The Truth about How to Make Money on the Internet
An old friend of mine I haven’t heard from in years just left a message on my answering machine. She was absolutely chortling with glee as she told me all about this wonderful business deal she had made. “I finally found secret to how to make money on the internet!” she said, “I found this website and the owner is making millions! You should see the car he drives! He showed me a copy of his bank statement. He made over $300,000 in just one month! I was so lucky! They’re only accepting a limited number of new investors.
You just won’t believe how easy it is! The company sets up a turnkey website and updates the content for you. All you have to do is sit back and wait for the big bucks to start pouring into your account. You really need to join this company. It only costs $500 dollars, and you’ll probably make ten times that much in less than a month! I’ve got to go to work now, but all you have to do is go to my site and sign up.” she said, then rattled off the URL before she hung up.
My friend had definitely NOT found the secret to how to make money on the internet. What she had spent her hard earned money on was NOT a turnkey website. It was just a web page on the company’s website with her own company name printed in bold type near the top right corner. It was loaded with promises of riches and the image of a pretty little document proclaiming her to be a certified member of the company.
As I browsed through the company's website, I found hundreds of pages exactly like hers. The woman had spent $500 dollars and she had not gotten a turnkey website, or even a domain of her own in the process. You can bet your bottom dollar nobody’s going to find her web page on a search engine! She won’t even be able to bring in few customers by exchanging links because she isn’t allowed to upload a link directory to the site. So where do all these “big bucks” she’s supposed to make from this "turnkey website" come from, I wondered. Then I picked up the phone and gave her a call at work and asked her that same question.
“Oh I don’t have to promote my website, the company’s going to submit the site to all the search engines for me.” she said. “I’ll get lots of traffic in two or three months. In the meantime, all I have to do is talk my friends and relatives into joining under me so I can start making thousands of dollars right now! Good luck with that, my friend!
There are some fantastic turnkey websites you can actually use to make money on the internet. Unfortunately, scam artists are using the term "turnkey websites" so often that they're giving honest dealers a bad reputation in the industry.
Here's how to tell the difference between a scam offer and a real turnkey website offer. Scam artists are similar to cult leaders. They recruit people like my friend; people who want to learn how to make money on the internet. Who dream of owning their own business. They brainwash their recruits with promises of unimaginable riches. They’ll tell you that they have made millions and show you a photo of their mansion with the Olympic sized swimming pool over and over again. They’ll display a copy of a “bank statement” with a balance so huge that your eyes are riveted on the numbers. You’re hypnotized by the possibility that this could be your bank statement, and it doesn’t even occur to you to wonder why the name of the account owner is concealed beneath slashes of a black marker. They promise to tell you how to make money on the internet. They tell you that you can get rich quick if you only shell out a few hundred bucks for their turnkey website. They make it sound so easy. Just talk your family and friends and a few strangers into shelling out a few hundred bucks for their own turnkey website too and voila! You’re rolling in dough.
A legitimate turnkey website is a package deal, which includes a complete professionally designed website you can use to sell products or services to your customers. The package usually includes all the products shown in the catalog at the time of purchase or the software necessary to perform the services you offer for sale on the site. You should also receive free setup and installation as well. In some cases, the website catalog features products you may purchase wholesale from a supplier who will drop ship the products. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the term, a true drop shipper will package and ship the product to your customers using a label with your company name and address instead of their own. A reputable dealer will probably not provide you the name of the supplier before purchase, for obvious reasons. However, the dealer should be willing to provide a wholesale price list for the products before you purchase the site so you can determine what your profit margin will be on the products.
A reputable dealer will provide a demo version of the turnkey site. They will tell you up front exactly what is included in your package. They will tell you that you need a hosting plan and your own domain name before they can set up your site for you. After you purchase the package, the website belongs to you. You can add more products, more pages, or edit the existing pages.
In addition to misleading you about the "website" you're purchasing, the scam artists omit a few more facts about the secret of how to make money on the internet that I'm about to show you. Scam artists tell you all you have to do is tell your friends and family and a few strangers about the big bucks they can make and they’ll be begging you to let them join up under you. Okay, sounds easy enough, like the guy says, if he can do it, so can you, right?
I say, the secret to how to make money on the internet is to buy your self a professionally designed turnkey website package for less than a fifty bucks, shell out less than ten bucks a month on a hosting plan, and invest some time and effort in building a reputable business. So test it. Before you invest your hard earned money, try both methods out. Give them your best shot and see which one really works.
