The First $10,000 - How to Earn Your First $10,000 Online

I am not a CPC or PPC or CPA or (three-letter with C and P are in there somewhere) kind of a guy. I build sites for others who then populate their site with good data. Still, the lure of this approach: build a site, people flock to it, and you reap the revenue. Lots of online marketers talk about this field. They always miss out some key detail that makes you need to buy their product. But you should buy their product-- it's so easy to make $700/day! If it were, then everyone would be making $700/day. Likely, they are making their $700/day from you falling for their claims of fast money.

A website is effectively a subject. EBay is about selling. BoingBoing is about geek chic. Huffington Post is about news. While sites can rely on a lot of data, charts and links to videos at their core they are published works similar to newspapers, comic books, novels or magazines. Each of those publishing ventures choose a topic. None of them cover everything. They all specialize. For your idea, you need to figure out your topic and the audience it will attract. What do you want to write about? It breaks into two sets of qualifiers, then clusters of idea sources.

There are moon bases on the dark side of the Moon!

Well, not really. But the dark side of the moon-- is unknown to us. We look at the moon almost every night but we never see the dark side of the moon. The same is true with the world of audiences and niches.

So you think you know how you're going make that money online? There are several important factors involved in making that first $10,000.

Everyone has strengths, skills and aptitudes. Add in hobbies and interests. Maybe you've never looked at a ledger, but your mind is tuned to following columns and rows and transferring figures accurately, so you would make a good accountant. Maybe you spent a decade selling shoes so you know patent leather from plastic at a glance. By the time you reach adulthood, you will have at least one skill under your belt that you can practice with confidence.

In steering this ship on the quest for the first $10,000, I have charted a course to an online only venture. There are lots of sites to help you sell doodads or do drop shipping. In fact, the online only venture does end up with physical products, but that's the icing on top of the cake of online content creation.

When looking for your “First $10,000” idea, you’re looking for $10,000 of profit. I can make $10,000 today if I went out and sold $20,000 of cash at half price. That’s the trap of the online marketers: when they say they’ve made $5,000 in 8 hours, I do not doubt them. They may have spent $20,000 or $30,000 to get that $5,000. Yes, the ratios can be that bad.

I've wondered: how come people seem to be successful when other products may be better and hidden in obscurity? A few years ago, I went to a talk for aspiring writers (one session from an ongoing group). My wife and I sat through it. At the end of the talks, they had a mixer. We left when the talks were done. I was asked: "How come these people seem to have book deals?" My answer: the mixer.

I saw this great video about how to do white-hat link building. Link building is a terrific way to build relevance with a brick-by-brick approach. The speaker had a lot of solid ideas until he came to one element.

This isn’t a shocker: commerce is driven by inequality. The more inequality that exists the greater the opportunity for high profits. When insurance companies hid their rates you had to go a great deal of effort or accept the bad deal in front of you.

If you're choosing a topic with the goal of writing for cash, look at what fetches the highest Adwords costs. Adwords is the flip side of AdSense.

As mentioned in What are you going to sell? one way to make money online is to feature products for sale by others. That’s the essence of affiliate marketing. You find products and sell them for others. They collect the gross revenue and you collect an affiliate fee. They could sell stuff on their own, but they want you to market products for them and the incentive is money-- potentially LOTS of money.

I used to have SEO dialed in. One SEO firm at a tradeshow had me plunk my URL, hoping that my keywords and meta tags would be akimbo. Nope: my site was ideal and they couldn't lure me in for some lucrative SEO contract work.
Then I went to sleep in a sense and came back to find that my SEO perfection was dashed to the rocks. Along with it my decent Google Adsense trickle and my legion of fans. It wasn’t entirely my fault and maybe you’re in the same boat and we’re both out to sea.