Can You Still Make Money Online?

By Carl Weiss

The concept of making money online is nothing new.  It’s what drove most of us onto the internet in the first place.  Back in the good old days before Google more or less monopolized search, there were real opportunities to grab the top slots on a number of search engines (some in as little as 24 hours), create an ecommerce site and get to it.  However, the game has changed to the point where there are now more than 300 million websites online with 130,000 new sites being spawned daily.  And they all want to be on page one of Google. 

While you can buy your way into the game with Pay-Per-Click campaigns, many people quickly find out that

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 in many cases generating a click doesn’t mean generating a sale.  As a result you can blow through your advertising budget on any number of search engines, social networks and video portals without turning a profit.  That’s the bad news.  The good news is that there’s more than one way to skin a search engine. 

Non-Traditional routes to Google Page 1

Websites aren’t the only thing displayed on page one of the world’s most popular search engine.  Videos, blog posts and social posts can also find their way onto the first page to those who know how.  Just as with websites, mixed media can also be optimized, particularly if you employ other Google properties to display your media. 

Got a video?  YouTube is owned by Google.  When you do a search on Google more often than not you 

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will find a YouTube cel on page one.  The cel leads to a YouTube video that has been optimized for Google.  While the googlebots can’t view your video, they can see the title, text, backlinks and keywords that wrap the video.  Savvy marketers have been using this for years to jump from YouTube to Google.  Better still is the fact that there will only be one or two videos on any given page and this could actually be more advantageous than having your website on the same page. 

Blogger is Google’s free blogging portal.  Just as with YouTube, properly optimized blogs can and sometimes do get placed on page one of Google.  Just as with video, the post and title need to be optimized so the bots will deem your post worthy of inclusion on page one.  It also doesn’t hurt to get your friends and family to read, comment on and repost your blog posts. 

Then there’s social networks.  While Facebook is currently the world’s most popular social network on the planet, Google+ is the only one owned and operated by guess who?  While some people have referred to G+ as a virtual ghost town, a number of savvy online marketers have used Google’s social network to leverage page one results. 

Is Being on Page 1 Enough to Insure Financial Success?

Sorry to say it but being on page one, even at the top of the page is not enough to insure success online.  It’s only a starting point.  Due to the fact that there are hundreds of millions of sites, people have become kind of jaded online.  That is to say that unlike a few years ago, most people are not going to take the time to click around your 32 page website to decide whether they should do business with you.  In fact, statistically speaking, you only have on average two minutes to dangle the bait and reel in the fish.  And if your offer isn’t all that appealing, then your results are not going to be anything to write home about.

This is why they call it online marketing.  Once you have satisfied the online side of the equation by generating a highly visible link on a search term that contains a great deal of traffic targeted to your product or service, then it’s time to put on your marketing hat.  More experienced internet marketers won’t even start a campaign until they have tested keywords, offers and results via some sort of pay-per-click campaign.  Spending a few hundred bucks to make sure you are going to succeed before spending months to generate organic results isn’t just a good idea.  It’s the only way to go if you are looking to convert cash to clicks.  It is also the best way to adjust your site’s look, feel and offer to maximize your return.

All too many people still subscribe to the Field of Dreams form of online marketing.  You know, “Build it and they will come.”  While they may come, that doesn’t mean that they will buy.  If they don’t buy, don’t blame the medium, whether search engine, social network or video portal.  Blame your offer.  Unless you have an exclusive way to solve a problem or save people money, this means that there is competition.  Competition is easy to find online, Google it. 

Before you start spending time and money constructing a website, shooting video or blogging, you need to see what the competition is offering for similar products or services.  If your product or service costs more and offers less, guess what? You had better start rethinking your concept for a successful launch.  This doesn’t mean that you have to give away the farm to bag sales online.  But you definitely have to offer at least a perceived value that is of equal or greater value than the competition.  As an example, a friend of mine ran a highly successful site for a number of years that sold plants.  The way he beat the competition was not by offering the lowest prices.  Instead he offered the longest guarantee that stated that if his plant died up to two years after purchase he would replace it at no charge.   He told me that less than one percent of his customers ever took him up on this offer.  As a result he was able to sell five figures worth of plants month in and month out.

Partners in Crime

A number of other successful online merchants have found online gold by partnering up with EBay and/or 

Amazon.  Especially if your business is retail in nature, either of these two mammoth online sites can give you quick access to a huge user base and simplified ecommerce solutions that are tailor made to jump you from retail to etail in a hurry.  That doesn’t mean that these portals are the best or indeed the only way to get into the game, since they both charge fees for promoting and/or selling your products.  But they are another way to buy into the game.

While there are no guarantees that your online store will make money in the short run, it will most definitely burn less money than a brick and mortar store, since you won’t have to hire more employees, invest in expensive displays and signage, or worry about the landlord doubling the rent.  The bottom line is that if you are serious about breaking out of your local market and selling nationwide, you need to be prepared to spend the time and money to test the water, build your brand and be realistic about your results as you build your online store.  If you can work out the bugs and find a way to turn browsers into buyers, you could find yourself wondering why you didn’t think of this concept years before.

Carl Weiss is president of W Squared Media Group a business that specializes in helping businesses go global.  You can hear Carl live every Tuesday at 4pm Eastern on Working the Web to Win.