Talk to your family, your friends, and a few strangers. Give them the same sales pitch the scam artist gave you. Tell them you’ve finally found the secret to how to make money on the internet. Tell them you're making thousands or even millions of dollars a month on the internet. Show them the photo of you standing in front of your big old mansion with the Olympic sized swimming pool—oops, you don't have that yet. Okay, show them your bank statement with the huge balance—oops, you don’t have that yet either. The scam artist can convince you to buy his “secret” because he’s an absolute stranger. You see the “proof” of his success and want to have those things too. You are dealing with family and friends who know you don’t have a mansion, or a huge bank account. Do you honestly think you will be able to convince them to invest a few hundred bucks to join up under you? Strangers you meet face to face will be even less inclined to invest money in your venture without proof that it works for you.
Ready to try my method now? Okay. Although I could cite hundreds of examples to prove these “secrets to success” have worked time after time after time for people in all walks of life, let’s use a lady I shared these “secrets for success” with several years ago as an example. This lady is a high school dropout who wanted to start a business online to help make ends meet; she had no knowledge of HTML and less than a hundred dollars to invest in her business. She didn’t know the first thing about building a website herself. And she certainly couldn’t afford to pay a web designer hundreds of dollars to custom build website for her business. She now makes an average of $5,000 per month on her website. Would you like to know the “secret” of how she did it? Okay.
The first thing she did was accept the fact that while she could eventually attain her goals, she was not going to get rich overnight. So instead of wasting her money in a get rich quick deal, she contacted a reputable turnkey website dealer and asked for some advice on how to start her business. She purchased her turnkey website package for less than fifty dollars. She selected a domain name for her site, and purchased an affordable hosting plan with the features she needed to manage her business.
Along with her hosting plan, the company provided a package of informational materials on how to make her business successful. She studied the materials and learned how to find the best keywords to promote her products; and how to determine which sites she needed to exchange links with to improve her page ranking on the search engines. She asked the dealer’s excellent support staff for advice and soon learned that she could do many of the tasks she thought she would have to pay them to do herself very quickly and easily.
She understood that just submitting her website to search engines and directories was just the first step in advertising her site. She handed out business cards to everyone she knew and left stacks of cards on the counter at her hairdresser's shop, her doctor's office, etc, for their customers. She printed some flyers and tacked them up on bulletin boards local businesses provided for their customers to use to advertise. She carried a supply of business cards and flyers everywhere she went. While on vacation, she talked to the owners of the restaurants, gas stations and convenience stores they stopped at along the way and obtained permission to leave a stack of her cards on the counter or post a flyer on the store window for their customers. She joined forums and added her website URL to her forum signature.
Her efforts paid off slowly, with a few sales trickling in, then a few more, and a few more. Finally she reached the point where she could afford to quit her full time job and work at home. Two years ago, when they reached the $5,000 per month goal they had set, her husband quit his job and stayed home to help her manage their business full time.
In my line of work, I’ve met hundreds of people just like this lady who discovered the true secret to how to make money on the internet is that you have to work for it. I've also met hundreds of others who categorically refused to believe they can’t get rich overnight on the internet. They invest in get rich quick schemes or just setup a turnkey website and sit back and wait for the money to come pouring in for a month or two, and when they don’t make any money, they just give up and close the website.
Owning an online business is not all that different from owning a store in your own hometown. You must setup shop. You must display your products so customers can find them easily. You must advertise. And you must provide good service. It's true that you don’t have to know HTML or be a computer whiz to start an online business. However, I do suggest that you take advantage of the many free tutorials available on the internet to learn a few basic HTML codes, such as how to set up links, make text bold or italic, or create bulleted lists. The HTML codes to do these tasks are extremely simple and easy to learn. As any successful businessperson will tell you, the key to being successful is to learn as much as possible about all the facets of your business.
So there you have it my friends--the secret to how to make money on the internet. If you want to succeed in the world of online business, don’t waste your time and effort, and your hard earned money in get rich quick systems or business ventures. If you really want to make that dream of owning your own business come true, you’re going to have to work for it. Do your homework. If you don't know HTML, or you don't have a product or service you can sell. Find a reputable dealer and purchase yourself a turnkey website. Set yourself realistic goals. Seek the advice of other entrepreneurs like yourself on the forums. Listen and learn, then use what you learn to improve and promote your site, and you will achieve your dream.
About the Author:
Loretta Wright is the CEO of
www.Topcat-Web-Design.com and currently serves as the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for
www.Topcat-Hosting.com. She also oversees the operations for seven other websites she personally owns.
