How To Get Rich Online

I have read many articles about how to get rich online. I'm not quite there yet myself, although we are making far more money than any of my dozens of jobs ever provided. Here are some of my thoughts on making money on the internet.

First of all, there is no one sure recipe for success. I know people who make good money buying and selling domain names, something I not only have no idea how to do, but also don't have the right mind set for. I know another businessman who sells a million dollars annually in products online. I think I could do that, but I have always hated the idea of having to ship things and - in his case - hire employees.

My wife and I have a simpler formula. We create websites full of great information, mostly about things that are of some interest to us (fortunately I have a lot of interests). We have websites about money, real estate, backpacking, brainpower, meditation, Spanish lessons and more.

To make money with these sites we simply have pay-per-click advertising and links to affiliate products that we make a commission on. No products to ship, no retail customers to deal with, and we make money while we are sleeping or on vacation. We like that. I have also been selling ebooks for a few years now, so I do have to check my email when I can to resolve any customer issues with downloads.

Of course to make big money with this design, you need big traffic. For us, the single best way to get that has been by promoting the sites with articles that we distribute through article directories. That process is detailed in my ebook You Can Make Money Writing.

How to get rich online? Although we are not yet rich, our own experience is that you get there by consistent work. We have managed to keep growing despite the current recession. How? Here's a simple plan:

1. Keep learning.

2. Keep trying new things.

3. Keep repeating the things that work.

Some Bad News?

I don't want to discourage anyone from trying to get rich online, but I do want to tell you what you can expect. First of all, although it's getting easier to get started online, it's also more difficult to make money. There is just a lot more competition. I'm glad we started when we did (late 2004). There are still great opportunities, but be prepared to plan long-term and be patient.

You'll see a lot of simple explanation of how to make big money online. For example, once you have a website, you'll open emails that say something like this: "Just link to my product on your site or introduce it to the people on your mailing list and you can make thousands of dollars per month." That will be followed by some simple math: You make a commission of $30 on a $50 product, for example, and "all you have to do make $55,000 annually is sell just five each day.

The truth is that there are plenty of good products that offer commissions like that (ebooks and other downloadable products offer the highest-percentage commissions). And yes, if you sell just five each day you'll make $55,000 each year on that one product. Find a dozen more products like that and do the same and... well, getting rich online sounds simple, doesn't it?

Reality check: It will be rare to find products that convert more than 1% of the traffic you send to them into buyers, despite the hype. You also will be lucky to have more than two of every hundred visitors to your site click on any given link. So if you have 750,000 visitors to your site this month, 15,000 of them are likely to click that link and of those 150 are likely to buy the product - 5 per day on average.

Now, more realistically, if you have 15,000 visitors monthly after building your site presence up for months, perhaps 300 will click that link and 3 will buy, netting you $75 for the month or $900 for the year from that product.

I don't mean to discourage, but to prevent discouragement when you look and wonder why with thousands of visitors you're not making money. In most niches you'll need at least tens of thousands of visits monthly to make a decent living, and hundreds of thousands to get rich. That is possible. We have hundreds of thousands of people visit our sites every month. But it took a few years to build to that level.

How do you get rich online? Start right now and keep working at it. Difficult or not, it sure beats having a job.