Make Money Online? Or Build A Business Online?

The Internet is the greatest media for earning huge amounts of money since as far as I can find in the history of economics. All forex, stock trading, auction sites, shopping malls, advertising agencies … you name it, are all operating online. So whether there is a possibility to make money online has not been a question since the late 1990s.

The real question becomes whether to just make money or build a long term business online?

How to make money online has been explained in hundreds and hundreds of ebooks, courses, coaching programs, membership sites, and even for free on blogs and Web 2.0 pages. It’s just a matter of picking up a system and sticking to it until you make the money you want.

Building a business, on the other hand, takes more than just learning a bunch of techniques and applying them. Building an online business, like any business, requires a vision, goals, a plan, resources management, and action to start this business and make it grow over time to achieve the desired goals.

What makes a difference between earning money online and building a business online is how you perceive it. The two might require the same activities and might result in the same thing, which is money, but one is taken as a hobby, and one is taken serious. The hobby might make you some money now, and make the same money a year later. A business, however, should not settle for just making the same amount of money. A business should be making 2X, 3X, 4X … of what it generated a year before because it should be growing.

What does that mean to you?

There are courses out there to teach you how to make money using all free tools available for every one on the Internet. Bum marketing and one week marketing are just examples. Those courses are great courses that are proven to work and many people are happy with their results. They are happy because they are making money.

They are making money, but not building a business. When you invest time and effort on putting content on someone else’s website because they allow you to do so and you use that to get people to click and buy through your affiliate link, when you do that you are leaving tons of money on the table and helping the owners of the sites you used to grow their virtual properties.

With the business mentality, you should be putting your content on your own website. Give your own domain more value by adding more content day after day instead of putting your content on someone else’s website. The more valuable content and back links you get to your site the more your sites value will grow. This is an asset that you can keep working for you and making you money, or you can sell it for a big some of cash if you need.

Also, funneling traffic to your affiliate product is not a good practice. You worked hard to get that traffic to click that link. Make sure you get those people to come back to you whenever you call them. Get their names and email

addresses and build your LIST. Your list is your most valuable asset that no body can take from you. Your list could be your virtual ATM machine. All what it takes when you need cash is to find a product and send an email to your list recommending this product. That’s it! Just send an email to your list.

I am not against such courses as one week marketing. In fact I highly recommend one week marketing for beginners until they learn how to build their own websites, capture their visitors’ contact information, and have money for all of that. The beauty of one week marketing is that you can start with $0 budge and make good money with it. But it’s just a phase.

After you have enough money to buy a domain name and hosting do it immediately. Build a niche site and change the links you’ve built with one week marketing campaigns to point to your own niche site instead of going directly to the sales page.

Once you have enough money to afford an auto responder do it without a delay and start building a list of your niche site visitors. Who doesn’t buy immediately on the site could buy a month down the road if you follow up with the proper email series.I have seen sales pages converting 7 times better with the follow up series vs. without.

Once you have these two (your site and your list) start buying traffic from search engines and other advertising platforms. This is the reliable source of traffic that you can buy more of. What you pay for is what you can build a business on. Organic traffic could disappear if search engines change their algorithms or if a competitor succeeds in kicking you out of your position. Paid for traffic, on the other hand, has to be delivered to you … or else.

Start making money online with one week marketing, article marketing, bum marketing, or whatever method of marketing you like. But once you have the ability to establish a business on solid foundations of virtual real estate (your website and your list) and reliable sources of traffic, don’t wait a minute.

And remember this: The more you wait the harder it will get for you to do it because every day hundreds and thousands of people start online businesses in all kinds of niches. The more you wait the less niches will be available and the harder the competition will be.