Warning: This post is going to mostly consist of text, no pretty images or videos for you guys to look at.. But if you read it, you might just save yourself from never achieving your dreams.
There’s a lot of people who make money by selling dreams.. They get to live the life you want, by “showing” you how to get there, when realistically, they got there with the money you just gave them.
I know, that’s some inception shit right there.
This post isn’t about mentioning names, calling people out or causing hate among the community. If you’re clever enough, you’ll see people for who they are and realize that you won’t go from having 3 figures in your bank account to 6 in a matter of days… Unless you happen to have the winning lottery numbers for next week, just lying around.
That One “HACK” / “TRICK” / “EXPLOIT”
Aside from the obvious reason of why I don’t use the word “hack” in my titles, or any other marketing-based variation is because it’s not true, or realistic.
Yes, there are some people who genuinely find a hole in a system and manage to exploit it, but if they went around making videos or blog posts about how they’re doing it… They wouldn’t be able to exploit it for much longer, would they?
The (very rare) people who do actually find these real exploits (and not the ones in YouTube videos being talked about) are either:
- Lucky – Because something caught their eye OR had it thrust upon them.
- Highly Intelligent – And would/do make money legitimately anyway.
- Risky – They don’t see risk for what it is, they just care about the here and now, what are consequences to these people? Meaningless.
You’re probably thinking to yourself that you could be any 1 of these 3 things, but this blog post is about realism… So I’ll break these down for you.
Luck: So you’re just going to sit around waiting to catch a trick that could make you millions? No, no you are not.
Intelligence: If you’re highly intelligent, then go make some money.. It’s very easy to make money by showing your intelligence and the 3rd part to this will probably put you off doing these kinds of exploits.
Risk: A LOT of people who do these things, end up in prison or publicly shamed for being scammers or create enemies for themselves – All 3 are things you don’t want in your life, because when your “exploit” does stop working, then you have nothing to fall back on but the hate for yourself you’ve caused.
Of course there are some legitimate exploits out there, I’m not saying that you’re going to end up in jail and on the front page of the local newspaper over all of them, but the majority of the exploits that have actually caused people to become very rich aren’t legitimate at all and the “exploits” most dream-sellers show, aren’t exploits at all… They’re just worded like that for marketing purposes, and are probably just basic tactics used by advanced people in the industry changed up a little to look better.
Shiny Object Syndrome
Unfortunately, 99% of you reading this have more than likely bought into something that offers nothing in return for YOU.
They’re re-shaped, re-worded, re-priced versions of what has come before OR don’t actually do anything altogether.
There’s a reason why in 4 years of blogging I’ve released 1 proper product and it’s still with us nearly 2 years later. Whilst in that space of time, most of these “gurus” (who mostly have a basic understanding of techniques, but a good sales voice) have released several, each year – If you’re getting a new marketing email every week from someone in the internet marketing industry, offering you a new “revolutionary” product.. Then Unsubscribe NOW, even once a month is a big turn off… Realistically, a good, new product that’s going to be supported for more than a year will come out once a year, if that, and certainly that tool isn’t going to be revolutionary – It’s just going to make your job/life a lot easier in one, or maybe a few aspects.
You can check out my full list of real tools here – These are tools that have been around for years, actually offer support past the initial 6 months of opening and will help you.. Plus, I didn’t even include any affiliate links in that list, so it’s pure advice as there’s no money in it for me.
How To Actually Get Rich
There isn’t a solid plan of do this and you’ll make money.. If there was, there’d be a lot more rich IM’ers out there.
However, there are certain aspects that you can run with to become successful, and start earning real money.
Get Capital
If you want to make serious money, you’ll first need money.
There’s a wealth of opportunity out there to make that initial income, you just need time. If you already have a paying job, then use that money, but if you don’t, then here’s a few IDEAS (I suggest using your own ways, and these ideas should be taken with a pinch of salt) –
- Content Creation Services – If English is your first language and you’re a decent writer, then you can easily charge around $20/500 words (including rigorous research) which shouldn’t take you longer than an hour or 2. You can find clients for this in various marketplace Facebook groups, offer a free review of your service to get some people buying.
- Website Builds – It’s not that hard to learn and setup a really good looking WordPress site, and people need sites for all kinds of reasons – From blog networks to affiliate sites to local businesses.. You can find clients locally through connections or again, use Facebook groups.
