Every business owner should be thinking about the longevity and sustainability of his or her income streams. This is especially true for web business owners because we invest huge amounts of time into our sites, as opposed to money. It may sound a little crazy, but I’d rather lose money than time. I can earn more money; I can never get time back. That being the case, I want to make sure any project I invest time into is going to have lasting value.

Build Your Sites to Last

Some of you may have wondered if your keyword sniping websites will provide an income that can last years beyond when you set them up. They can, and they should. You’ll just have to be proactive in making sure your income streams not only don’t stop flowing, but grow. Here are a few things you can do to protect your future earnings:

1. First and foremost, make sure your content has value to a searcher. I’m not saying your sniper sites need to be the Encyclopedia Britannica, but I am saying that a reader should be able to learn something substantive by reading any page on your site. Quality, original content will protect you from being labeled a “Made for Adsense” site, which will get your account banned.

2. Strengthen your winners. I hope you’ll follow the advice to create 10+ (or 50+) sniper sites. In the short term the best way to have a high average daily income is to have as many fishing lines in the water as possible. In the long term you’ll start to identify which of your sites are performing best in terms of traffic and daily income.

When those patterns begin to emerge, pick your two or three most successful sites and focus effort on them. Add more content, build more links, and consider expanding into more a competitive, more lucrative niche. Any sniper site should earn between $5 and $20 per day; you can expand the best of them into sites that earn $50 or $100+ per day.

3. “Cut” your losers. Why do I put cut in quotes? Because I’m not necessarily saying you should get rid of your lower performing sites. If they are covering their own expenses (domain renewal and hosting), and not taking up any of your precious time, why not keep them around. They gain value as they age in Google’s index. Down the road you can either re-visit them when your winners are fully developed and you have more time, or you can sell them on the open market.

So by ‘cut your losers’ what I really mean is don’t allocate them mental or creative energy. Part of making your income sustainable is not spending your most precious asset (time) on sites that you know aren’t performing for you.

Always Keep An Eye On the Future

Above all else, maintain a long term perspective. Forgive the sports analogy, but today’s home runs aren’t likely to win tomorrow’s baseball games. We’ll all have to adapt and grow with the times. Optimize your business the best you can for today’s environment, and be flexible. The only people that will lose the ability to make money online are those who choose to stop learning and adapting.

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While many dream of a life spent working from home, most people will never make it. Partially this is because most don’t put in the elbow grease that is needed to build a successful home based business and others fail because they chase the wrong dreams.

It happens everywhere you look. It even happened to me too. In the past I wasted months with the classic “show stoppers” like procrastination, chasing the wrong dream and feeling sorry for myself. I think to some extent we all experience this at some stage during our business building cycle and there really isn’t much wrong with this.

It’s called being human.

We all make mistakes. After all, making mistakes is part of our life and helps us to move ahead. You might have heard the saying “the more mistakes we make, the more successful we will be”. If I take this as some measurement of my future success then I shall be very happy indeed.

Hoping alone won’t get me there and neither will this work for you. While hope is great for the health of our mind, it is another attribute that help us to step out into the fresh air.

Success is the result of our ability to learn from our mistakes and act

I know, this is a very strong statement to make, but look around you. How many successful people do you know? I bet all of them have a pretty powerful story to tell.

A story of failure, sadness and defeat eventually lead them to success.

Pretty much all successful people in business have taken what they learned from their failures and turned it into success.

We all deal with our own little demons day by day. Whether they are related to the way we’d like to run our business, customers, family, colleagues, business partners or last but not least ourselves, we can choose to learn from negative events and use them to our advantage in the future.

You are not dumb

If you understand this concept, but still struggle to make a dime with your business you might want to look at your patterns of behavior.

Often we tend to repeat mistakes, because we are in a habit of doing things a certain way. As you might already know, it takes 21 days to change a habit and really, this is the only thing that stands between you and your bad habit right now.

Take baby steps

The problem for most is that we try to change too many things at once. We are sick of our habit to check email ten times a day which stops us from working effectively. Then we remember that while we are at it (changing things for the better), we could also clean up our messy office.

