Ways To Make Money Online

I remember when I first looked into ways to make money online, and the possibility of how to make money blogging.

I already had three successful businesses, over the last 20 years. They were all entrepreneurial, meaning the good news was that I only worked for myself…no boss to answer to. And they had all made me a decent living, with the natural dips and bounce-backs in income of any business. But they all had one problem. They were not passive income. I had to actively work all three of them, HARD, every day, to stay afloat and guarantee enough income to support my family.

As I got a little older, I started to hanker for a less labor-driven income that would still bring me the same $75K – $100K per year I was able to pull in from my three labor-intensive businesses. You know the “dream”: work from home, mostly on your computer, working maybe 2-4 hours a day, 4 days a week, with the rest of your time to do whatever you want. Make enough money to not only pay your monthly expenses, but with plenty left over for lots of travel & vacations. And since all your work & business is conducted on your computer, you can work from anywhere there’s an internet connection, so there’s nothing to tie you down to one location. You can even “work” from all those fabulous travel destinations.

I never cared much about fancy cars or 10,000 square-foot, multi-million-dollar homes, and I only had one child to put through school, so for me the dream was pretty conservative. All I wanted was the short work hours, the time freedom, and the travel. You’re dream may be more opulent…big houses, audiophile home theater systems, Maseratis & Ferraris, and caviar & champagne every night! But however the dream looks for you, it certainly starts with a lot less work in a lot less hours per week, working from home, and making at least twice as much as you need every month to pay all your bills, right?

Well, some friends told me about people making beacoup bucks doing online marketing, and I started researching what it would take. I was already fairly computer savvy, had a website or two up, and knew how to start a blog. I figured, “This can’t be that difficult, can it? You put up a few websites, put some products or services on them from vendors who will send you a nice commish for every click on their banner, and then go put your feet up on the coffee table or go get a lemonade and lay in a hammock. No big deal, right?”

And curiously enough, “back in the early days” of Internet Marketing, where you could simply stuff an empty website with a bunch of repetitious tags & links, there actually were some folks that made fortunes that easily. But Google and other search engines got wise, demanded more quality in your web content, and soon it became very hard to build a website that stood out from all the other hundreds-of-thousands offering the same products as yours, to get enough traffic or ranking to bring you even two or three sales a month! Once again, I had missed the “curve” (like forgetting to by stock in Amazon or Starbucks when  they first went public!) Once again, the easy make money blogging days were past, and my chances of success were significantly reduced, unless I could really learn it and really get good at it – fast! What to do?  Read on to my next post to see what I did next.