What does physics have to do with making money online? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

Our scientific understanding has advanced greatly over the centuries. But while our knowledge has brought plenty of complications, in a way it has also made things simpler. We can now explain the workings of the universe with just four fundamental forces:

- Gravity
- Electromagnetism
- Strong nuclear force
- Weak nuclear force

The number of fundamental forces has come down over time. For example, electricity, magnetism, chemical bonds, friction, etc., once thought to be separate forces, are now known to just be different aspects of an electromagnetic field.

If we’ve now reduced physics to four fundamental forces, might we someday get it down to just one? This is the search for a unified field theory.

Physicists disagree about whether one is possible. There have been proposals for how to combine electromagnetism with the weak force, but incorporating the strong force is problematic, and gravity really throws a wrench in the works.

There have been different unification theories, but so far they’ve all had holes. Maybe there really are four fundamental forces that can’t be put under a bigger umbrella.

Making money online

Much has been written about how to make money online, but when you look at the big picture, what are the principles at work? How many truly different ways are there to make money online? Does it all come down to just one?

People say that to make money online, you need to write for people, not search engines. Well, no, you don’t. Nor do you have to solve an urgent problem, or be authentic, or target a lucrative niche, or any of the other things that people say you have to do.

Yes, these are all good ideas, but each one has plenty of counterexamples. For any “must do” principle, there are success stories from people who violated it.

Why is this? Because there’s not just one way to do things. Here are four fundamental forces, if you will, for making money online:

- Being cool
- Being spammy
- Satisfying a want
- Satisfying a need

Maybe there are more, but these are the ones that came to mind. They appear to be independent, in that while you can certainly combine them, you can also succeed with one while ignoring the others. But are they really independent, or is there a larger force that unifies them?

Let’s first look at them separately.

Being cool

“Cool” here includes likeable, funny, entertaining, etc. People in this category make money by leveraging their personality.

Johnny B. Truant went from making practically nothing online to five figures a month in nine months, once he started being cool. Officially, he sets up websites and such. I’m sure he’s good at it, but the reason people want to buy from him isn’t because he’s better at websites than everyone else. He gets fans because he swears, he tells clients he doesn’t care if they work with him, he blogs about stuff that has nothing to do with what he sells (like why Christmas is gay), and he confesses to crimes he didn’t commit. In short, because he’s cool.

Gary Vaynerchuk is the face behind another personality-driven business. Today he has the whole “crush it” and branding expert thing, but he didn’t have that when everyone first started talking about him. I watched his videos trying to see what he was all about, and he was very entertaining, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what he actually does (other than screaming about wine). And then I realized that was it – screaming about wine; i.e., being cool.

Stuff White People Like became an instant hit on humor value alone. Sometimes sites like this get a lot of traffic that can’t be monetized, but Christian Lander reportedly received a $300,000 advance for his book based on the blog.

Being spammy

I don’t necessarily mean actual spam, or doing anything unethical or illegal. I’m just talking about focusing on tactics for converting visitors into cash as opposed to providing value.

The guy known as Grizzly has a number of sites, but I only know one of them. And he was nice enough to spill his money-making secrets for this site in How to Increase Your AdSense CTR.

His blog is about making money online, and filled with content containing relevant keywords. It happens to be very good content, but that doesn’t matter, because he doesn’t make his money from regular readers. He just needs relevant content so Google will send him search traffic.

He deliberately went with a blogspot blog because it’s ugly. When visitors see this ugly blog, they want to get out of there, and 7% of them leave by clicking the huge ad in their face (at the very top, above the post title). I’d guess that most of his other sites use this same approach, but minus the good content.

(Actually, I just checked out his site for the first time in a long while. It now looks much less ugly, and the big AdSense ad is gone. Not sure what happened.)

Satisfying a want

This is the category for professional problem solvers: copywriters, blog consultants, marketing consultants, and so forth. They don’t create stuff first and then try to find people who want to buy it. They start by identifying their ideal customer and getting to know them.

