Making Money Online - Pros vs Amateurs

An amateur online money-maker is one that WORKS online instead of making the internet work for them. More specifically, an amateur online money maker is someone who is most probably just starting out and completed some research, and they generally immerse themselves in things like surveys, get-paid-to programs and article writing.

Sound familiar? If so then this message is especially for you and the aim is to help you see the difference between amateur online money making strategies and professional online income intelligence, which anyone can use to turn the internet into their personal, long-term income stream.

Every single online money maker, weather they have eventually turned professional or not, started out as an amateur, so if you're trying to make money online using the above-mentioned channels, don't feel bad - we all have to go through a learning process and get burned once or twice.

One more thing to mention in this amateur online money making category is the purchase of hyped up electronic products like money-making e-books, "revolutionary online money making systems", "systems put together by gurus" and all sorts of other programs that promise some insane profits if you make a simple purchase...If you've had a little bit of money to spend as capital in your online money making exploits then you might have fallen victim to one or more of these "programs", spending your hard-earned money only to find that you are required to market that same product you bought (or a similar one), and usually it leads to a dead-end...You are not alone, it has happened to all of us...

So we've established what an amateur online money maker is; they try to make money online by WORKING online, in other words they join programs that require them to spend their time completing tasks in order to build up some sort of earnings reserve which they can cash out later...Now we are going to take a look at how the professional online money maker goes about their business of making money online...

Professional online money makers do one simple thing and do it very well - they let the internet work for THEM instead of working on the internet! Sure it takes a bit of work in the beginning to get the structure up and running, but once that is out of the way, it is as automated as having a mall owner collect monthly rent from all the shop owners...and it's so easy that everyone and anyone can do it...

The Details:
The bottom line is, if you are going to make real money online, money that you can count on at the end of each month as your living, then there is only one way to go about it, which can be approached in two ways, further enhanced in several ways.

You have to sell a product or products if you're to make any real money online, making the transition from amateur to pro, and there are two ways of doing this:

Firstly, you can either create your own product (an electronic product is best, like an e-book or "how-to guide") and sell it via a sales page. This isn't as difficult or expensive as you might think it is. You can also acquire a ready-made product and easily allow visitors to buy it through online payment processors which are free to join, like Paypal and Alertpay, which accept credit cards too. This is also VERY easy and not expensive at all.

Secondly, you can promote other people's products (OPP) as an affiliate and this is a great way to sell stuff online. Affiliate programs are usually free to join and pay you up to 75% on each sale. I won't get into any details here, but they generally work in the following way. You sign up as an affiliate and an affiliate link is generated for you, for each product you choose to promote. You then promote that product and every time someone buys the product through your affiliate link, you get a portion of the profits. Things like cookies and web sessions are used to ensure the buyer is tracked back to you, so as to ensure you get all the rewards for your hard work. It's simply a matter of finding the right affiliate program, getting the right product to promote and using the right advertising channels to ensure sales conversions...

We'll get into the details a little bit further on, but once one has a product to sell (weather they had a product created, acquired resale rights to an existing product or sell other people's products as an affiliate) and has a sales page erected (they will need the services of a web hosting company), the next step in making a real income online is effective marketing (which we will also get into detail about further on). Basically this involves employing passive marketing methods that work even when you're away from you computer and busy with something else. While you're having breakfast or preparing to go to bed, someone, somewhere in the world is viewing your sale page and they are a potential buyer...more on that later though...

So, we have now established what an amateur online money maker is, what a professional online money maker is and the difference between the two. Now we are going to go into how one makes the transition from amateur to professional...

The first thing you need to do is set aside a budget of $75. That will cover EVERYTHING - a fully-functional online sales business, including a sales page, a product, and an automated buy-and-download mechanism that automatically delivers your e-product and credits your online payment processor account.

This will save you thousands of dollars as getting a website designed and developed in itself is very expensive, so it's better to get resale rights to a product that already exists and has been proven to sell well. It'll also cover your web hosting fees AND a domain name (e.g. www.yoursite.com) as well, for an entire year...It's simply a matter of knowing where to shop, and fortunately that has already been done for you.

So go ahead, get yourself a fully operational e-store by choosing from thousands of ready-made products that'll save you THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS!

Once you have your sales page set up, offering a product for visitors to buy online, you will need to get traffic to your site. You need people to actually visit your site so that they may make the decision to buy your product. There are different ways of driving traffic to your sales page, some more effective than others, but what you want to focus on is those that are passive. In other words, instead of doing time consuming things like posting your link to message boards, placing adverts in online classifieds etc, you'll want to employ marketing techniques that get visitors to your site even when you're busy with other things.

Google AdWords
Google AdWords is one way in which to drive TARGETED traffic to your sales landing page. I won't go into detail about it but it simply works in such a way that a link to your sales page will appear in Google search results or on content rich web pages of publishers. You then only pay for each click through your site gets through this mechanism. This is a great way to set up a constant flow of targeted traffic to your sales page and people who visit your sales page through this program will most likely have an interest in what you have to offer. The program is free to sign up to and you only pay for each campaign you want to run. It is very useful too in that it offers many great tools you can use, such as the keywords tool to help you choose the best keywords for your campaign.

Targeted Emails
Another great way to send a constant flow of targeted traffic to your sales page with great results. Here, you pay a list-building company to send email adverts of your product, with a link to your sales page, to a list of opt-in subscribers they have on their data base. Targeted emails are highly targeted too and bring about great results; it's a little less complicated than AdWords as you don't need to spend time choosing possible keywords: You get an option to make a choice from pre-listed categories.

Traffic, traffic and more traffic! That's the most important part of making a success out of this, and if you stick to passive traffic systems like AdWords and Targeted Email Marketing, you should expect to easily reach the standard sales page conversion rate of 1-2%. That means for every 100 people that visit your sales page, 1 or 2 will buy your product. More about how to increase this to 10-11% later...