There are three ways to earn money through Internet.
- Advertising
- Selling and promoting products and services of others
- Selling your own products and services
Each of these ways have the potential to make you full-time income or add another income stream for your Internet business. None of the ways rules the others out, so always think about ways to add additional ways to earn money to your business. At least test the different ways out. After you've found what works the best for you, you can re-think your strategy and start concentrating on the ways that are most profitable for you.
1. Advertising
To make money through advertising, you can either
- Display ads from advertising networks, or
- Sell ads directly to the advertisers
Displaying ads from advertising networks means that you sign up to a service and place a code or link from their service to your website, like blog, and the service displays ads on your site through the code. For example, you can sign up and display ads from Google Adsense. Advertising services, like Google AdSense, are available for some free blogging or website creation services, so this is the easiest way to get started.
The money you make through this kind of advertising is based on
- Clicks on the ads, or
- How many times the ads are displayed
The other way to make money through advertising is to sell advertising directly. This means that advertisers can buy advertising directly from you and you display the ads on your website. An example of this would be selling banner advertising placement for your blog.
To make money through direct advertising you need
- a website (like blog, preferably self-hosted, most free websites don't allow you to sell advertising directly), and
- traffic to make it worthy for the advertisers.
In theory, it is also possible to get paid for advertising without a website. But paid blog posts, sponsored tweets and such are more of a paid service than advertising, or at least that's how I look at them.
2. Selling and Promoting Products and Services of Others
To sell products of others through Internet means setting up an eCommerce store or site. From the ways to earn money through Internet, running an eCommerce site is probably the most complicated one as you would need to get the products for sale, handle delivery, payments, customer service, etc.
Setting up a business where you sell products of others is not nearly as common as an Internet business centered around promoting other people's products. Getting paid for promoting the products and services of others is called affiliate marketing. For affiliate marketing, you don't necessary need a website, although it will make things easier and more scalable for you.
Affiliate marketing is sort of re-selling, but in the digital world you don’t have to move any products, just REFER someone to a service or product. If they buy or join, you get percentage of the sale. After signing up for your first affiliate program and getting the affiliate links to the products you want to promote, you send people to someones website or offering and get paid for the completed sales or for the leads that the traffic you sent generates (e.g. sign-ups for email list or registering to a service).
3. Selling Your Own Products and Services
At the end of the spectrum for earning money through Internet, is selling your own products and services. Your products and services can be fully sold and delivered online, e.g. information products, like eBooks or consultation services through email, instant messaging and Skype. Offline products, hard goods or live consultations and presentations can of course be sold online and online presence is important to these kind of businesses as well.
A service that make money can be anything from hiring yourself as a consultant to building a web service for thousands, if not millions of users. It doesn't matter whether your Internet business is a big company with hundreds of employees or just you. It's about offering people a service they need and are willing to pay for.
To sell your own products online, you need to create the product or outsource the production, and pay someone else to make the product for you. For example, you could write an eBook or hire an writer to write an eBook for you, and you would have your own product to sell.
If you turn your eBook into audio and video, divide into several parts, you have yourself a course in your offering. Add webinars, conference and coaching calls, 1-on-1 consulting and your product product grows into a full-scale coaching course and even a consulting service.
The Chuck Norris of Internet Business,
Antti Kokkonen aka Zemalf
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