The main reasons most people never make significant money online.

The main reasons most people never make significant money online.

 

There are lots and lots of reasons people never make money online, but I'm going to talk about some of the major ones that exist and how you can overcome them.  

 

Information Paralysis - There are people who sit at home and read blogs all day about how to make money online, but they never actually DO anything.  They believe that once they have learned everything, then they can finally start.  And so they wait, and nothing ever happens.  

 

"It is better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing perfectly." - Robert Schuller

 

I know it can be confusing with so much conflicting information on the Internet, but just taking action is the best way to start.  Put up some websites, experiment some, make some mistakes, and put up more websites.  I promise you that you will learn a lot more doing that than you ever will from reading how to make money online blogs.  

 

Poor Time Management - If you know you only have 2 hours to work on your only business, I hope you don't check Facebook or your favorite news blogs before you get started!  That would shave off at least a half hour from that time, and unfortunately, this is what a lot of people do.  

 

Work on your business FIRST, and then if you have time, go ahead and read your blog or jump on Facebook.  This will make sure every work session you have puts you a little bit further ahead than you were before (instead of when entire work sessions have passed and you realize you've accomplished nothing).

 

Misinformation - Sometimes the lack of money being made online isn't from lack of work, but from putting your time and effort into the wrong activities.  It can be very frustrating working several hours each day only to find out months later that what you're doing isn't working (trust me, I know this very well).  But like I said before, some of the best lessons are learned through your mistakes.  The only issue here is that you need someone to give you the right formula so your work time isn't wasted.

 

Luckily I am here to do that for you. So watch the lessons, put in the work, and you will start to see results. ;)

Learn more about Home Entrepreneurship and making money from home! 

Why making LOTS of websites is the key to making money online.

Whenever you talk to a business investor, they all say the same thing: make sure you have a well-diversified portfolio.  Why?  Because it reduces your overall risk.  

 

The funny thing is, a website behaves a lot like a stock does (assuming you are in a strong economy anyway!).  A stock can go up and down in value, but over time, the general direction is upward.  And websites behave in the same way: their traffic numbers go up and down (remember, traffic = money), but the general direction is up.  If you have a portfolio of many websites, even if one website takes a dive in traffic numbers temporarily (which happens from time to time), you won't feel it because you have so many other websites that are continuing to do well.  This is why it makes sense to have lots of different websites on lots of different topics with different types of monetization techniques (I will tell you more about different monetization techniques in another newsletter).  The owner of one website whose entire income depends on that single website is in a much riskier position (the same way that someone would be if they put all their money in one stock).

 

While a diversified stock portfolio and a diversified website portfolio are similar in some ways, a website portfolio has some significant advantages.  For one, the returns are much, much higher for websites (the best stock portfolios can get a 15% return per year).  A website portfolio that cost you $100 for domains and $10 per month could make you $5,000 passive per month after a year if your work is focused on the right places.  The returns you can get after five years into this business are mind blowing.

 

The other advantage of an Internet portfolio is that you will never have to worry about a stock market crash!  Your websites WILL grow in traffic over time because one of the main things Google cares about when judging a website is its age.  This is because new websites are constantly in and out of Google's index, but if a website has some age on it (like at least a couple of years), it means there is at least someone behind that website making payments for hosting and renewing the domain year after year (most websites are left to die once their domain expires their first year and Google knows this).  As a website has been around longer and longer, Google will trust it more and more and send it more traffic.  

 

This is why investing your time in a diversified online portfolio is a good plan to develop passive income for your future.

Why a website and Google's Pay-Per-Click program are an Entrepreneur's best friend.

Instead of strictly discussing ways to make money online, I want to show you the power of what you can learn in my program for bigger ideas. What this program is teaching you is essentially how to judge the numbers of any industry in the world.  Google provides the exact searches for every single keyword searched on Earth and the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) of each one.  If you multiply those two numbers together, you get a rough estimate of how much advertising money is being spent in that industry online (and the actual number being spent would be bigger, because we are not including offline advertising). This is because the CPC of a keyword is based on a bidding system that all advertisers participate in.