- YouTube Affiliate – Creating, optimizing and promoting videos costs nothing. You can easily make a lot of money by reviewing a big product, optimizing the video with a huge description, good title and tags and then use free link sources to build links and rank it in Google. If video/talking isn’t your thing, then use a free blogging platform to make an affiliate blog and rank using free link sources.
There’s just a couple of ways to go about making money on the internet. There’s a ton more out there as well, all require your time and aren’t going to cost you money to learn how to do.
Specialize OR Expand
There’s 2 paths you can go down once you have capital to invest. I’ll cover both of these for you:
Expand
If your capital idea is doing well, then why not expand it using the capital you’ve earned?
In the first example idea I gave, you could use your capital to hire a fulltime writer for $10/500 words, and still charge $20 – Making a 100% return, and you already have the client base to buy the articles off you.
You can also use the capital you’ve made to create a website where people can order your content, create systems to manage your writers, hire people to handle the support/sales, invest in paid traffic or SEO to get more clients and so on… And that’s just that one example idea I gave you.
Specialize
If you don’t want to expand your free operation.. Then you need to specialize. You need to pick a certain area of IM that you want to focus on and really learn and grow your income from the money you’ve invested.
You could do a Ryan Stewart and guest post on every SEO blog going, to get clients and grow an agency.
You could join Stack That Money and master the arts of paid traffic affiliate.
You could do a Gary Vaynerchuck and go after your potential customers by answering their questions on social media.
You could join BlackHat.Community and start dominating SERPs with black hat SEO.
There are a plethora of things to specialize in, inside of internet marketing… It all just depends on what interests you and what you want to invest your life into.
P.S. Use Your Money Wisely
Once you have money to invest, you’ll need to constantly be thinking about ROI, aka “Return on Investment”.
For every penny you spend, you want to be making a dollar back – That’s not accurate, just the mentality you should have.
Don’t spend $500 on courses if you only have $1,000 capital. Spend that $500 on domain names, paid traffic, social tools.. Or whatever it is that you want to do in your internet marketing specialty or business expansion.
Thanks For Sticking With Me
That was one huge wall of text, aye?
I hope this gives you a bit more inspiration and a better understanding of making money with internet marketing, though it will take a lot of your time.. Nothing happens over night, you’re building a business here.
Don’t forget to join my email newsletter and drop a comment with your thoughts on making money with IM or if you have one, drop your your success story below.
I’ll see you in the next post!
Charles I feel your post title oversells what’s offered for information. That said the advice given contains many truths. For example I applaud you for avoiding the word “Hack” in every sentence uttered. This one is by far one of the most repugnant words adopted by the current generation. If someone applied for a position at any company I owned and on the resume, application or during an interview used the work “Hack” I’d dismiss them immediately.
The recipe for success is a TON of hard work over a course of years and even then a dash of luck goes a long way. The digital world moves so fast success can be created quicker but by no means “fast”. Anything else can’t be duplicated and therefore is pure luck. In fact most people have no idea how they got to be successful and even if they actually do and can articulate it in such a way that others could replicate it (aka a franchise), there are factors which contributed to their success which no longer exist and can’t be replicated. Such is why there were so many “six figure SEO’s” before 2011 and the vast majority are gone now.
Any post like this though is doomed to fail the reader since statements like “It’s not that hard to learn and setup a really good looking WordPress site” are ambiguous. They rely heavily on the readers imagination about what is “easy”.
This isn’t really a problem unless it is presented in a post defined as “Rags to Riches” giving the reader the expectation of some path to follow to achieve such things.
This leaves the reader with the impression that all that needs to be done is develop a “good looking WordPress site”. You even said in your blog post here that to make money online you really need a plethora of skills, building proper websites is just one, and make no mistake, it’s NOT that easy. Sure if you’ve done it dozens of times and have a background with the web you’ll pick it up quickly, but easy is an ambiguous definition.
The problem with our industry is people aren’t honest. Even this post could take the honesty up a level. It fucking hard to make money online. Even if you do everything right, there are still innumerable factors out of your control which are at play. If SEO is your primary income stream people need to be fully aware of the risk that they are taking on. One algorithm update can destroy your livelihood. I say this over and over, but people refuse to believe. They want the lie. Lie to us. This is why the lie still sells after all this time.
I’ve had just a few people who I can say have made a truly positive contribution to the success Alyssa and I have achieved online. Those people had some sort of blind faith in me that I wasn’t just another lazy, do-nothing, make-excuses person looking for quick riches. They didn’t give me anything, but they opened my mind to what’s possible.
