Work From Home Online Guide

If you want to work from home online, you’re probably looking for passive income. Passive income is money that automatically lands in your bank account after you’ve finished working on the project and have moved on to something else. You can make passive income while you’re asleep, or on vacation, or working a new project. It’s the holy grail of internet marketing.

There are several types of passive income that you can make online, but I’ve chosen to focus on the two that are easiest for the solo web entrepreneur to learn, set up, and repeat, without hiring help or spending a lot of money to get started. Those two types are income from affiliate marketing commissions, and income from advertising commissions. I’m doing both, and I’ll be writing about both in upcoming posts.

For people who want to work from home with an online business, there are a lot of misconceptions about passive income. People who are new to the internet, known as newbs, think they can earn passive income without doing any work. There are also people who have been trying to make money online for months or even years who still think they can earn passive income online without doing any work. These folks aren’t newbs–they are noobs. If you go to the Warrior Forum or Digital Point, you’ll see newbs and noobs all talking about how they did (or are going to do) 20 minutes of work, and made (or are going to make) hundreds or thousands of dollars. Ignore 99 percent of these people. Actually, for now, ignore all of them. Once you have a good solid background in making money online, you’ll know which 1% to pay attention to when you run into them on a forum.

Passive income is work–a hell of a lot of work. People think it’s easy because when you’ve been doing this for a few months, you can get a website up and running in 15 minutes and start selling your stuff. But without knowledge, just putting up a site isn’t going to help you. You need to get a basic understanding of internet marketing, and you need to do specific research on the niche you’re working in. You do niche research to find out whether your niche is monetizable and how to best monetize it. You do all this before you even think of registering a domain name or taking a site live.

When you’re first starting out, learning the concepts will take you one to two months. Niche research will take you about a week of intense work (20 to 40 hours) per niche. Putting up your site will take 20 minutes. Then, getting traffic to your site will cost you either time or money. Once you have traffic, you’ll finally have passive income–unless you’re working a very competitive niche, in which case you’ll have to fight to stay on top.

Sounds boring, doesn’t it? It’s like being in school–you have to read and learn from many different sources and make the concepts fit together in your brain until they make sense as a system. Step by step instructions might get you a site, and maybe even make you a little money, but you’ll never be as successful as you’d be if you understand the theory behind the instructions. When you know the theory, you can work in many different niches, including niches that most internet marketing noobs pass up in order to get to the same low-hanging fruit that all the other noobs are chasing. If Google changes its system, you’ll be ready to change with it, because you already have a working knowledge to build on. And you’ll always be several steps ahead of your competitors who haven’t studied and learned how internet marketing works.

Set aside time to read and learn. I suggest Learn How to Make Money Online, work from home jobs, and Make Money Online for Beginners.