How to NOT Make Money Online

The share of Americans working from home has been growing at a steady rate. In 2000, 3.3% of Americans worked from home. This last census shows that now 5.2% work from home with many more splitting work between home and the office.

That’s the dream, right? Get up. Make coffee, eat breakfast, relax a bit, pull out your laptop and start making money.

No rush hour traffic. No sneaking into work late. No one over your shoulder asking if you have that one report.

But it’s not all roses and lollipops. It’s easy to entirely ruin all your chances of making a living online. Here’s the how NOT to do on making money online.

Maybe you’re an affiliate marketer or maybe you’re providing a service online or maybe you’re selling crafts on Etsy. Either way, you’re trying to sell something. People do not buy things unless they want or need them.

How then do you convince people to buy your stuff or use your services? Marketers use a variety of tactics to entice people to buy, but only one method consistently brings the customers to the yard. Paint points.

Pain points are simple (or sometimes complex) problems. Sometimes people don’t even realize they have a pain point until you poke it. Fortunately, you’re right there to assuage their pain.

How? Through your product or service.

Once they realize they’re missing something or hurting for something and you have the solution, they’ll be more likely to buy.

Unless you have a host of dead baseball players with supernatural powers on your side, they will not come unless you invite them. I mean, most people have better things to do than wander through the cornfields of Indiana hoping to find a random baseball game.

Likewise, your website isn’t going to show up automatically on search engines and on people’s social media pages. And it’s practically impossible for people to just stumble upon your website. Expecting someone to just wander onto your site is a great way to not make money.

If you don’t want to be a marketer, that’s fine. Find someone who can help you market your site or your product to the masses. Invite people and they will come.

We are a paper-light society. We don’t send letters by mail anymore, we send email. Doctors don’t print out their records and write in them, they type them out and post them to a cloud server.

But there is still a U.S. Postal Service and we still get junk mail. Why? Because people still like to hold things.

As marketers, we often focus solely on email or PPC. And we focus on those things because it’s easy to gather data through those methods. But did you know that you can gather data through mail?

Of course, you can’t gather nearly as much data, but you can use certified mail to gather data through the mail system. If you don’t learn more about how to use analog methods of marketing, you won’t make money online.

Buying and selling scams account for over $16 million in lost money in 2019. Scammers are everywhere online. And they make people think they’re getting a good deal.

Funnel hacking can be a scam. Some of these people prey on your laziness. Just use this awesome method and make money while you sleep! It only costs a premium amount of $6000, but I’ll give you a steep discount and only charge you $2000 for something that will make you millions in only a few weeks.

Beleive these people and you’ll end up out of your $2000 and still making no money online.

Oh, I’m an affiliate, I don’t need ads on my site. The pennies I make on my affiliate make me enough money.

These are the last words of the failed online marketer. When you don’t monetize your website on top of your business, even if those ads only make you a small amount, you’re losing out. Even those small amounts will add up over time.

And monetizing doesn’t just mean ads anymore. It means data-mining and tracking metrics too.

The reason your web browser slows down so much on certain sites is that someone is gathering a bunch of data on you. They’re making money off of what you do on the internet. And you can do the same and make some substantial change.

You’re passionate about people. You want to help people by cutting into them and removing their cancer because cancer sucks. You set up shop in a remote part of town, buy a bunch of surgical tools, medical books, and learn how to do surgery.

You passionately put money into marketing and you convince desperate people you can cure their cancer. They die on your operating table.

Why? You followed your passion, right?

This is how some people approach making money online. They’re passionate about Yoga, so they start a Yoga business with no prior experience or education in business or training in teaching Yoga.

The internet has given us this false sense of confidence. Giving in to that false sense of power will cause you to waste your money and time and possibly hurt others in the process.

If I shouldn’t follow my passion, I should go for the most lucrative option. Yeah, ok, let me paint a picture for you.

You love money. You want to make lots of it. And your parents would love for you to do the same (they’ve instilled a rock-solid work ethic in you, after all).

You go to medical school, get awesome grades, and become a doctor. You’re now making money. Lots of money. But you don’t really care about your patients. Soon, a few patients die and you get in trouble. You’ve been taking on too many patients or too many surgeries because money.

This is the problem with doing it for the money. Either you’ll have zero motivation to do the work or you’ll end up caring only for the money and your customers or clients or audience will notice.

The best way to make money online is to follow your passion within reason and with discipline and leverage it to make money.