How long it takes to start make money online is usually the first thing that newbies to the online marketing scene want to know, but it is a tough question to answer not least because there really isn’t a correct answer at all. Whether you can succeed in making an income from home exclusively from the Internet, particularly to the extent that you can comfortably quit your day job, depends on a lot of factors. However, we’ll start off by reinforcing the fact that there is no practical or reliable way to get rich quickly on the Internet, in spite of what you might hear. As with any entrepreneurial venture, success is rewarded to those who put in a degree of time, effort and skill.
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What Motivates You?
Long gone are the days when people could get lucky flipping domain names and launching basic affiliate websites to make a bit of cash, if indeed they really even existed at all. You cannot simply be motivated by making money alone, as we’ve seen from the countless poor-quality affiliate websites that fail to make even a single sale over many months or even years.
Motivation doesn’t come from seeing the first dollar land in your PayPal account alone. It must also come from a genuine passion and interest in the niche that you choose to get involved in. You need to have a skill, or be prepared to learn one, that you actually enjoy working with. Instead of being motivated by money alone, you’ll need to be motivated by increasing traffic to your website, building up an online community and establishing a name for yourself.
Setting Your Goals
We’ve all heard the claims and stories about people making a six-figure income online in return for minimal effort, but they usually come from those trying to sell a get-rich-quick guide. Putting these wild claims aside, you should instead set realistic goals and prepare yourself to invest a considerable amount of time and effort into your online ventures. In reality, most people who actually approach online marketing in the right manner, backed by a realistic set of goals, can reasonably expect to start making a respectable income only after six to twelve months.
Your most important goals will not be your financial ones alone. You’ll also need to set goals that complement your marketing strategy. Important activity goals to set include those that cover content publication, social media marketing and analytics among others.
Understanding Online Marketing
Finding a hosting company, registering a domain name and building your blog or website is a relatively small part of the job, and it can easily be done in a day. You’ll then need to put all of your focus into actually marketing it before you can even hope to turn it into a moneymaking venture.
It shouldn’t come as any surprise that there are literally countless thousands of others doing much the same thing as you are. Some will succeed, but many will fail and give up very quickly. Internet marketing is enormously competitive, and in order to drive that much needed traffic to your website, you’ll need to have a clearly defined target audience and use every channel available to you to draw people to your website.
You generally don’t need to spend any money on marketing your website, and the only costs involved are typically the nominal domain name registration and hosting fees that typically amount to no more than $10 per month. However, you’ll need to invest a lot of time in marketing your website by ensuring that it is easily readable to the search engine crawlers (a process known as search engine optimization) and by engaging your target audience with great content and a solid social media marketing strategy.
Since most of your traffic will come from either the search engines or shared links on social media, you’re going to need to do everything in your power to ensure that your website takes advantage of this fact. Above all, you’ll need to have a publication schedule whereby you publish relevant, quality and original content both to increase your rank in the search engine results and encourage more shares on social media. To summarize, the quality of your content basically acts as a catalyst to increasing your website’s exposure.
Choosing Your Niche
The niche you choose plays a very significant influence on how much money you can expect to make from your online business, but not only because some niches are more profitable than others. Some niches are saturated while others are so specific that you truly need to be an expert to have any hope of success. However, by far the most important factor regarding choosing your niche is your own attitude towards it.
More than anything else, success relies on your passion and knowledge in your niche, and there’s no chance of succeeding if you hope to market what you perceive to be a highly profitable affiliate products that you have no interest in yourself. Stick to what you know and what you love, whether it’s home brewing or budget travel, and market affiliate products related to your niche. If you actually enjoy what you’re doing, and you’re prepared to learn the rules of online marketing, you can usually expect to start making money in a matter of months.