That data alone is very interesting and will give you the scope of any industry compared with another. You know how much you can pay for a qualified lead to your website (since that is what a paid Google search is), and you know the total number of searches for any keyword per month. 

To give you an example of how you can use this data, let's say you have an idea to make specialized leather backpacks to sell (just an example that popped in my head, your idea could be anything!).  You talk with a manufacturer, and they tell you they will make the bags to your specifications and dropship them to any address you like for $20 (dropshipping means they will take the order and ship it for you).  Now you jump online and find out that the CPC of "leather backpacks" is $0.50 and is searched for 26,000 times per month.       

This means that on average $13,000 per month is being spent online by advertisers who are selling leather backpacks.  What this means for you is that you can get a visitor who typed in "leather backpacks" to your website for $0.50. 

In the old days to try out a venture like this, you would have had to have paid to get these products made, gotten them in a store somehow, and then hoped that that would sell and your idea would become profitable!  That is a HUGE amount of money (and time) to invest in an idea that may not work. 

What could you do today?

You could spend $20 on a website and another $100 on a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign.  Then what you do is make a sales website for your leather backpacks and set up a PPC campaign to send you 200 visitors (with the CPC price at $0.50, that is how much traffic you would get for $100).  Let's say you price your backpacks at $60; that would be a $40 profit per backpack sold since the manufacturer would make and ship each one for $20.

If you make $40 per backpack sold, that means you would need to sell three backpacks out of your total traffic of 200 visitors to make a profit (if you sell three backpacks, you would make $120 from the backpacks, minus your $100 spent on the PPC).  In other words, if three people out of 200 visitors buy your backpack, you are technically profiting (your minimum amount of profit to go forward with this project may be something different though).

The good thing here is that you can test this whole process without investing too much time or money...when your visitor clicks the "process payment" button, you can redirect to a page that says "sorry, we are currently out inventory," and then mark that as a sale (the reason you couldn't just send the order to the manufacturer is because they'd usually have an initial fee that you wouldn't want to pay until after testing the product). 

See the beauty of the whole process?  You have just tested an entire idea with a fraction of the time and money you would have had you have gone through with the entire traditional approach.  If you sell less than 3 backpacks, you absolutely do NOT move forward the idea.  If you sell the minimum amount that you had set in your head to make the idea worth it, you move forward.  Then you can set up your website and PPC campaign to run on autopilot, and have your manufacturer make and ship the product.

This is just a quick example I made up, but there are LOTS of people making a living this way, utilizing easily made sales pages and PPC campaigns to test their ideas and run with the ones that work.  This is the world that is enabled by the Internet, dropshipping, and PPC campaigns! What you will realize is that once you learn more about online marketing, more and more ideas to make passive income will start coming to you, and you can grow your passive income with one project at a time, all while taking breaks as long as you want in between in each one! 

One website like that could end up making you THOUSANDS of dollars in passive income each month.  Your website is your permanent salesperson and the drop shipper takes care of delivering the product, as well as customer support.  All you do is check your bank account when you wake up in the morning, see that it's bigger, and do whatever you want the rest of the day!

Learn more on the Mike Omar Lions Club YouTube channel! 

A $1000 Per Month Passive Income Sample Website

To understand the proper structuring of a $1,000 per month passive income website, you need to understand how Google ranks their websites. 

 

Anyone who has ever heard of Google has probably heard of their "top-secret" algorithm that they use to sort their search results.  Well the truth is that the foundation of that "top-secret" algorithm isn't very much of a secret at all (Want to know how everyone knows?  Through Google search haha!).  

 

The heart of Google's entire search engine algorithm is links.  The more links a website has pointing to it from other websites, the more powerful and authoritative it is in Google's eyes.  That's it...that is what it all boils down to.  Sure, there are lots of other factors that make Google's results extra accurate and relevant (and a lot of those are still secret), but the number of backlinks to a website are the factor given the most weight.

 

So why does Google keep claiming that their search algorithm is much more complex than it actually is?  Well, one of the main reasons is that it is in Google's best interest to keep their search engine inner-workings mysterious.  For one, it keeps competing search engines from using their algorithms (Google is by far the most used search engine because it consistently gives the most relevant results, and they want to keep it that way).  Another main reason is that Google doesn't want any websites trying to manipulate the system to gain a top ranking (remember from my earlier email how much more a #1 ranking is worth than a #5 or #10 ranking?).

