What’s that you say? You’ve read in 100 different spots how easy it is to make money on the Internet. Oh yeah, I’ve read those sites too. Make $1000 a day, you’ve gotta be kidding. Or how about “quit your job in 30 days”. Yep, I even bought into it for a while.

Trust me, it’s not as easy as some people would have you believe. I’ve tried several different approaches and have found some that work, some that don’t work and some that I’m not sure about yet. But one thing is clear, the Internet is not going to make you rich quickly, at least not as quickly as you’d like.

Internet promise #1
Make a fortune with affiliate marketing! This one seems simple enough, promote somebody else’s product and they will pay you a percentage of what they get paid. An example of this might be web hosting. If you can get somebody to buy web hosting from a provider (like GoDaddy for example) and you are a GoDaddy affiliate, then GoDaddy will pay you a percentage of what that person buys. This seems like an excellent idea, but it’s not as easy as it may seem.

First of all, to get somebody to even click on your link to GoDaddy will be a challenge, then after they click it, what is the chance that they will buy. Not likely. If somebody does click on your link it is more likely an early exposure situation (or first exposure). Sure, they see an ad for inexpensive web hosting, they click to check it out. Of course after that they do some research, maybe sleep on it. Then, if they like what they’ve seen they go back to GoDaddy to buy their web hosting, but not via your link. You do not get credited for the sale (BTW: I’m not picking on GoDaddy here…I like their products and use them…it’s just an example).

So, affiliate marketing’s main challenge is to get the user in a “buy” state of mind before sending them to the affiliate link. Easily said, not easily done.

Internet promise #2
Make a fortune with Google AdSense. I won’t argue that there are people making money using AdSense (or affiliate marketing for that matter), but it isn’t easy. Let me qualify that, it isn’t easy unless you already have a high traffic web site. If you’re just starting out with a new site, or your site doesn’t have significant traffic then all AdSense will be paying you is pennies. For example, many of the clicks on my AdSense ads pay 3 to 6 cents. With a click through rate of about 5 percent, you need a lot of traffic to generate a reasonable amount of money.

Why am I telling you this? I know everybody wants to hear that this stuff is easy and they’ll be able to quit their jobs and work from home. I’m telling you this because you need to hear it, you need something to cut through all the garbage on the net trying to sell you an easy fix. It is possible to make money, but you’re going to need to work at it and it’s going to take time.

The next question you are thinking is “what can I do?”. The only answer to this question is this, GET TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEB SITE. It’s that simple, you need to increase your traffic before even thinking about affiliate marketing or ad programs. The only reliable way I’ve found to increase traffic is via article marketing! That’s the reason that I’m writing this article, to get you to read it, then follow the links in the resource box. When you follow that link, you’re on my web site and ready to listen to what I have to say. Hopefully this article will show you that I’m a no nonsense guy and I’m not trying to sell you something you don’t need. Don’t waste the $1500 I’ve wasted, read up on this stuff and make informed decisions.

John Murray
http://www.articlesbase.com/online-promotion-articles/making-money-on-the-internet-is-not-easy-89996.html

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 9:23 am and is filed under money making jobs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.