One of the questions that I get most often on MasonWorld.com, through support tickets and blog comments ( and directly in email) is from people who are looking to just simply make a little extra money online. Usually they’re trying to cover a car payment or a shortage in their house payment and they want to know how they can make an extra 300 dollars online.
My answer is always the same. It’s very simple to understand how to make that amount of money online. I’ll admit to you that it’s not always simple to actually make the money, that usually takes work, persistence, and understanding of some internet marketing ideas. But, fundamentally it’s really easy to understand how to do it.
Now I actually wrote this post a long time ago — it’s been sitting in my draft posts. Then I got a video from Andrew Hansen about Plug and Play Niche Cash, and I knew I needed to get this out there.
I was really pleased to see that Andrew Hansen teaches exactly the same thing (a fact I already knew). Here is his take on this issue. In his example, Andrew is talking about $1000/month, but the concepts are the same. Andrew has given me a direct link to his video, and you can watch it here (highly recommended).
My Take On Making Extra Money Online
Let me break it down for you the same way that I always explain this answer to everyone who asks the question. If you need to make 300 dollars a month online, really what you’re saying is you need to make 10 dollars a day online.
When you look at that already it doesn’t sound so bad. After all, the other day I went to Starbucks and bought a cup of coffee and it was almost 10 dollars, so 10 dollars a day sounds like something we can get at.
In order to make 10 dollars a day we need to do something that generates that 10 dollars. One of the easiest things you can do online is sell affiliate products that generate a commission. So, let’s say you’re going to sell something online and for the purpose of this example let’s say you’re going to sell Elvis bobble heads, after all I’m really good friends with the Queen of Elvis bobble heads, Lynn Terry and I know she’ll appreciate this example.
If you hook yourself up with a merchant who offers Elvis bobble heads, you might find (just for the purpose of this example) that a 30 dollar Elvis bobble head can pay you a 5 dollar commission. Let’s just say that’s the case. This means that in order to make 10 dollars a day, you need to sell two bobble heads each and every day of the week for each and every week of the year to average 300 dollars a month in extra income in your house.
Now, of course the big question is how in the world do we get two people to buy an Elvis bobble head every day? The answer is very, very simple, but you need to know some math, so let’s do some very simple math. It turns out that you can know the rate at which people buy Elvis bobble heads.
Every Site Is Different; Concepts Are The Same
Now, it’s going to be different for every site depending on the kind of website that you have and how you are presenting the Elvis bobble heads, and what kind of sales copy you’re writing about the bobble heads, but you can know, for example, that for every 100 visitors to your Elvis bobble head sales page one your website that a certain percentage of them will actually buy.
Let’s say for the purpose of this example that for every 100 people that visit your website on Elvis bobble heads you have a fantastic killer website and five of those people are buying an Elvis bobble head. 100 people find your site, five people buy a bobble head, that’s a 5% conversion rate, that would be an outstanding conversion rate for Elvis bobble heads. Your mileage may vary, but for the purpose of this example what it means is that you need 20 visitors to sell a single Elvis bobble head.
Since you need to sell two bobble heads every day it means that you need to get 40 visitors to your page every day in order to sell two Elvis bobble heads. If you can sell two Elvis bobble heads you’ll make 10 dollars every day, that will get you your 300 dollars a month.
Well, now the question is where are we going to get our 40 visitors? There are lots of places you can get traffic, but since we need to make 10 dollars a day I’m not going to talk about spending money to get traffic, I’ll just talk about free traffic, search engine traffic.
It turns out that if someone searches for something in Google they’ll get about 10 listings back when they type in a search term. So, if someone searches for buy Elvis bobble heads they’ll get back a page with 10 Elvis bobble head listings on it with web pages that hopefully contain information about Elvis bobble heads.
Research suggests that approximately 40% of those searchers will click on the very first link. So, let’s say that you are ranking number one for the term buy Elvis bobble heads. What that means is that 40% of the people who type buy Elvis bobble heads on Google will see your link first and click it.
That means, of course, if 100 people search for buy Elvis bobble heads, 40 people will click through to your site. We already know that if 40 people arrive at your site you’re going to sell two Elvis bobble heads.
Take Action On Simple Math
So, what do you need to do? You need to create a web page that’s targeted to an Elvis bobble head keyword that gets at least 100 searches per day so that you can get at least 40 people per day to your web page, so that at least two people per day will buy an Elvis bobble head, so that you can make your 5 dollars per bobble head, 10 dollars per day, which will translate to 300 dollars per month.
It really is simple math. Now, of course your mileage may vary. You may be a poor copywriter and at first you may only convert one out of 100 visitors. In that case, you need to two things. In the short term you need to get more traffic, and in the long term you need to work to improve your copywriting skills.
Maybe the market for Elvis bobble heads is not great right now and the commission is only 2.50. In that case, you need to two things. One, you need to find a better offer with a higher commission and two, you need to get more traffic to that page so you can sell four Elvis bobble heads a day to make your 10 dollars.
In every case these complicated problems of “how can I get an extra 300 dollars to pay my house note” can be broken down into very simple steps that allow you to reach your goals online.
If you want to know more about niche affiliate marketing and how you can make money online doing that I encourage you to visit my new website NicheProfitUniversity.com. Over there you’ll find a few free videos that will explain what I consider to be the five most important pillars of niche affiliate marketing.
Be sure to check out Andrew’s Video — it is a great one and says the same thing that I am saying here (only with a funny accent).
My name is Mark Mason, here at MasonWorld.com where we teach people how to build internet businesses one night at a time.
