Make Money The Honest Way

Following on from my last post Make Money or Save Money?, where I looked at several honest methods of making money by actually saving money ( you have to read it!), I’m going to turn my attention back to one of the oldest and still most successful ways of making money online.

List building and doing it using the favourite tool of the Internet Marketer, the autoresponder.

We’ve come a long way in the last year or two in the general mode of thinking when it comes to list building. It is something that has been around for a very long time and will probably still be around after all the current fad make money techniques and search engine subterfuge have died away.

The reason that “the list” is where the money always was and still very much is, boils down to one major fact of life. Trust.

If you are trusted, then people are more likely to buy something from you or something you recommend than from someone they don’t trust. Trust has to be earned and one sure-fire way to earn people’s trust is to keep in contact with them and prove to them that what you are selling or recommending is giving them true value. People hate to be ripped off, but the flipside of the coin is they love to be shown respect and honesty. The honest Internet Marketer who can prove their integrity and honesty to a wide group of people gains their respect and will be seen as someone who deserves their loyalty and trust.

Many Internet Marketers who fall over and blow it are the ones who build up a huge list then rip the people on that list off by selling them crap, or trying to sell them too much too soon. Greed is the common denominator in many an Internet Marketer’s downfall.

So where does that leave someone who wants to be successful, make a lot of money the honest way and keep doing it if they can’t sell a ton of products to their list constantly and often?

Well, it means using the benefits of having a large list to make money but not being so greedy and hasty as to go at it too quickly and with products that are not 100% value for money. By all means build as large a list as you can and give them plenty of free stuff. Everyone loves something for nothing and the more free stuff you can give away to your list that has value for them (even though its free) the more the people on that list will trust you. If, every once in a while you throw in something that your list will have to pay for, as long as you explain how it will benefit them and give them more value than the money they would spend on buying it, then you should be ok and will not alienate anyone from your list.

Be honest and tell them if there are any aspects of the product you want to sell them that might detract from its value to them. Or highlight specific areas that the product will help them and those that will not help them. If they know exactly what they will be paying for before they open their wallets, there is much less chance they will be asking for a refund a few days later and sending you an unsubscribe email!

So this then leads me on to how to build your list.

The most important aspect of building a list is having a good autoresponder. An autoresponder is a software package that enables you to harvest the email address of anyone who opts-in to your free giveaway or promotion package and then sends them whatever emails are necessary for them to download your freebie as well as generating a series of follow-up emails as you define over a period of time.

By using a good autoresponder, you circumvent the possibility of being accused of sending spam emails. That’s because firstly, the person willingly gave you their email address and secondly, the subsequent emails send out contain an “unsubscribe” link should they wish to opt-out and no longer wish to receive any further emails from you. This is infinitely better than using your own host’s autoresponder service. That’s because any accusations of spam activity must be investigated by your host which could mean your account being suspended for the duration of the investigation. Meaning all your sites go down for an unspecified length of time. Which could be disastrous for your business.

So where do you get a good autoresponder?

Well, there are several good ones on the market of which some are free and some must be paid for. It stands to reason that the autoresponders that are paid for are going to be better in many ways to the free ones. They will contain several important features not available on free autoresponders and will be much more robust and reliable. One such offering comes from iContact Email Marketing. iContact is a simple to use email marketing, surveying, autoresponder and blogging tool. It allows small businesses, non-profit organisations and associations to communicate easily online with their customers, prospects and members. Its worth checking out as their monthly rates are highly competitive and the additional services that come with the package are substantial.

Of course its a matter of personal choice and there are other autoresponders around, so the honest way recommendation, as always, is to look at all of the available choices and weigh up the pros and cons before deciding upon which is best for your business.

Remember, once you’ve built up a solid list of email subscribers, you don’t need to keep trying to sell them stuff, otherwise you’re just using them as milking cows and people will not tolerate being treated as such. So there are lots of other ways to make use of your list while keeping in friendly contact on a reasonably regular basis. There are always free offers that you can direct their attention to - as long as you have checked them out yourself first and are happy they are not thinly veiled opt-ins for scams.

You can also direct their attention to other money making possibilities that you have affiliate links to, such as online writing sites like Constant Content that will pay them for selling their articles, or online job offers from legitimate companies.

Just as long as everything you recommend to your list is honest and trustworthy, you’ll keep the people already there while continuing to nurture it as it grows. From which you will make money, honest!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Shock horror! He’s writing another one so soon after Do It Right, what’s going on?

I also should point out that I just changed the permalinks template for this blog, so all my previous posts now have different urls which is why the Blogging Zoom and other buttons all show zero - can’t be helped!

Well, I noticed that I’m not posting as much as I used to in here and there is a very good reason for that. At the same time, I also realize that this is a good site that is steadily gaining popularity with the search engines in terms of its authority, so I should be spending more time on it.

