How the heck do you make money online?

Good Evening!

Today I will be writing about the different ways to make money online. When I first decided I wanted to make money online I had no clue as to how I would do it. I knew other people were successfully doing it. But how the heck was I gonna do it? So I started to do some research into cashing in on the internet.

When you get down to it there are actually only 3 ways to make money online.

1) Sell your own stuff
2) Sell other peoples stuff
3) Sell other peoples ads on your site

Now obviously there are many variations of these 3 things...but those are basically the main ways to make money online. So if you break them down you come up with these options.

1) Sell your stuff.

This can be accomplished in quite a few ways. Ebay is one way, cleaning out your attic or garage and putting your stuff up for sale. Purchasing discount or closeout items and selling them on Ebay. Creating your own product, crafts, artwork, info products, the latest greatest mousetrap, etc., and then selling it on Ebay. You can sell almost anything on Ebay, ( I believe body parts are out of the question in case anyone's thinking about selling their extra kidney or anything like that). 8 ) But Ebay is only one avenue to sell your stuff.

You can put up a website of your own, or utilize something like Ebay stores or Paypal Shops, or any of a number of other storefront options available on the web for setting up shop and selling your stuff.

The main benefit to this option is you pretty much get to keep all the profits for yourself, (unless you are offering affiliate partners a share of the profits), so all the money make you get to keep yourself. And you have complete control of the product you are selling, no worries about whether or not the product is worthwhile or a some junk someone is trying to pawn off on unsuspecting customers.

The main drawback to this is more work. You have to create, buy, or find whatever it is you are going to sell. You have to ship it or make it available for download, or however it is you are going to get your stuff to the buyer. You have to set up a website or pay someone to create your site if you are selling from your own website. You have to deal with customer support, refunds, etc. So in a nutshell more work...but more $$$.

2) Sell other peoples stuff.

This is probably one of the easiest ways to make money online. You can become an affiliate marketer, you advertise somebody's product for them, direct customers to their site, the customer purchases said product, and you get paid a commission from the seller. You don't have to deal with product development, customer complaints, payment processing, etc. All you do is drive traffic to the vendors site and collect your share of the money when they buy.

This is probably the easiest way for newcomers to start out making money online. When you are first starting out you usually don't have a website, or a list to promote and sell to, or a product, or anything actually except a desire to figure out how the heck to make money online! So affiliate marketing is usually a good choice to "get your feet wet" so to speak and start generating an income online.

3) Sell other peoples ads on your site.

This is probably one of the hardest ways to make money online in my opinion. At least initially. To be able to sell ad space on your own site you are going to need a pretty large traffic count coming to your site to be able to charge any kind of money for ad space. You are going to be hard pressed to convince anyone to pay any kind of real money to advertise on your website if you don't have a few thousand people dropping by your site on a regular basis.

Ads and affiliate marketing are 2 ways to generate money on your blog, and if you can generate enough interest on a topic on your blog you could start getting a good base of traffic coming to your blog. But even with a good topic it's going take a while to generate enough traffic to start selling ad space on your blog.

So there you have it. Now you just have to decide which way you want to go. Get out there and do some research into the different venues and see which one appeals to you. Ideally you would eventually branch out into all 3 ways. Remember multiple streams of income is the way to go. You don't want to rely on just one thing if you are looking to replace your daily 9-5 grind with an income from the internet.