Hi everyone, today we will check out the various principles, strategies, and tools to help us live happier, more productive lives. There are three legit ways of making money online. But, before we begin, we need to talk about what money is. There’s a poem from the early 1900s that goes as follows.

 

So, putting all this together at its core, money is just a medium for exchanging value. Like we all use the money to buy things that we find valuable. Suppose we want to make money. We need to provide some value that someone else is willing to pay for. So there are three forms of value that people will pay for over the internet. And these are three levels of making money online.

Levels of Making Money Online

First Level: make money online by selling your services.

Second Level: make money online by selling products.

Third Level: supercharge your money-making powers with attention.

LEVEL 1: Earn Money Online by Selling Your Services

This’s most likely the simplest way of making money online. There are only two things we need to do. First, we need to develop a skill that people are willing to pay for. Second, we need to find people who are willing to pay for that skill.

1. Develop a Skill That Others are Willing to Pay For

If you think that I don’t have any valuable skills, it’s okay. You’ve got the internet; you can learn it. You can learn anything online for free. There are hundreds of ways you can learn how to code online. I’d recommend starting with HTML and CSS basics by following random YouTube tutorials or paying for something like code school or code Academy. Then, build your website if you want to learn proper coding. I’d recommend the introduction to Python course over it, Brilliant who is sponsoring this video.

Suppose you’re not into coding. You can provide a huge selection of solutions online if you look at the websites Fiverr or Upwork and browse their categories. There are hundreds of different things that people will pay you for. They are related to doing stuff on the computer like coding, websites, graphic design, and illustration. You can do numerous areas on the internet,  pretty much as long as you have a good internet connection.

Another easy one to learn is video editing., if you want to make money online, having a monetizable skill is not a reason any longer. Because you can teach anything over the internet, and then you can sell that skill to other people.

2. Find People Who Will Pay You Money for That Skill or Service.

You will find two kinds of individuals who will essentially pay you for your services: people in real life, people on the internet.

You can find people to pay you for your services over the internet. And, You can browse through all the different things people are looking for, and you can sell your services there. You can say, I will do it for five, I’ll do it for ten, I’ll do it for twenty, hundred fifty and over time as you get better, you can start charging more.

LEVEL 2: Earn 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 suddenly becomes scalable like it’s not directly tied to the amount of time you’re putting it. You sell pretty much anything online. We want to sell the ideal thing that has a one-time cost of time and money. Then we can sell infinite copies, and we want the cost of reproduction to be zero. We want the price of distribution to be zero. And, We want the ongoing time commitment to be as low as possible. We can make the thing once, and then we can sell it a million times without spending much more time.

The ideal product category is digital goods or digital products. a digital good is anything from a website to an app, an online course, or an ebook. Digital product has a one-time production cost, a zero cost of reproduction, zero cost of distribution, and hopefully a zero cost of maintenance. So, we can either sell digital or physical stuff, but obviously, digital is better. But there are two ways of selling it, either sell other people’s stuff or sell our own stuff.

1. Selling Other People’s Products.

There are different ways of doing this. But today, we’re going to talk about dropshipping and affiliate marketing. Let’s start with drop shipping first.

a. 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 buy it from a third party. And then ship it to the customer. So, we’re making fifty pounds without ever handling the watch at all.

Drop-shipping focuses on physical goods. Physical goods are not as fun to sell as digital stuff. Because you have to pay for it, you have to arrange the logistics and the shipping. Whereas digital products really are the way to go.

b. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is selling someone else’s stuff, and you’re getting a commission from each sale. There’s an excellent review website called wirecutter. They do reviews about the best electronics in different categories. They have Amazon affiliate links, so when someone clicks on that link and buys from Amazon, then the website will make 1%, 2%, 3% commission on that sale. So if you get enough visitors buying enough things, you can make a lot of money from affiliate marketing. You’re selling someone else’s stuff, but you’re getting a percentage Commission on the sale.

