5 years online and nothing to show for it

Try and focus on one thing, choose something that you are comfortable with and make a plan which is divided into daily,weekly, monthly etc. If you need information there's plenty available on the forum. If you have questions at any point you can post your questions after making sure that the information is not already available by doing a search.

I barely make anything online too. I think its more common than not.

"Cracking the code" makes making money online seem like some Holy Grail.

Translate that into the need to learn a new skill.

This skill is learnable.

It has been said that about 97% of people who try to earn money online do fail. This is because they don't take time to understand the process.

Here's a quick blueprint for the 3 steps to making money online.

• Find a Profitable niche
• Build a list in this niche
• Market related products to your list

It is very easy to get distracted and go off to chase the next shiny product, or push-button riches before you have learned this process.

So
- do you have a niche?
- do you have the capability to build a list - online form, autoresponder?
- have you identified related products to sell to your list?

Perhaps it's time to go back to the drawing board and re-gather your thoughts. All is not lost.

Regards

You are suffering from information overload, stick with one business model such as affiliate marketing and you will start seeing some money

don't worry you are not the only one still tring myself.

5 years is very long period of time. You are doing something wrong. Try focusing yourself on only one thing until you make some money. Don't jump around from one way of making money to another.

When you say "nothing", surely you're not talking literally. You must have SOMETHING to show for it. If you're exaggerating your losses because you expected to be an "industry expert millionaire" by now (as most of the users on here self-proclaim themselves to be including me), you're simply following a big BS bandwagon.

Focus is absolutely the key. There are many different ways of making money online, but you must pick one model and stick with it. It is very easy to lose heart before you start to see results, and get distracted by the next 'shiny object' that comes along. There ARE lots of people making money online, and they do not have any special abilities that you or others do not. Pick a proven strategy that suits your skills, and see it through to the end.

how much time do you put in internet marketing every week? how many sites of you have to spend more than 6 months working on?

Want to know what's working?
-Adsense
-Affiliate marketing
-Product creation
-Writing
-Graphic design
-Website design
-Social media
-CPA
-Flipping domains
-Backlinking services
-Consulting
-Joint Ventures

There are TONS of things that are working for people. TONS.

If you've been doing this for 10-15 hours a week for 5 years, you should at least know how to do basic SEO, right?

So provide a service- sell the shovel to the gold miners instead of trying to mine gold yourself.

Or you can keep trying to dig for gold for the next 5 years and not have a penny to show for it.

The secret to success is doing work to fulfill a need- period.

If you give up you will not succeed at making money online.

If you do not give up, then you might succeed.

If you never give up, and if you have unlimited time, then it seems that you would likely succeed eventually.

I certainly feel your pain! Perhaps you should really consider what you WANT to be doing. People are making money online doing thousands of different things, but you have to find your niche.

It is frustrating chasing every pot of gold only to end up shortchanged. I think that you need to really decided what you want to be doing and go after it. For example I tried my hand at offline SEO and did good with it, but I didn't enjoy it, so I moved on to other things.

I would say you are approaching this from the wrong angle. All the things you mention in your first post can make money - but only if you learn how to get traffic to your site.

Stop worrying about how to monetise your site and concentrate on keyword research - finding keywords you think you can rank on p1 of Google for. Then start learning how to get your site onto page 1 of Google. Once you start getting traffic to your site(s) you can monetise in a variety of ways.


Traffic is the key.

Rosetrees advice is right.. focus more on getting traffic. Thats what seems missing to me. When you rank, then you'll have traffic and visitors to test your page with.

No everything works for all the people - you need to find what works for you

I first made money selling records on ebay and then created my own info products which sold in the first week of my site going live but I knew it was a small niche

I tried affiliate marketing and never made a penny (still haven't to this day) where many people swear by it as being the best and easiest way to make money online. For whatever reason it has never worked for me.

You just need to find what works for you and once you do - scale up!

arabmoney,

You probably know more than 99.9% of the people in your country about internet marketing if what you say is true.

I am in the U.S. and do you know what? Some of the best coaches in our professional sports programs never made it as an athlete? Yet they still coach professional athletes.

You may make an excellent candidate as a consultant (as one of the other Warriors mentioned). People will pay you money to help them market online. Many offline businesses have no clue how to do this and chances are you can help them.