Soon enough we have a list of twenty things we want to change and give up before we even start.

We fall prey to the classic signs of over commitment and that is the end of that exercise.

Less is more

Instead of pushing too hard, we should aim to work with a conscience at changing things for the better. Some issues can be resolved within hours, while others take days.

Don’t worry about the time. As long as you are moving in the right direction, all is well.

I used to try to take big chunks out of my “negative patterns of behavior”. I resolved to be good by the end of the week and set out to become the next success story…

…Only to give up half way down the road because I tried to take on too many things at once. Countless times I stood up again, only to trip over my own feet the next minute.

I only learned to stand strong once I allowed myself to take things easy, naturally and from that day forward my business magically improved. Well, actually it wasn’t magic. It was hard work, passion and resolve to be successful once and for all that did it in the end.

I gave myself permission to become successful and started implementing steps to move ahead, one step at the time.

It worked!

Are you keen to try, or have you already experienced this amazing feeling of getting closer to your goals every single day?

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During the 15 months that Court’s Internet Marketing School has been around, we have discussed literally dozens of ways to make money online. Many of you are quite new to the site, and many others will be introduced to the site by searching for information contained in this article. In order to help everyone to better understand the ways people go about creating an online income, I wanted to provide a simple list, complete with a simple explanation of each method. I will also try to point you toward some resources that you can use to dig deeper into creating online income.

#1 - Starting a Blog

Blogs are informational websites that people use to share information. The basic idea here is that the sharing of free information can bring visitors to your website, and you can in turn make a profit from that traffic. Most blogs will show the latest articles (known as posts) on the homepage, making it very easy for people to find the latest information that has been shared.

Examples:

• Engadget
• The Huffington Post
• Lifehacker
• Treehugger

People use a variety of methods to bring traffic to a blog including search engine optimization, social media, paid advertising, email marketing, and press releases. Recently there is a growing trend of bloggers using traditional media such as television and radio to gain exposure to their blogs, but in all honesty this is only happening for elite level bloggers.

To make money with a blog, people use a variety of different methods including selling advertising space, products, and services. Many other blogs make great money by using affiliate marketing, which is selling products for others in exchange for commissions.

This method is a great way to go, especially if you want to start casually. You can start a blog with no pressure, and allow it to build up over time. For more information on this method, check out this post: Starting a Blog.

#2 - Starting a Content Website

This method uses the same basic idea as idea #1. You will use free content to attract visitors to a location where you can sell advertising and products.

Technically, a blog is a content website, but for the purpose of this guide, ‘content websites’ are the traditional content sites that aren’t blogs. There are a lot of ways to create content websites. Usually people use content management systems like Joomla, Drupal, and Mambo to manage the content.

You may be wondering to yourself what type of content people use to create content websites. These sites can be built around literally anything, but many of them review products and services or report on news specific to an industry or niche.

Like idea #1, people use a lot of different methods to bring traffic to content websites, such as search engine optimization, social media, paid advertising, email marketing, and press releases.

Examples of successful content websites:

• GSM Arena
• SEO Chat
• DP Review

#3 - Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is the process of promoting products for other people and companies, in exchange for commissions. For example, let’s say that you have a site that provides people with home loans. I could sign up as an affiliate and then push people to your loan site. When people get a loan, you will make some money and will pay me a commission. I would be the affiliate marketer and you would be running an affiliate program.

There are thousands of different affiliate programs that you can use to make money online. Here are some examples of some of the more well known programs:

• eBay - eBay’s affiliate program pays you commissions when you get people to sign up for eBay, and also pays some commissions if the traffic you send ends up buying something on eBay.
• Amazon - Amazon’s program pays you commissions for pushing people to Amazon. You earn a commission when a person you pushed to Amazon buys a product. Amazon commissions start at 4% and go up from there and depend on how many conversions you can get.

Affiliate marketing is often combined with a few of the other ways to make money online. For example, bloggers often use affiliate marketing to make money from their blog traffic. List builders (see list building section) use affiliate marketing as the primary method of making money with their lists. They will usually send their list an affiliate offer (an offer to buy a product or service) around once per month (sometimes more or less often).

