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Do you get tired of slogging through article after article claiming to tell you how to make money online? But, when you get down reading them you feel cheated because they just gave you a brief overview without ever getting into the nitty-gritty components to make it work.
I know I have.
I’ve been sucked in, eyes bulging out, to every clickbaity headline there was for years just to feel like a family dog abandoned on the side of the road when the article was finished.
Let’s just stop this nonsense right now.
I’ve tried just about every get-rich-quick scheme on the market looking for the right one. Looking for the one which was going to land me somewhere in the Caribean, on the beach in a Speedo, while the old internet cash machine spits out hundreds on autopilot. Well, maybe not in a Speedo. I’m more of a Bermuda shorts type of guy. If you’re too young for Bermuda shorts, look it up. It was a massive pop culture craze in the sixties and a little into the seventies.
I digress though, let’s move on.
I have had some successes. I’ve had lots of failures. I will tell you one thing to be absolutely true. You can make tons of money on the internet. You just need a couple of basic principles and some basic tools. Don’t believe your Uncle Charlee, who sits around drinking beer in his pit-stained white t-shirt all day long, telling you, “It’s all a scam!”
It’s not.
You’ll first need to take a good evaluation of yourself, I’ll go over that in a minute. Then you’ll need something or some way you can help people.
Ok, this is where most blog posts stop and throw people out into the wild, naked, and hungry to get going.
I will tell you this about this post. There will be some work involved. The internet changes very fast. Tools come in and out of favor. I will recommend some that I use but in reality, there may be some better ones out there. Some, I might not even be aware of.
If you find something better, give me a shout. I’m all ears. I’m open-minded and want to continue to learn and improve.
Ok, I’ve screwed around long enough. Let’s get at the good stuff.
The basic internet marketing rule few understand
Not everything will work for all people. You will need to put some deep thought into and evaluate what you are good at and what you have some knowledge in. Make a list of these things. Make a long list. Crunch your brain for a week, or a month, or two months. It will take as long as it takes. Then make a list of things you really hate doing. When you wake up on Monday morning and think about all the things which will bring you dread and angst throughout the day, write these on that list. This is your strengths and weakness list. This is the master list that will control what you do and what direction you will take when those bright and shiny objects pop up selling you the dream of yourself sitting on a beach somewhere while your cash machine fills your spare room floor to ceiling with hundreds.
Those bright and shiny schemes might work if they align with your list of things you’re good at and enjoy. If not, all they will do is leave you feeling hog-tied lying on the floor, robbed of money you didn’t need to spend. And, even worse, having wasted time you didn’t need to waste.
This list is your barometer to guide your way and your business litmus test to determine good from bad when someone presents you with an idea.
Find something to help other people.
Now, you will need something you enjoy doing and is fairly good at which will help other people. I don’t want this to sound all mystical and airy, leaving you wanting to sing the next verse of Kum Ba Yah. Again, if you are too young for this reference, look it up. I was a child of the seventies, what can I say?
In this post, I’m going to show you a business model of an art business. If you are not an artist, many of the principles will still apply, but you’ll need to skew them toward something which will work for you. This is a rebirth of a passion of mine I dropped away from for years. That’s why I’m interested in it and I’m blogging about it. That is why the list must come first. Once I get talking about these more specific principles, I don’t want a ton of people running out buying things they don’t need and wasting a ton of time just because of the money you can make. This is an area that ticks off a large part of my list. Make sure what you choose checks off a large part of your list.
If you love doing other types of crafts, your business may look really similar but just steered toward a different market and have a couple of different things to make it work.
If something doesn’t immediately pop out at you, I would do an internet search for some of the fun things you like to do. I like Youtube. There is probably someone on Youtube showing how to do something similar to what you want to do.
Watch what people do and not as much of what they say.
Once you find someone, say on Youtube, watch their videos and start to deconstruct their business. Many will have some training to buy, but don’t fall trap to the at first. Just start by deconstructing their business first. Ask yourself these questions and write down the answers.
How are they making their money?
Are they making it through the Youtube advertising system? If so, you will need a ton of subscribers to make it work. Are they selling products? In the art world, people are making money in a variety of ways.
If they have a large enough following, they may make their money partially through advertising. Most in the art world make their money by either selling their art, selling tools for art, working for clients, or selling education about art. Some artists have a large enough subscriber base where advertising might pay out pretty well, but they are still probably making more on selling.
Where are they getting their traffic from?
You will need to do a deep dive into figuring out where they are getting their traffic from and where they are sending that traffic too. Are they getting traffic from Instagram and directing it toward Youtube? Are they taking their Youtube and Instagram people and either sending them to a Shopify store, their own website, or Etsy? Are they getting people from Twitter or a publicly hosted Tumbler blog and sending them to one of their online stores or their Youtube channel? Are they working hard on Facebook and sending people to a sales site or just selling to them on Facebook?
There are so many options out there; I would create a diagram of what different people’s internet structure looks like. If there are several which are similar, that might be a system for you to model your own business after. Just make sure it hits the boxes on your original list. Here is the original list of the likes and dislikes coming up again. I keep stressing this list because by not following my list I wasted too much time and
Most of the people in the art world are on Instagram because it is a visual-driven network. People in the craft world, Pinterest, and Etsy are where they live.
Every business type may be a little different. Spend some time and map it out.
How to organize your money-making system.
Creating your money-making system is your next biggest hurdle to clear. How you put this all together is actually an intersection of what other people are doing online and what you have on your list of stuff you like to do.
