jvzoo.com (downloadable info products)
• www.amazon.com (all kinds of products)
• www.ebay.com (all kinds of products)

These sites are all tested and proven to pay their affiliates regularly. They also give you a lot of tools to help you make as much sales as possible.

A good platform that allows you to quickly get approved for affiliate account for Amazon and Ebay and also potentially bring your articles to literally thousands of people almost instantly is the platform you're reading this article on right now, www.hubpages.com.

I suggest you learn these skills if you want to really begin making steady income online. There are virtually limitless sources where you can learn these skills online:

• Basic HTML
• CSS
• Copywriting
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A common mistake of Internet marketers is also creating only one stream of income.

Sure, it might work for a while or even for a very long time. But things change online. You can lose your rankings literally in a day and begin to rely on other marketing techniques.

Your product can become obsolete over night and you have to start making a new one.

There might be another crisis and people stop buying online altogether (and continue only on established, huge sites like Amazon and eBay).

So, your strategy should be to diversify.

Never only rely on Google traffic for your products. Go for YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter traffic, too. Get advertising from other sites. Make every source of traffic only about 1/5 of your whole traffic. The less you can make that number, the better. So if one single source of traffic fails you completely, you still have 4/5 working for you and have some time to recover.

Don't only sell one product. In the beginning yes, but make sure you create a few and also try selling some affiliate products too.

Create multiple streams of income online and you're sure to have a long-term steady stream of income.