5 Reasons Why You Are Not Making Any Money Online

It is a well-established fact that it is very possible to make money online. There are countless of stories of people who have not only made the occasional few dollars online, but have gone on to quit their jobs and have been earning a full-time income from their internet businesses.

A quick visit to any digital marketing online forum will reveal several discussions that gives an idea of the scale of this phenomenon. For example in a forum called Digital Point, a particular thread  has several people talking about how they made their first $100 online. In yet another very popular forum called Warrior forum, this thread contains several discussions from users regarding how much money they make online with affiliate marketing, and how long it took them to start making that amount of money.

So, if you are convinced as to the possibility of being able to earn a part time or full time income online, the question remains why have you not started doing so?

Chances are that you will have your specific reasons that are unique and peculiar to you as to why you haven’t started making money online, and I won’t try and guess as to what they might be. What I can however try and do is to categorize any of these reasons into five broad categories.

I am going to give you some ideas at the end of the article on a few ways that can make you money, but for starters let’s see why you have not yet managed to find the right way.

1. You don’t get enough traffic to your website or blog

To make money you need traffic, this is how the online business model works. If you are selling a high converting product you can make money with only a few visitors per day but if you want to make money from advertising you need a few thousands per day. Without traffic do not expect to make any money online.

When we talk about traffic, in the minds of many people Google is the only way but this is not true. There are many sources of Internet traffic you can use to meet your monetary targets but you need to know where to find them.

2. Your website/blog is too young

Don’t believe in everything you read about making money online. There is no magic way to make thousands in a few months and there is no magic way to make money without doing a lot of hard work.

This also means that if you just started a website or blog you will not make money any time soon unless of course you created an exceptional product or website.

From my experience you need at least one year (usually more) of hard work before making any decent amount of money either from AdSense, affiliate programs or through selling your own product.

3. You don’t practice good SEO

SEO is important for many reasons and if you believe that you can succeed online without following good SEO practices then you are wrong. Everything starts with SEO and I am not referring only to keyword analysis or content marketing but to the bigger picture which includes understanding your customers and using SEO to give them what they want.

The majority of webmasters still make mistakes with SEO despite the plethora of information about proven techniques that work.

4. You are not patient enough

They say that ‘patience is a virtue’ and when it comes to working online and expecting to make money from it, is more than true. To help you understand how important is to be patient, take into account the following examples:

• It may take 3-4 months before you start getting any organic traffic from Google or Bing
• It may take a few months until you build a decent number of Facebook and twitter followers
• It may take months until you get your first RSS subscriber or comment in your blog

The bottom line is that you need to aim for long term success and forget about any short term temporary results.

5. You created your blog/website for the sole purpose of making money online

Creating a website for the sole purpose of making money online is a thing of the past. 5 years ago you could create a number of blogger sites, publish a few posts, build tens of incoming links and make money through Adsense, Amazon affiliate stores or other affiliate promotions.

It was a model that worked for a couple of years and some people who were clever and fast enough to understand this, made enough money.

This model does no longer work. You cannot start a website for the sole purpose of adding Adsense or promoting a particular product or anything similar to this.

Your website or blog needs to have a purpose which goes beyond making money. You need to create something that adds value to the user by offering good content, free services and incentives for the user to come and visit your web site again and again.

When you do that persistently for a number of months, money will follow. I know that it is difficult to understand this especially if you are a beginner to the online world, but take my word for it there are no shortcuts or overnight tricks.

So, how can you make money online?

I don’t want to pass the message that it is impossible to make money online, because it is far from truth.  To close this post with a positive message here are some tested ways to make money – if you manage to combine some of these methods together then you can make a living online as well!

• Creating a website in a niche you are really passionate about – You create a high quality web site with good content that offers value to your readers. After some time you have enough readers and daily visits and you make money through Google Adsense.
• Writing a book about a topic you know very well and publishing it on Amazon (kindle book)  or selling it directly from your website. As an example, check out my SEO Book.
• Create a mobile application and upload it to Google Play, Apple Store, Windows Store and Amazon Appstore.  The application can be either free and gain from advertising or paid. To make money from advertising you need to have many downloads (at least 200,000) and many active users. To sell you application you need to have a good marketing plan. The competition is tough and without a marketing strategy it will be very difficult to make a decent amount of sales.
• Sell your services online – If you have the necessary skills you can sell your services online. This is not limited to IT or SEO or Internet Marketing. Check out peopleperhour.com and upwork.com to see examples of services offered and wanted.

Speaking of online services you can check out our SEO audit services and our SEO packages.

These are the four main methods I have used successfully over the years and made a living online. If you search more on the topic you will find other methods like selling on ebay or amazon, running an online shop, drop shipping etc. I am sure that these methods work too provided that you stay away from ‘get rich overnight’ methods.

My best advice is to find out what is more suitable to your abilities (either technical or educational), study about it, find out what others are doing, make a plan and don’t escape from it until you get the results you want.

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