- Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake of Robertoblake.com,
helping you create something awesome today.
In today's video I want to talk about how
to make money online.
I'm gonna give you actual legit answers
and strategies for this, just like I have
in my previous videos.
Many of you in the comments, you've loved
and enjoyed the content,
but you didn't feel like there were a lot of specifics
when I do a top five or top 10 list style video for that.
So in this one I'm gonna have more
of a conversation with you about some
of those detailed steps in how to make money online
using different platforms
and using different forms of content and media.
None of this is any type of get rich quick scheme.
None of this is overnight success.
It's gonna take you real work and real effort,
and in some cases real actual skills.
Now let's go through a quick disclaimer.
This is April 2017.
So as of the making of this video
I don't have a course to sell you.
I don't have a book to sell you.
So for all the cynics out there, 'cause I know
that you wear this badge of honor on your chest
about being cynical and skeptical about everything,
congratulations, you can continue watching the video.
One of things I did to make money online very early,
I was a younger person when I was doing this,
and a lot of you will understand this one,
is sell stuff on eBay.
One of the things I did back in the early days
of the internet was I used to sell things
that were related to a lot of my hobbies on the internet
to other people, whether that was stuff
for my tabletop gaming like Warhammer 40K,
whether it was Magic: The Gathering cards, Pokemon stuff,
that was the things I was selling on the internet.
Also, I was buying and then repurposing, upgrading
and selling used computers and computer parts
and components.
This is something that's very practical for you to do.
You can clean out your garage, your house if you're moving,
like I am to Atlanta.
There's plenty of stuff that you can find.
And you can use your phone app and you can snap it
and you can sell it on eBay.
But you can also sell this stuff on Amazon.
Amazon lets you sell used items as well.
If I wasn't passing down some of my camera gear
to my sister who's going to college in New York,
then I would be selling that stuff probably
on Amazon or eBay.
Facebook also lets you set up like a marketplace,
kind of like an online garage sale.
So you could actually sell your old items online
and that is an extremely practical thing to do.
You may not get rich off of that,
but you can clear out some space
and from a cash flow standpoint,
it's a pretty quick turnaround.
So I would just consider doing that if you have things
that are just taking up room that you could stand
to get rid of that other people might want.
So this one, this second one is something that I also did
pretty much in the early days,
but I didn't master it until much later.
Took, I think, maybe two or three years for me
to really a system in place for this
and that was starting my own website and blog.
What I did with that was I went
to what is Google.com/AdSense.
And now it's just AdSense.com,
and I signed up for a Google AdSense account as a publisher.
And what this meant is
that with having my own hosted website, my own dot com,
and having my blog there, I was able to write content
and write articles, interview other artists, designers,
and creative's, Photoshop people.
And I was able to run advertising against my website
and I was able to make some money off of that.
Did I make a lot of money off of that?
Did I make a crap ton of money?
No, but I was starting to make hundreds of dollars
after a few months pretty easily,
because I was increasing the traffic to my website,
because people were actually interested.
Whatever you're interested is, whatever your niche is;
design or photography, or maybe it's movies and film,
or maybe it's fitness, you can go ahead
and you can start a website or a blog.
People have done this
and built six figure businesses around it.
And you can make money off the advertising.
But advertising isn't the only way
to make money with a website.
You can also do affiliate marketing programs.
So here's how this works: With the advertising stuff
in terms of the banner advertisements,
Google pays you for every thousand views of those banners.
It also pays you if people click on those
and you make a certain amount of money.
Depending on the niche, the genre that you have,
you'll make more money than others.
What I will tell you is that the people who pay more
are web hosting companies, insurance companies,
IT companies, big B2B businesses, and things like that.
Which means that if you have something in terms
of content that is more related to that,
you'll get better placement of advertising
and you will make more money.
Google does not pay you until you've reached
a hundred dollar minimum threshold of what you've earned.
What that means is even if you only earned 50 dollars
this month, if it takes two or three months
and then you make over a hundred,
the 50 you already made will roll over in that payout.
