There’s plenty of online side gigs on t’internet to choose from. The question is, which one is going to make YOU money? From Forex marketing, to online tutoring, to buying and selling on eBay to creating your own digital products to sell online. You can create an eBay store, an ETSY store, become a blogger or even get into information publishing using Amazon’s self publishing platform. The choice is endless.
With all the possibilities it’s no wonder that most people are completely lose when it comes to making money online. I was too and I tried a number of strategies in an attempt to make money online. From Forex for two years, mostly losing money, I went on to buying and selling on eBay, I have even published a book on Amazon’s self publishing platform – check it out below:
Online Side Gigs – Affiliate Marketing
Of all the strategies I’ve tried one shone out as the clear winner. That one was affiliate marketing. Years ago I was trying to make money from a website and I tried two main strategies. One was to advertise on the website, and make money from advertising clicks. The other was to sell affiliate products from the website. The far and clear winner was affiliate marketing. One product sale made the same money as hundreds of clicks on my adverts.
So I pursued affiliate marketing, in an attempt to make it a living. From the start I attempted a free traffic strategy, which had a lot of problems. Although I did make a sale or two, it was an underwhelming income that I made at first. I tried multiple strategies and courses but struggled for some time. Later I found a community of online entrepreneurs. This is definitely worth doing if you’re going to take earning an income online seriously. You can find an online community through these free videos.
Affiliate Marketing Secrets
The key, I found to making real money with affiliate marketing is:
- To build an email list – an email list is the massive golden nugget I found which made all the difference as an affiliate. Don’t try it without building an email list
- Subscription products – at first I tried selling books from Amazon which paid tiny amounts. What a waste of time it is! Instead, find high value subscription products which are selling already.
- Find a mentor – without a mentor, it’s easy to wander around, wasting loads of time online. You need purpose and direction if you want to make an income online. Without direction, you’ll easily find a number of rabbit holes which suck up your time and efforts without delivering any results.
Online Side Gigs – Building A Profitable Affiliate Business
Once you have found a suitable product to promote online as an affiliate, you simply build out the infrastructure and promote it. The basic infrastructure is a website, landing page and email marketing system (autoresponder). Once you have everything in place, you can promote your affiliate product/s with a simple marketing strategy. This can involve social media marketing, blogging and content creation, YouTube, TikTok, or paid advertising. You can also use a combination of a few methods although the advice is to work on one until you’re good at it then move on to another.
Ideally you want to test a scalable strategy too, such as paid marketing. With a paid marketing strategy, and a digital product to sell, you have a global audience to sell to. So once you have mastered marketing in one country, for example, you can move on to other countries and ultimately sell globally if you like.
Making Your First Sale Online
Making your first sale online as an affiliate is the most difficult part. When you’re a beginner you won’t know the actions you need to take in order to make a sale. So it’s best to start by following a program until you have some experience. Get started here. You also won’t have much content and your email list will be small. Everyone starts from zero as an affiliate but as you gain some subscribers and learn how to drive traffic to your website, you’ll start to see how it works.
Keep going for long enough to make your first online sale. Once you’ve done that you’ve proven to yourself that you can do it. Many give up in this stage because there’s a lot of work initially, without much to show for it. But this is the stage where you’re building the infrastructure and your knowledge at the same time. As your email list grows, it becomes easier to make sales because of the work you’ve already done.
Summary
The best way I’ve personally found to make money online is with a business model called affiliate marketing. See my post what is affiliate marketing for more detail on it. However, there’s lots of ways to do affiliate marketing and I struggled at first. My advice is to use subscription products, join a community and build an email list.
With subscription products you can earn a regular income from each sale. A community gives you accountability and a touchstone to reach out when you need help. An email list is something I didn’t use at first as an affiliate to my downfall. I didn’t know just how powerful an email list can be. An email list gives you leverage and as your list grows you reach more and more people with your marketing. It also gives you more control over your traffic. Without a list, you’re relying on traffic from either paid ads or organic content – which takes a lot of time and effort to build.
Make sure you start an online business the right way – get started here to take the first step.
