Welcome to the Moms Make Money Series
This is the first of many articles for our “Moms Make Money” series here on Light’s blog. Hopefully, she can make use of this information when she grows up.
To kick things off, I’d like to outline the different ways to make money online for moms that are staying at home, taking care of their young ones.
You might be wondering how you’ll have the “time” to do this as you are a full time mom at this point or maybe you are a mom that has graduated from being fully hands-on (kids are now teens) and just want to make some income on the side or maybe even a full-time one.
Start with this post.
Before I begin, I want to say that for the other posts that I will be posting in this series, I will be focusing only on how to make money online by using websites, from offering products, services, offline business promotion to blogging and NOT offering V.A. (virtual assistant roles) or writing services where you trade your time directly for money.
Let’s get started.
Ways To Make Money Online
I know you’ve seen those ads on your favourite blog showing you those big fat cheques.
You’ve also heard about your friend making money through their blog because of “advertising” most of the time.
You might have heard somebody sell their old stuff on classified sites like OLX.
Heck, you might have even taken part in those “clicking programs” where they pay you to just click on something in exchange for a few cents.
Well, you’ll get a little bit of everything today.
Consider this as a crash course to understanding how the online business world works.
Offline Business Promotions
Do you have a business right now? Why not build a presence for it online?
If you sell goods, you can sell it through the site. If you offer services then offer it through the site and expand your reach. Maybe you have a company that does both which is to sell and offer a service, like this one that sells solar panels and offers installations for solar energy systems, then build a site around it.
If you have a business that is hard to translate into a website environment, then even a simple website to attract phone calls, text messages or emails will do.
With a properly optimized site, you’d get found through Google, heck even Facebook, where you’ll enjoy endless (free) leads and customers, if you do it right.
Actionable Tips:
- List down the details of your business and draw out how the process works.
- See if you can translate that into a website.
- Create a website and test it.
- Start marketing your new website.
- Alternative: Don’t have an offline business? Start with a friend’s business.
E-Commerce
You have probably seen a lot of new websites popping up recently selling products. You might have bought something from Amazon, maybe even bought a book on their Kindle app. Maybe you bought that shoe from Zalora or bought that coupon from Groupon. That’s all part of e-commerce. You can even put your products on Etsy if you have some goods that fit their market.
There will be a lot of other new e-commerce sites that will pop up this year and it will not stop coming. The industry has been rejuvenated recently and in the current stage of the online world, e-commerce looks like it’s here to stay.
Actionable Tips:
- Do you have goods to sell? List them down!
- Create a website. If you want to keep costs low, stick with WordPress as your CMS. If you want to take this seriously, don’t ever use those free blog platforms. They are blogs, not e-commerce sites.
- Put up the products and easily create a buy now button using Paypal. There are other ways like using Gumroad but that’s for another day.
- Get a sale and savour that taste to drive you to aim for more.
- Want to take this seriously and have a boat load of different products? Have an e-commerce site developed using Magento.
A Subscription Model
Remember back in the day when you subscribed to a newspaper company to deliver your newspaper daily?
This is now in the online world! The surprising part is, you are probably using one now.
Maybe you are using Spotify now. Are you on the brink of paying for it or did you already pay for it? Maybe you also paid for an Evernote account or your Dropbox account got filled up and you already used all your free invites to raise your limit?
Are you having your meals delivered because you are on a diet?
Are you a member of some private group that you need to pay an annual membership fee for?
Are you paying for a course now to learn something each month?
Those are all under the subscription/membership model. It can be a really complicated model when it gets big, but if you are starting out, even the smallest ideas can work. TRY IT.
Actionable Tips:
- Don’t be afraid to try it out. IF you are on Instagram, a lot of the people you follow are already using this business model.
- Brainstorm ideas that people would want to keep paying for each month. Start with real products just to speed things up. It should be something that SOLVES a problem. You can even outright go to people and ask them what pain points they have in their lives and businesses.
- Validate your idea by bouncing it off your friends and find other people that you don’t know. Network!
- If it’s good, ask for an advance. That will usually mean that the product is really good. They’d really want it!
- Create 1 paid plan first to test it out.
- Create the site around it and start marketing it.
Offering a Service
Can you teach English online? Do internet marketing or SEO like us? Offer web design service? Maybe a shirt printing service?
Do you have special skills that you can use to serve people?
Maybe you can sing to the tune of Happy Birthday while walking on ice barefoot holding up a sign with the name of your client? Offer it on places like Fiverr. Have a special skill like graphic design or writing? Go to Elance or Odesk.
Actionable Tips:
- List down what you are talented at. (Example: let’s say your grammar is top notch, can research quickl and you can type really fast.)
- Go to a platform such as Odesk to set up your profile. (Example: Offer Ghost Writing services)
- Apply or bid for a project.
- Alternative: Create your own personal website where you sell your services. Start marketing it.
Selling Your Own Digital Products
This is probably the hardest, most competitive and the most profitable of all the things on this list.
Much like when offering a real product or service, you want to solve a pain point for the customer.
Imagine yourself having a website about baby photography. You took your time to make it look really good. You get comments about how your work is awesome and these people ask how you did it.
What do you do? Sell “presets” made in Adobe Lightroom.
That’s your first digital product right there.
Actionable Tips:
- Create a website
- Collect emails of prospects
- Find a pain point
- Create a digital product
- Repeat
- You don’t need to have a following to start selling your own products.
- PS. Don’t underprice your products…ever.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is essentially getting a commission every time somebody clicks a link that leads to a service and buys from them. Not all companies offer this though.
