A Link & A List – How To Get Started Making Money Online

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People who are very experienced at making money online always tend to forget the fact that most of the population don’t have a clue about the internet, beyond buying items on eBay or Amazon and using Facebook occasionally.

They certainly don’t know the potential for making money online, not as a full time job but as a second income.  And they certainly don’t know the basics of how to go about it.

All the infomation is available online, if you go to YouTube you can find a video to show you how to do just about anything, but the sheer enormity of the information is totally overwhelming, you don’t know who to trust and so nothing gets done.

This is a real shame because I don’t know if you have noticed, but for some people, times are tough.  People with jobs, people with bills, people with fixed incomes.  People vulnerable to the vagaries of the economy for their financial comfort or worse, dependent on just one income.

Just think for a moment, if you could learn something that is pretty easy and step by step, that could bring in a second income, or even grow to replace your main income, that you could do from your dining room table, your garden, even your bed, whenever you have a spare couple of hours, wouldn’t you be interested?

I always have been!  And I’ve made a lot of money online – one memorable day I made over £14,000 from just one email.  Can I just repeat that?  I sent one email, with a link in it, to my mailing list, and I made over £14,000 in just one day.  There WAS a bit more to it, but I made that money from sending a link, to a list.

And guess what?  That day was New Year’s Eve.  Tell that one to people who say that you can’t make money over a holiday period.

There are many other people who would answer a big fat “yes!” to the question I asked above, but who just don’t have a clue about the basics, or how to get started.  Perhaps they hear people talk about  the possibility but they just don’t think it’s a possibility for them.

This was brought home to me anew this week, from two incidents that came within a day of each other.

One of our Money Gym clients was enthusing about a product or service on our private Google group the other day, really singing their praises and, no doubt, generating a lot of clicks from interested people.  My business partner Judith clicked through, had a look and realised immediately that this company offered an affiliate scheme.

Just for those of you who don’t know what an affiliate scheme is, I’ll explain again.

An affiliate scheme is where you sign up, recommend a company, product or service, using a special unique link, and when people click through and buy, you get paid a commission.

so by genuinely recommending a great company, our Money Gym member could have earned commission on all purchases made through her recommendation.  But it just wasn’t on her radar to look for an affiliate scheme so she didn’t see it and so didn’t make any commission.

(We have told her subsequently, obviously!)

And this really shows that you don’t need to have your own product or service to make money online.

The second incident was when I agreed to be interviewed by one of Marcus De Maria’s Wealth workout graduates, for a book he’s writing, and who asked me some brilliant questions so we got a great interview.  I was, in retrospect, a little worried about his using a digital recorder to capture my voice coming out of his speakers, instead of using a free conference line with recording built in…but it was too late to do anything about that by then.

I asked him how he was going to make the recording available, so that I could send my subscribers to  listen, and he replied that he was not sure, as he didn’t have a website yet.

My brain went into overdrive, thinking on my feet, about the easiest way for a non-techie, creative and action orientated as he was, to get a web presence as quickly as possible.  Because if he’s giving away great content (which my interview was, natch!) then he ought to be building a list at the same time.

Are you on Facebook? I asked.  Yes, he replied.  So why don’t you make a Facebook page for your forthcoming book and you can upload the audio interviews there, collecting Fans” of your page as you go.

Then you can even make little videos out of the audios  using Windows Movie Maker (which all PC’s have installed) and get snippets on YouTube linking back to your Facebook page.

Could you show me how to do it, he said?  There are lots of videos online showing you how to do it I replied.  But I’ll forget what I’m looking for and I won’t know which are the right ones to watch, he replied.

So I spent 20 minutes making a video (and you can see it via the link in the Note From Nicola) showing him how to set up a Facebook page.  I also sent links to the Facebook tutorial, and to some of the videos on YouTube.

A web page, a method of building a list and a proven method of generating traffic, all in one fell swoop.

And once you have a list, you can build a relationship with your subscribers and then start to send emails with product and service recommendations and an affiliate link.  You can even find products or services to recommend that pay a recurring commission, month by month.

And that really is all you need to make money online.

A list and a link.

So why don’t more people do it?

I don’t know, because it really can be that simple.  My great friend Martin Avis makes a substantial six-figure income from simply sending out an ezine (online newsletter) twice a week, recommending products or services that he uses himself, enclosing his affiliate link for people to buy through.

(Martin is going to be teaching us his simple system on our Money Gym Internet Day on 10th October, so if you like the sound of that, come along!)

You can even set up a pre-written series of emails, so that when people sign up to your list, the emails go out automatically, giving great information, and starting to earn you commissions, no matter what time of day or night it is.

Then you add to the pre-written series with occasional broadcasts, such as an ezine or special recommendation.

Martin even used this method to raise over $1000 in one day for a sick, broke friend of his, who had had a massive setback in life.  Very cool.

A list and a link.

You can get a bit more sophisticated and set up a series of emails recommending one product, then when someone buys, you move them onto a second list, recommending a complementary product….but let’s not try to run before you can walk.

Why not try watching my video, and then setting up your own Facebook page, to make a start?  Your profile is you personally, but your page can be for anything, your business, your hobby, your passion.  I would recommend you name your page carefully – you want it to appear when someone types the key word in the search box on Facebook.

For example, in the video I set up a page for my son Nelson, who is keen on skimboarding.  In retrospect I should have set it up with the word “skimboarding” in the title so it appeared when someone was searching for that.  BUT there is already a skimboarding page or five on Facebook, so what do you do if someone has already snaffled your word?

Think laterally.  I’m going to go back now and make a “Skimboarding For Teens” or “Skimboarding UK” or a similarly named page and link that to Nelson’s personal profile.

Pages are pretty much the only thing that show outside Facebook, so you will be attracting the search engines immediately.

Once you have your page, you can start discussions, upload video and audio, collect fans (mailing list) and you are off!  If you decided to start chronicling your journey to a second income, you could do that via a blog, which can feed through to your Facebook page, or via a Twitter account, which can also feed onto your profile or page.  Joined up marketing at it’s finest.

By the way, you can earn recurring commissions by recommending The Money Gym by signing up as our affiliate here >>

I hope that this article has inspired you to think about creating “a list and a link” for yourself and to start to break the tyranny of depending on just one income.

Do let me know how you get on, via the comments section on the blog?

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