Three Levels of Making Money Online

 

Money is such a massive source of stress in most of our lives we often feel like we don't have enough of it and most of us trade more than 80 thousand hours of our lives a huge chunk of our short time on this earth.

To go to work so we can make money which we need to live but 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.

So let's break it down, basically there's only three ways of making money online but before if we want to make money we need to be providing some kind of value that someone else is willing to pay for so. There is 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
LEVEL THREE:   ATTENTION

 LEVEL ONE: MAKING MONEY ONLINE BY SELLING YOUR SERVICES

This one's probably the easiest way of making money online. It's the one I have recommend to everyone to begin with, 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 okay you've got the internet and you can learn coding, HTML and CSS which are the basic and a markup languages of websites. There is 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 code Academy and then trying to build your own personal website. 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 UPWORK and browse their categories there are literally hundreds 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 as long as you have a reasonable internet connection. Another easy way is one to learn is VIDEO EDITING. 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.

 

LEVEL TWO: MAKING MONEY ONLINE BY SELLING YOUR PRODUCTS

When you start selling PRODUCTS like physical or digital goods then your ability to make money online magnifies a lot because it suddenly becomes scalable like it's not directly tied to the amount of time you're putting it. Now 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 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 product.

Now a digital good is anything from a website to an app or an online course or an e-book 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. So we can either sell digital or physical stuff but obviously I think digital is it's better but there's basically two ways of selling it like we can either sell other people's stuff or we can sell our own stuff. Level two basically 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 today are firstly DROP SHIPPING and secondly AFFILIATED MARKETING.

Let's start with DROP SHIPPING:

The basic idea is that we could make a pretty-looking website that sells nice-looking watches, let's say for a hundred pounds apiece when a customer orders that watch we then buy it from a third party that's actually selling the watch and we arranged them to ship it to the customer so we're making fifty pounds without ever handling the watch at all. Now I've never really done this myself and I would recommend you probably stay away from it as well just because I've seen so many kind of online courses that seem to a little bit scammy about how you can make money online by drop shipping, I also don't like the fact that drop shipping 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 and the shipping is just a massive bollock. Whereas digital products really are the way to go the second way.

Selling other people's products with AFFILIATED MARKETING:

AFFILIATED 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 wirecutter 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 wirecutter make 1% 2% 3% Commission on that sale and so.

If you get enough visitors buying enough things you can make a load of money from AFFILIATED MARKETING or you can do affiliate partnerships with certain products. 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 we're selling our own stuff then we control everything from the aesthetics to the price to the distribution to the logistics that are the entire customer experience we are controlling ourselves.

So there's 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. 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 load of money.

I wouldn't recommend doing the physical product thing it's something I'm kind of looking into myself when it comes to selling merch but it's kind of hard and I think personally more trouble than it's probably worth.

Secondly you could make a website or an app and you could sell access to that like for example let's say you make an iOS game or something and people buy it from the app store you're making money of that or let's say you're making a website that's offering some kind of service and you're charging people a subscription fee or something for access to that service.

Point number three is I think a much easier way that anyone can make money online and that is by selling info products, so buy info products I mean things like ebooks or digital downloads or online courses because if you can teach something and you can teach it in a compelling an interesting way online increasingly it's becoming easier and easier to find people who are willing to pay you for that online education. You know more and more people are turning to online education so if you can teach something well you can make money of that. online courses over on Skillshare like of course on how to edit videos and a class on how to study for your exams and again those generate passive income.

You could literally learn anything online and then you can make an online class teaching that thing to other people and if you want you can set it through your own website or if you want you can scout it through Udemy course or a skill shed. There's all sorts of different platforms that you can sell your expertise on and as long as it's good obviously has to be good because you know we make money online by providing value if it's valuable then people will buy it.

 
LEVEL THREE: MAKING MONEY ONLINE WITH ATTENTION

Level 3 is when we supercharge our money making powers with attention, now there are all ways that you can get your product in front of people whatever it is you could try running Facebook or Instagram ads you can go around knocking on doors in your neighbourhood, you can send a cold emails to mailing list whatever you want but really the easiest way of selling anything online is by using attention and that's the attention of people, who know like and trust you and by far the easiest way of getting people to know like and trust you is by providing valuable content on the Internet completely free of charge for example if you wanted to write now you could start a blog about PRODUCTIVITY TIPS and every week you could write one or two blog posts sharing your favourite productivity from BOOKS, from ACADMEDIC PAPERS, from ARTICLES FROM PODCASTS,  from your own LIFE and over time if you do this consistently and provide value because again this is an exchange of value we all care about value.

There's no snake oil you can sell here there is no shortcut to making money online, you're providing value for free across the internet over a long period of time and then in three years time you build up a mailing list of 20,000 people and now when you want to run your own productivity course you've got this mailing list of 20,000 people who know like and trust you from the value that you've given them for free over an extended period of time and now they're far more likely to buy your thing.

The ratio that free content versus paid content needs to be providing 25 pieces of valuable free content for every right hook that you're launching every time, I've been following Gary Vaynerchuk for years, I've been following people like Tim Ferriss who kind of modeled this perfectly over time by just flooding the market with a ton of really valuable free content not really worrying about trying to charge people for things and then later on you know once you've got this audience of people who know like and trust you, so if you can build up that personal brand that professional reputation this this audience of people that know like and trust you at that point you are supercharging your abilities to make money online because now you can sell goods now you can sell services and in fact you can even sell attention directly by doing sponsorships and stuff like that.

It like completely an utterly life-changing when you've got this huge audience that you can leverage to make money online and in fact the audience doesn't even need to be that big, even with a very small amount of people if you've got the right audience following you, you could easily sell a product there's. if you can get a thousand people who like you enough to potentially pay you $100 a year for the stuff that you make, you're making $100,000 a year. you've got a full time living from a thousand true fans and so the audience doesn't need to be that big but the way of building any kind of audience as Gary Vaynerchuk and Tim Ferriss say is to just produce a ton of really valuable free content over a long period of time but only if I give away content for free people won't buy my paint stuff that's not how it works people will buy your paid stuff but only if you give them content for free.

You don't build an audience by selling them stuff, you build an audience by giving them a load of stuff for free and then you can sell to them three years down the line and so.