We are in desperate need of more truth in our communities. Less bullshit, less half truths.
The problem is we’re all at war. Business is war. So we can’t tell the whole truth. It’ll ruin our businesses. We can only entrust our closest associates with the most critical bits of information. These are the small things that after all the “heavy lifting” has been done will separate people who are “just getting by” from those who are “smashing it”. As the saying goes “the devil is in the details”.
I wish I could have found a mentor early in my work online who could have given me the brutal, honest, hard to swallow truth with realistic expectations. I’d much rather have that with full disclosure than a sweet story about making huge money, scaling massive, working my own hours, traveling while running a business, making “six figures” and all the other crap people use. Sadly this is when people are the most vulnerable and easy prey with many predators happy to have their wallets for lunch.
Till such a person appears I’ll keep reading between the lines for the nuggets of gold, continue stitching them together into a system that brings success to my business and family.
Thank you for creating this post and starting this conversation. Hopefully we’ll start to see more of this type of stuff as people become fed up with the other. We need more leaders.
The title is “Rags to Riches” – I don’t see how it oversells it? I know a LOT of people who make very large amounts of money from all the examples I gave in this post.
I’m sure you and a lot of others would dismiss them, hack isn’t just a bad word to use but to 99.999% of the population it’s VERY scary.
I totally agree with the 6 Figure SEOs, most of those reporting that income now are sitting there watching their savings dwindle away or hoping to hit the jackpot again with a new ranking technique – They aren’t used to putting the grind in.
The whole “setting up a WP Site” thing IS easy, go buy a $49 theme from ThemeForest, follow the documentation (which most are in video form now, so even easier) and you’ll setup a site that can be delivered to a client for $1,000, in a matter of hours – I know, because I’ve done it before.
My entire point around building that site is to make capital.. The title it comes under is “Get Capital” – It’s the initial $1k/$10k/$50k that people need to invest into growing a legitimate business online. It’s not supposed to be: Build a WP Site and you’ll go from rags to riches, it’s supposed to be: Build a WP Site, get some capital, invest the capital, work your ass off and you’ll get rich – That’s a legit formula, because my own family members have done it on the back of my advice.
Overall, I do agree with your premise.. Though you forget that there are people out there that aren’t completely self-obsessed.. There are people out there who would love for other people to thrive WITH them, which is important. In my example, I’d love people to read my blog, make a few hundred bucks, invest in an eBook or my BH.C or whatever I sell/promote, and then they go off and make a few thousand bucks, and then they buy an hour of my time and make ten thousand bucks and so on – And I have people who’ve done this, look at James Gregory or Rohit Palit or any number of the other folks who’ve thrived off my help. It’s actually within my interest to provide value for free, because then I can provide value for money. I’ll be honest with you, I enjoy blogging, it’s therapeutic for me and it’s fun, but it also accounts for about 30% – 35% of my business and as such, means I must treat it as a business, as well as a hobby.
Thanks for the comment Jesse, it’s rather insightful and I too hope to see a lot more reality-based posts. Have a wonderful day! 🙂
– Charles
All fair Charles.
Where I feel people are deceived is that every SINGLE one of the “steps” you mentioned even in a simple “throw up a site and sell it to a client” scenario requires many, many skills and time to learn. It might be easy for someone who grew up on the internet, but not everyone did.
That’s like saying all you need to build a house is a saw, hammer, nails, boards, windows and roofing. Sure it’s that easy, but I’m sure a house you built would like very different and take considerably longer to build than one built by someone who grew up building houses.
Believe it or not there are people who don’t even know that there are hosting companies other than Godaddy.com who are coming to these SEO blogs and Facebook groups seeking advice. They’re like children. Intelligent, but very inexperienced…at least online. They may have a massive skill set elsewhere, but here they are total newbs.
Many are also naive enough to think they’ll actually get ALL the truth by asking questions in groups and on blogs. I’m not condemning asking questions, only pointing out that they are lead to think, or are actually silly enough to think, the people helping them are 1) actually knowledgeable on the matter and 2) actually telling the full truth. In the majority of cases one or both of these fail.
For example, Matthew Woodward has no problem at all continuing to profit from his GSA video tutorials on Youtube, though it’s fair to assume, if he actually does do SEO, that he’s surely aware that these tactics are no longer wise and should only be employed by those who understand them, but taking them down would cost him precious income. So the misinformation prevails. There are very likely new SEO’s who will pay dearly for taking this now antiquated advice from someone many perceive as an authority..
