3 Paths To Creating Wealth Online

When I was young, I had this dream of making money online and Now with a ton of mixed experiences of failures or successes under my palm, I now make money from the Internet on the side as I do in my full time job. This is the guide I wish I would have had when I first got started.

We must learn how to either make money from businesses online or take our business online

Being able to make money online outside of our day jobs is pretty cool. It means that if we’re lucky enough to be doing a job that we love, then happy days. We’ve got some spare cash to go on holiday with.

But if maybe we’re not entirely happy with working 40 to 80 hours a week, then we’ve got the option of going part time or taking a job that pays less, but that we enjoy more or even to stop working altogether, if that’s what we want.

Obviously, this isn’t an overnight thing. It takes a lot of time and effort and luck to get to the point where we can quit our jobs and stick it to the man. But to be honest, I don’t think anyone watching this would say no to having an extra few hundred dollars a month kicking around. And the process of getting there isn’t as mysterious as it can sometimes feel. So let’s break it down. Basically, there’s only three ways, three legit ways of making money online.

But before we go there, we need to talk about what money actually is.

And there’s a poem from the early 1980s that goes as follows. Money is a matter of functions for a medium, a measure, a standard, a store.

And so putting this all together at its core, money is just a medium for exchanging value. But we all use money to buy things that we find valuable. And so if we want to make money or make money online, we need to be providing some kind of value that someone else is willing to pay for. So there’s basically three forms of value that people will pay for over the Internet. And these are three levels of making money online, and that is level one services, level two products and level three attention.

I’ve been doing variants of all three over the last 13 years. I started off selling services as a web and graphic designer. I then moved towards selling products so products for med school applications and online question banks. And now it’s mostly through the attention that I’ve got on platforms like YouTube that I can leverage to superpower the sale of services and products. And those are sort of the three levels of making money online.

1. Level one, make money online by selling your services.

This one’s probably the easiest way of making money online. It’s the one I’d recommend to everyone to begin with. And it was how I got my start. There’s only two things we need to do. Firstly, we need to develop a skill that people are willing to pay for. And secondly, we need to find people who are willing to pay for that skill.

Step one, develop a skill that others are willing to pay for.

If you’re thinking that I don’t have any valuable skills, that’s OK. You’ve got the Internet and you can learn. When I was twelve, I decided I wanted to be super cool and therefore learn how to code through using Google and finding a ton of free resources online. I taught myself HTML and CSS, which are the basic kind of markup languages of websites. And then because I wanted to make a video game for my nerd friends, I decided to teach myself PHP, which is a service like programming language.

And my brother did some years ago with just free information on the Internet, way back when all of these online courses and stuff were not really available. So you can pretty much learn anything online for free these days.

There’s hundreds of ways you can learn how to code online. I’d recommend starting with the basics of HTML and CSS by following random YouTube tutorials or by paying for something like Code School or Codecademy and then trying to build your own personal website. And if you want to learn proper coding, I’d recommend the introduction to Python course.

If you’re not into coding, there are literally hundreds of services you can offer online. Like if you just look on the websites, Fiverr or up work and browse the categories, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of different things that people will pay you for. Some of them are related to doing stuff on the computer, like coding and websites and graphic design and illustration and stuff. But there’s a lot of other things to make money from, like writing and copywriting and data entry and being a personal assistant and admin services using website like fiverr

And just there, just like this whole world of stuff that you can do on the Internet, wherever you are in the world, pretty much as long as you have a reasonable Internet connection.

Another easy one to learn is video editing. If you want, you can check out Skillshare Ali Abdaal class on how to edit videos and final cut. And after working through that, you’ll be pretty good.

Like not having a monetized skill is not an excuse anymore at all. If you want to actually make money online because you can literally teach yourself anything over the Internet and then you can sell that skill to other people a step to find people who will pay you money for that skill or service.

Now, there’s two sorts of people who will pay you for your services, essentially people in your real life( I mean friends and relatives) or secondly, people on the Internet. You can always start with peoplearround you.

My brother learned how to make websites when he was around 12, 13, and then told all of our friends, family members and friends of friends that he was going to be designing websites. And he started making small money and from there started getting referrals as times went on and his skills grew to a better level of excellence with website design, video editing and graphic design.

Although some of his first websites that he made were these Janki looking HTML CSS thingy looking sites, he got paid some cool amounts of money that he was a little rich teenager then. So that was pretty solid. Alternatively, and a much more viable long term solution is that you can find people to pay you for your services over the Internet.

Now I got my start on a website called nairaland where, you know, people would post projects saying they need a web designer or a developer to do these various things. And he would bid on those projects and say, oh, I’ll do it for so, so and so amount of money. Although he was getting underpaid when compared to market price that time but, oh my God, he was a rich kid in our house then.

But today, there are places like Upwork, peopleperhour, and Fiver that seem to be the biggest ones and you can just kind of browse through all the different things people are looking for. And then you can sell your services there.

You can create a profile for yourself on those platforms and say, I’ll do it for five dollar or I’ll do it for ten dollar or do it for $20 or $50. And over time, as you get better at the thing, you can start charging more and more, especially as you start getting decent reviews and you start building up your own portfolio of whatever the thing is that you’re doing.

And so I did this whole selling services thing for a few years, but I realized pretty quickly that ultimately what I was doing was that I was trading my time for money.And that’s ultimately not very scalable model because obviously my time or our time is limited.

