As of August 11 last year, I celebrated making my first million selling books and products online. I’m not saying that I’m an Internet guru, but I do believe that my experiences in making money online might help you get to your first million.
1. People are sick of marketers—especially online marketers
How many times did you close that long sales copy page a few seconds after it popped up unexpectedly while you were searching for something? People are already sick of such pages, and they would never want to come across one unless they were intentionally searching for it.
This means that in order to sell something, you should never let people land on these pages without warning. Instead, consider providing some kind of free content first that can assist in building trust. Once trust is built, you can sell anything to your customers.
2. Provide something different
How can trust be built online while the Internet is full of copycats, amateurs, and inferior websites? The only way to establish trust is to provide some kind of different content. You don’t have to be Einstein—you just have to do things differently.
- You can provide more in-depth information.
- You can organize your information in a better way.
- You can back your information with research, numbers, and charts.
It won’t make any difference how you decide to be different; what really matters is being different.
3. AdSense can help you buy a small car, but not a Lamborghini
I make less than $1,000 a month using AdSense, even though my site gets 500,000 page views per month. Okay, maybe my website is under-optimized, but even so, I don’t believe there’s enormous potential in AdSense. How much could I have earned if I’d optimized my site? $2000? $2500?
Four months after introducing on my site three ebooks that I wrote, my earnings increased almost ten-fold. Unfortunately, this is not some kind of magic tip that will help you become a billionaire over night—before I launched these books, I was busy building trust for two years, by applying the points above. But ultimately, you’ll need more than AdSense to make good money from your blog.
4. There’s no such thing as getting rich quickly
When I started my blog three people were working on it and we were all partners. After to years of very low earnings (a few dollars per day), the people who used to work with me decided to quit.
Fair enough. But today, one of the popular search key phrases on Google is “how to become a millionaire overnight” or “how to become rich fast”.
Blogging is not like the lottery, nor is it close to gambling. It’s the art of building with small bricks, and being patient to wait until the building is finally completed.
It might take a year or more before you start making a decent income from your blog, but as long as you’re following a plan and seeing good signs along the way, you’ll know that you’re on the right track.
5. Don’t listen to negative comment
In 2006, I was mad enough to tell people about my intentions. I was inspired by bloggers who made a lot of money at that time, so I told people what I was about to do. Here are some of the responses I got:
- A close friend: People don’t like to read. Starting a website is a bad idea
- Relatives: Focus on your career, son, and stop wasting time on your site.
- A friend behind my back: Farouk is wasting his time on projects that bring him nothing.
There were others. I received condemning email. My website was banned from Wikipedia because an editor their didn’t trust the information, and told me so in a horribly sarcastic email. We all have examples of discouragements like these.
Today, my site attracts 500,000 impression per month, makes me a five-digit income, made me a dot com millionaire, and silenced all of those who said bad things about it. Believe in yourself, forget about what others say, and you will succeed.
What other lessons can you add for the beginning blogger?
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