See the biggest problem with earning money online is most people never get past the first step of making the first $.

I know how that feels, I was there once.

You have all this excitement when you discover the amount of money that can be made online, but then you try and fail.

That failure kills your inspiration.

If you let your failure drive your belief, it will kill your natural ability to leverage the power of the internet to ignite your income!

There are very few examples in history of a change were a person in any country in the world could go from poverty to a millionaire. The internet provides that money making power.

Like I said I know how it is to fail and lose inspiration. I was almost there when I was a newbie at internet marketing.

But luckily I didn’t let it happen or right now you wouldn’t be reading one of the top blogs on make money online.

To get to where I am today, I did exactly what I am going to tell you to do in this post.

This is the formula I used to go from a newbie to my first $100 a day and scale that $100 to $1,000s.

Rule number #1 is simplicity. Making things too complicated is a big reason most people fail online.

As most people fail they start searching for more information about how to make money online.

Then information overload sets in and everything becomes complicated.

That is not the formula to success. If you find yourself there now, you have to forget all that crap and focus on simplicity.

This making money online stuff isn’t that hard. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to make a $100 a day.

And to scale that $100 a day to $1000 a day you certainly don’t need to be a rocket scientist.

The hardest part in your first $100 a day is not losing your inspiration.

Yea you’ll have failure along the way. And you’ll think it’s hard, but all that thinking is making your life complicated.

Complication = failure online.

You have to get all that complicated stuff out of your head and focus on simplicity.

In my writing on this blog, I try to keep it simple so I can help you achieve success.

I want to help you, but I can’t do that if you make things complicated and kill your own inspiration.

Rule # 2 is making money online comes down to three things. Build traffic, build relationship with your visitors and convert relationships with visitors into customers.

That’s it. It doesn’t matter what market you are in. That’s the simple formula.

You don’t need to worry about all those other things that complicate your life.

Keep it simple!

When I started this blog I’d never blogged before. I had 100 reasons to make blogging complicated.

Instead I just kept it simple by building traffic and relationships with my readers, and the money followed.

And this blog isn’t the only time I used the three step formula. This is the exact formula that changed my life when I was a newbie and almost gave up on making money online.

I have used this formula in every niche I am in and it worked every time since I discovered it!

Rule # 3 relationships with your visitors is major lesson for you. People don’t like to be sold. That doesn’t mean people don’t like to buy.

People will buy from you when you give them extraordinary value.

You see this in the world around you everyday. Apple created extraordinary value with the iphone and ipad which has people in a buying frenzy.

You have to do the same thing in your marketing. That means building a relationship with your site’s visitors and giving them so much value they can’t help buying from you.

Just the other night I was listening to a webinar with one of the top internet marketers.

The value provided on this webinar was so great that all the listeners were just blown away.

By the end of this webinar the listeners felt like they had just hit the lotto for $20 million.

The value was so extraordinary one of the listeners told the webinar host “I Love You!”

This is a grown man telling the host (another grown man) he love him because he was so giddy about the opportunity to make money online with the information discussed in the webinar.

When you can achieve this in your marketing you have hit gold. You have provided so much value that visitors can’t help themselves to buy from you.

And it doesn’t matter what market you’re in. You have to brainstorm how you can add value and be unique.

What can you provide your visitors that your competitors aren’t? Is there specific information you can provide that makes you unique? Can you show an undercover video of information that is not commonly known?

Those are all things that make visitors see you different and explode your conversion.

Rule #4 take massive action. Without action none of the above three rules will ever work.

Yea you might fail at first but without trying you’ll never get anywhere.

If you find yourself not taking action ask yourself everyday what’s the worst that can happen.

That is an easy answer. You fail. But you learn. Or you succeed and change your life.

Either way you learn a ton, and that is better off then where you are with taking no action and sitting on your a$$.

When I first started online my ability to take action was killed by trying to find out how to succeed online.

I’d read sales pages, view forums and waste so much time I never had anytime to take action.

Until I shut all this out of my life, I never made a dime online. The day I figured that out my life and freedom changed forever.

So that is it for this post:

Keep it simple.

Build traffic & relationships.

Take massive action!

So what struggles are you having with trying to earn money online?

