Sell Your Own Services
Continuation of Lesson 20 from You Can Make
Money Writing
You can sell services - yet another way to monetize that web
property. If you are a business consultant, an astrologer, or
in any service business, you can use a website to promote your
business. Articles, of course are a great way to promote the
site. They give you greater credibility. A few articles and you
are an "expert."
I have to tell you just how powerful an internet presence
can be in terms of making you the "authority" or "expert."
I have a wide variety of interests and so a wide variety of websites.
I read a lot and know a lot, but I have no degrees.
Still, as a result of my articles and websites, I have been
interviewed as an ultralight backpacking expert by Backpacker
magazine, as a creative thinking expert by a marketing and innovation
website, as an expert on unusual ways to make money by a British
Magazine, and I've turned down the opportunity to be interviewed
by a television station as a real estate expert (I was on vacation).
Publishing your writing online is free and gives you credibility.
You can use that to promote your service-based business.
Paid Membership Sites and Newsletters
Many sites are adopting a paid membership model. A membership
website can be a combination of following your passion and sharing
your specific knowledge with those who will truly appreciate
it. This works best if you provide information on things that
change frequently. Stock market advice and internet marketing
news are good examples.
Whether the visitor pays to subscribe to a newsletter or the
"members area" of the site, there is usually a sampling
of free content so they can get a feel for what you do. A free
sample newsletter or "trial membership" can help, especially
if you mention this gift in the resource box of your articles.
This is how writing articles and giving them away becomes writing
for money.
Note: Often the free membership comes only after the subscriber
enters his or her credit card information. Billing is then automatic
after the trial period. They are free to cancel prior to the
first charge or at any time, but this keeps procrastinators from
forgetting to buy your service after they have had their trial.
Contract Work
If you are good at editing, or at writing articles, or anything
else that internet business people need done, you can make a
living providing these services online. If my wife didn't handle
the submitting of my articles to directories, I would be paying
someone else to do it. People pay to have research done for their
e-books as well. The possibilities are varied and many.
You can advertise your services on your own website. Another
way to generate business is to go to those sites like www.elance.com,
where people advertise their needs and you can send them a quote
for a project. For example, we currently pay someone to write
short articles that promote our websites (at some point I had
so many projects going that I couldn't do more than a couple
hundred articles per year on my own).
There is also good money to be made in copy writing - the
writing of sales copy. Learn how to do this well and you can
be paid as much as $2,000 for one page. Sometimes buyers want
to pay for results instead, and that's fine too. Suppose you
got 10% of sales on a hot seller for the rest of your life. That
could be a nice residual income.
Recycling Non-Copyrighted Material
There are many books out there with an expired copyright.
These can be used in almost any way you like. That means you
can just publish and sell them as e-books without changing a
thing, or you can alter them to include your own content or commentary.
One gentleman took the book "As A Man Thinketh," and
gave it away online, as a way to generate a mailing list which
he makes a living from.
You could, for example, take an old translation of "The
Art Of War," keep the parts you like, and add commentary
that makes it relevant to modern day business (okay someone has
already done this, but you get the idea). Whatever you create
can be called your own and sold how you want. Doing this online
opens up a world of possibilities.
More Ways to Make Money
You may have heard about the young man who financed his college
education (and then some) by selling "pixels" on his
"Million Dollar Home Page." One dollar each, linked
anywhere the buyer liked, and they remain there forever. He sold
a million pixels. Most people had to buy a couple hundred at
least to have the room to advertise something.
There are probably a hundred other ways you can make money
on the internet. In fact, you'll find five or six more in the
next lesson. It covers ways that require no website and (mostly)
no investment of anything but time.
A Short True Story
You may have noticed that many of the ways to make money listed
here still require having a websites and getting traffic to it.
That's why this book is primarily about using articles to promote
your website. How well does it work?
A short while ago, a new website owner wrote me to see if
I would exchange links with her site. The site she wanted me
to link from was UnusualWaysToMakeMoney.com. It had no "links
page." It was something I had forgotten to create despite
the site being several years old. I thanked her for reminding
me, and made the page just to put her link on it.
She soon wrote back asking how I was getting such good search
engine exposure without trading links with anyone. She assumed
that doing well with a website was largely about trading links
with others. It is for many, but that's tough to do, and those
reciprocal links are worth less and less as the search engine
algorithms change.
I explained that I use articles as my primary link-building
strategy. The site made $1,000 that month by the way - before
I traded links for it. That shows how well article distribution
(and of course proper optimization on the site) works.
Lesson 21 is only available to subscribers
to my Internet Income Newsletter (form to the right and on the
homepage - free to sign up), so next we go to Lesson 22...
Continues here... Using Articles
Written by Others
Note: This is part of the book, You Can Make Money
Writing. There are links to all the all the lessons/chapters
on the home page.
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