It also has a negative implication in some cases because people just recommend things in order to get a commission which is the wrong way of doing it.
I am a big fan of affiliate marketing because if done the right way, you are just recommending something you already love and use!
Like in this blog, I’m using themes from StudioPress. I’m recommending them because they are awesome and they have been awesome to me for years. I also use LeadPages and that’s the bomb! I can’t recommend them enough!
You might have been to blogs where they recommend Amazon products. It’s because when you click on it, they get a commission, IF you buy. You might have also seen Agoda banners or HotelsCombined.com banners. They pay you when the clicker books a flight or hotel. It’s like the local “ahente” selling you make up products or something.
Now, I know a lot of the readers here are from the Philippines and the crab mindset is very prominent here but there’s absolutely no extra cost, sometimes, you even get a discount by clicking the link so don’t worry. Give the guy that recommended that book about Dr. Seuss his commission. He earned it!
Actionable Tips:
- Find a niche
- Check if there are affiliate programs for that niche
- Create a website around it
- Market it
- Get paid
Virtual Assistant Roles
This is probably the most common way to make money online here in the Philippines.
This is a spinoff of the “Offering a Service” point earlier in the article but this is usually a straight up trade of your time for money.
A lot of moms are doing this as a side job while staying at home. They get offered jobs to do daily, weekly or whatever the setup is for a limited number of work hours.
This can be handling social media accounts, to going through email, doing support for a product, telemarketing and so on.
Actionable Tips:
- Find job openings. Just type it in Google. There is a big demand in virtual administrative work out there and there are no shortages of employers looking to outsource work.
- Don’t under value your worth.
- Batch the same tasks together to be more efficient.
- Negotiate your time so you can spend time with your kids or do other chores.
- Negotiate a fix amount of pay if that works better than hourly.
- Do regular reports, your employer will appreciate that.
Auction Sites
Remember eBay? It’s still alive, even here in the Philippines.
Not much to say here. It’s still a big company right now. It’s been around for forever!
You might want to take a look at what products are selling there and see if you can do something similar.
Actionable Tips:
- If you have some antiques or heirlooms lying around, you might want to search online and find the value before posting it for auction.
- You can also find local suppliers for unique products and sell it there.
- You don’t have to always auction products, you can directly sell from there.
Selling Your Click
For many of you, your first venture to make money online came in the form of clicking links.
You’ve been clicking on that button or ad for the past 30 minutes and you have 5 cents now.
This is basically the WORST thing you can do to make money online.
So what others do is find software to do the clicking which gets them $1! #WIN
Now go find a better thing to do online.
Actionable Tip:
- Go do something else.
Online Gambling and Betting
There are a lot of online casino websites out there today. You can play poker if you want! You can bet on horse races (I’d pick this one personally) or sports events and anything you can think of!
Actionable Tips:
- You have to know what you are doing and what you are getting yourself into.
- Know your limits
- Know your local laws (if applicable)
Scamming People
You can do a lot of things with this. From faking to be a really hot girl in need of money, to faking to be in love with a lonely foreigner, to straight out email phishing.
I’m not going into more of this because this needs a totally separate post. I’ll get to 10k words easily on how many online scams are out there.
Actionable Tips:
- Get a job and stay away from the online world
- Don’t try this
Getting Paid For Your Reach
Do you have a humongous following online? Businesses will easily chuck out the money for you to promote their products.
Celebrities do this daily but even you can outshine celebrities, especially if your niche is really targeted.
Oh, you’ll probably get free stuff, too. Who’s complaining?
Advice:
- Promote only products that you believe in.
- Don’t over promote or people will unfollow you.
- Integrate promotion with a series of other useful information.
- Have a number in mind before you start negotiations with the company.
- Don’t buy your followers. You’re account will get a penalty and eventually you will lose them anyway so that’s money down the drain.
Blogging
Blogging is the central topic for many people trying to earn an income online out there.
A lot of them can’t even get started, most of them are still lost, some have experienced moderate success and some are superstars in their niches already.
You can use the blog for personal branding, whether you are a realtor, a speaker, a fashion blogger, a beauty blogger, a mom blogger, heck, even an agent for a company.
Multi Level Marketing and network marketers land in this category most of the time because of restrictions for many of those programs.
BUT HOW CAN YOU REALLY MONETIZE A BLOG???
- Well, this is another spinoff of the “Offering a Service” point earlier in the article. You can sell services, coaching services
- You can do affiliate marketing (mentioned earlier)
- You can sell your own products (mentioned earlier)
- You can rent ad space
- You can get paid to create a review for a product
- You can get promote events or product launches
- If you have a big enough email list, people will partner with you so they can send their offer to your list
- They can pay you so they can do a guest post on your site (though this isn’t really good in Google’s eyes)
There’s probably a few more that I didn’t include there but that’s it for now. I don’t want to over simplify it because it’s not simple at all. It’ll take time for you to build up your following and content archive.
Advice:
- Don’t expect this to be easy and quick. This is not get rich quick scheme.
- Blogging should be enjoyable, not a chore. That’s how you will grow your readership which will open doors to new monetization opportunities.
- Create great content with both the User and SEO in mind.
- Don’t monetize too early. Focus on your blog’s content.
You Can Make Money Online, Too
Don’t be overwhelmed. This is just the beginning. A really short introduction to what can be done in the online world. We haven’t even started with marketing yet, where you will be introduced to terms such as JV’s, launches, SEO and other terms.
Take the time to brainstorm and ask questions in the comments area if you have any.
Hope that clears things up and it gives you a good perspective on what you can do.
Watch out for the next blog post to continue your journey online.
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Papa
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