Why You Should Make Money Online Part Time

Is it really hard to make money online part time? It certainly is not going to be really easy, but is anything worthwhile really easy?     Here's a list of things that are very easy to do vs something that requires more effort:

• Ordering a takeaway pizza vs cooking a tasty healthy meal
• Watching football on the TV vs working out
• Reading a novel vs writing a book
• Playing computer games vs creating a computer game
• Browsing Facebook vs making real connections with people that are "crushing it" on Facebook

I'm going to let you decide which ones are worthwhile and which ones suck time away from us.  

How Can I Make Money Online?

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A quick Google search of this sub-heading will bring up hundreds of blogs with people telling you hundreds of ways you can make money online. From filling out surveys to selling domain names to selling your services on platforms such as Fiverr and Peopleperhour. These are all legitimate ways of making money online and they may be a great way to earn some side income whilst you are getting started online (providing you have the time to do this). However, what I am mainly talking about in this blog is affiliate marketing and creating your own online business. Primarily through writing useful content and providing links to other peoples products or services through "affiliate links" (click here to read more about how to use affiliate links). The goal is to eventually create your own products or services and set up an online business that provides an income without you having trade your time for money.  

What are the Benefits of Making Money Online?

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Make money while you sleep Without a doubt, the biggest benefit of making money online is that we can spend time today to pay us over and over again in the future. Jobs require us to trade our time for money. If we have a long-term sickness or do not turn up to work, we cannot make money. The internet has changed this old fashioned way of thinking about work. We can work in the day and get paid whilst we sleep at night. Most people get paid based on the number of hours they work each day. Making money online allows you to get paid by the second for 365 days of the year.  Unlimited potential Therefore, there is unlimited potential to how much money you can earn online. There are no pay scales and no promotions on the internet. There are just billions of people online with unlimited amounts of money to spend (if you understand the financial system today with quantitative easing [printing money] you will know how true this is). Small upfront costs compared to most businesses Making money online should be treated just like starting a business. Most businesses require you to put up a lot of cash to get started, such as renting office space, hiring staff, purchasing goods and stock etc. Getting started with your online business can be completely free. There are some things that you will need to put in place if you are serious such as website hosting, a domain name (your website URL- e.g. maketimeonline.com) or an autoresponder (a website that collects email addresses and automatically sends emails out for you). However, the costs of these are very minimal compared to most businesses. No staff required You literally do not need to rely on hiring, paying and managing staff. This is quite often what businesses will rely on to make them work effectively. You may have a super idea, a great product and vision, but you will always be relying on staff to carry your vision out for you in the majority of businesses (as you can't be everywhere all the time). Getting started online requires only one person. YOURSELF. You literally get all of the benefits of the work that you put in and you don't need to worry about training, providing benefits or managing staff.  Start Part Time You can start part-time by putting in an hour a day or a few hours a week. You don't have to quit your job to start an online business. You can work on it at any time as you don't need to wait for opening hours and you can write on a word document if you haven't got an internet connection. Easy to scale This is a huge benefit of an online business! There are systems and things that you can do online to make your business go from reaching a handful of people to reaching hundreds of thousands, without changing what you do. Over 3 billion people all over the world currently use the internet. Autoresponders can send an email to 2 people or 2 million people. There is nothing you need to change to do this, you still just write one email and the autoresponder does the rest for you. Even though you do not need to hire staff, you can still outsource work that you do. For example, I am currently writing all of my own content, responding to all comments and advertising my own work all by myself. However, using websites such as Fiverr and Peopleperhour these tasks can be easily outsourced to professionals on an hourly paid bases.    The above screenshot is the outline of my post, which I do before writing anything. This could be sent to a virtual assistant to expand and write the content for me. You can pay people to reply to comments that you receive and you can pay for adverts to promote your website and "drive traffic" (bring visitors) to your website. This is when you know you have created a business and not only created another job. There is a big difference and being aware of this difference is what separates the most successful business people to someone that tried and gave up (I bet you've heard that 7 out of 10 businesses fail within the first 10 years before... this is a big reason why)  

Why Isn't Everyone Doing This?

