Can You Really Make Money On The Internet? 5 Success Stories!

There is certainly plenty of people that talk about it…  But can you really make money on the internet?

Yes.  There is no doubt about that… you can make money online.

How much really varies in scope too and, honestly, most people who look for a way to make money online – leave having not made a thing!

The reasons for failure are variable but may include…

• Not being able to find legitimate training, there is a lot of fluff and blatant scams online -and they get confused by conflicting info.
• Not really learning the marketing aspect of making money online.
• Getting tired with it and giving up too early, prior to seeing any success.
• Having limited success and giving up for a long time and giving up.
• Feeling overwhelmed with information.
• Hitting technical barriers or difficulties.
• Finding it difficult to motivate themselves working on their own.
• Disliking the solitude of working alone.
• Getting distracted by too many ways of potentially making money, before they have conquered one.

This list could literally could go on ….and on…. and on….

There are so many ways that people can and do make money online now.

Popular Ways To Make Money Online:

• Affiliate Marketing,
• Freelancing,
• Blogging, (which leads to various ways you can earn – Ads, affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, selling your own products).
• Buying and selling on platforms such as Amazon or Ebay.
• Creating products and selling them – on platforms such as Etsy.
• Having your own E-commerce website.
• Creating designs and having them printed on products and shipped for you, such as uploading T-shirt designs to POD services, (print on demand).
• Website testing – getting paid to give your opinion about other peoples websites, on platforms such as User-Testing, (smaller income opportunity).

That’s just some of the most popular ways that you can get started online.

For the sake of this post though, I’m going to focus on a small bunch of people, who have had some success within a particular area online.

By looking at their success, you should be able to see the potential there and hopefully be inspired to give it a go yourself.

Too many people do get frustrated when they don’t see results quickly, they think perhaps it’s just a waste of time.

It’s not a waste of time, but it DOES take time and considerable effort.  Perhaps most importantly, it takes consistent effort too.

Now, even though the people I’m going to talk about are making great money online, there are hundreds and thousands more, who are making money online at different levels.

Anything from a small amount of extra pocket change, to a substantial full time income and anything else in between that and beyond…

There are people at every level, trying to make it work for them!

Five Gateways Into Making Money On The Internet:

There are plenty of ways to make money online, but I’m going to focus on a five individuals today in different areas of online business – all who have  inspired me along the way.

So, the five of the routes into making money online I’m covering today are:

• Affiliate marketing,
• Freelancing,
• Blogging,
• Kindle self-publishing
• And a new one I’ve been introduced to recently…selling T-shirts online!

So, let’s get started!

Affiliate Marketing:

I’m starting off with where a majority of my income comes from at this point, affiliate marketing.

There is some cross over here with blogging and affiliate marketing – because affiliate marketing is also be known as a way to make money from your blog, (one of many ways).

But affiliate marketing doesn’t necessarily have to be paired with blogging at all, so it can be considered separately from this.

Affiliate Marketing Master:  Pat Flynn.

Affiliate marketing is regularly discussed in the same breath as Pat Flynn, because he’s astonishingly successful within the affiliate marketing field.

Although it’s not the only way he’s bringing in income – I think he’d agree that it was the foundation of his online success.

After losing his job in the world of architecture, he found success building a little website that he’d originally started to help him pass an architectural exam.

Pat discovered that this simple website was generating traffic and found a way to turn this website into a successful income stream, bringing him in thousands per month.

From there, he built a new blog called: Smart Passive Income and has inspired thousands of people start building their own online business.

He also runs the smart passive income podcast, which is how I personally discovered Pat for the first time.

Pat has always been transparent with his earnings an how he’s making his money online, which is quite unusual at his level.

As well as his online income reports, there is a graph on his website showing how much he’s made in the last 48 hours and you can see the numbers rising by the minute.

Yes… you’re seeing that correctly: $184, 094.67 in the last 48 hours.

While Pat Flynn’s income is clearly epic, it’s worth noting that he is one of the most well known names in this space and has a huge following.

So, while replicating Pats success would be a challenging, it shows you how making money from affiliate marketing – even if we’re talking a fraction of Pats income, could certainly be a reality.

The most important thing you do need though, is an audience.

That is something that Pat Flynn has managed to build very successfully.

Learn About Affiliate Marketing: Get Started Here!

Freelancing:

Freelancing is often thought to be one of the best ways you can start making money online, because there is a big demand for freelancers online and such a low barrier to entry.

This is especially true if you have a skill to offer – for example; perhaps you’re highly knowledgeable in a certain niche,  have graphic design, or SEO skills.

Whatever the skill may be that you can provide online, they’ll be people out there looking for workers.

One person that I’ve followed for a while that’s had success in the Freelancing space and has been a personal inspiration to me – is Gina Horkey.

Gina started her freelance journey back in 2014 and within just six months, was making $4,000 per month!

The amazing thing was, this was a side-hustle for Gina, she hadn’t yet even quit her day job.  But within eight months of starting on her freelancing journey, she had quit her 9-5.

Since then, Gina has created several courses to help people get started in the freelancing world, which can often feel overwhelming when you have no experience.

She’s created courses for virtual assistant work, Pinterest virtual assistant work and freelance writing and she has an inspiring blog over at Horkey Handbook.

I personally signed up for Gina’s Freelance Writing course and found it incredibly accessible and easy to follow.

Freelancing is often thought of as a good way into making your first money online.

