The Truth About Making Money from Home

Sometimes people wonder what is the secret to making a good income from home. Some people pay large sums of money for promises of quick, easy money. How come some people can make thousands of dollars working only a few days a month? What is their secret?

The truth is, there is no secret to cashing in from home. You need a good plan and a whole lot of work. There are lots of people who want to sell you "the secret" and if you fall for it, then you probably deserve to lose the money. You can pay 50 bucks for an e-book that supposedly will tell you how to make big money from home almost instantly and almost with no work. Buy it if you like, but trust me, there is no secret! There are several good e-books out there that will show you methods to earning a lot of cash online, but the e-book author won't do the word for you. YOU yourself have to put in the work to see profits. If you just read the e-book and don't take action, then guess, what? You won't make a single cent.

Getting started is the hardest part of all. First you have to figure out what to do and there are so many different ways to make money online, it can be quite confusing. First you have to get past the confusion and get a real plan. Then, it's time to put in the work and effort. Some people are making thousands of dollars a month in passive income, but they probably spent hours upon hours upon hours of sitting at the computer and a lot of hard work to get started.

There are only two ways to make money from home. One is good old fashioned hard work and putting in a lot of time and effort. The other is by scamming people who want to make money from home and getting rich off of their dreams. (And sometimes stupidity and greed)

The internet has a major impact on nearly everyones life. Billions of dollars are spent each year on internet commerce.

You can start selling stuff on the internet and get your own little slice of the pie. You don't have to even have a product to sell. There are so many products online you can promote and make a commission from.

Here are some things you can sell online to make money.

1-Your own physical products- This can be T-shirts, crafts, or anything else.

2-Your own digital products- This can be e-books, graphics, websites etc.

3-Affiliate products- You don't have to deal with shipping, handling, customer issues, stocking, or anything. You just promote other people's products. This can be e-books or physical products.

4- Services- This can be writing, website design, graphic creations, installing scripts, virtual assisting, etc.

There are so many different ways to earn money from home.

You have to pick what's right for you.

If you are outgoing and a natural sales person, get into direct sales or sell your very own product. Join a direct sales company with a low start up cost and one that pays 40-50% commission and you can earn a great income.

But some people just are not comfortable selling. There are still many ways to earn money from home. You can become a writer. Webmasters are always looking for fresh, unique content for their sites so writers are always in demand. It may be hard to get your foot in the door, so offer very low prices to your first clients to get good feedback and references, then you can charge what you're really worth.

Or you could be a blogger. You will have to blog regularly and it can be hard sometimes to come up with fresh content daily, but once you get a blog established, this can be a great way to earn some extra income.

There is always ebay. Their fees keep rising which will cut into profits, but it's still possible to make a good income from ebay. Some people make full time incomes off ebay alone. If you don't have enough products to keep selling on ebay, yard sales and thrift stores are a great way to find new products to list and sometimes you can really find a treasure.

There is also affiliate marketing where you promote products or services from other companies and if someone buys a product from your website, you get a commission.

Then, if you have any special skills, you can market those. Can you design websites? If so, you could be a freelance web designer.

You can have some websites and monetize those with ads and affiliate programs. The best hosting for the price is hostgator.

Associated Content is a great way to earn some extra cash if you like to write.

You simply write articles and submit them. If they are approved you are made an offer. You can choose to accept or reject the offer.

Some writers have earned a nice supplemental income from writing and submitting articles.

It's also a way to share your writing with the world.

Is there something you are good at? If so, you can make money online doing what you're good at.

Can you design websites, program/install stuff, create logos, banners, headers, or write? If so, you can make money.

The tricky part is finding customers but I will tell you an effective way. Join forums dedicated to webmasters and offer your services.

There are always people looking for website designers, custom banner designers, and content writers.

I have been a customer and have found services this way. I am not good at technical stuff, so I need someone who knows what they're doing to do stuff for me. On a webmaster forum, I have found threads of people offering their services for low prices and have taken them up on it. It's a win/win situation. I get good service at a fair price and they get prompt payment.

It didn't cost them anything to advertise. They simply start a thread in the "services" category of the forum stating they offer X service for X amount of money.

If you can offer those services, go ahead and give it a try. There are always customers out there who aren't sure where to find the services they need.

Join a freelance site and sign up. People who need projects post their projects while service providers bid on them. The buyers then select the person to do the work.

Some popular freelance sites for writers, programmers, website designers, graphic designers, and more online services are:
www.elance.com
www.rentacoder.com
www.getafreelancer.com

If there is a topic you can write posts about on a regular basis, you can start a blog and make money from blogging.