So we owe it to them to at least give a small disclosure that what we’re sharing isn’t the “whole story”. However the wise, driven and motivated people, such as James Gregory (though he did have over a year with an Agency before going on his own? and he too grew up on the internet, so that’s not really a fair comparison to someone who is new to this world), will find a way to get what they need and not simply come in as sheep to be preyed upon by wolves, whether intentional or not.
Your sobering post is hopefully the beginning of more dialogue and a pulling back of the curtains on what it takes to succeed online and while many might be inclined to throw in the towel, perhaps the right people will find the truth refreshing and invigorating.
The whole website thing is based upon the fact of how easy it really is to set up a site:
1) Buy a domain
2) Buy hosting, which often can be automatically setup and have WordPress installed all within the purchase of the domain
3) Buy a premium theme, read the documentation and setup the theme
4) Profit
It’s really THAT easy.
I’m sure it would.. But building a house requires numerous skills, buying a domain, hosting and installing a theme whilst following the detailed documentation every premium theme now has doesn’t take nearly as much skill.
I realize that there are total newbs out there, but my advice in this post still holds true – You have to learn the basics first, if you don’t know anyone but Godaddy, then I suggest you take a basic introduction into the internet, let alone internet marketing.
The year at the agency was based on me advising him to go join an agency and have free access to tools he wouldn’t normally be able to afford, have a fulltime job paying the bills whilst he learns on the job and be able to test with the clients he was given.
Unfortunately for those people that haven’t, the people who’ve grown up on the internet have an unfair advantage anyway.. Because they understand the new, prevalent culture and the way things inherently work. If you go and ask a normal pensioner what coding is, they’ll likely have no clue, yet ask a 10 year old and they’ll of likely learnt the meaning at school, from friends, older siblings or many other ways.. It just comes down to an unfair advantage. I’m sorry I can’t take this blog post into a 50,000 word post on the internet culture, language and complete introduction to this new world but 99% of my readers already know the basics of the internet anyway, or they wouldn’t of found me.
It gets to a point where you get tired of reading other people’s success stories and want to create some of your own. That should be the theme for 2016: Why read about someone else’s success stories when you can make your own.
Exactly! It’s why I changed my income reports to traffic reports, instead of showing off how much money I make every month, how about I showcase exactly how I got the traffic to make that money, whilst also doing a round-up of all the content and features I put out that month.
Really well said Charles. I rarely agree with you completely. This time though, I’m 100% in support of every word you’ve put above.
/me doffs hat
Thanks Jason 🙂 Glad you finally agree with me completely ^.^
Real Talk. Well said man.
Thanks Richard 🙂
Great to hear something real
Thank you Charles
Thanks Josh 🙂
This is such a great piece of content I’ve read in a while. Disturbs me to read stuff how we make money by teaching you how to make money guys. This is real and raw!
Thanks Gregory 🙂
Jesse, I agree with you that newcomers are easily get confused, because they hear from every guru how easy it is to make a lot of money. They try it, fail obviously in 99,9% of the cases and probably feel stupid that they couldn’t achieve what “hundreds of thousands of people” could.
On the other side, I think Charles is targeting a different audience, me for example (or at least me a few years ago). I have a lot of experience in online marketing, made many mistakes and successes over the years, but reading such a post few years ago could help me a lot.
I’m not stupid and had a good understanding about how to make money online in theory and I got so motivated after hearing about the newest miracle methods that I wanted to try them out immediately.
Believing in this BS was my biggest mistake, because it prevented me from focusing on reality: That making a lot of money is not about finding a loophole, it’s much more about solving a mathematical problem: to make a lot of money, you either have to earn a lot a few times, or find a way to earn little money and scale it.
I was going for keywords that are hard to rank, because everybody suggested that you just need a few PBN’s and [insert your favorite BS software/loophole here] and you are done. What Charles is suggesting that I should have go for 1 easy keyword instead, find out a system on how to rank for easy keywords constantly and scale it up.
Years later, I’m almost immune to new “hype”, but I still open to try out things that are “too good to be true”, because humans are just like that. We want everything the easy way and it’s a good thing when some people remind us from time to time that we should focus on the next realistic steps instead of living in a dreamworld with full of easy loopholes.
Couldn’t agree more David, thanks for dropping by with your comment! 🙂
Dam, awesome post Charles. Just found this blog and can’t believe you’re 19 man, your ahead of the curve.
Thanks Benjamin, glad you liked it 🙂