How to Make Money Online (For Beginners)
“I am trying to figure out where to start with internet marketing. I just read your post about lifestyle and I know the kind I want for my family, I just don’t know where to start…”
-Lynn Woolums Smith
http://life-inbloom.blogspot.com
Hi Lynn! I actually hear this question a lot, so you’re not alone. In fact there are 161 searches every day for “how to make money online for beginners” and more than 700/day for “how to make money online”…
There are a number of ways to make money online. Options range from creating your own product to sell online, making money as a professional blogger, managing an online community, developing a content site on a hot topic – just to name a few.
All of these are just various ways to deliver content online. Your first step will be choosing a niche, which is the market or topic you are going to focus on.
Speaking of focus, with so many options to make money online – focus is key. You want to choose a niche and a business model, and work on that one project all the way from start to profit. Don’t let all the other options distract or derail you. 
Once you decide on a topic or niche, you should sit down and map out a plan for your internet business model. What market are you targeting, and how can you best serve that market? This is the angle you want to work from, vs the more common: how can I make the most money from this market? (Most people get it backwards and then get frustrated when that doesn’t work out for them)
See: How to Become a Market Leader in Your Niche
So you choose a niche, create a blog or website, set up social media profiles to interact with your target market on the topic, and you create and share useful content that will build your reputation and readership in that niche.
I can hear what you’re saying…
“That all sounds great, but how do I make money from it?”
How to Make Money Online (For Beginners)
The absolute easiest way to make money online is with Affiliate Marketing. You don’t have to create a product, set up a shopping cart and merchant account, do customer service, work with clients, etc. It’s very much like a traditional commission-based sales job where you earn commission on any sales you refer.
The difference is that you’re doing it online, and you can do it from home without ever doing in-person or phone sales. You simply recommend products and/or refer people to specific merchants through the content on your website.
The method I prefer is creating SEO Content, or content that is optimized to rank well in the major search engines. People find it when they are searching for that, click through, and buy what they need or want. This works really well because you write the content once, and it continues to rank well and earn you money for years to come. As long as you maintain your search engine rankings.
“How can I make 3-4k a month or more? What steps will it take to get there?”
I know this is stating the obvious, but it should be said: It takes time, work, and being both persistent and consistent. An online business is the same as any other business in that it requires an investment on your part to get it up and running. The positive side of online business is that it takes a lot less time and money than most traditional offline business models.
Do these 10 steps, in this order, to get started:
- Choose Your Niche
- Register a Domain Name
- Set up a Website or WordPress Blog
- Set up a Facebook Page and Twitter account
- Download and read SEO Fast Start (free)
- Create Optimized Content for your Site/Blog
- Sign up for Affiliate Programs in your niche
- Write Product Reviews for those products
- Get links pointing to your pages or posts
- Continue creating content, getting links & interacting via Social Media
Once you get all this set up and you’re making money as an Affiliate, you can look at other ways to monetize your site. You might create short reports on your topic to sell, test contextual advertising, or look into even more methods to make money.
Yes it’s work. And yes – it’s worth it! 
If you do these steps, and continue to learn & tweak as you go, you’ll start earning money. You can increase your traffic (number of visitors) and your income as you continue to grow and market your website. It takes time to get to a consistent $3-5K per month in revenue, but you could easily do that within the first year.
Also See: Online Jobs – Work From Home
Best,
p.s. Lynn was referring to my Lifestyle & Income of a Super Affiliate post. Give that a read if you haven’t already as it will give you a sneak peek into my life and success doing the exact things I outlined here. If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a comment below.
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Wow. The 10 steps you outlined are incredible, extremely precise and accurate. These are the basics steps that I am taking to achieve rankings, I’m glad you and I are speaking the same kinds of things. Keep it coming!
Follow me @jeffry_evans on Twitter.
These 10 steps seem so easy and cheap to start with…I’m jsut confused as to where the licensing and tax ID comes into it. If I’m making money online, don’t I need to be doing it under a certain business name with a tax ID? Or can I just declare it on a 1090?
Hi Lynn!
You really outlined the best information that a beginner would need to start making money online. These 10 steps can really make you money as long as you do them consistently. Thanks!
Great post! Keep them coming.
Really nice post…worth something for beginners like me…
Very concise advice. Starting a business must be well planned. Just like constructing a house you must have a floor plan, electrical, and plumbing plan. Same also in business you must have a plan on how to market and how to deliver your products to the consumer. All those must be well planned and executed with precision.
great post Lynn! I really appreciate you putting all this great info out there for us newbies in the blogging world!
$5k a month first year, is that realistic?
Follow me @buysurety on Twitter.
Great post Lynn. So often people try to make earning money online more complex than it has to be. There was a time when I learned from a ‘guru’ exactly what I had to do to make money, and I couldn’t help thinking it was exactly the same thing that I had been told so many years earlier (and exactly what you have listed here). I’d just thought that it wasn’t complex enough to work, and how wrong I was. Simplicity and consistency is the key.
Follow me @faymclean on Twitter.
This post is loaded with rich information! Thanks. I’m getting much more.
Follow me @ruraldweller on Twitter.
I like you you broke it down step by step. I think choosing a niche is probably the most important thing because once you’ve got a website established, you have to start over again from scratch if you change your mind. Make it about something you love to write about, so you don’t get bored and want to quit.
You have made it look so easy.
I will try some of your ideas
thank you
magan bhadresa
Follow me @magan999 on Twitter.
[...] How to Make Money Online – for Beginners [...]
I personally believe that for a beginner who is absolutely new to making money online will find that earning 3 to 4k each month and unobtainable target and they will quickly give up.
I am not saying that is isn’t achievable but I would suggest for someone new to set more realisitc goals, first goal is to earn $100, then try to increase that to $500 per month, $1000 per month and so on, there numerous ways to make $100 per month and with alittle bit of work and some patience everyone can be making that and in the mean time they are learning some valuable lessons.
It’s really not hard to get started and Lynn has given a pretty much a play by play list on how to go about setting yourself up and getting started with making money online.
There is no need to buy expensive ebooks, for under $100 you can have a domain and hosting, install wordpress on your site which is free, install a theme that coincides with your chosen niche and you on your way, it just takes work and some patience after that and soon you will see the friuts of your labour.
Hi Lynn
I think the biggest problem for me when starting out, was indeed distractions. There’s so many fun things to do on the internet to waste hours and hours of valuable time. Focus is definitely the key, as is writing down what you want to achieve at the beginning of the day and making sure you complete each task.
When I first started making a few bucks a day on adsense, I found myself logging into my account every 20mins, to see if I had gained anymore clicks!
For beginners, who are writing all their own content and creating their own backlinks etc, undergoing one or two projects at a time, is also very important. To much going on and you will get snowed under, unable to complete anything properly.
Just my experience, I made lots and lots of mistakes and had many failed attempts. I kept going, and was always keen to learn more.
Thanks
James.