 

Google is very against people trying to manipulate their rankings...they would rather all rankings be natural without anyone trying to artificially inflate their backlinks (this makes sense because they believe that the best results would be produced by the websites that naturally attract the most links).  Unfortunately for Google, backlinks are the best way to judge a website's legitimacy and people who are in the business of making money online know this fact very well!  

 

So you have better idea of how it all works, Google ranks each website by assigning it a number called PageRank. A PageRank can be anywhere between 0 and 10, with 10 being the highest possible rank.  Google uses these numbers to give a rough assessment on how authoritative a website is, and generally websites with higher PageRank will rank higher in searches for more keywords.  

 

Every time a website links to another website on the web, that means that the website is essentially giving a positive review of that other website.  The more links a website has from different sources, the more authoritative that website becomes.  Also, if a website with very high authority gives a link to a website with a much lower authority (i.e. - lower PageRank), that website will immediately gain credibility for having gained a link from an already credible site in Google's eyes.  To put it plainly, the more links your website has, the better it will rank in Google (especially if some high PageRank websites have linked to your website).

 

And although Google cannot stop website owners from artificially inflating their PageRank and backlink profiles to get better rankings in searches, they can certainly make it more difficult or scary to do so.  They do this by penalizing websites they suspect are engaging in that practice.  This is known as black-hat search engine optimization (SEO) and Google has automatic triggers within its algorithm that will penalize websites that are caught doing black-hat SEO (essentially, shortcuts to gaining better rankings).  A penalty can range from pushing your website to the last page of search results temporarily, to a complete deindexing of your website.  A deindexing from Google pretty much means the death of a website, as you will never get any significant amount of organic traffic and all your work will be lost.

 

The practices I teach are white-hat SEO.  These practices are the ones that Google encourages.  They will bring you slower earnings and traffic numbers at the beginning, but they will make you the most amount of money over time.  Not only that, they will safeguard your portfolio so you will never have to worry about penalties from Google (in fact, you will be rewarded in the long run).  And trust me when I say you DO NOT want Google to notice that you have been messing around with black-hat SEO (I have friends who have lost website portfolios that were producing over $20,000/month because Google decided to deindex their portfolio due to shady link building practices...all at once).

 

Developing a steady-growth and passive income portfolio that will be safe and continue to grow for years and years is what my entire program is founded on, and all my free video lessons are founded on white-hat SEO link building practices (that is why the "get rich in 30 days online" Internet courses never work...they don't last long in Google).  

 

So how does this knowledge relate to making a $1,000 per month passive income website?  It's because I am going to show you how to structure a website so that each post is optimized to rank #1 for a particular keyword.  Each keyword chosen must have a potential passive earnings income of at least $50 per month, and the website will have at least 20 posts on it.  $50 per month * 20 posts = $1,000.  

 

Want to see how an example of how a white-hat SEO website is structured?  Check out a fully Search Engine Optimized sample website that is designed to make $1,000 in passive income per month.  A full explanation video lesson of how this website was made (and why it was made this way!) can be found here: How to Make a $1,000 per month Passive Income Website using Onsite SEO. Obviously this lesson is relevant only AFTER you do your keyword research!  But once you have, you are ready to make your first passive income website. ;)

 

The next part of the process is taught in the video lesson How to Structure a Link Building Campaign.  Remember, only white-hat SEO link building practices are taught for a safer portfolio and more money in the long run!

 

Also note that this passive income website is $1,000 per month because it is based on only 20 posts total.  There's no reason not to make a website with 100 keyword researched posts. And then make 10 more of those websites.  

 

Like so many things in life, making money online is a numbers game.  More websites + more posts = more traffic = more money.  THAT is the foundation of making money online.  

If I want to make money online, where do I start?

I have been making money off the Internet for several years now and have had many websites fail and many websites succeed (succeed meaning they make money passively, fail meaning they don't do anything).  Now that I understand how the system works, I understand one of the biggest factors to building a successful website: doing proper research before even starting the process of building a website!

