A website is not the magic answer to having money pour into your bank account. Any way you do it, it takes TIME, WORK, and PATIENCE at least, to make a site generate any significant amount of money. In fact, it takes those things to make it return even one cent!

There are many people out there who are willing to take your money to promise you an easy solution. Ignore them, there IS no easy solution, they just want your money. There are ways to generate income online though that are based on the same old principles that have made business succeed since the dawn of time, with a twist or two to accommodate the new technology.

You can spend a lot of money trying to make money online. You can spend thousands without seeing one penny of return. Now, I am not going to tell you that you won't make money if you spend it, but what I will tell you is that if you are going to spend money, you have to do it on things that work, and not on proven losers. And you CAN make money with minimum expenditures, but you will have to trade time and work if you do. Nothing comes from nothing!

You can certainly choose which things you want to spend something on, and which things you don't. Our other pages give information on marketing, website design, and other things that someone is always trying to sell you. We will outline ways here that you can make money. Look for more details in our other pages though, because this is just a general overview to give you ideas of what you might be able to do, or what you might want to try. Some of our other pages give specific instructions on some of these topics.

I know how to make money online. I have run auctions, and have had email notifications of sales, and email notifications of instant payments coming into my mailbox on a regular basis. I have sold bulkfoods online, and orders regularly appeared in my inbox, which I then had to process. I have sold custom order used laptops, and a variety of other items. Each took a lot of work before I could see the real potential, and each was successful in its time in my life. I no longer do some of those things because of the amount of space required (I had a separate rented office when I did them, now I work from home and our house is small!). Right now I get email notifications of sales made through affiliate links, or through sales from my sites. That took a lot of work also, and still does.

Here are some ways in which you can make money online:

1. A traditional store - places orders for things that get shipped to customers. If you have a product, you can start a store. You must be able to reliably deliver what you promise though. Advantages are that you can photograph your products and set up an online order and catalog system fairly quickly. Marketing and promotion are standard and conversion from a storefront to an online storefront can be relatively simple. Disadvantages are that you have to have inventory storage space, and you face the usual online competition.

2. Drop Ship store - Same as above, only you do not carry inventory, rather you place orders for other companies who then ship them for you with your return address on them. How hard it is to set up depends on what you choose and how many items, and how much help your suppliers give you. Advantage is that you don't have to carry an inventory, and the supply company has to deal with return issues and shipments. Disadvantage is that if the supplier messes up, YOU look bad. Suppliers can be hard to find, and the ones that are easy to find are not particularly the best ones to deal with. Read up on this more if you choose it, because it can be a spectacular success, or a spectacular failure. NOTE: PayPal now has restrictions on using their service with a drop ship store.

3. Custom Order Store - This is pretty common online, and is used by crafters, seamstresses, or anyone else who makes items to order. It can also be used by people who sell used items by specific request. You set it up just like a regular online store, either with set prices for certain items (takes a lot of research ahead of time for used items), or by custom price quote. Advantage is that it takes no inventory, and you don't have to buy supplies until you get an order. Disadvantage is that when someone needs something, you have to drop everything and produce it within a predictable time period - two weeks is pretty standard. You can arrange for the customer to pay before you spend anything on supplies or before you purchase the used item, but if you do it requires a great amount of trust from your customers, and then you are risking their money, and must be able to make good if something goes wrong. You cannot take a custom order for something you cannot deliver, and when you deliver, it had better have been worth the wait. You need to offer a product or value that they cannot get by just clicking a "buy" button somewhere else. And your service and customization options must be personal. NOTE: PayPal requires that you have a two week turnaround time if you are selling items that are not specifically in stock, and that you inform the customer clearly.

4. Selling services - Website Design, Proofreading, graphic design, repair services, anything that you can negotiate and deliver remotely. There is a lot of competition in this arena, but if you have a good service, and a friendly negotiating manner, you can succeed here. Advantage is that you need no inventory and you may not need to handle product per-se. You do need to have skills that are marketable and the ability to present them well on a website. If you do, this can be an ideal choice if you have the patience to give it time to gain momentum.

5. Selling electronic products - Electronically deliverable products include eBooks, Music, Software, Images, Templates, customizable document forms, and anything else you can connect to a download button at the end of a payment system. Advantages are that you have no inventory, and that electronic delivery gives instant product delivery so that you don't have to ship anything. Disadvantages are that it can be complex to set up with some systems, and that people do not like to pay for electronic items unless they have a good preview or it is a high demand item.

6. Membership websites - A membership website has to have something that people want badly enough to pay to get it. If you have instructional information, humor, articles, a large amount of images, downloads, reviews, or anything that people cannot get elsewhere, that they would want to pay for with a one time fee or a subscription service, then you may be able to make a go of it. The advantage is that it can be 100% electronically automated so that all you have to do is maintain the site. The disadvantage is that it is technically demanding to set up, and you will require either a lot of time to manually track memberships, or a significant investment to pay for the software to do so. You can start small though, and then upgrade to a better management system if it gains momentum. There is also a lot of competition there that is hard to fight, because a lot of sites set up as free access supported by ads instead of membership accessed. Some offer a premium "no ads" service also, but takers can be few. When it works, it works well, but it also frequently fails.