~Evan

I’ll never forget the year of 2002. This was the year I really became interested in how to make money online.

As a newbie, there were so many emotions that would flow thru my brain from the sheer excitement of the massive money making potential, to complete information overwhelm on how to do it.

Up until 2002, I had always had an entrepreneurial drive. But one thing that always held me back from starting my own business was how to work a full-time job and find the time to start a business on the side.

When I discovered making money online, that is when my entrepreneurial drive really began to ignite. I had finally found that opportunity where I could work a full-time job, and still achieve extraordinary income by starting a home business on my limited spare time.

In 2002, my first child was on the way, I was working a full-time job, and commuting one hour each way to work. I had such little time, between shopping for baby items, to preparing the nursery and working a full-time job.

Most of 2002, I spent from 10:00pm to 1:00am just learning everything I could. On the weekends, I would get up at 5:00am and work to 9:00am. I was starting from scratch with only a burning desire to make money online.

I remember it like it was just yesterday my biggest challenge was I didn’t know a thing about html, programming, marketing online or even how to make a website.

Things got even more challenging in 2003 when my son was born. My time got even tighter. I still wasn’t making any money online at this point and was exhausted from sleepless nights, both from raising a newborn and trying to learn about making money online.

I got so frustrated at times, and I wanted to give up. But fortunately I didn’t because in 2004 the internet finally began to change my life and income. I was seeing 2 years of hard work payoff.

I can remember the feeling when I cracked the five figures a month income barrier. About three months into 2004, I was absolutely blown away that in March my income had continued to grow hitting $6,623.

Every since 2004, I’ve been making a great living online. Here are some points I have put together to help you reach your income potential and freedom online:

Making Money Online Requires Focus

I know a lot of people trying to make money online today that are failing or overwhelmed. If this describes you I know exactly how it feels, because I was there in 2002 – 2004.

Focus is one of the most important factors that can separate online success from failure. With a mindset not filled with consistency and focuses its easy to fail online.

I came face to face with getting my own mindset and focus right in 2004. This was 2 years after I started online and when I finally started making good income online.

During this time as I saw my monthly income grow, I also noticed my entrepreneurial drive began to ignite.

By 2005, I had started jumping from niche to niche trying to make more money online. This one action left me unfocused with the wrong mindset and caused me to hit a painful slump.

Instead of getting my 3 money making sites on solid footing, I was jumping into niches that offered huge opportunity that I knew little about. My mindset was wrong and unfocused.

I should have been focusing on creating documented processes that could be outsourced and guarantee long-term success of my 3 sites that were making me a good five figures a month.

Fortunately for me as I saw my income begin to drop I realize I had to get my mindset right. I learned a valuable lesson that consistency and focus matters online.

I immediately began focusing on documenting the processes with my 3 sites. I needed processes that were well documented that I could outsource.

I needed my processes to be so good that each could be consistently repeated by someone else. I realized when I mastered this; I could then finally focus on growing my income in other niches.

To this day I never stop focusing on a site and move to another niche, until I have fully documented the business into repeatable processes that can be outsourced.

Getting Momentum

It’s important when you begin a home business online that you set very small goals and let the small goals sum up to establish your momentum online.

You’re going to be online a lot and it’s going to be easy to get distracted, but you have to push thru that. Don’t get information overload. Take small steps and develop small wins for yourself. Each small win will sum up to help you create momentum.

Momentum is like the law of compounding with investing. You’ll start off slow but eventually over time lots of small successes help you gain momentum which sums up to make your rich. Without momentum it will be difficult to make it online.

Most people start online thinking they are going to make a million dollars overnight. Unfortunately if you think like this it’s going to work against you and greatly prevent you from gaining momentum. There is nothing wrong with setting a big long-term goal, but don’t set your expectation so high that you’ll get discouraged.

When I started in 2002, I was just a normal guy with no technical experience that wanted to make money online. My overall plan was to eventually work at home by starting a high traffic money making website on the side. To realize this plan, I had a lot of things to do since I knew nothing about making money online.

I set small goals. The first was to make my first very basic webpage. To accomplish this goal I viewed online tutorials. I could have gotten all sidetracked on graphic design and stuff like that, but instead I just focused on making a super basic webpage.

