making money online is hard work

We all want a job where we put in a few hours a week and get a nice income to replace our day job.

The big attraction to the Internet as a business market is that many have achieved this. Not the huge rich marketers flogging how to get rich to poor suckers who will never get a dime out of the Internet,

I mean the mums and dads who quietly create a decent business, then hone it with the latest software, outsource the other work and live on the passive income, just needing to write occasionally oneself. My daughter has just such a business

When starting an online business no matter which business model you decide on, it will take time to learn how to find your customer and get your sales.

Article writing for AdSense, eBay, kontera, amazon or any other advertising systems will take keyword research and careful market selection to make it pay, and it takes some understanding of each of the ways each system attract advertisements as well as which one suits you and your writing style best.

Organic search or adwords?

AdWords can work for start-ups.

My daughter started her online business about two years ago by writing tips on being organised and publishing a monthly newsletter for free to attract buyers for her down-loadable ebook. She advertised using AdWords.

AdWords can cost thousands of dollars a week if you don't watch it closely, so you need to ensure that you tightly control your advertising budget and start small, testing several ads at one time. AdWords will split test these ads for you. Don't be afraid to increase your budget as long as sales exceed your costs.

In my daughters case. the business structure was simple to set up and the first product was already in her head. The AdWord advertising was paramount to success in the beginning.

Writing an ebook that is worth reading that people will buy, then selling it online by just sending a simple pdf download looked like the way to go as she loves writing and has some admin skills, but the real business model is much different when one has a lot of subscribers.

Free high quality contents works!

After getting the reader to the sales page you need something free that is valuable to give to your customers to gain trust. Trust is a big issue and many people won't trust you until you have proved that you are worthwhile to them.

She gave away heaps of good information in exchange for a strong mailing list.A method introduced by the course she bought from Neil Waterhouse who put his course out in 5 pdf or online books. He is a well known marketer who talks straight and knows what to teach.

The complete set of 5 books cost about 100 bucks or less and provided pretty good easy to understand info on how to get started although there were a few things that were improved later.

The information she had purchased although incomplete, (it always is) was very helpful and she would never had got her business off the ground without it.

Making money online with an ebook looked to me to be a very bad way for my daughter to get a start, as she knew nothing about computers nor marketing, but she does like to write.

She followed the instructions pretty well and got good results and started selling the book as soon as she advertised with AdWords. Money started coming in within a day or two.

Money also started going out!

To start making web sites that sell products can be bloody close to impossible if you don't know how, and about 97% of people give up before they make any money at all, and often by this stage they have already spent a few thousand dollars just trying to get the right advice.

A better idea is to learn how to build a keyword campaign first!

Neil Waterhouse's cash package was easy to follow and got her started. After a short while the sales started to come daily, but to keep it happening she deliberately over spent on keywords for a few weeks as advised by Waterhouse. This increased sales to double pretty quickly.

If you have any questions Feel free to ask and I will attempt to help. This is not a promotion for any marketers or their services.

The real cost of sales.

the initial setup cost of a few hundred was dollars spread over time, so she had know idea how expensive it would become until she started getting about $2000 a week in sales.

She soon found that she had loads of people in her list and plenty of sales..... but more and more costs.

Sending the book and getting paid for it reliably meant buying online services. A shopping cart with built in auto-responders that work with big lists is expensive.

It can also be a nightmare to set up and keep running smoothly, and working long hours on the phone to solve shopping cart and auto-responder problems can be frustrating and go on for months.

She is still with her second choice of shopping cart, because despite the glitches it has delivered better than the rest she has tried, and was at least possible to install.Her new Joomla platform has a plug in shopping cart, but is still shaky with her large list of subscribers.

The cost got higher when her newsletter got to over 25,000 subscribers, but It is now fairly reliable and produces usable information for her split testing with about 47,000 subscribers to her free tips, newsletter and blog.

She still uses google AdWords only, and does not place other adds. Learning how to make a profit using MSN and Yahoo as well as Google will take a fair bit more work, and this will be done after she masters Google AdWords and her costs are well under control.

Google charges an enormous amount to buy keywords when you are a beginner. Until you get ads right and have some authority your keywords cost far too much and you pay through the nose.

The Google AdWords price for keyword drops as more knowledge is gained and she works out all the tricks her competition use to make her pay too much for the keywords.

It is a very competitive market

Until pages are aged and have lots of authoritative back links you will need to buy your advertising.

It is very hard to get your page on the left hand side of google search page for organic or free adds, for the search words you need, because these words are very sought after.

For an opposite example I have a bricks and mortar business selling automotive workshop machinery online, and that is very easy to advertise and promote because there are very few advertisers.

I have never had to pay for any advertising to remain on the first page of Google for my products in the niche, even world-wide.

As a small niche market it has been easy to dominate with just updates to my products and a couple of articles written and a few new keywords about once every three months. No paid advertising is needed at all.

You need to know a lot of stuff to be able to make any money online.