7. Affiliate websites - Learn more about these before you decide for or against! You can read our instructions on the Shoestring Startup page. An affilate site is one where the income is made by your memberships in affiliate programs. You get paid a portion of sales made to your site visitors. You place links on your site to merchants, and those links contain a tracking code that lets the merchant site know that the customer came from you. There are a lot of technical issues to doing this well, and your expectations must be realistic. It can generate income if you do it right though, so learn how to do it right if you want to try it.

8. Affiliate programs - You can create an affiliate program for your store. If you sell anything you can attach an affiliate program to it. You will have to pay your affiliates for each sale, and you will have to either pay a third party company to manage the program for you (easy but potentially costly), or you can do it yourself which takes time and organization on your part. The advantage is that you don't pay for the advertising unless it generated a sale. The disadvantage is that you also have to market your affiliate program, and it is still no guarantee that you'll generate sales. I personally feel though that it is worth the time for any online merchant to set one up and at least give it a try.

9. Info site supported by Ads - These are all over on the net. We have a booklet on the subject on our Shoestring Startups page. The advantage is that information can come easily to some people, so for them to create an infosite is less complicated than other types of sites. Overhead costs are very low if you keep your site costs low. Once it is started, you can just maintain it and income grows as site popularity grows. The disadvantages are that site popularity may not grow, and that returns from ads are very small unless you generate a ton of them. If you have more than one business line, you can use your own ads on info-pages.

10. Download site supported by Ads - You can put any kind of downloads on the site. It is the same as having electronic goods for sale that people pay for, only you can link to free stuff or put your own free stuff on the site. Generally in order for this to make anything significant, you need to have a large amount of items linked to it.

11. Support Community supported by Ads or membership fees - There are many of these online also. In order to be successful they have to offer something that free sites cannot - safety, no ads, expert advice, etc, and they must be very popular or people won't pay. One of the major disadvantages is that in order to be successful they need a lot of members. It is hard to get a lot of members when you start out. So this might be something you could evolve into, but not something you could do right off. If you have an infosite and add a forum, you might later add a paid community. It takes a lot of computer resources, software, and programming expertise to do this also, so it is not something you can do without a good financial foundation. The advantage though is that once people come in, they usually stay.

11. Ads as a secondary income - You can stick ads on any page. This is done by virtually every major player on the net. A few corporations do not have Google ads and Amazon.com links, but even the big guys use them. They figure that if they do not sell you something, they might as well refer you someplace else and get a cut of that sale. Tastefully and thoughtfully done, ads need not be a negative thing, they are now pretty much a standard feature of any successful site. You can use third party ads, or your own ads for your own products in context.

12. Auctions - People lose their shirts in auctions because they don't research well or because they don't understand how the auction economy works. They work well in two instances: If you can get a product dirt cheap and sell it for a marginal amount, or if you have rare and high demand items that will sell for a high price because of hot competition. Either way, you can only make money if the item is in demand on eBay when you try to sell it (and that varies seasonally, and even through the week). Read the eBay Seller's Handbook before you venture into it (on the Shoestring Startup page). Because in spite of all those people who spectacularly bomb with eBay, there are those few who make it very well. I have a friend who buys used toys at yard sales, and sells them for profit on eBay. She makes a nice income doing it. She knows what will sell, how much it will sell for, and when to move on to something else though, and she does not deal in trash. Learn the rules before you try it!

13. Host a download link for someone else. Some software authors who publish free software cannot afford to keep their own webspace. Free space does not work well for downloads that get a lot of traffic, so there are a couple of software publishers that are always looking for hosts to park their download in. If you want this to work to your advantage, you need to do two things: Ask the software publisher to link to a gateway page on your site instead of directly to the download. That way you can greet the people who are downloading with an ad for your site, or with other ads. This way it can generate traffic for you. Secondly, put a link to that page on your home page, and on any other page in your site where it might be useful. Label it with a name and description that will clearly indicate that it is a free software download and the name of the software. This triggers the search engines to pull up your page on searches for that software, which gets you more traffic. This can work as both an income generator (through ads) and as a marketing tactic. Make sure you have sufficient space and bandwidth to do it though. We have a page with recommended hosting which will explain what will meet those requirements: http://www.adventuretech.us/ipowerweb.htm

There are other ways to generate income also, but most are simply variations on a theme. You basically have two choices, to sell something direct, or to make it popular enough with free access to make your money on ads. When making money directly you can do it with 1% of the traffic that you need when you are relying on ad income. The reason is that one purchase can give you dollars. One click through from one visitor to another site gives you pennies.

Either way you choose to go, you need to have realistic expectations, put in lots of hard work, and learn enough to know how to do it smart.

Adventure Tech-Web offers a website assessment service for $25. We check your site for functionality, design, efficiency, and accuracy, and make recommendations for changes. We also provide complete web design services including graphical design and content writing. Please ask us for a quote before you decide that you cannot afford it!