How Long Have You Been TRYING (unsuccessfully) to Make Money Online?

good question..

being trained in business finance and management myself.. i think maybe i have a slightly different outlook on IM than others on here.

truthfully speaking.. i often see a lot of people on WF 'deceiving' themselves.. i know this post might offend a lot of people but just take it as food for though.

you buy 1000s WSOs and spend additional $$$ on SEO and domain/hosting etc etc all for what? to create sales and generate and income correct? but i suspect what most WF members dont do is to actually tabulate how much is coming in and how much is going out.

spending $5000 up front to make a $20 sale is not good business practice. that is a terrible ROI of 0.4%/month. and 80% of WF members will probably even not make a single sale.

looking at it from another perspective.. if you make $500 a month, well good on you. but my question to you is, how much stress and headache and time wasting have you spent to get to this 500$? u spend $100 on SEO and another $100 on content and you think wow profit of $300? but how many hours did you take? 3 hours a day, every weekday = 60 hours. 300/60 = $5.. you're only making $5 an hour. why not take a job at macdonalds and earn more money? if even learn trading which can make you a 1000% return on good days.

i think this actually applies to more than 80% of the people here but no one will admit that.

yes, there are people making 6 figures every year.. but how few? it's like how there are billionaires in this world.. BUT HOW FEW?? 1 billion people think that they are smart enough to become a billionaire.. only less than 0.000001% actually becomes a billionaire.

i'm not just talking out of my butt here..

i just started on IM recently.. but i am not in IM because of the money.. i am doing it because i love writing about my passion and want to share my knowledge with people. i don't do backlinking.. i don't do SEO.. (i have to admit i have been very tempted by being here on WF).. i just do what i love.. as a hobby and as a passion.. my site is 2 months old and i just put up adsense yesterday and i made 35 cents.. i was over the moon.

bottom line is.. if you are in this to make money.. you'd better MAKE MONEY (not $20 after spending thousands of $$) or else spend your time doing something else.

if you are in this because of passion, then your income will be intangible.. money is just an additional benefit..

sorry for the long post.. just my 2 cents..

It is not that hard getting the first $. A whole different story is getting enough to make a living out of it.

When your money depends on companies such as Google and Clickbank and Amazon you'll always have fear of losing what you've worked for.

It took me about 1 month on the start to get my first adsense click, which was worth 4c.

You wouldn't want to know years +

Only money I've got from online is coming first in a game spot competition last year which got me around £3000, jesus i need to sort my crap out this year.

I've been online for 2 years now, and I do make money the only problem I have is that it's not consistent. Some weeks I can be doing $xxx and other weeks I make absolutely nothing.

Bobcarl - awesome post!

being in finance, let me say it like this to you.

Backlinking, SEO and Adsense are to IM what an interest bearing savings account is to finance. Does it work? yes. will it earn you money? yes. Is it worth it? probably not, there are much more efficient and profitable ways to earn money.... think on that as you deal with IM



Daniel,

that is a valid fear...so your income should NOT depend on google, clickbank, paypal etc



EVOLUTIONS & JGEEKED, did you ask yourself the 3 questions?


Trevor - good point.


High hopes, the truth is: the principles for offline success are the same for online. IM is NOTHING BUT offline Mail-order Marketing tactics - 100%

Very true igrowyourbiz. Marketing is Marketing, no matter where it is. I think most people don't truly project themselves as Internet Marketers and thus never grasp a true meaning of it. Also, business is business and you need to run it like one if you want to succeed online. Alot of hours in front of comp and prob some headaches to go with them are just part of it. For me...I advise three things. Plan. Execute. Evaluate. If you come up with a big fat goose egg so be it but don't just give up. Learn and grow is my philosophy.

Jim

great advice by JW & Torrey!

Plan.Execute.Evaluate

and

NEVER QUIT!

The operative word here of course is "trying" - are you really putting effort into it? Or just dabbling. Dabbling doesn't get you anywhere. Real effort and hard work does, and will.

Although I am not making full time income I am making some income consistently. Its a grind doing internet marketing. The one thing that transformed my marketing was creating my long term vision. One day I just had enough of jumping from plan to plan. I was sick of being disappointed from the latest and greatest guide. I took a good solid week of brainstorming on what I wanted to dedicate the next several years of my life to. I then started to sculpt the plan and implement it. I no longer have the shiny object syndrome. I just stick to the plan and make the tweaks to keep climbing uphill. That allowed me to finally see some tangible results.

11811 as a coach, I know a lot of people SINCERELY TRY HARD...they just are following the lies of shovel sellers so they don't get anywhere

James - AWESOME - keep it up!

16 people have been going at it for 6 months or more and not made any money...


have you guys asked yourselves the questions? did asking give you a different outlook?

Well, I started on June 2011, started with amazon affiliate niche sites. Sometime around there, amazon affiliate was unavailable for California resident's due to some new law. So, I changed to micro niche sites with adsense. Because around when I was learning, there were lot of reports regarding adsense. But, I knew how to make, but was dumb at SEO and driving traffic. I just wanted autopilot websites lol. While buying those established websites on WF, there was one scammer.. who made many of client's adsense account disabled.. I got new adsense account but they disabled again because my sites already had history of invalid clicks. I have made my first commission selling micro niche site also without providing offpage SEO like they do today. Made about $xxx but I outsourced most of the work and actually all the provider's delivered very late so I quit that too.

Now, I am currently studying about CPA. Promoting both on minisites and facebook. Have started recently, so I guess I will be seeing some revenue soon from this method.

