One of the most common questions I get asked about starting an online business is, “Michael, what is the fastest path to making cash online?”
There’s is a specific strategy that I have adopted that not only works for me but I’ve also seen it working for everyone who makes a full-time living from internet marketing. I’ll share this with you in a few moments.
When I got started online, I was working a full-time job which meant I had to do it on the side. I didn’t have any savings to speak of and was living paycheck to paycheck so quitting wasn’t an option for me when I started out.
Obviously, this is not ideal as it is very taxing time and energy wise but lets face facts, I’m sure that’s there’s going to be a lot of people in the same boat as I was.
I needed to replace $5K per month before I’d be able to sack my boss and feel good about it. Now I had no previous internet skills, wasn’t tech savvy and couldn’t program to save my life, so if you’re one of those people who thinks these are a MUST have to succeed online – it’s not the case.
In fact, making money online is more about using skills you already have that can be translated into a product or service online, and then having the tenacity to follow through until you are making a living from it.
The biggest challenge is that most people tend to quit when it doesn’t happen for them overnight. Lord knows, I wanted to quit to almost every day for 2 years before things started to take off for me.
My work was incredibly stressful, I was never at home and even though I was making good money I woke up every day with a feeling of dread and despair. Funnily enough though, the fact that my life sucked added rocket fuel to my veins.
No matter how tired I got, or how many setbacks or hurdles I faced, I just kept pushing through. Even my friends, family and loved ones gave up on me and told me I was crazy to be working so hard on something that wasn’t paying me a dime for almost 2 years.
Get Rich or Die Trying
Even though it added more stress to start building an online business on the side, I had no other choice. It was do or die trying time. I knew I deserved a better life and that, ‘if it was to be – then it was up to me’.
What I’ve also discovered after coaching hundreds of people to success is that some people just don’t have what it takes – plain and simple. It could be that they are too comfortable with where they are at in their lives and while it’s a ‘nice’ idea to have an online business there’s no real urgency.
Or, it could be that they just don’t have the discipline or the willingness to stay committed to their dream no matter what life throws at them. Either way, if it’s a wishy-washy idea rather than something that your determied to succeed in, then it probably won’t happen and you’re better off no wasting your time.
There are thousands of ways to make money online but they all require 1 thing… and that’s for you to put in a consistent effort and stay true to your course. I see so many people who get started online with all the right intentions and enthusiasm only to get easily side-tracked by something more ‘alluring’ to them.
I call this the ‘shiny-object’ syndrome and it is the biggest killer of dreams around. If you really want to know what the fastest path to cash online is it’s to take whatever passion and skills you have, do your research on how you can monetize it and then get started immediately and don’t let ANYTHING distract you until you’ve achieved you financial targets.
I know people who have started up a blog around their interests and have done daily posts for 12 to 18 months without making a penny before they started to see success. But guess what, they put in the ground work. Some people expect to put up a blog, do a few posts and then watch the sales come in – well that’s never going to happen.
Once you decide what your area of focus is, then do your research on how you can make money from it. The way you do this is look at who your top competitors are that are succeeding and see what they are doing to make their business work.
Almost always it will boil down to building a list through a free giveaway and then making money on the back-end as you work your list. This is still one of the best working models for online success.
The Two Most Important Online Business Skills
Using the example of setting up a Blog, once it’s setup then you need to get targeted traffic to it which happens using either free or paid traffic marketing strategies and then you need to be able to convert a percentage of those leads to customers. This is all you really need to get good at to succeed online.
Yes, there are hundreds of other ways to make money online, some require more skill than others. The bottom line though is to start with what you are passionate about, don’t stop working on it until you’ve reached your financial goals and then you can start branching out into different areas.
The last piece of advice I’ll give is get real good at getting low or no cost traffic to your site, and get real good at converting visitors to customers. Once you develop these skills you can approach any niche you like and make it profitable.
It’s not rocket science, it’s just plain old knowledge that comes from hands on experience. If you leave this to others then you’ll be putting your fate in the hands of those who may or may not have your best interests at heart.
So if you don’t want to get caught with your pants down and your business failing before it even begins, these are the skills to develop.
