Starting out - which method to pursue after researching all I'm interested in

Hi Ryan,

You'll first have to decide what you can do/create to ensure that people want to engage with YOUR site.....as opposed to going to another site [bearing in mind that lots of other sites 'affiliate' to Amazon or indeed other suppliers].

You will be offering products that are available anywhere else and so you need to figure out what is different [has value] about YOUR site.

Remember....you'll be selling the same products as every other affiliate and supplier, including of course......Amazon themselves [that's where an awful lot of people search first for physical products].

So....WHAT you sell is not really important. HOW you get traffic to your site AND how you ENGAGE with them is what you need to figure out first.

When you've figured that out, you can think about what you are going to sell [and all the other details surrounding your new enterprise]. Don't be fooled into thinking it's all straightforward....it isn't. DO NOT INVEST BIG MONEY into any type of training yet.

I suggest you look for a successful person or website that matches your ideal vision of success.

What motivates you? What are your talents? What are you interested in? How can you help others? How can you fulfill your highest potential?

Study the leaders in the area you choose, then you can reverse engineer to create your own success.

Look for how they make money-- either through selling advertising, affiliate sales, services, info products, or physical products.

And look at how they drive traffic-- through SEO, social media, partnerships, etc.

Find something you can excel in, find a unique angle you can use to set yourself apart from the pack.

Be honest with yourself about what you are willing to do, what you are good at, and what you ultimately want out of life.

What kind of business will motivate you to become better and allow you to enjoy life?

Congratulations on being able to pay for school with money you made online, that is quite a feat! Sounds like you have a bright future ahead of you.

The very best advice is to do your homework before spending any significant amount of money. Internet marketing is so huge / many ways to get started and it's not as easy as many will want you to believe.

I personally don't like any of the things you mentioned, as I'm completely biased towards lead generation rather than trying to produce sales.

For the past 16 years, I have been promoting PPL (pay per lead... lead generating) offers.This is because there is no credit card / purchase required to complete an offer. All a user has to do is fill out a form, so conversion rates tend to be much higher compared to offers that require a sale to be made.

You can find PPL offers at most CPA networks. This is the simplest way to get access to them.

You can become an affiliate directly with the advertiser / offer owner. You can usually get a higher payout this way, over a CPA network.

Last but not least, you could develop your own offers and sell the leads directly to the end users. This requires more work and has more risk, but offers the most reward.

I've done all of the above. For anyone starting out, the first is the easiest.

I favor offers that have a make, get or save money benefit to them, as they have overall worked the best. They also tend to have the greatest mass appeal (will be of interest to a large general audience), so the potential exists to produce high volume and they are fairly easy to cross promote on the back-end.

Some of the verticals I have done extremely well with are: education, insurance, loans, debt, credit, mortgage, assistance, discount offers, homeowner offers, etc...

The bulk of the offers that I promote pay around $20-$40 per lead, but I also promote offers that pay more and less. However, you don't want to get caught up solely on what an offer pays because how well it converts is just as important. For example, if you have an offer that pays $9, but if it converts at 2X or more of a $20 offer, then it will perform about the same and possibly better. At the same time, if you have an offer that pays $90 and it converts poorly, it may not even be worth promoting.

Everything I promote is about mass appeal and the path of least resistance to generating conversions / $$$. It is far easier to get someone fill out a short form than to get them to pull out their credit card and make a purchase. So why struggle with trying to sell this or that, when you can provide free information that users want/need and get paid well doing it.

The online lead generation is a multi-billion dollar industry. Done right it can be far more profitable than many imagine. Everyone that I know that is in the business and knows what they are doing, for the most part, does 6-7 figures. While that's a huge range, much comes to one's ability to scale and effectively build / manage the infrastructure needed to scale.

Something you may want to consider while you are doing your research.

I was very surprised to see the question "is Amazon FBA or Shopify E-Commerce still viable?being asked.

The majority of online buyers go directly to Amazon to find the item they want to purchase. Amazon has HUGE buyer traffic and very high consumer confidence. IMO it is extremely obvious to have some of your inventory listed on there site, particularly when they do all the fulfillment and customer satisfaction for you.