My next goal was to make my first very ugly and basic website. Then when I accomplish that I had gained enough momentum to start building traffic to my very ugly and basic website.

By setting small goals I was able to get momentum and not get overwhelmed by all the things I had to learn to be successful online.

My first site was the most difficult and took the longest to build. But that experience helped me with my next two sites. Eventually I had 3 sites.

The cool thing is over the years I have expanded into many more niches, but I still have my 3 original websites.

All of my original three sites still bring me passive income today and I hardly touch them. Just last month’s my affiliate commission was $7,424.32 from these three sites.

To sum this one up, my thoughts are to not get caught up on the big picture when starting out, just get started, take small steps and gain momentum to get you going. Once you get going the momentum will feed on itself giving you unstoppable energy for success!

Pick A Market In Demand With Good Profit Margins

You’ll see a lot of people online tell you to follow your passion. While in spirit this is good advice, it doesn’t always work that way.

If your primary passion is a super small niche with little opportunity to make money, it doesn’t make sense focusing your energy on starting a business around it.

If your objective is to make money online, you need to pick a market that has enough demand and money making opportunities to make you a healthy income.

The market you pick might not be your primary passion in life. You might have to dig deeper inside yourself to find a market that interests you and also has money making opportunity.

Or you might even have to find a highly profitable market and change your belief to become passionate about it.

It’s easier to make money online by finding a market with true money making potential, versus entering a low demand market that you are passionate about that has little money making opportunity.

Stop Looking For The Next Big Thing

When you start working at home online, it’s easy to neglect working to surf forums and blogs looking for the next big thing. But guess what that is not going to make you anymore money.

You need to treat your business serious just like when you go to your full-time job everyday. Document your business processes into steps that can eventually be outsourced.

Focus on building unique content in your niche as this is one of the most important keys to building a high traffic website.

It’s easy to not write that next article and instead surf the net looking for ideas, but until you get serious about your time you won’t reach your full potential.

Change, But Don’t Quite

I remember when I started online in 2002, I almost quite. The pressure of knowing so little about how to make money online and trying to figure it out with little time was emotionally draining and very challenging.

After I spent months developing my first site, I was having a lot of trouble getting traffic to it. Month after month nothing was happening even though I spent a ton of time writing excellent content. Google just didn’t seem to like the site.

I almost quite, but instead I changed and began studying article marketing and SEO. I eventually realized it wasn’t Google that didn’t like my site; it was my site was not optimized for Google.

That one change paid off hugely and I eventually saw results with the site ranking in Google and many of the articles I wrote driving traffic to the site.

Not every change worked out as good as the above example. But on average changing and not quitting has worked better for me.

I would have never achieved making a good living online without making changes to what I am doing. Change is an everyday process with an online business. If something is not working don’t quite, simply change what you are doing and test new methods.

Sometimes what you discover in the process of change will surprise you.

In this post, I’m going to show you a very creative affiliate marketing example created by Tissa Godavitarne of ACME People Search.

People searches represent a huge market, and affiliates have substantial opportunity to generate income from this niche. What most affiliates do in this niche is just throw up a review landing page and send traffic to affiliate partners.

But Tissa created an “out of the box” business that combined two highly profitable markets and drives massive affiliate profits.

Market # 1

Tissa’s business model began by recognizing the huge opportunity in the people search niche market. To dominate the niche, Tissa created a very unique way to capture the market with his own search engine.

The ACME search engine is simple. When you search for a person it returns results just like Google does for keyword searches.

But unlike Google keyword searches, the Acme People search engine only provides partial data about the person being searched. If you want to unlock all the data, the search engine refers you to affiliate partners where big affiliate commissions are earned.

Another unique aspect of this business model is the auto responder feature.    Before referring you to an affiliate partner, the Acme search engine is setup to capture your e-mail address.   Your e-mail address is then placed into an Aweber autoresponder for future follow-ups on the person you were searching about.

In total there are 4 streams of affiliate commissions generated from the search engine. But those 4 income streams are only part of the story, market # 2 is where Tissa really distinguished himself.

If you want to see the search engine live and play around with it click here.