 

Many people (myself included, when I was a beginner) go about trying to make money online in the wrong order; they have an idea and then build a website based on this idea and then later on hope it pays off.  This can cause many hours of work and frustration for a project that never makes a cent, and will cause a lot people to give up on their dream of making money online forever.  

 

What would the correct sequence of action when starting a website to make money online?

 

Do your research first!  What exactly do I mean by that?

 

Google provides the data for how many times every word (also known as a "keyword") is searched for around the world on a monthly basis.  If you go into Google and search for the "Google Keyword Tool," you will be able to look up any keyword you can think of and see how many times it is searched for on a daily basis.  

 

You can also look up the value of that keyword if it is used in a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign.  In other words, you can look up how much advertisers will pay Google every time someone clicks on a link and generates a lead for that company.  Certain keywords are worth more money than others.   This is because the payoff is much higher for certain industries than others (a click for "health insurance" or "buy car" will be much higher than "hair brush" or "white socks").  This is because someone interested in buying health insurance or a car has the potential to spend A LOT more money than someone who might be interested in purchasing a hair brush or white socks.

 

So why is this information important to someone who is trying to make money online?

 

Well, with this information we have some very important metrics related to a keyword: how many searches there are per month for that keyword and what the value of that keyword is as a paid lead (also known as the Cost-Per-Click or CPC).  We also know what percentage of traffic a #1 ranking in Google will bring on average:  42%.  We also know how much Google pays it's publishers (i.e. the people who place their Google Adsense on their website):  68%.  We also know the percentage of people who land on your website that will click on a paid link from Google on average (assuming good Ad placement):  4%.   

 

So what can we do with all these numbers?  

 

We can calculate the minimum amount of money a website can make monthly when it ranks for a specific keyword in Google.  I say minimum because Google Adsense is generally the lowest money making method for monetizing a website online.  It is also the easiest and that is why it is the introductory method I use, but once you become more experienced in making money online, you will learn other monetization methods that can make you much more money with the same amount of traffic to your websites. 

 

So how do I calculate the amount of money a website can make if it ranks #1 for a specific keyword?

 

The formula is:

 

(Number of Searches) * (Cost Per Click) * (.42) * (.68) * (.04)

 

The .42 is the average percentage of visitors that will land on a website that ranks #1, the .68 is the percentage of earnings that Google will pay its publishers, and the .04 is the average percentage of people who will click on your website when they land on your page.  So if for example, you look up the keyword "mountain bikes" and find that is searched for on average 45,000 times and has an average CPC of $1.00, this would be its monthly potential:  

 

(45,000) * (1.00) * (.42) * (.68) * (.04) = $514.08

 

You would earn about $514.08 in passive income if your website ranked #1 in Google for "mountain bikes" and you put Google Adsense on your website.  If you were to monetize with something like Amazon Associates, Ebay Affiliate Network, Commission Junction, or something else, your earnings could be much higher than that.  

 

*Note: If you want to look up some keyword values in the Google Keyword Tool, be sure to look up the EXACT match keywords and not the BROAD match keywords (this is because we want to use only searches that type in that EXACT keyword, not keywords that includes those words or have some mix of them).  Also be sure to use the GLOBAL average monthly searches instead of LOCAL (this is because we can drive traffic from all around the world to our website, not just our country). 

 

So now you know the minimum amount of money you will make when you rank #1 in Google for any keyword by using this formula.  To start playing around and doing a little research, check out the Google Keyword Tool.  You can also watch a full free VIDEO lesson of me doing actual keyword research using the Google Keyword Tool. 

 

The next step is to figure out how competitive each keyword is by learning how to judge the current top 10 ranking websites for those keywords in Google's search results.  You can do this by checking their PageRank.  If you want to accurately figure out if YOU can rank a website for one of those keywords without too much work (because remember, if it's too much work, it's not worth it - easier keywords can be found), you can watch the free VIDEO lesson of me doing competition analysis for keywords using PageRank. 

