The idea of making money online is one that’s very appealing to most people. It conjures up images of making hundreds of dollars a day while sleeping or relaxing on the beach on a Monday morning. It’s the idea of making money online 24/7 – independent of their time that appeals to most people.
So they venture into this huge world full of promise and hope only to be barraged by millions of ways to make money online from people who claim they do it everyday.
Put up this site and the money will roll in. Set up a billion sites and get a dollar a day from the traffic of each of those sites and you’ll make a billion dollars in one day. Fill out online surveys. Read emails. Install this toolbar while you surf the net to make money. Buy resell rights to products and sell them on eBay.
As you look at all ways that people mention of making money online, you soon begin to realize it’s perfect ground for scammers to sell the “dream” instead of a offering a tangible, legitimate, real way that the everyday person can use to make money online in the real world.
All the hype that gives off the vibe that making money online is something you can do immediately and have great success with is fool’s gold.
Don’t fall for any of it it. It appeals to the “easy way out” button that most people are dying to have pressed and a lot of people out there know exactly how to press it. And when it does get pressed, they fall hook line and sinker for all the ads that tell them to fork over $49.95 in order to find out how they can immediately start making thousands of dollars on their first day of making money online.
Don’t get sucked in. Don’t get seduced by all the big earnings that others show off either because they conveniently forget tell you all the costs they incurred. The costs of advertising, marketing, etc., not to mention all the time it took as well. If you’re a reader of this blog, you know by now that nothing of real value comes quick and easy. Anything worth value takes time to build.
That being said, go for the REAL gold.
The very first thing to realize is that making money online is pretty much the same as making money offline. The principles are the same while the methods employed differ due to the medium of the online world. Obviously, having an online business does give you more of an edge in that you have access to a global market, you can make changes instantly to your marketing and sales strategies, you’re selling 24/7, you have very specific ways to measure progress, the startup costs are relatively low, etc., hence the ideal business for the average person to start.
The biggest misconception that people have when it comes to making money online is that if they just set up a website offering a product or service, the money will come rolling in and that’s just due to a lack of experience.
That mistake is usually learned when people make the transition from working in a business to starting their very own, especially if they’ve been employed their whole life. That mistake in a nutshell is the shock that comes with marketing and sales. Unless they have worked directly in marketing and sales, weakness in these two factors are responsible for the failure of the majority of businesses that have just started.
When you work within a company and not directly in its marketing and sales department, it’s really easy to take these two factors for granted.
Your job exists because of the work done in marketing and sales.
Marketing and sales plays a vital role in the first genuine, tangible, legitimate way to make money online that people will eventually realize after sorting through all the scams out there and that is the route that involves buying a domain name and writing a single sales page that offers a product or service and uploading all that information on there. Now what? You obviously have to direct traffic to it. You need to get people to know about it. You need to market it. So they submit the site to directories, maybe offer a press release, post in forums, direct traffic with Google Adwords, do search engine optimization, exchange links etc. and it may work. They may have some success, get some sales, but at best it will most likely be supplemental income due to all the time and advertising costs that go into it. It won’t be enough to free them from their job.
There’s another route that has MUCH more potential to making money online that is the real deal. It’s not the fools gold, but the real gold.
It’s the kind of route that has everybody is looking for but cannot “structure”, up until now.
If you look at the real people making real money online – the people behind Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, you will see this exact model being used. And don’t be put off by the fact that they are all social networking sites. You don’t have to build a social networking site in order to follow the same model.
The model is simply this.
Build the market FIRST by giving away product/services that are of real value for FREE.
It sounds illogical at first, but upon closer inspection, you’ll see that this is the way to go to making real, legitimate, “free yourself from your job” money online.
What most people try to do is the opposite, even in the offline world. They build the product and or service and then assign it a price and try to sell that. That’s hard to do – especially if you’re new and nobody knows about your products or services. A lot of money has to go into advertising and marketing in order to do make up for your lack of presence in the marketplace.
But when you use the magic word “free”, you attract the market. The market gets built. A HUGE one. Especially if you offer products/services that are of value for free online to a global audience.
Let’s go into this model in more detail.
The very first step is to think of a product/service to offer online based on your own passion, or your own needs that have come up that haven’t been fulfilled yet, or an opportunity you see that doesn’t yet exist.
Just think of an idea. That’s all you need for now.
When you think of the idea, then go through all the necessary motions. Buy a domain name, set up the site, hire a website designer and/or programmer if you need one or if you’re computer savvy enough, do it yourself. Bring your idea to fruition online.
Then, just give it away for free.
But before you do, make sure that it’s something worth of value to people. If it’s worthless, it doesn’t matter. You won’t attract a market.
Slowly but surely, word will spread about your site and its value and the fact that it’s free. Traffic will start coming in. Word of mouth will start spreading, but don’t just lean back in your chair and kick your shoes off. Keep the momentum going. Tell everybody you know. Write press releases. Contact newspapers, TV shows, etc. Get the word out.