If you have a speech impediment, podcasting might not be the best idea for you unless you take it so far over the top creatively it becomes something the world has never seen before. But, I think this is the way you need to think about your whole business.
What do I mean by taking it over top? Let’s say you do have some sort of speech problem. Run your voice through some sort of synthesizer and play the role of a space alien interviewing people of earth. That’s over the top. And, you may find an audience if your whole program was wacky and entertaining.
We are entertainers.
I’m going to sidestep for a moment and talk very briefly about where we are in the online world right now. It is crowded in every niche. To be noticed in a niche we all need to be entertaining as well as provide knowledge. It will be a rare case where someone will be good enough to be boring and still gain a large following. Now, entertaining doesn’t always mean funny. Entertaining can also mean compelling. Be able to present your material in a way to best pull in your audience.
I’m going to use the podcast idea to give you an example. Many podcasts in the internet marketing space have the same format. Some may change it up a little, but many are all the same dishing out the same content. Once one person steps up and creates something new and it takes off, a dozen jump on board and copies it trying to make the magic happen for them. The fact is the magic is in the new. The magic is where the originator decided to take a chance. Be the originator. Take chances and try new things.
What is your home base?
For years everyone had a blog or website and they directed all their search traffic or social media traffic to their blog. I agree that you need to own your own home base. Making all your money directly from a Facebook page is too risky. If Facebook shuts off your page, you are out of business. But, there are other ways of doing things if you choose not to own a blog.
There are services you can pay for to host landing pages. Paid landing pages like Leadpages are less likely to shut you down because you are paying for their service.
If you were to first send your traffic from different sources to one of these lead pages and then to a shopping cart site to handle a sale, you could eliminate the need for a blog.
Some people create Shopify or Etsy stores. They drive traffic to these stores from their different social media accounts or articles they have syndicated on the web.
Take a close look at the structure of other people’s online systems. The structure maps you created in the exploration phase will be a good guide for how you may want to structure your business.
In the art world, some people have blogs, but the majority of people are selling through their own Etsy store or Shopify store.
A paid one-page website.
Choosing something like Leadpages for your home base can work out pretty cool. Leadpages are a subscription-based service where you can essentially create a one-page website for a particular topic and get the person landing there to take a specific action. Let me clarify this a little. Let’s say you want people to signup for your mailing list.
You create a lead page that sells them on the idea of signing up. You connect that lead page to your email service. When you start talking to people on your Facebook page about signing up to your mailing list, you convince them they should find out more. You send them to your lead page where you talk all about the benefits of signing up for your mailing list. They sign up for the mailing list right on the lead page and their name and information goes to your email service for storage.
These lead pages also work for making a sale. Let’s say you are an artist selling a digital print. You put a pin on Pinterest to get them interested. It’s a specific print so you just don’t want them wandering around Etsy looking at other people’s stuff. You first want a chance to tell them everything about your print. You send them to a lead page and give them the full sales message. Then send them on to Etsy to place the order.
Instead of the complications of starting and maintaining a blog, you just need to deal with the lead page.
Mailing lists aren’t dead.
Let’s talk briefly about mailing lists. I still believe everyone needs to build an email list. Someday I think something will come along to eliminate email, but email is still way too powerful of a communication tool to be ignored. Many people say email is dead. And, in many markets it is. But having the ability to directly connect with someone on a one-to-one basis and block out a lot of the distracting noise is very powerful.
Here is a slight side note contradiction. I think SMS or text messages on a phone are way more powerful than email, but I haven’t found a system I like yet. Plus, it is a slightly different medium. It’s an attention getter for short messages, but the person will need to take another action after seeing the SMS. The system isn’t perfect yet, so I’m still pushing good old email. For something to last as long as email has, the system has to be good.
An email service.
You will need an email service. I recommend a service called Get Response. It’s fairly cheap, pretty easy to use, and it has the ability to section out your list. By sectioning out your list I mean separating your list into different groups of people who have interests in certain topics but not other topics on your site.
If you are an artist, you will want to separate other artists who sign up to your site to buy art supplies from people signing up to your site who want to buy prints. You will want to talk to other artists differently than you will customers there to buy your art.
I’m going to throw a word of caution in here. Other magical wand-waving internet gurus get too many people’s undies in a bundle thinking they need to do all this stuff from the start. You don’t need to worry about sectioning your list from the beginning.
Start small and it will build from there.
Signup for an email service and start selling people on joining your list. Then, when you have time, create an opt-in incentive. Then when you have more time start writing email sequences and subdividing your list. Just start small and build your list.
Don’t ever let the complications of the business interfere with your art.
To make money you will always need to be creating. You’ll need to find the right balance between creating and doing internal business items, but when in doubt always err on the side of creation and getting the product part done. So much of the business stuff can be subbed out. I am still speaking from the position of an art-based business. Art is something only you can do.
If you get busy enough and the business side starts sagging, just pay people to work on your website, insert the links, write your landing pages, and work on your mailing list. The art you create is the stuff that brings in the cash. So concentrate on that first.
I know it’s a lot to take in if you are new to the internet marketing field. I’m going to create more articles to slice and dice this stuff up into even further easy-to-understand chunks. I could go on for days about the details of the email service. There is so much to just that component alone.
The biggest part you need to concentrate on is instead of listening to the gurus say you need this or that, start doing your research and looking at what other people are doing in your field of interest. Look at the structure of what they are doing where they are finding customers and how they are going about making the sale. Then consult your list of likes and dislikes. Do your likes and dislikes align with the way they are running their business? Your list is the most important component to getting this whole internet snowball rolling. If your list