 

I hope you're starting to get an idea of how regular people ACTUALLY make online...by doing research BEFORE they make the website!

What are some of the most common methods for making money online?

Freelancing - The first most basic way to make money online is by freelancing (in other words, getting paid to make websites for other people). It's the way I got started in this whole business. More and more people need websites on a daily basis, yet most people never even look into how to make a website at all. If they did, they would realize that putting up a basic website is a simple process that takes less than an hour total and requires no knowledge of coding at all. The very first lesson I teach on my website is the making of Mike Omar Websites (all my lessons are free video lessons that I recorded and put up on YouTube).  

 

If you want to make money online, you need to learn how to make a website, plain and simple. Your first website project may as well be a website advertising your new website-making skills! 

 

Google Adsense - This is the simplest monetization method for a passive income website. Basically, you put the Adsense code on your website, people click on the links, and you get paid for every click.  Then you receive a check from Google at the end of the month depending on the number of clicks.  Plain and simple (in my next newsletter I will explain the entire process behind how Google Adsense works and why Google is one of the richest and most powerful companies in the world). 

 

This method USUALLY makes you the least amount of money of all passive monetization techniques (although in some cases it is the only viable option).  That is why you make your initial monetization technique Adsense (to get a foundation eCPM with which to compare the rest of your results from testing).  

 

Once you understand the process of keyword research and Search Engine Optimization, I show you how to make this Sample Passive Income website that is primarily monetized with Google Adsense. 

 

Amazon Associates, Commission Junction, and Other Affiliate Programs -With these programs, you put an affiliate link on your website (this is a link pointing to another website with your tracking ID on it).  Then if someone clicks on that link, whatever they buy from that site, you get a commission on (the tracking cookies vary in length, but it could be anything they buy in the next 24 hours to anything they buy in the next 30 days depending on the program).  This method is a little more complicated to make money from, but if you do it right, you can do VERY well.  This is because so many people go to whatever website from your affiliate link to buy that one product you recommended, but then they decide to do some extra shopping and buy a whole bunch of stuff.  That means you get commission on THE ENTIRE PURCHASE!

 

This method works best for websites where you recommend and review products OR websites where your search engine traffic is highly targeted (i.e. you rank #1 for "toaster ovens" and your website is a bunch of toaster oven reviews with links to Amazon where they can buy them).  It also works on blogs you have where you have a regular readership that trusts your opinion and you recommend specific products (using your affiliate link).  Websites that are monetized with affiliate links make a KILLING during Christmas (my Amazon websites will make me more in November, December, and January than they do the rest of the year).  

 

Informational Product Websites - These are websites where you sell your own downloadable product.  This could be an ebook, software, a video series, or any other product. Basically if you are an expert in any field that people are looking for information on, you can put together an information product on it (and use whatever medium works best - for making money online, a video series works best).  Then put up a website that tells people why the product you made has value.  You can use something like PayPal to charge for your product and then redirect them to a download page after, so it is pretty much a hands-free operation.  

 

There are several third party credit card processing companies you can use to do this (including PayPal), but I personally like to use ClickBank and this is why: ClickBank allows other people to become an affiliate for you very easily.  This means that other people can send traffic to my website, and if that person buys a product, I give them a portion of the profit.  I like to participate in this program for all my informational product websites and give affiliates a generous 50% commission.  I like to participate in the affiliate program because even though I'm giving up half the profits, those are sales I wouldn't have had otherwise.  It's a win-win.    

 

On my website, in the more advanced lessons, I teach you the entire creation of this Sample Digital Product Sales Page website.  My very first ebook website that I put up years ago was How to Become a Ticket Broker, and it continues to make me passive income to this day.  

 

Membership Websites - Membership sites are probably the most complicated ones to start and become successful with, but if you can gain some momentum, these websites will make you the easiest and most consistent money out of any of them!  This is basically a website where each member has to pay a monthly fee to gain access.  If you charge $30/month to be a member of your website and you have 100 members, that's a steady $3,000 per month, and depending on the type of site you run, you may not have to do anything but maintenance (and you'd probably want to promote too, for more easy money...I mean members!).  Include a forum within the website (not hard to do with a WordPress plugin) and some kind of service that keeps them wanting to stay members, and you're set - your new focus becomes getting more members while maintaining the site.  And you can offer an affiliate program too so current members can send you new members that you wouldn't ha ve gotten otherwise.  