The point is, just like how igrowyourbiz said, Plan.Execute.Evaluate, it is so easy to find the free information here on WF, so learn it and plan it, and actually DO IT, don't just sit around feeling all confused, you have to try and learn from mistakes, and you will see the results. Nothing happens right after the very next day. It takes time, so have patience.

Nice post. Thanks for putting this out there.

Define try?

I am actually making a full time living online now which is great, but it took about 2 years to get this consistent and I wasted a long time in the beginning.

I think for those who aren't making money the biggest stumbling blog is going from one BS product launch to the next I know this was the case for me.

People starting out should stop thinking of it as "make money online" andfast overnight money and start thinking of it as building a real business, to begin with you need to work hard then and only then will things get easier and you can start to automate things and start to live the dream IM lifestyle where things are a lot more auto pilot.

Its ridiculous to think that you can start producing decent stable income overnight like all these flashy hype filled product launches promise, the best advice is get choose something stick with it and work hard, and unsubscribe from the 20 useless mailing lists you are undoubtedly signed up to, trust me this is just a distraction you don't need.

Well this quiet little poll popped-up with a handful of condensed wisdom, didn't it?

I would like to see where each of you are at this time next year.

Thanks to my programing skills i've made my first dime after a month or so by making a nice script that i thought can help marketers (i was wrong but i still made some money out of it lol).

Actually making money online can be really frustrating and sometimes i felt like I'm gonna throw myself out of the window if i will not make my dollar now!

Anyways I'm still here and more successful than ever, I just have to tell you guys how important is to NETWORK with other people, to have a whole bunch of JV's and no.. I'm not talking about JV's that will sell your ebooks I'm talking about partners that will share anything they got with you and you will do the same for them.
Basically networking was more important for me than whole the "magic words" pack such as "Take Action", thanks to my partners i was able to do more money than i can waste in a year on the Christmas alone.

Another thing i have in mind which helped me a lot is research and creativity. people here think that can make a living out of IM if they will waste all their precious time on the Warrior Forum or even worse.. buying ClickBank "Get Rich In A Click" products.. guys you must understand that IM is huge and the possibilities are limitless, SEO, Adsense, PPC, Facebook, Amazon and Products releases are huge and there is a lot of money in it but that's far from being the only ways you can make money online. What about Media Buys, Silver Path, The ADULT Industry (which is totally forgotten by the IM's for some reason and it makes more money every week than Facebook makes in a year) and a whole loads of other stuff?

When i was just starting my career as an Internet Marketer i has completely no clue about how should i do stuff and what other markets and techniques are available to me until i decided to stop lurking the WF whole the day and to look for other methods i can make money with.

My first `real` money was when i took a screenshots of a product (it was a wp-plugin) and then i started to analyze and reverse-engineer the sales page and the plugin itself, after two days i've found a developer on oDesk that agreed to make the exact same plugin just with my little creative tweak for $1k and believe me or not starting from like a year and a half ago and till now this stuff still makes me around $300 a month. The point is - stop reading too much of the same fluff and go do a research on some other markets, find something that works -> and do the same! It can be approached with almost any niche e.g look on someones ads and do the exact same ad from scratch and it will be yours, proven to work and the only thing you will need to do is play with the BID's and your balance.

I wrote so much stuff now, I'm not sure it will help someone and I'm not even sure someone will understand what I've done here but it was worth a try

Search for Friends (sounds funny),
Research and be Creative,
Don't Give UP!

Best Regards,
Rico S.

To be honest, I think it took me 1 month to make my first money online offering services. It was a hard start, I agree, I was quite skeptical at first so I didn't really put much work in that 1st month, only after I made my first money online. That was a $35 project and it felt AMAZING. Of course, just having them in my PayPal account meant nothing, I had to withdraw to my credit card to actually believe the "miracle"

For some people it takes months for some just weeks and some it takes years. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who will never make a penny because they have the wrong mind set. The important thing is to learn from your mistakes, focus on one thing at a time, and to take action. Too many folks expect a million buck over night and it isn't going to happen that way. I hope this thread shows noobs it takes time and work, itll happen if you put in the effort but it won't happen automatically.

I've been toying with the idea of making money since 2001. I made a few dollars here and there but it was only when I did service-oriented jobs did I make any money. Now here it is 2012 and I'm back at it again trying to brainstorm on how to monetize my blog; which by the way is still not up and running and thinking of ways to get traffic.

I can tell you my problem stems from not actually trying. I totally have information overload syndrome and shiny ball syndrome.

My goal for this year is to actually map out my tasks and plan a logical route to establishing myself on the web. Oh and I'm sticking to one program each that deals with (1) info product creation and (2) affiliate marketing...plain and simple. I can always tweak and adjust but this moving from one program to the next is nonsense.

For anyone else who has the same syndromes as me...I've found we can succeed if we:

- believe in ourselves (don't doubt yourself, too often we feel like we don't have the looks, smarts, connections, etc...and in truth we have all the skills & talents needed to be successful and prosperous. Case in point...and no offense to any fans out there, but seriously...are you not smarter than the Kardashians? They are earning big money with absolutely no talent!)
- stick to a plan (preferably one which is written out and worked consistently and persistently),
- make a vision board and view it everyday,
- seek out mentors. Send an email, a note, call...without being a pest of course. You'd be surprised how many people are willing to give you a nugget of valuable advice, only if you ask!
- and last, do not give up after one, two or several failures. Treat failures as test drives!

I've achieved success in other areas of my life which were not IM-related and those were the "rules" I followed. And I never wasted time seeking 10 different programs to achieve my goals...I just did it.

So, with that said, I'm going to follow my own advice and work on making some $$ in 2012 with my blog! Good luck to everyone this year...2012 is going to be a great year!

BTW, great thread by the OP!

ahhhh that first nickel from adsense....