So that's how that is going to work,
and that's how your gonna make your money there.
I like affiliate marketing on websites
a little better than that,
because you're paid per transaction.
Doing a blog about photography,
or about laptop reviews makes a lot of sense
because with Amazon specifically,
you can get pretty decent commissions from that.
So that's why I like Amazon affiliate marketing.
I've done several videos on this YouTube channel
that talk about Amazon affiliate marketing
including five ways you can make more money
from affiliate marketing.
And I do very well there.
I make thousands of dollars a month off
of affiliate marketing as a whole
by using multiple different affiliate systems,
not just Amazon, but also the web hosting companies
and other plug-ins and apps, security plug-ins,
just different things.
And they're products and services
that I use in my day-to-day business.
The camera gear that I recommend is the camera gear
that I use to shoot my YouTube videos.
I've shot over a thousand videos
just on this one YouTube channel, plus stuff for clients.
I was doing wedding photography when I was a teenager.
So I built websites around things that I knew,
things that I understood, things that I liked
or that I had professional experience in.
I built these what you would call niche websites or blogs.
And then I would post the ads from Google
and I would also post affiliate revenue stuff
in terms of the reviews of whatever I had,
and then a picture of it that's a banner that links out
to the website, whether it's Amazon,
eBay has a partner program for this
that you can sign up for,
or I think even Newegg also has one et cetera.
You can do those things, and then you make a commission.
B&H Photo Video has this as well.
So whatever websites you want to use,
whatever affiliate marketing places you wanna use,
if you have multiple websites that are very specific,
very niche, and speak about like a very,
very important topic that would translate to sales,
like again, what camera to buy, what laptop to buy,
what phone to buy,
then that could be very profitable for you.
With laptop reviews, I think every time
someone buys a laptop I average about 20 dollars per laptop.
So if you're getting thousands of views a month.
That is a good way, and a good system for making a lot
of affiliate revenue on recommending something
that you use or that you have expert advice on.
So that's how you would make money using a website.
It's not the only way though.
With a website, you can sell your own product or service
or you could also directly sell advertising
for sponsored posts.
Or you can sell an ad block and you can do that directly.
So if you're local and there's a local business
that wants to advertise on your website
or even there's a business abroad,
you could just tell them how much it costs for the month
and then you could put their banner ad there.
Put a tracking link with Bitly or something like that
in place so you can tell them how many people clicked on it.
And then you can just make sure you're billing them,
or that you're taking the money up front,
however you wanna do it.
So these are the ways that with a website
you can make money online.
If you're going to do web hosting I know that
that is something a lot
of you may not know where to get that.
I'm gonna recommend two possible options.
I'm gonna recommend microsite, or Hostgator.com.
So go to Robertoblake.com/Bluehost.
That's my affiliate link.
That does help me out.
And you can set up a website.
I'm using them for a couple of my sites.
Hostgator, I also have to set up some tutorials
on that website.
And I like to actually just segregate
where I host all my websites.
I've used everybody, but my favorite hostings
are Bluehost, Hostgator, Namesheep.
And if you can't code, or you don't want use WordPress
to make a blog, you can use Wix.com, it's a visual editor.
I'm gonna link to these in the description
and I'm gonna link to a couple of books
and resources that could help you.
But if you go to my links for that, that does help me out.
Aside from websites,
obviously you can make money on YouTube.
Even with all the ad boycott stuff that's going on,
you can still make a lot of money on YouTube.
I still make thousands of dollars a month directly
on YouTube from advertising.
And I still feel like
that could be a very significant revenue stream.
I wouldn't rely on it to live off of.
I could live off of it.
I choose not to.
So what I would say about that is,
that won't happen overnight either.
I've been on this platform actively for four years
and I would say the first year I was making money,
but not what I would consider real money.
I would consider, oh you could pay a bill with that,
oh you could buy a new computer with that,
you know month-to-month a few hundred bucks
is what I think I was making in the first year.
