2 Main Ways To Make Money Online

There are 2 main ways to make money online.

You can be:

1. A Merchant
As a Merchant, you SELL PRODUCTS or SERVICES you’ve created, or have the right to sell. You earn from the selling price.

2. An Affiliate for a Merchant
As an Affiliate, you REFER interested parties to a Merchant in return for a reward (usually money). You earn your money in a few ways, depending on how the Merchant would like to reward you. You can earn for referring interested 3rd parties to a web site (your Prospects click on your Affiliate Link to land on the Merchant’s web site), a lead (your Prospects fill up a form at the Merchant’s web site to get on the Merchant’s list) or a sale (your Prospects make a purchase of the Merchant’s product at his web site).

What you DO to earn your money determines what you are - either a Merchant or an Affiliate.

You can set up a Blog and update it with regular content that your readers find valuable. In this case you’re a Publisher. However, a Publisher can be either a Merchant or an Affiliate or both, depending on what he does.

As a Publisher, you can make money with the SPACE on your web site or within your e-newsletter. You can SELL the space there to interested advertisers - in which case you’re a Merchant (selling your own “product” - space).

If you team up with Google via their AdSense program and insert Google advertisers’ Ads within your web site content, and get a share of the advertising dollars paid by Google’s client to Google for every display or click on those ads on your web site, you’re Google’s partner, or “Affiliate”. Google does the hard work of finding advertisers, and it rewards you for helping them place their clients’ ads on your web site.

Google’s clients can be either Merchants or Affiliates of Merchants.

As a Publisher, you can also SELL SUBSCRIPTIONS to your content, in which case your content is now your product, and you’re now back to being a Merchant - even as you’re simultaneously selling space there.

Publishing can at the same time help with getting the traffic since valuable and regular content are appreciated by their readers who can then refer their friends to read them, who then get exposed to the ads (which can be the Publisher’s own ads for his own products) or Affiliate links within that content.

Most Merchants and Affiliates aren’t full-time Publishers as it can be very difficult to publish regular and valuable content all the time. Publishing can be outsourced, however - and the Merchant or Affiliate who solves this issue would benefit from a steady stream of Prospects and Customers from both the Search Engines and their readers’ word-of-mouth recommendations to others to check out the content.

The above puts the Publishing activity into proper perspective - even though I do occasionally put “Publishing” into its own category of making money online (and thus making it “3 main ways to make money online”) since “Blogging”, which is a publishing activity, is the “in” thing right now.

The following is a brief summary of what the Merchant and Affiliate does.

The Merchant’s main focus is on creating products, selling them, dealing with customer support and getting traffic.

The Affiliate’s main focus is doing the things necessary to give the Merchant what he wants from 3rd parties - which is usually a display of his ad to them, or a display of his web site to them, or having them get on the Merchant’s list, or buy his product. The Affiliate also focuses on getting traffic since that’s where it all begins for him.

Because there’s no need to create products or deal with customer support issues, many beginning Internet Entrepreneurs start by being an Affiliate.

I’ve been both a Merchant and an Affiliate. And here’s the juice.

When you’re an Affiliate, you’ll be competing with thousands of other Affiliates in representing the Merchant. You don’t immediately stand out, and you’re basically on your own. Becoming a Super Affiliate (where you earn much more than other regular Affiliates) isn’t going to be easy.

When you’re a Merchant, and you succeed at it, you can easily become a Super Affiliate since your very customer base will be your best Prospects for other Merchants’ products that you’re an Affiliate for!

But of course, being a successful Merchant isn’t going to be easy either. But with both being a Merchant and an Affiliate requiring quite a bit of effort to do right - why not start as a Merchant from the get-go because you’ll eventually be both a Merchant and an Affiliate - and reap the benefits of both?

When people start off as an Affiliate, they don’t usually end up being Merchants. And by being in this position, they miss out on what being a Merchant can offer. It’s another stream of income - and it’s usually not even considered by most Affiliates.

Not that being a Merchant is extremely difficult to be - because it isn’t. I’ve been a Merchant for YEARS - and if I had known at the beginning what I knew later, it’s what I would want to be when I’m starting off.

Especially when you’re a Merchant of a certain type of products where most of the “disadvantages” of being a Merchant simply disappear, or become insignificant.