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It is not taught in schools Our current education system teaches very little about starting businesses. There is pretty much zero good financial education within our schools.  However, the internet has really changed the business game. Teenagers can start an online business due to it requiring such little funds. You don't have to be an expert in anything, anyone can write/ record whatever they like and publish it online. The challenge is getting visitors to look at your work. This is a big reason why so many people try to "become famous" or use TV shows to "put their face on the map" (those people that go on Love Island [a British reality TV show in case you didn't know] each year are not as stupid as you may think!!) Most people don't know it's possible Most people finish their education without knowing what they really want to do. The vast majority of these people are completely unaware that they have permission to create a business let alone actually try to create one. Making money online is still seen as a "strange thing to do". Older generations generally have no idea this is even possible so why would they want their children or grandchildren to pass up on their education or "secure job" to spend time on something they do not understand? It's easy to get disheartened The results are not instant. There are programs offering amazing results overnight. They will promote their success stories of someone who earnt $10,000 in their first month of an online business. What they won't tell you is that this person already had 100,000 active followers on Twitter, a bank full of money to advertise and they worked on it for 14 hours a day solid for a month. So when the normal working mum with 3 kids puts in an hour a day for a month without paying for any adverts and doesn't earn a penny she thinks, "Why should I bother!?" Actually, an hour a day for a month is 30 hours, which is not even one full working week. Yet people expect to replace their full-time income straight away. To be in this game we need realistic expectations.  

But It Sounds Too Hard

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What is your Why? I want to tell you a quick story about what I have seen since moving abroad in 2015. In the first summer holidays when we started teaching in Qatar, Sarah and I went back to England and I dragged her to a free property investment seminar. I sold it to her on the basis that we are starting to earn more money and we should start thinking about what we are going to do with it. I'd read "Rich Dad Poor Dad" a few years before and I had become more and more obsessed with property. It was during the three day course that we ended up signing up to that I came across this question for the first time. What is your why?... strike 1. I had never even thought about this before. I had never even considered why I get up in the morning and go to work. What was my motivation? We were told to really think about it that night and we ended up writing something vague such as for our future selves (LAME!!!!) Anyway, the next year I went on a course with work and the PE team in Bangkok. When we walked into the first workshop, the screen on the slideshow said:

A man with a why can cope with any how.

The underlying theme throughout the 3-day workshop was to think about your story and what your WHY was... Strike 2. We then went back to work in our next year and the whole staff training was based on thinking about your WHY using your passion and bringing out the children's passions... strike 3! Finding a "why" is so important in anything that we do because when it gets hard, it helps us to continue. It helps us to know that what we are doing has a purpose and there is a reason for doing it. Be realistic Starting any business is hard. There is no way around this fact. If we can only dedicate half an hour a day to it when the kids go to bed then that's what it will have to be to start with. However, doing this for 3 months is the equivalent of one week of full-time work. So we should expect to see one weeks worth of results, not 3 months worth!! Make it a habit The most important thing here is doing it every day because momentum is so important. If we want to do 7 hours a week, it is much better to do an hour a day (at the same time) than to do 7 hours on a Saturday and nothing for the rest of the week. If we have 6 days away from it we will forget what we were doing previously. We will not be productive for all 7 hours as that is too long to work for in one go. So that 7 hours will probably be the same as about 4-5 hours of productive work.  There's always something that comes up! So making it a habit means you can choose a time when you know you haven't got anything else going on each day and it makes the workload more manageable. Set small targets that are not financial Rather than focusing on how much money you want to come in, you can set goals such as a number of words to write in a month or visitors to get to your website. You have more control of this and this can help you to ensure you are doing the key tasks each day instead of fretting about the big fat $0 in your affiliate account. Use support It can be a lonely process starting an online business. Whilst one of the benefits is that you don't have to manage anybody else, you also don't get to bounce ideas off your colleagues or employees like you would in most businesses. This is the main reason that I would recommend starting with a program such as Wealthy Affiliates. You can speak to like-minded people and get insights into what works for others doing the same thing.  And as the saying goes...  

"If it was easy, everyone would be doing it"

 

But I Don't Have a Passion

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I have written a post all about how to choose a profitable online niche. The most important part to remember here is that if you don't have a really strong passion for ONE thing in life, just choose one that works for you. You do have to be interested in it as you will have to spend time thinking about it and learning more about it. However, an interest is enough to get started. It will actually work more like this... Find a profitable interest... make money online... it becomes a passion. Don't worry if it's not a passion right now, get started and it's almost guaranteed to become one. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Choose something that you can see working online and maybe choose a sub-niche that you can start writing about. You don't have to be an expert right now. Let the internet follow your journey and if you stay consistent with it, you will become an expert.  

MakeTimeOnline Summary

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To sum up, it's important to remember that making money through affiliate marketing is still a business. It's not going to be super easy, but as long as you have a reason why you are doing it, then it will be easier to keep going when it becomes hard. You will never "find the time" to do anything, you have to make time. Set a time each day where you know you will be able to work on your online business. Maybe you can get up an hour earlier, or maybe when you get home from work. It doesn't matter when as long as you can be productive during this time. Look at the benefits again for creating an online business. Making money when you sleep, the small upfront costs and the unlimited potential outweigh any negatives of an online business for me. Remember, that if you are not sure what your niche should be, choose one and start. You can always change or retweak what you are doing to work better for you in the future. Keep changing for the better Mike   If you would like to see how I started my online business and what training I am currently using to grow it click here.