However, if you’re thinking about freelance writing, getting a blog started first can be beneficial.

Prior to having a blog myself, I’m not sure I would have been confident enough to apply for a freelance position.

But the great thing about writing regularly for a blog, is that it builds your confidence and your skill set.

Perhaps even more importantly, you will build up a big catalogue of writing to showcase, when you do start pitching for work.

 FREE: 200+ freelance writing niches here.

Blogging:

Blogging obviously something I’m doing and while you don’t simply make money via blogging itself, there are various ways you can make money from your blog once you have enough traffic.

Key ways that people tend to make money from their blogs is through having Ads on their blog, such as via google adsense or other Ad network, affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, or selling advertising space.

While a huge number of bloggers leave big money on the table from not monetising their blogs, some bloggers are absolutely killing it.

One blogger that’s been an inspiration and motivation to me, is Michelle from Making Sense Of Cents.

Michelle started up a personal finance blog in 2011 – a big motivation behind this, was to pay off her student loan and become debt free.

Within just 7 months, Michelle had made enough from her blog to be able to pay off $40,000 in student loans!

If you’d like to hear about how she’s doing at the moment, this recent income report shows how she made over $120,000 in a single month, (and growing).

While Michelle’s numbers are by no means the norm when it comes to blogging, thousands of people online are making great money with their blogs.

For most, it’s having a short term and long term goals, consistently taking action week in week out that has led to me starting to make money online.

You also cannot give up when you hit a stumbling blog, suffer burn out, or have a lapse in motivation!

Most importantly, you need to enjoy the process.

Blogging can be tough, if you don’t have some passion for what you’re doing, you’ll have trouble to stick with it long term.

Kindle Publishing:

Self-publishing has become huge in recent years and there was a time that it seemed to be a quick gateway to making money online.

However, it was soon over run with people putting out books and it’s certainly not as easy as it once was to make money.

I was first introduced to Kindle Publishing via Stefan James of Project Life Mastery.

Stefan started project life mastery in 2012, and as well as becoming a highly successful blog, he also had some of his first success online with Kindle Publishing. 

Stefan went on to create a kindle self-publishing course, which I purchased myself.

The idea around the course is to target certain niches and keywords and to create ebooks around those ideas – primarily the course focuses on the non-fiction market.

Stefan recommends outsourcing the writing and concentrating on the researching aspect.

However, of course many people choose to write their own content and publish that.

These days, I believe Kindle Publishing works best for people who already have a platform – such a blog,  or website.  Because, that way you’re already starting with an audience.

But even without a blog, some publishers have done well by building an email list by giving away a link to freebie inside their book, (such as a free ebook).

By building an email list, you can then market to people in future who are already interested in the type of books you’re writing.

I wrote an in depth review – Read It Here.

Selling Tshirts – With Merch By Amazon:

I’d long heard about selling tshirts online with various print on demand sites, such as Teespring or teepublic….

But these websites require you to find your own traffic.  For example, I’d need to set up Facebook Ads and drive traffic to my products, which requires additional expense.

But one day I was listening to a Podcast episode from the Side Hustle Show interviewing a lady named Elaine Heney, who had made $53k in Tshirt profit in just 10 months on Merch By Amazon.

I’d recently heard this opportunity mentioned a couple of times already, so it immediately sparked my interest.

The difference between Merch By Amazon and other POD sites, is that many people were having great success on the platform – WITHOUT the need for paid traffic.

They were generating their sales completely organically, with no Ads and no promotion.

Because Amazon works like a search engine – by targeting long-tail keywords, you could get your tshirt ranked high up in Amazon, for specific search terms.

It reminded me a lot of Kindle Publishing – in the sense that you target certain niches and keywords that people will be searching for, but this time it was with Tshirts and not books.

The other big plus here was, people who were succeeding were not all designers.  Far from it, plenty had zero design experience.

That was good news for me, because I’m certainly not a designer and have no knowledge at all of things like Photoshop.

Luckily, many of the shirts that do well on Amazon are very simple designs, or text based.

There was also the option of outsourcing the designs, which could be done fairly cheaply on somewhere like Upwork.

The downside with Merch, is that there is a waiting time involved.

Merch by Amazon is invite only and you need to apply…. but you don’t need any special skills or experience to be accepted.

I personally signed up with Merch myself and got accepted within a couple of months.

I’m still in my first month starting Merch and have made my first few sales already  – it’s been quite interesting in comparison to blogging, where it took a few months to make my first couple of dollars!

update 2019 – I slowed right down with merch sometime ago, but still make sales every month. Plan to get back to it soon!

Merch looks a lot like a numbers game right now and you need to sell a certain number of shirts to tier up to different levels.

So, you’re allowed to put up 10 designs at first, then you tier up to 25 designs after 10 sales.  You tier up to 100 designs at 25 sales, 500 designs at 100 sales and it increases further from there.

I dedicated a post to Merch By Amazon, which explains what you need to know in more detail and I have some useful links on there too – you can find it here.

So, That Just About Concludes My Post Today….   But What About You?

I outlined 5 different ways that you could get started making money online… and some success stories to prove it!

If you’re making money online already, what route did you decide to go down?

Or if you’re not making money yet…  what way appeals to you?

I personally make the most online from running my own blog… 

The great thing about having a blogging business, is that you can run it from anywhere in the world.

If you’d like to learn how to get started, I recommend this training.

Let me know in the comments below!

All the best…

PIN ME 🙂