When the traffic starts picking up and you get that exponential factor going, this is where you can capitalize on the market and begin monetizing it.
You can monetize it through advertising and/or from introducing your own products and services to the market that you now have.
That’s it.
That’s the real, legitimate, no B.S, consistent way on how to make money online in the real world.
To give you an example in the offline world, think of how a newspaper makes money. The cost of buying one is relatively low. It only costs you about $0.25 or $0.50 to buy a newspaper. Now there’s no way a newspaper can stay in business if all the revenue it gets is from newspaper sales. The bulk of a newspaper’s revenue comes from advertising inside the newspaper.
The newspaper is in essence, “giving away” value for free. Obviously, it’s not literally free, but the cost of access to it is very, very low for the consumer.
BUT, the newspaper has a wide circulation. It has a market.
And where there’s a market, there are sure to be advertisers willing to pay good money to have access to it in order to market their products and services.
Again, in essence, what you’re doing is building a market FIRST, THEN building a business on top of that through the sale of third party advertising or of your own products and services.
The beauty of this business model is that marketing takes care of itself for the most part.
Many people make the mistake of building a business and trying to sell priced goods and services FIRST, but find themselves at odds with how to attract their ideal market and sell to them. It’s like opening up a store in the middle of the Sahara desert and wondering how on earth you’re going to get people to visit it.
EVERY person who has ever started a business knows that more than half (I would actually say more than 80%) of what the success of the business depends upon is marketing and sales. And you can’t have sales before marketing. You can’t sell when there’s nobody to sell to. Marketing is one half of the lifeblood of any business.
Offering goods and/or services that are of value for free online will take care of most of the marketing because that has a way of attracting people like no other method possible and when you consider the fact that the Internet is a medium that attracts people worldwide, you have HUGE potential to attract a very, VERY big market.
The bigger the market you attract, the bigger the revenue you can generate.
Let’s look at some real life examples today in order to see how real people have made real money online using this exact same business model.
We start with one of the most recognized URLs in the world today. Facebook.com
It started as a simple idea. Connect with the people you meet at your own university.
The code was written, the design was set, and the site was launched. The service was given away for free and we all know just how much our cash strapped college students love the word FREE.
Soon, word spreads of the site as our young ones tell their fellow peers through cell phone conversations and the Internet and word of mouth.
The site begins to open its doors to more universities. Soon enough, it attracts one of the most sought out market demographics that every company wants to get its hands on – the 18-22 year old college demographic.
Fast forward years later and Facebook.com has opened its doors to high schools and to pretty much everybody around the world.
Yahoo had offered to buy it for $1 billion dollars but the deal was rejected. Microsoft bought a 1.6% stake in Facebook after forking over $240 million dollars for it. According to those numbers, Microsoft values Facebook at about $15 billion dollars. That’s not $15 million. That’s $15 billion. Not bad for the founder of Facebook, a 23 year old Harvard dropout.
Now think about all the other online success stories out there – craigslist.com, plentyoffish.com, reddit.com, digg.com and you’ll see this exact same model being used here.
But don’t be put off by the fact that these are all social/networking type sites.
You don’t have to make one to generate that kind of income.
A 17 year old girl started offering free Myspace layouts that she personally designed for her friends on her site and word about it spread and her site became so popular, she started putting advertisements on her site to monetize the market she attracted. She’s now a millionaire and employs her friends and her mother to work with her.
Now obviously, even though you have a great idea, if you’re not computer savvy enough to implement it, you may need to spend money getting it to work the way you envisioned it online.
You will need to spend money if that’s the case, but the potential upside is enormous if you follow the real, legitimate, model that’s being used right now to make money online.
And once you have economies of scale, once you have that tipping point, once you get on that exponential growth curve, the sky’s the limit when it comes to monetizing the market you attracted.
So don’t fall for the fool’s gold. Go for the real gold. Think of a great idea that is of real value to people. Offer it for free. Build the market. Spread the word. Then, monetize the market.
What you ultimately want is to attract a market and to sustain it. If you can do that, then you can make money online consistently and not only that, you now possess the magic tool that every business wants – LEVERAGE. Companies will come knocking on your door wanting access to the market you created.
Keep in mind though that these things take time, just like anything else worth doing of value. It won’t happen overnight.
Some say that it will cost you if you give away whatever idea you have for free. That’s true. But think of it this way. You can either spend that money on marketing and advertising, hoping you will get some sales of your priced products/services OR you can spend that money by giving away value for free and let the market come to you and then monetize it.
Obviously, there’s a lot more information regarding this subject, so much that I can’t possibly put it all in this one article so I will write more on this subject later on the blog and the VIP newsletter. I just wanted to provide the solid framework that everybody can work off of.
Bottom line: Don’t fall for the fool’s gold.
Build the market and go for the real gold.
http://briankim.net