Suppose you are thinking about learning more about affiliate marketing. There are many websites and smart passive income podcasts. They have a load of materials that teach you how to do affiliate marketing properly.

2. Selling Our Own Products.

If you’re selling your stuff, you can control everything from the aesthetics to the price, distribution, and logistics. You are controlling yourselves. There are three broad categories of stuff that you could sell.

a. Selling Physical Products

You could try selling physical products. Peter McKinnon has done very well selling his camera bag. Pat Flynn has done well selling this switch pod, which is a tripod for vloggers.

It’s quite hard selling a physical product; it’s a lot of work. You have to manufacture it, distribute it like logistics. It costs a lot of money … Frankly speaking, I don’t recommend it.

b. Selling Website, an App, Software as a Service

You could make a website or an app and sell it. For example, let’s say you make an iOS game or something. People buy it from the app store you’re making money. Or you’re making a website that’s offering service, and you’re charging people a subscription fee or something for access to that service.

It’s quite hard to do. In general, you need to know how to code. You usually want to find some co-founders. You can go down the start-up route. There are so many things out there for building an app that makes money.

c. Selling Info Products

Selling info products is an easier way to make money online. Info products I mean things like ebooks, digital downloads, or online courses. If you can teach something, you can teach it in a compelling, interesting way. It’s becoming easier to find people who are willing to pay for online education. You know, many people are turning to online education, so if you can teach something well, you can make money.

It’s reasonably straightforward to develop the sort of expertise. I mean, you can teach the thing. A lot of us struggle with this. Because we think I’m not an expert, I can’t teach online, but you can. Because if you’re a beginner, you can teach other beginners.

It’s so easy you could learn anything online, and then you can make an online class teaching that thing to other people.

You can set it through your website, and you can scout it through udemy, Coursera, or skill shed. There are all sorts of different platforms that you can sell your expertise on, as long as it’s good. Obviously, it has to be good. Because we make money online by providing value, if it’s valuable, then people will buy it.

LEVEL 3: Supercharge Your Money-Making Powers With Attention

There are many ways to get your product in front of people. You could try running Facebook or Instagram ads, and you can go around knocking on doors in your neighborhood, you can send a cold email to the mailing list.

The easiest way of selling anything online is attention. 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, you could start a blog about the medicinal plant. Every week, you could write one or two blog posts sharing your favorite medicinal plant from books, academic papers, articles, podcasts, and your own life. If you do this consistently and provide value for free across the internet over a long time. In three years, you build up a mailing list of 20,000 people. When you want to sell your own book. You’ve got this mailing list of 20,000 people who know, like, and trust you from the value you’ve given them for free. They’re far more likely to buy your thing. You’ve got an audience of people that you can sell to.

Gary Vaynerchuk has got a book called Jab Jab Jab right hook. The model for a jab is like kind of a boxing analogy. A jab is when you give someone content and valuable content for free. And the right hook is when you ask them for something or try and sell them something. He says he wished he could have called the book jab, jab, jab …. 25 times and then right hook in an interview.

It is entirely life-changing when you’ve got an enormous audience that you can leverage to make money online. The audience doesn’t even need to be that big. There’s a load of podcasts.

Noah Kagan runs about marketing. He shows that even with a very small number of people, you could easily sell a product if you’ve got the right audience following you. There’s a guy called Kevin Kelly who wrote famous essay ages ago called 1,000 true fans.

If you are a musician and a thousand people following you on the internet and those are your loyal fans. They’re the people who will go to every show. They’ll buy the special edition of your album if you can get a thousand people who like you enough to potentially pay you $100 a year for the stuff you make. You’re making $100,000 a year. You’ve got a full time living from a thousand loyal fans. And so the audience doesn’t need to be that big. But, the way of building any audience, like Gary Vaynerchuk and Tim Ferriss, say, is just to produce a ton of precious free content over a long period.

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 free stuff. And then you can sell to them three years down the line.