Market #2

The true power of Tissa’s people search engine is centered around another massive affiliate market, the online business market. Tissa recognized there is a huge barrier for people entering the online business market. That barrier is the technical skills required to get an online business running and actually making money online.

Consequently, Tissa, built his AMCE people search engine so that anyone at the “push of a button” can start their own affiliate earning search engine for FREE.

That handles the technical hurtle, but what about making money. Well Tissa did not stop short, he built lots of money making opportunities in his people search engine.

First if you follow Tissa’s 3 steps (1. Affiliatize 2. Monetize 3. Advertise) and flip his super affiliate switch, you will have access to your own people search engine which can earn money from 7 unique affiliate programs.

Four of the affiliate income streams are in the people search market itself and are earned when people do searches via your search engine.

The other 3 income streams are in the make money online market and have high conversions since you must complete the affiliate offers to get the maximum benefit from your search engine.

For each person you refer to start a free ACME people search engine, Tissa pays the below 3 affiliate commissions to you.

1. Referral Fees – If a user completes the 3 steps (1. Affiliatize 2. Monetize 3. Advertise) your referral earnings are as high as $30 per signup.
2. Global Domain International (GDI) Affiliate Commissions: Each time a referral sets up a free people search engine a domain is needed. When the domain is purchased from Global Domain International, 100% affiliate commission is paid. As an Affiliate of GDI you can also make money for every person who signs up under you or someone in your downline 5 levels deep.
3. HostGator – When you follow all Tissa’s steps and flip your super affiliate switch, you can earn as much as $125 per sign up from HostGator hosting for all your referrals. If people you refer want to flip their super affiliate switch then they must first get HostGator hosting from your affiliate link. A win win for driving hosting affiliate commissions to you.

Please don’t misunderstand this post as me selling Tissa’s system, because I am not.

What I want you to see is that with a little bit of creativity, you too can create value in any niche that will drive big affiliate profits.

If for some reason you want to learn more about ACME people search,
click here.

Many people in internet marketing focus on just plain old affiliate marketing because it appears very easy to get started. But with affiliate marketing you are putting a cap on yourself with earning the really big money online.

See, if you are creating your own products you have much more leverage in creating marketing funnel that upsells your customers and that leverages the power of joint ventures.

Think about it, would you rather spend all your time writing article and paying for pay per click campaigns to drive traffic to others or would you rather have other people drive traffic to you?

Obviously, the latter is more favorable for you, but in order to get joint venture partners you need your own products.

Getting the traffic is only one of the benefits of having your own products. The next benefit is the ability to upsell your customers and to create a marketing funnel.

Here is how it works. You offer a product paying a commission of 100% on all upsells to your joint venture partners. This provides joint venture partners substantial incentive to send you traffic.

Next, you set up your site with a squeeze page to capture the traffic as a lead via a free report, and have your marketing funnel set up via your auto responder to sell backend products to your leads.

Here is how a funnel may work:

Free report lead product –> $49 upsell report (100% commission to your joint venture partners) –> $97 audio product you created (100% profit to you) –> $400 home study course (100% profit to you) –> $1000 live seminar ticket (50% affiliate commission to you).

If you get 1000 visitors via your affiliates and can capture 30% of this traffic to the free report then 20% purchase the upsell and 10% purchase the audio course and 2% get the home study course and 1 person purchases a live seminar your results will be the following:

• 1000 visitors * 10% = 300 leads
  • 300 leads 20% purchase upsell at $49 = $2940 paid to your joint venture partners at 100% commission.
  • 300 leads 10% purchase audio course at $97 = $2910 in pure profit to you.
  • 300 leads 2 purchase home study course at $400 = $800 in pure profit to you.
  • 300 leads .1 purchase of live seminar at $1000 = $1000 at 50% commission = $500 profit to you.
• Your total income from your marketing funnel would be $4210 and best of all you still have the 300 leads to market to well into the future.

The above is just an example and obviously your results may vary. But this example does highlight the true power of a marketing funnel.

The nice thing about this whole marketing funnel is that there is no limit to the number of products you can offer. You could even include a membership site in the mix that pays you a great monthly commission. Best of all, the traffic was generated free by using the leverage of affiliate partners.