Good luck.

u must read more and more

Ya agree with what everyone says about focus. Always better to focus on one business model on one or two markets and really go deep into them, rather than trying out all sorts of different things but not going anywhere with them. It's not about 'cracking the code'. The code is not really a secret at all. It's really guts and persistence, and focusing on the long term.

I used to have the same problem and lost a lot of money in Forex, but have since started to work smarter and focusing on one thing at a time. Once I started seeing success in one thing, I moved onto new things to add to my streams of income. The key for me was to focus on one thing without giving up before moving on to something else.

The thing about your issue is that everything works.

You probably have not focused on one thing long enough to really reap the benefits.

I made my first dollar with SEO and have made many thousands since that first one. Its all about breaking the seal because once you do that, you'll know exactly what it took to get to that point and can then rinse and repeat.

Since then, I've made money with just about every main stream method these days. CPA, PPC, affiliate marketing, SEO, list building, email marketing, blogging, youtube, and many many others.

For you, pick one, stick with it, and HUSTLE YO BUNS OFF!

Also, you need to either leverage your time or your money. Use whichever one you have more of.

If you have lots of money to invest, do PPC and buy Solo Ads.

If you have lots of time or are on a budget, do some SEO, YouTube and other free forms of traffic generation.

There is no magic button.. The only way any of the systems that many share on this forum work is to take action.

If you take action on anything, you are going to make money.

Example... Today you can go and create a gig on fiverr.com and tweet that gig to all your contacts. You will sell a few of them and pocket few dollars.

And if you want to carry on making money, then just stick with your plan, do not look for the magic pill.

There are just too many, get rich tonight softwares and programs out there. My take is that most don't even tell you anything about IM.

IM is all about taking baby steps and working hard..

But once you do the initial work, then you can enjoy the benefits.

try and focus on one thing , take it step by step , I recommend to start in affiliate marketing , and building your list . it will take time , but you need to do it the right way

Stop looking for how to make money and start looking for how to deliver value to people who need it. The money will follow.

i can feel your pain. though i have been at it for only one year. The truth is that its not as easy to make money online like how to so called gurus always say. However i thinks its still possible to make good money here. this forum should help. Jus come here as match as you can per-week.

Hope things change soon for you.

best regards.

Here is the process.......
1. Find a niche with an attainable market ! can you get to that market for little cost to you. (try micro niche finder)
2. Build a squeeze page or go to Elance and get someone to do one for you.
3. Build a website or go and get someone to build it for you.
4. Offer great FREE content to get people to sign up to your list.
5. Offer great FREE content on your site, go overboard on giving great content.
7. Autorespond your list by using Aweber, still offer great content and build a relationship.
8. As your list builds respect for you then can review products in your chosen niche, or make your own, and offer those products to your list, with a handsome guarantee.
9. Make cash from sales as you promote to your list through your autoresponders so people are all purchasing at different times from you.
10. The ultimate would be to build a membership site in your chosen niche, continuity cash is the way to go as you get regular income each month as you keep adding regular content.

BUT ALWAYS REMEMBER, STOP THINKING HOW MUCH YOU CAN MAKE AND START THINKING HOW MUCH YOU CAN GIVE !!

All the best,
Steven.

Some great tips here - I agree with the "focus on a single strategy" idea. I'm still in the beginning, but I've got my plan ready and I'm going to work hard on it until it pays off!

Good luck,

Andy

Get focused, get diligent, and stay committed...it's better when you focus on one niche/business at a time.

"Two little mice fell in a bucket of cream. The first mice quickly gave up and drowned. The second mouse wouldn't quit he struggled so hard that eventually he turned that cream into butter and crawled out."~Christopher Walken

It sounds like to me you're the first mice...don't give up!

Success for sure is a principle but I've seen a few people who came
online and the very FIRST thing they tried they made money with and
went on to great success. Yet, there are others who work just
as hard and never made a dime.

I once bought a software for $3,000 that was making some
users a ton of money with adsense back in the good old
days. I tried using the software following the same
directions and never made back my investment. That
was with over 100 domains!

Yet I was making money with a $247 software doing a
similar job on a smaller scale.