You can always use free blogs, but I prefer to get my own domain name and use a wordpress blog. If you have a hosting account with cpanel, you can easily set up a wordpress blog, no technical skills are needed.

Go to hostgator and sign up for a hosting account. They offer 24/7 customer service and have 99.9% uptime and you get a cpanel.




Then go to godaddy, namecheap or your domain name registrar of choice and buy a domain name that relates to your topic. Hostgator will give you nameservers. You log into your domain name account and change the nameserves to your hostgator nameservers.

Then you log in to your cpanel at hostgator and click on the smiley face button that says Fantastico.

After you click on that, you will see "Wordpress" on the right hand side and you click on that. Then you click on the domain name you want to set the wordpress blog on. Then you enter some information such as the name of the blog, your user name, password and then click Install. And Voila, your wordpress blog is ready.

To log into your wordpress blog and start blogging, you type in your domain name then /wp-admin. For example if your domain was www.yourdomainname.com, you would type in www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin. Then you would enter your username and password and start blogging away.

If you have a website, you need traffic to it to make money. There are several ways to monetize your website. You can promote an affiliate product, you can sell your own product, you can offer skills, or you can just have adsense on it.

There is a lot to learn on affiliate marketing. You can't just slap up any products on any website and expect to make sales. There are entire e-books just on affiliate marketing and how to have a successful website. I won't get into that here.

This is just to show you ways to get traffic to your website.

There are free ways and paid ways. First I'll go over the paid ways, and then the free ways.

1- Adwords: This is the most effective way of getting targeted traffic to your website, however it can be very costly. You have to set an adwords budget or it's no telling how much this will cost. Adwords let's you put a limit on your advertising campaign such as $10 a day or whatever you choose. If you have a great website selling a great product this can be a profitable choice. If you don't know what you are doing, this can be very costly. So basically you can either make a lot of money or lose a lot of money. If you are considering adsense, you should talk with someone who knows how to run effective adwords campaigns first.

2-Paid links: With paid links you buy a text link to a website that gets high traffic.

3- Banner ads: With this method, you place ads on other websites with high traffic that's related to your website's theme. This can be expensive.

4- Paid blog post: You pay a blog owner to write a post about your website/product. What this costs will depend on the particular blog owner and how much readership they have. This can cost $10 or $200 or more depending on how popular the blog is.

Keep in mind if you have a website that gets lots of traffic you can also use these methods to make money from your website.

Free Methods

1- Very easy, very effective: Go to a busy forum and put your website address in your signature. Making controversial or crazy posts gets a lot of visitors very fast, but that's not to say they will be customers.

2- Put your website address in your email signature. Everyone you send an email to will see your website address.

3- Put your website address on your social networking sites such as myspace or facebook.

4- Create a Squidoo lens and put links to your website. Or A Hubpage.

5- Write articles, put your website in the author's resource box and submit the articles to article directories.

6- Link exchanges- This is where you and another website owner trade links. You put their link on your website and they put your link on their website. To find website owners to exchange links with you go to webmaster forums such as Digital Point.

Tiffany Dow
She is the Queen of Squidoo. While Squidoo is mainly for quality backlinks, free advertising or because it's free, easy, and fun, Tiffany makes good money from her Squdioo lenses. She has a whole lot, while I don't know exactly how many. She also makes Squidoo lenses and sells them for $125 a piece. Only Tiffany could do this because she is the Master of Squidoo and knows basically everything about Squidoo.

She is also a writer and writes articles and sells them as PLR articles for webmasters and she has clients that she writes unique content for. Go to http://www.TiffanyDow.com for more on Tiffany.

Willie Crawford
This guy went from food stamps and being on government assistance to being a big time guru.

John Reese
Another big time Internet Marketing guru who pulls in millions. He's a marketing genius.

Holly Mann
She got into internet marketing because she wanted to raise her baby boy herself instead of having a daycare or babysitter raise him. She makes around $12,000 a month and wrote an e-book called Internet Riches that teaches other people how she became a successful affiliate marketer. She moved to Thailand because of the lower cost of living and because she loves the people, culture, and weather and that's where she lives now in her dream home. To go to Holly's Honest Riches sales page go to Honest Riches or to learn more about Holly on my Holly Squidoo page "Click Here

Avery Berman
This is an 18 year old guy who works full time on internet marketing instead of the kind of typical job most 18 year olds have like in a fast food place.