How do you make money online

There are three main ways to make money online:
1.  Sell your own goods or services.
In this method to make money online, you simply create a web site then sell products or services on it.  If you have nothing to sell, do not be discouraged!  There are ways around that.  Examples of things you might sell are:

• Products you make from scratch (e.g. pottery, jewelry, food items, crafts, handcrafted furniture or clothes, etc.)
• Products you distribute or resell.  For example, you can buy products directly from an Asian manufacturer, and then sell them to your online customers for less than major American vendors can. 
• Dropship products. I meet people who rave about “dropship products”.  Dropshipping is the shipment of a product to a customer by a factory or distributor at the request of a seller.  You basically sell these products as your own by forwarding a copy of each order to the manufacture, who then ships the product directly to your customer. Sometimes the manufacture can even label the product with your logo and company name. An example might be LightInTheBox. There are hundreds if not thousands of  dropshippers right here in the USA who literally offer anything people can buy.
• Services such a consulting, programming, accounting – even psychic readings!   In addition to selling your services through your own web site, you may also use one of the many companies founded to help consultants and clients come together remotely  (e.g. ODesk, eLance, etc.).
• Memberships.  You can sell memberships to newsletters, online forums, Member’s Only websites, etc.  You can either make the site yourself and create content, or re-sell for a major membership driven vendor.
• eBooks. If you have any kind of expertise or experience that might be valuable to others you can write an eBook and sell that online. You can even create an affiliate program so others will sell your book, too.
• Software. Whether it is a simple tool that helps peoples’ lives, or a complete software package, you can sell that through your website.  You can even outsource the development of that tool or software to a developer. You can find many developers on ODesk and eLance.

2. Advertising on your website.
In this method to make money online, you basically create a web site about anything you feel others might find interesting, then display advertisements on it. There are many ways to achieve this.  I will be covering this topic in more depth in future videos and articles.  In essence you either use a program like AdSense from Google which helps you sell ad placements on your site to customers who use Google for sales leads, or you sell directly to other internet professionals who may want a back-link (i.e. a hyperlink from your site back to theirs) banner, or other type of ad on your site.  

3.  Affiliate Marketing (selling others people stuff).
Affiliate marketing, also called Performance marketing, is a vast subject which will require many articles and videos to explain properly – all of which I will attempt to do as time goes on.  For now, in a nutshell, you basically create a website with a link on it to a vendor’s website.  When people come to your website and click that vendor link, you will make a commission on anything they purchase. The link the person clicked is called an affiliate link and will often track the sales even when they are performed days or weeks after the person clicked it.  In other words, you drive traffic to a particular site or sites through your own, then share in the profit.  There are thousands of affiliate programs out there.  Because of this, you can pretty much always find a merchant that offers the products you want to ‘sell’ to your particular customers.
To improve your knowledge of Affiliate Marketing please visit my Affiliate Marketing Introduction.