 

Those are some of the most common ways of making money online that don't involve shipping a physical product (which is yet ANOTHER method of making money online!).  The possibilities for making money online are truly endless. 

What is the simplest way to make passive money online?

Everyone knows that there is LOTS of money being made online by people all around the world on a daily basis.  Every year the amount of money made online grows exponentially and hasn't showed any sign of slowing down, even during this terrible recession.  And even though everyone knows that money is being made online, they don't understand HOW money is being made online.  

 

So how exactly are people making money online?

 

To understand one method of making money online, let's examine one of the most profitable companies in the world: Google.  Google commands the most search engine traffic in the world, and as a result is in a very powerful position.  Why?

 

Well let's pretend that we are Nike.  Because we are Nike, we want our website to rank #1 for shoes.  If we rank #1 for shoes, we are going to get a lot of traffic for people searching for shoes to our website (roughly 42% of searchers to be exact).  If we rank #2, we will only get about 25% of that traffic.  At #3, about 10%.  After that, the numbers start to get pretty low.  You may as well not even exist on the Internet if you are on page #2 of the search results.  

 

The exact search item "shoes" is searched for roughly 1,160,000 times per month.  If Nike is at rank #1 in Google and getting 42% of that traffic, that is going to translate into almost 500,000 visitors to the Nike website that are interested in the word "shoes".  That is going to translate into A LOT of sales.  If it is sitting in spot #3, that would be a little over 100,000 visitors.  Still a lot of sales, but MUCH lower.  If they aren't in the top 10, they are missing out on a lot of action, and their company will miss out on a lot of potential sales.

 

And because Google controls where a website ranks, they are in a position of power.  If they decide that Adidas is a more relevant search result for shoes than Nike is, Adidas will make much more money online than Nike does on the Internet.  And Google has that power over every industry in the world!

 

So how does that ranking power translate into money for Google?  Well, if you ever search for anything in Google, you may notice that the top two or three results have a slightly differently colored background.  This is because those are paid search results (as opposed to the natural results below them, which are referred to as organic results).  These top (differently colored) results are paid for by those companies so that their links can rank at the top of Google search engine results.  Google is basically a lead generator to lots and lots of companies around the world.  And whenever a regular searcher clicks on one of those paid links, the owner of that link pays Google for that click.

 

With millions of searches every single day, Google pulls in A LOT of money.  And it makes sense that companies would pay for links, and this is why:  Let's say that you are Nike and you know that 1 out of every 50 people that searches for "shoes" online will buy a pair of shoes if they land on www.nike.com.  With this knowledge, you can calculate how much you could spend on a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign with Google and be profitable.  If the average pair of shoes makes Nike a $50 profit and each click costs an average of $.50, then out of every 50 clicks you pay for, at least one pair of shoes will sell, and therefore you will make a $25 profit (you paid $25 for 50 leads and made $50 profit off of the sale).  In other words, if the leads from Google cost you less than amount of profit from those leads, it makes sense to set up a PPC campaign with Google and get your links on the top of the search results.  And Google just pulls in the money from all the companies out there that are doing this, even if it's just a dollar or two at a time (don't forget how many searches there are per day on Google though).  

 

So how does this translate to regular people like ourselves making money online?

 

Well Google has a program called Google Adsense which allows website owners to put those same paid links on their own websites.  And when someone clicks on one of those links on one of those websites, that company pays Google, and then Google pays the website owner a portion of that money.  

 

Therefore, the first step to making a passive income online is to make a website that generates traffic, and the most basic way to monetize that traffic is with Google Adsense.  

 

This is the foundation of everything I teach on my video lessons blog: how to generate free traffic to your websites and how to monetize that traffic.  The simplest monetization method to implement is Google Adsense, but eventually I will teach you other monetization techniques for you to test that can result in much higher eCPM (earnings per thousand impressions!). 

Learn more at the Make Money from Home LIONS CLUB.