Want to Earn Money Online? It might be too late.
Here is why following common advice on making money online is not a good idea…
The Great Lie
Ah yes, the wonderful world of online marketing!
Many people promise you every day how to make a lot of money online. It’s quite simple. After all, they already make several thousand dollars a month.
Or at least that’s what they say.
I don’t want to judge whether their statements are correct. I’m sure they are. What I would much rather comment on is the fact that these are isolated cases.
- No, many people who earn money online can’t make a living from it.
- No, it’s not easy to make money online.
- No, it’s not quick money either.
The Truth
I recently came across this post by Anastasia Petrenko:
I had a 37K YouTube audience, and that’s what I earned and learned
It shows us that the world of making money online is not as rosy as it seems. What we have here is a competent content-creator who regularly publishes YouTube videos. She tells us her earnings for the work she puts in.
Short summary: It’s not that profitable.
Six hours of work for a video and at the end of the month you get $30.
That’s not a lot of money for six hours of work. Mind you, she had to upload new videos regularly. So she also needs the creativity and new ideas. It’s just not profitable. If you see it differently, please comment below.
Is It Over?
Damn, so what are we going to do now? Is it really that late? But a few hundred dollars a month would be enough for me. Isn’t there a way?
Of course, there are always ways…
The Problem Today
Many of these “methods” are designed for making money with popularity.
So if you generate a lot of traffic then you will be successful. You generate a lot of traffic because you are popular. You are popular because you represent the general opinion and create content again and again.
One of these ways is earning money through partnership programs. All you have to do is create enough content, represent the general opinion, and hope that enough people will read it. You hope to become popular.
Then you earn from the advertising revenue.
That’s another problem that is specifically true for partner programmes:
You don’t earn directly from a customer. You don’t even have a customer. You don’t build a business relationship. You earn because big companies pay for it.
You hang on the tit of big companies.
You are therefore dependent on such companies.
That is also a big problem.
And in the end, the big company earns the most.
Do you really want that?
Not in your control…
If your channel is taken away from you, you have no way to generate revenue from your subscribers. You have no opportunity because you haven’t built a business relationship. You have viewers but no customers.
It’s the same with Medium.
You have readers but no customers. No one here to pay you money for your content. Of course, there are some who pay $5 a month to read everything on Medium without restriction. But that’s not a business relationship with you, it’s with Medium. In the end, you only get a very small portion of those amounts, if anything at all.
The popular accounts will continue to earn the most.
And these are the very people you have listened to so far.
Of course they will continue to earn well. They were either the first or have already built up a certain popularity. But this is not very common. In fact, few new accounts will become so popular that they can live off the advertising revenue.
Popularity over skills?
So this way of making money does not count on how skillful you really are or how much value you give. That is the big lie.
Your skills are irrelevant.
The only thing that matters is how popular you are. You already have a huge advantage if you are looking decent or sexy. This is the reality of “making money online” today.
Under such conditions, why should someone who’s pretty still go to college?
There are more than enough reasons for going to college, but let’s not discuss them here. The problem is just that popularity is valued so much in this system and that charismatic good looking people have many different ways of making money. The recent surge in OF accounts is just one of many of such ways.
You know it.
I know it.
We all know it.
Is that a problem? Not really. Good for them. It is their decision. It gives them an advantage and they use it. But don’t think that you have it as easy. Because you don’t. But this is not what this post is about…
What this post is rather about is that popularity is valued over skills and that those who are already popular will continue to earn a decent amount of money while those who just started will have a very had time — unless they are good looking and/or charismatic.
So how can we earn money if we are neither popular nor good looking?
What to do about it?
I will try to show you something that will help you earn more money, or any money at all. You don’t need to be popular or become popular. Yes, you can use your skill and it doesn’t matter what you look like.
After all, money does not care what you look like and people who buy what they like do not care either. Unless of course you sell on OF, but that is a different story…
Geez, why can’t I stick to the topic?
Alright let’s go…
The Solution
Earn money in different ways rather than just depending on income from partnership programs. All the following methods are not get-rich-quick schemes, but you may find it easier to get a foothold in some of them.
1. Creating Books
If you already write on Medium, this is a great way to make even more money with your content. Write books and sell them on Amazon. It’s easy to do via KDP. No, A Book Will Not Make You Rich… But it has other benefits that are worthwhile in the long term!
2. Coaching
Once you have written a book, you can coach other people on how to write a book. Or explain other things to them, whatever you already know how to do and where there is a demand here. Also, the great thing is that you can publish what you coach as information products.
3. Crypto
Buy low, sell high. There’s not that much to say. However, it is only possible if you already have a little more money at your disposal.
It does not matter what you choose to do.
Do something differently to what everyone else is doing!
Do NOT go where the masses already went…
Conclusion
There are many partnership programmes and you are dependent on one company. Is that a good thing? For some it seems to pay off, for others not. There is never a guarantee. Anyway, get away from what everyone is doing. Try something new.
Learn a little more about money by reading my book. Since only a few people have read it, that’s a good sign that the methods in it are not yet so popular that everyone is doing them. I am pretty sure you will learn something useful from them.