And so if you really want to make money online, then we want to get toa level to make money online by selling products.

When you start selling products like physical or digital goods, then your ability to make money online magnifies a lot because it’s suddenly become scalable, like it’s not directly tied to the amount of time you’re putting it. If we want, we could sell pretty much anything online. But the ideal thing that we want to sell is something that has a one time cost of time or money to make. But then we can sell infinite copies of and we want the cost of reproduction to be zero.

And ideally, we want the cost of distribution to be zero. And ideally, we want the ongoing time commitment to be as low as possible so we can make the thing once and then we can sell it like a million times without having to spend much more time. So the ideal product category then is digital goods or digital products or digital goods, anything from a website to an app or an online course or an ebook. All of these things have a one time cost of production, a zero cost of reproduction, zero cost of distribution, and hopefully a zero cost of maintenance as well.

All right. So we can either sell digital or physical stuff, but obviously I think digital is better. But there’s basically two ways of selling it. Like we can either sell other people’s stuff (Affiliate marketing) or we can sell our own stuff level to basic is selling other people’s products. Now, there’s various different ways of doing this.

But just to simplify for clarity, the two that we’re going to talk about here are firstly, drop shipping and secondly, affiliate marketing.

Let’s start with drop shipping: The basic idea is that we could make a pretty looking website that sells nice looking items. For example we see a watch on another website selling for Fifty pounds and we list it on our website and let’s say, we upload the watch on our website for ￡100 a piece. When a customer orders that watch, we then buy it from a third party store or website. The watch is actually not our product and not in our inventory but we make arrangements with the owner of the watch and we arrange them to ship it to the customer and we collect money of the item.

So we’re making fifty pounds without ever handling the watch at all. This is what I have been doing for years now and I actullally make profits that are times three of four of my 9–5 monthly salary.

Although, I don’t like the fact that drop shipping generally focuses on physical goods. And as we’ve talked about, physical goods are just not as fun to sell as digital stuff because you actually have to pay for it,You have to arrange the logistics of the shipping.

It’s just a matter of Bulky job, whereas digital products really are the way to go.

The second way of selling other people’s products is with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is when you’re selling someone else’s stuff, but you’re getting a commission from each sale, like there’s a really good review website called WIA Couteur, and they do reviews about the best electronics in different categories and they have Amazon affiliate links. So when someone clicks on that link and buys from Amazon, then the website will make some amount of money in commissions, this could be one percent or two percent, three percent commission on that sale which cumulatively will run to thousands of dollar monthly.

And so if you get enough visitors buying enough things, you can make a lot of money from affiliate marketing or you can do what I do, which is to have affiliate partnerships with certain products like there is the Dreamhost web hosting service, which I’ve been evangelizing for the last few months because I genuinely love the product. And so if someone buys the web hosting service using my link, I will get some percentage commission on that sale.

And if enough people are doing that, that can make a reasonable amount of money. So that is how affiliate marketing works. You’re selling someone else’s stuff, but you’re getting a percentage commission on the sale. If you’re interested in learning more about this, search google or youtube for free videos or courses and they’ve got a load of materials that teach you the ins and outs of how to do affiliate marketing properly.

But selling someone else’s stuff is absolutely fine. But really, we want to be getting to the Holy Grail and the Holy Grail is level to expert, level to expert is when we’re selling our own products. If we’re selling our own stuff, then we control everything from the aesthetics to the price, to the distribution, to the logistics, to the entire customer experience. We are controlling ourselves. So here this kind of three broad categories of things that you could sell, you could try selling physical products.

Peter McKinnon has done very well selling his camera bag. Pat Flynn has done really well selling this switch pod, which is a tripod for bloggers. It’s quite hard selling a physical product. It’s a lot of work. You have to manufacture it, distribute like logistics. It costs a lot of money. I wouldn’t recommend doing the physical products thing. It’s something I’m kind of looking into.

Secondly, You could start as a SAAS ( software as a service) business, you could make a website or an app and you could sell access to that. Like, for example, let’s say you make websites, Apps for different things like games, services e.g. you can build websites where people can prepare for exams or games for kids.

It could be APP that shows a new way to store photos or a podcast download organizer, prayer book organiser, productivity planner e.t.c.

Don’t panic if you don’t know how to code or develop Apps, Just get the idea. You can hire people to create it. With the availability of programmers at reasonable rates, you could probably find someone on a site like Fiverr. Of course, the exact amount you’ll pay your developers depends on the complexity of the app.

You should create your app so that it works on both kinds of smartphones, Androids and iPhones. That way you maximize your customer base.

3. Third way, is to sell information products.

What Are Digital Information Products?

An information product can come in all sorts of formats, but at its heart, a product like this must provide values to its consumers if you truly want to make money from it. People don’t just want information, they want solutions to their problems, they want products that will meet their needs. They crave tips and strategies for making their life better. They want guidance.

And that’s what the best information products must provide, whether it’s a video, an ebook, an audio, a webinar, a membership website…

You must Keep in mind that in creating your ebook, youtube videos, blogs or courses, value must be provided for your consumers and the products must be easily accessible.

The reason for this is because this way your customers can order products anytime day or night, from anywhere in the world, and get their product instantly, without you being involved in the transaction. It’s money while you sleep. And because you are not physically printing or shipping anything; it will virtually cost you nothing to supply your consumers while you sleep.