So sometimes it's just a small change that can make a
big difference and most of the times it takes an
outsider to recognize this. So asking advice here
is a great start.

Don't give up!

-Ray Edwards

This is a very information-intensive industry and one that perpetually changes at that. Fortunately, you don't have to know it all.

Just keep trying stuff out and measuring your progress consistently.

In 5 years, you must have found at least one thing (a system, idea, niche, subject, hobby, etc…) that you enjoyed working on over that time. Take a step back. Think about the one thing you most enjoyed working on over the last 5 years and take a second run at it. Learn more about it. Chances are that someone else is already making money with it. If it is engaging to you, you will be more likely to stay with it.

I have made the mistake of latching on to the next alluring thing, only to find out I really wasn’t that into it, and I end up abandoning the effort. You need to be who you are and do what you enjoy first. It took me over three years to figure that out before I started making any significant income online.

I call BS.

No one is that stupid to persist with absolutely no results after 5 years.

You need to focus on one method( one goal ), don't waste time on other
Be consistent
For start just think about your strong skills
Let say you are good in making graphics( logos, banners, icons, etc )
Offer it as service

Def not the only one with this problem.

Its why I signed up. Ha!

Build a squeeze page for your selected niche, rewrite the articles from ezine that get a ton of views and keep the same keywords that they use. Send the traffic to your squeeze page and give them something tempting to get them to sign upto your list. Within 5-6 months you will have 100's or 1000's of potential customers on that list that are dying to throw money your way. I struggled for ages and it is the worst place to be in were you are now. After you start seeing some cash come in, you can get people writing for you so it gives you time to do/learn other skills. I learnt this method from this forum and just stuck to it and its a piece of cake. Im only just starting to learn about SEO now so i can have a try at getting into google search.

I agree with sticking to one thing. The first time I made an affiliate sale that was significant (in my opinion) it was because I found a product I believed in, communicated with the product creator, and focused on making sales. You are going to have to spend time perfecting whatever model you choose. That may mean four hours each day link building, promoting, and more before earning any money.

Also, if you have any "skills" that you think would help the IM community selling them here would be a good way to start earning money. The important thing to remember is if you aren't willing to spend some time on one project (I'm talking a few weeks to a few months) you are going to have an extremely hard time finding out what works for you.

If you have been at it for 5 years with no success, you are doing something wrong.

If you have been working at it for over 5 years, it clearly isn't information overload, you should be well beyond that. However, there has been a clear lack of focus, if you have tried all those things. More concerning is that after 5 years, you can't elaborate of what the actual problem is.

It sounds like you try something and if you don't see results you move on to something else, rather than trying to figure out the problem. The problem is that if you don't figure out the problems with one of them, you likely won't succeed with any of the. Bottom line, is that it all comes down to traffic and conversion. There really isn't much difference between CPA, Adsense, or affiliate marketing. They aren't really different business models. Those are just different ways to monetize. It all comes down to traffic and conversion. How you get traffic is a bigger variable.

You don't give any indication as to what your problem is. That makes me assume that you don't know. You can't just put up a site and expect people to suddenly appear and start buying stuff. You need to work to get traffic to your site/offer, and you need to make sure that site/offer is converting that traffic.

You say you want to make your problem known, but you don't say what the problem is. "Not making money" is not enough. That could be caused by any number of reasons. Why aren't you making money? You can't expect good answers that will help if you aren't more specific about the problem.

As many people have already suggested, your first step is to focus. Your next step needs to be good product and keyword research. I think that is the biggest problem people have when they start, they underestimate the value of proper research in a niche/market before jumping into it. They either go for things that people aren't looking to buy, or they go too broad in the niche rather than targeting long-tailed keywords. If you don't know how to do keyword research, search the forums. There is a lot of information here, in the forums, for free. Everything you need to start making money is here. Just avoid the WSO forum when doing your search. That will just be more of a distraction. Then work on SEO, and make sure you are using analytics on your sites to determine what is actually going on with your traffic. Come back with more specific questions, and people will be able to give more specific answers.

Once you get the traffic, you need to get that traffic to convert. Far too many newbies put up simple squeeze pages, or load up their site with ridiculous amounts of advertising and wonder why they can't convert traffic. Know your market and make sure you are providing what your visitors are looking for.