Can You Really Make Money Online?

You may have seen ads online claiming that you can make money from home, but can you really make money online? The answer is "yes", but it isn't always as easy as it sounds.

There are certainly work at home jobs that allow you to make money online. In these, you work for a particular company and you may perform administrative assistant or customer service tasks. Legitimate opportunities like this, however, are hard to find.

Most of the ads you'll see encourage you to make money through something called affiliate marketing. Companies pay you a percentage of the sales that you send them from your website. Think of it this way--how many times have you recommended a product to a family member or friend? Wouldn't it be nice if the company paid you when your friend bought their product. In affiliate marketing, they do.

These "make money online" ads often lead you to purchase a product that tells you how to make money through affiliate marketing. In a nutshell, it involves choosing a topic, finding a product that fits in with the topic, creating a website, sending traffic to that website and showing ads that match the topic's audience. It sounds a bit complicated at first, but it can actually be quite easy to get started. In many cases, beyond the initial cost of the information on how to do this, you don't have to spend additional money to get started.

However, you can't just create a website and expect to be making millions of dollars overnight. You have to have visitors to the site to see what you have to offer. This can take a bit more work, but again, there are both free and paid ways to do this.

Can you really make money online? Yes, you can. But as with most things in life, you'll actually have to work for this money. After a bit of hard work, however, you'll be able to work less and less while earning more and more money.

Why Start an Online Business?

I understand that the security of a "real job" is attractive and that's why you're probably looking for one, even if you are trying to work from home. But the problem with that type of work is that you're tied down to an hourly wage. If you stop working, you stop earning money. And with a lot of the types of jobs that you can get from home, there isn't much room for advancement. You'll be stuck at the same salary for a long time.

With an online business, however, you're earning residual income. You do the work just one time, then keep getting paid for it. Yes, you are taking a bit of a chance. There's always the chance that you'll do the work and it won't pay off. But there's a potential for making money that's just not available with traditional employment.

Now, that doesn't mean that it's all easy. You will have to do some work to get your website set up. And you'll have to do some work to bring traffic to your site. But once things are up and running, you'll be able to have more time to do the things that you really want to do.

Learning to Start an Online Business

There's no doubt that there's a steep learning curve when you're trying to start an online affiliate business. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Building websites is work. It's not some quick fix that's going to earn you millions of dollars overnight (despite what some ads may claim). You'll have to work hard to get better.

However, that doesn't mean that you can't succeed faster with the correct recipe. When you understand the specifics of how to create a site, how to create your own product, how to affiliate market and how to drive traffic to your site, things really start to fall into place.

Now, I'm assuming you've looked around at some programs to learn about how to do this. And I'm assuming that you've seen how much some of these products cost. They hype it up, then ask you to spend $40 or more, which is no small drop in the bucket for most people.

That's why I like Kevin Riley at Product Creation Labs. His books are easy to follow, complete and priced low. Many are even less than $10, which is more in line with what I'm willing to pay. If you're ready to get serious about starting an online business, you really need to check out his info.