But after that first year a few hundred started
to add up and I think within that first year
I started clearing close to a thousand and so on so forth.
So the way that works is also just like Google AdSense,
you have to sign up for Google AdSense
and then you link it to your YouTube account
and then based on the views and based on clicks
on ads you will make money there.
And so that's how that's going to work.
YouTube plays advertisements in front of your content.
It also puts banners on the side or sometimes
on the bottom of video.
And because the advertisers are getting seen
by an audience they care about,
they start to pay you some money from that.
Again, you have to meet a 100 dollar threshold
before they write and send out that check
or give you that direct deposit.
You also can tie affiliate marketing
and sponsorships over to YouTube as well.
And that's another way to make money online.
One of the other ways that I've made money online
that I don't think I give enough attention,
I should make a dedicated video about, is writing articles.
I started with writing articles on my own blog
and that did make me some money.
Eventually some smaller publications came to me
and I wrote for them as well, some paid and some for free.
Eventually because I had hundreds of articles
and had proven that I can write on certain subjects,
I was able to start doing paid articles
for a few hundred dollars apiece.
When I started out, I think I was getting 150.
After doing the smaller blogs
where I think I got maybe 50 or 60.
But I didn't have like a word count limit
or anything like that.
I could write short posts
and still get 50, 60 or up to 100 dollars.
When I started writing stuff that was 500 to 800 words
it went up to 150 and then eventually 250
and higher, and 500.
So being able to write 500 to 1000 word articles,
as a minimum now, I get between usually 250
for something shorter and 1000 to 500 for something bigger.
And it also depends on if I include a video.
So it just depends on who the publication is,
what they want, and what their budgets look like.
But that's fairly straightforward.
If you are an expert on something, or you experience,
maybe that takes you an hour, two hours,
and you make a few hundred bucks.
And sure, that's not as glamorous as making money
in your sleep, but it's also really practical.
To be able to get your online money you should have
a few different things set up in place.
You should have a PayPal account.
I'd also recommend considering a Venmo account
and a Stripe account as well.
These different payment systems are gonna allow you
to collect money from people.
There might be some fees associated with that,
so you just have to keep that in mind.
And I would also set up two different email addresses
from your regular email address for those accounts.
And the reason for that is for safety and security
and just making sure that these are email addresses
that people only have if they're paying you.
So that would be my answer to that.
From a security standpoint,
you don't want somebody getting into the account
that has your money in it.
For the money that you make online,
you have to pay taxes on it just like anything else.
You have to declare it.
You have to say that, hey, this is income I made
and then you have to pay taxes on it.
A lot of these platforms that I've talked about
definitely have 1099 forms including the freelance websites
that I used when I was doing work online
as a designer using freelance websites.
So if you make enough money or any money often,
they'll send you a 1099.
I also know that print on demand websites;
things like Spreadshirt and Zazzle and CafePress,
if you're selling online products like T-shirts, or posters,
or mugs or anything like that,
these websites also send you that stuff when tax time comes
and then you just have to report it.
So report your income and your earnings,
pay your appropriate taxes.
You don't want to create a problem there.
And just make sure that you understand
where all your money is coming from.
Because that's just good to know in general.
I hope this has answered some your questions
on how you actually make money online.
I will probably make some specific videos
about how I made money online doing writing,
or doing freelancing, or selling Te-shirts
or any of those things if they're interesting to you.
I've definitely talked about the affiliate marketing stuff.
I've talked about how I made money on YouTube before.
I probably should get more into
how you make money with blogs and niche microsites.
So if you have questions about that stuff,
leave them in the comment section.
I'll try to answer them and help you guys out.
Tell me what videos like that you'd like me
to make in the future.
Like this video if you like it.
Don't forget to subscribe.
Check out the other awesome stuff on the channel.
Remember, I've linked up resources and books for you
in the description below to help you guys out.
As always, thanks so much for watching
and don't forget, create something awesome today,
Take care.
(upbeat techno music)