Affiliate marketers often stay under the radar, but for a good site that teaches this process, visit Super Affiliate Zac Johnson.

#4 - List Building

List building is one of the more aggressive and powerful ways to make online money. The method combines amazingly well with affiliate marketing, and most good affiliate marketers rely heavily on building lists to scale up their businesses.

A good list builder will usually set up a site specifically to capture names and emails. You have probably done a search in Google to find a page that offered you a free product. All you have to do to get the free product is type in your name and email, right? By downloading that free product, you will probably be signed up to be on that marketer’s list. He will then be able to communicate with you in the future and will send you and everyone else on the list offers. A certain percentage of the people on the list will take advantage of those offers and this will get the marketer paid.

Good list builders will come up with ways to help the people on their list, which will keep them on the list for a longer time period. They are able to create a win-win. Over time, their list grows larger and larger which provides them with larger and larger income. Good affiliate marketers sometimes end up with millions of names.

To build their lists, list builders usually use a service like Aweber, which helps them to create forms to capture information, and stores the names and emails in a database for future communication.

List building combines with quite a few of the other methods, including blogging, affiliate marketing, lead generation, and starting an online service business.

#5 - Lead Generation

Generating leads can be an extremely lucrative way to create money online. Mortgage leads, for example can be sold for more than $40 per lead, with no promise of conversion.

Usually the process of lead generation involves setting up a site to bring traffic, and then funneling traffic to a page where the visitor requests more information about a product or service. In the case of mortgage loans, the visitor would request more information about a loan. The marketer doing the lead generation (the person who created the lead) will then sell the information to a mortgage broker or company, who will in turn call the lead to try to get them to get a loan.

There are literally hundreds of different industries that rely on lead generation including:

• Loans
• Finance
• Weight Loss
• Real Estate
• Credit Cards
• Cell Phone Plans

Savvy marketers will set up businesses that capture leads in these and other industries and can make some truly killer profits.

To find lead generation programs, I would visit CJ.com - they manage affiliate programs and lead generation programs for hundreds of companies.

#6 - Starting an Online Service Business

Those who become good at generating leads will often transition into creating their own service businesses. They usually realize that while they are able to make good money selling off leads, they could make more by creating businesses for the leads.

For example, a marketer may create a site at some point that provides people with good information about finance. They then go through the lead generation process to create and sell leads to an experienced financial planner. This goes great and the marketer makes great money, but eventually realizes that the financial planner makes a lot more from those leads than he does.

At that point, the marketer will often find a financial planner to partner with, or will become a financial planner himself. The leads are already there so the transition isn’t too complicated.

Selling services online usually takes a few simple steps:

• Bringing traffic to a website
• Generating a lead
• Selling to that lead

Since the first step in the process is bringing traffic to a website, the method is often combined with other ways to make money online including blogging and list building. Many times, people that use this method will also purchase a good amount of paid advertising, as long as they are able to convert that traffic into clients.

Examples of online service businesses:

• Clientside SEM - Aaron Wall’s SEO consulting service
• Unique Blog Designs - blog design service
• Logoworks - logo, web, and graphic design services
• Article Marketer - article distribution service

#7 - Creating Products

Those that make the most money online are often those that create their own products. These products are often informational and can be downloaded by the purchaser.

For example, a savvy marketer will do research and then create an information product that will teach people how to lose weight. The product will probably be sold as an ebook or as a site that has a paid membership. The marketer will then use a variety of methods to bring traffic to the site including affiliate marketing (the marketer will recruit affiliates), paid advertising, list building, and sometimes blogging.

Since an informational product costs basically nothing to deliver, there is often great money in creating this type of product. I would highly recommend getting some experience before using this method because there’s a lot to it.

#8 - Setting up an Online Store

The old fall-back is creating an online store that sells tangible products. Some people will buy products at wholesale and sell them at retail for profits. Others will drop-ship, which is the process of selling a product before you buy it. You hold a list of what you can buy products for and sell them at an increase. Your supplier will then ship the product for you.