So I thought I might post about what’s what.

Sure, I can write about making money online until the john cows come home, but would it be the right thing to do? Of course its harder to come up with great stuff that isn’t the same rehashed, regurgitated crap that most make money bloggers vomit up in their blogs almost daily. Most of which is pure bullshit, because most of them are NOT making money themselves, so how can they claim to know how to do something they’re not doing?

I’ve got tired of writing the same old same old and it doesn’t do this blog any favours to fill it up with worthless crap, so the posts are going to be fewer and farther between because there really isn’t that much more to say on the subject of how to make money online.

Griz has practically said it all in his make money online blog about the right way to go about making money online, and I just feel that by writing on the subject, I’m only paraphrasing him and Vic (make money online at Blogger Unleashed) and Court (Internet Marketing School) in order to make posts to keep this place alive and maybe even move it forward.

Perhaps its time to allow this blog to diversify somewhat. It’s too late to pigeon-hole it into one tight niche because its getting rather big and sprawling. So instead, I’ve decided to go with the flow of the site as it is. I’ll be looking at creating sub-pages on related niches with top level posts to support them. Spread it out instead of reign it in.

As I said in my last post, it may not make very much money itself, but it will be useful as a promotion and link booster for other sites I have in different niches. Having the forum attached to the site means it gets spidered often by the search engines, even though there’s not too many people in there these days.

People still email me for advice on how to make money online and I don’t mind helping out where I can, but I’ll have to be honest and say that the information I’m giving out now comes mainly from what I’ve learned from Griz, Vic and Court, whereas before it would have come from stuff I learned from other marketers who are not gurus or A-listers but market their own products to make money online rather than use their sites as affiliate or PPC advertising media.

Oh, did we forget that?

Yes, we did! Affiliate ads and PPC ads are highly profitable and very doable ways of making money online - no doubt about it. That’s the school of thought coming from the guys I just mentioned. But don’t discount the marketing side of selling your own stuff if you have stuff to sell that people want to buy!

I’ve lapsed on that front and stopped working on my own stuff to sell. Like the eBook I was writing on how I beat arthritis naturally. Its something that I’m sure a lot of people would buy (although not at the outrageous prices that many eBooks sell for online) with some work put into marketing it. Which I can do - only thing is, I shelved that and a couple of other book projects because my attention got diverted from that path.

I read Griz’s blog and realized there was a way to make decent money online without a product of your own and even without a website of your own - just creating free blogs. He also made it clear that working to attract social traffic was a waste of time if you want to make money. He’s right and the stuff he writes about in his blog works too. If you’re doubting it, try it first and see for yourself before you dismiss it out of hand. Its every bit as much work as anything else to make money, but the rewards are there for those that are prepared to do the work.

Then Vic came along and added his side of the story which is also geared to making money as opposed to attracting social visitors to your site or blog. Vic knows what he’s talking about and is giving his knowledge away for free to anyone who is determined enough to want to make money. The catch is that you have to abandon all the stuff you learned from the A-listers and so-called gurus and do it his way. That’s up to you - it depends on how much you really want to make money.

Of course, this is all bringing me back to that terrifying statistic that 95% of Internet Marketers will fail. Period. That’s because they either don’t listen to what they’re being told - because they know better - or they are too lazy to do the work, or they don’t have the self-belief that they CAN do it and give up too soon.

So if you have your own stuff to sell, and you are sure there are people who will buy it, then go for it! You may have created a great piece of software that is highly useful in some way, or written a great book on how to cure something or cook something or whatever - just don’t be trying to sell yet another book on how to make money online - there are more than enough of them! You’ll be surprised just what people will buy if it will help them in some way or make their life a bit easier. Maybe you have developed a a great line in safe children’s toys, or a new board game… the options are endless as long as you are sure people will want what you’re selling!

Of course the knack is then in the marketing - you have to make people want your stuff by getting their interest and creating desire for your product. Here’s and example: Sunny Delight is a sugary orange flavoured drink that thanks to a TV campaign in the UK actually overtook sales of and knocked off the No1 spot, Coca Cola! Ok, that’s extreme, but marketing rules if you are trying to sell something. That’s beyond the scope of this post, but there are several good marketing articles on this site.

There are more ways to make money online than the few that you constantly read about. Selling your own good, worthwhile product is one of them.

If you want to make money online, you need to:

• Listen to what you’re being told
• Know how to filter out the truth from the bullshit
• Understand and accept what your being taught because you do NOT know better (even if you think you do)
• Be prepared to work hard and put in long hours
• Truly believe in yourself that you can do it
• Don’t let negative people put you down or tell you that you’re wasting your time
• Have the patience of Job

and…

NEVER GIVE UP!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way