This method is often combined with many of the other methods including list building, lead generation, affiliate marketing, and creating products.

Examples:

• Amazon
• Lets Talk
• Buy.com

Hopefully this list is enough to get you started. While there are literally hundreds of ways to make money online, this list contains some of the most powerful. Adding one or more of these to your current arsenal may also help some of you to be more successful with what you’re doing now.

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A goal that I have had for Court’s Internet Marketing School in the last few months is to step up the pace in order to provide each visitor with more helpful information.

The addition of Mark has been truly great. He has been able to provide expertise and insights that we wouldn’t have on the site without him, and that has been good for everyone.

In order to expand the site further, I’ve been looking for another contributor for quite some time. I wanted someone with a true entrepreneur spirit and someone that had some experience with business and ‘making it happen’. Many of you are hoping to someday be able to quit the 9-to-5, and I wanted to bring someone on board that has made that jump to provide each of you with insights into what that’s like. I wanted a person that can help you with that enormous challenge.

After thinking about this and looking for quite some time, I found exactly the right person, and have invited her to contribute regularly to the site. Let me introduce to you our new contributor, Monika Mundell.

About Monika

Many of you are probably familiar with Monika because of her freelance writing blog, TheWritersManifesto. I’ve been reading her stuff for quite a while and can tell you that she has a great understanding of writing, blogging, entrepreneurship, dealing with working from home, and a lot of others areas that we all need to improve on. I couldn’t be more excited to have her.

Monika has been working as a freelance writer for a while now and does a great job with her work. I’ve hired her for writing before, and was very pleased with the work she did. If any of you could use a good freelance writer, Monika gets a 5-star approval rating from me.

Monika and I have spent a lot of time talking on the phone, and I can tell you that her understanding of online marketing is extensive. Hiring her as a freelancer would be very wise, she understands a lot of concepts that many freelance writers won’t - keyword targeting, niche marketing, lead generation, and sales. Since I have hired Monika to do some writing for me, I can tell you in all honesty that she is truly an extremely skilled and consummate professional.

Monika, we couldn’t be happier!

Everyone - please give Monika a warm welcome.

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Folks, twitter is stupid. I’ve spent the last two hours trying to find a single redeeming quality to the service, and I have nothing to report. For those of you who haven’t familiarized yourself with it, two things:

1. Don’t.

2. Watch the video below.

It introduces the concept of twitter as “life happens between blog posts”. Well, yes. It should. But it’s hard for life to actually happen if you’re wasting it watching people’s…twitter feeds (did I say that right?) with such dazzling information as:

“Going to the store.”

“Working on my newsletter.”

“Overslept.”

All I see on twitter is an odd hybrid of a forum and a blog, except nothing meaningful is being said. And I mean nothing. So far as I can tell twitter is something the A List bloggers are promoting as a way to get their groupies to follow them around all day, begging for a shred of acknowledgment with some sort of “@joeshmoe” response to a….tweet (again, am I saying that right?).

Talk about a colossal waste of time. Be warned, there are those that are saying twitter is great for connectivity and getting information in real time. I can’t think of a tool that gives you a lower roi on your time when it comes to networking.

A noteworthy blogger talks about how he loves twitter, but then he disclosed his traffic sources: Google - 42%. Twitter - 1.87%. I think that pretty much tells the story. Go build some links.

Anything you get from twitter you should be getting from your blogging efforts. It’s nothing but a time sucker, and do any of you feel like you have lots of excess time?

Guys, when your content is written and your link-building is done for the day, get outside and get some sun. It’s Spring, and instead of tweeting you should be shutting off your computers and going to hang out with your kids at the park. Or going to spend some time with friends IN PERSON. I’m here to tell you that a good laugh in person with friends is quite a bit more gratifying than any LOL from a twitterer (”twitterer”…brilliant). Phones, emails, and blogs are enough…and maybe too much. Twitter is blogging taken to an unhealthy extreme.

And besides, how can I possibly participate in anything where the primary activity is called “tweeting”?

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