When they understand the problem that is keeping their ideal customer up at night, they’re in a position to give the customer exactly what they want. They show this by listening, establishing trust, telling stories, highlighting benefits over features, giving a call to action, etc.

Satisfying a need

You’ll have a hard time selling something to someone who truly doesn’t want it. However, you don’t need to sell to their wants per se.

Steve Pavlina has done quite well by ignoring what his readers want, and just telling them what they need to hear. He positions himself as an expert with advice to give, a position that would only be weakened by asking for permission. He makes enemies by calling his readers Nazis for eating eggs or selfish for being underpaid teachers, but he also makes tens of thousands of dollars a month.

Is there a unified theory of making money online?

In practice, people don’t necessarily restrict themselves to just one of these. Naomi Dunford is cool in addition to being a problem solver, Grizzly quite possibly parlayed his reputation for AdSense success into an additional income stream, Steve Pavlina asked his workshop attendees for detailed feedback so he could improve, etc.

Still, these methods appear to be different. Is there some higher thing that ties them all together, or are they really independent? Albert Einstein failed to unlock all the secrets of the universe, leaving questions that may never be answered. But maybe we can unlock the secrets of making money online, which would be almost as good.

Photo by Victorrjr

If you’ve tried to sell a product online before, you know that there’s a lot more to the process than just creating the product. People say “if you build it, they will come,” but it’s not true. Many people have trusted that advice, only to spend countless hours creating a wonderful product that nobody bought.

Why would people not buy your product, if it’s so good? Well, there are many possible reasons.

• Did you convince your audience of your credibility?
• Are you a good enough copywriter to create a compelling sales page?
• Did you get powerful testimonials from well known people?
• Did you build up enough buzz before launching?
• Did you sign up key people as affiliates?
• Worst of all, were you doomed from the start because you didn’t research whether there was a big enough market for your product?

The list of pitfalls goes on and on. There are so many intricacies to a product launch that it takes enormous effort to master the process. Jeff Walker learned so much about how to successfully launch a product, that he was able to sell his Product Launch Formula for $2,000 a copy. But $2,000 is probably a lot more than you want to pay, right?

There’s now a much cheaper alternative. Dave Navarro and Naomi Dunford have come out with a new ebook called How To Launch The **** Out Of Your Ebook. From the title you can tell that this is specific to writing and selling ebooks, but actually most of the information applies to any kind of online product launch. (In case you’re wondering, no, they never reveal what **** stands for.)

I’ve bought both Dave’s and Naomi’s products before, so I didn’t need much convincing. Plus, people actually hire Dave as their launch coach. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a launch coach, but it makes perfect sense when you consider how much the launch affects your sales. Naomi saw this firsthand when she launched Online Business School with Dave as her launch coach, and made five figures in three days.

Their sales page very clearly says what’s in it, so I won’t repeat that. I’ll just tell you what I thought about it. First, the good.

The information in this ebook is essential for running a successful ebook launch, and nobody else is really talking about it. I didn’t even know that there was more to a launch than just saying “Here, I wrote this. Buy it!” It turns out, there’s a lot more than that.

This ebook contains a lot of information (113 pages), covering the entire launch process. It takes you all the way from testing your market, to actually writing your ebook, to running the launch, to making money even after the launch is over. It’s very thorough, and it includes lots of worksheets to help you stay on track from start to finish.

It’s hard to imagine this ebook not easily paying for itself when you put it into practice. And even if it doesn’t, for whatever reason, there’s no risk. Dave and Naomi will not only give you your money back, but you can actually get double your money back! (Getting your money back is completely hassle-free, but getting double your money back requires completing their worksheets and showing that you actually tried.)

Now, the bad. Yes, unfortunately there are some things I didn’t like about it. It’s still worth buying, but I have to mention these things.

First, if you’ve bought any of Dave’s or Naomi’s products before, you know that they usually make them really entertaining. Dave’s “What’s Holding You Back” was a pleasure to read, even for people who aren’t productivity junkies. Naomi’s “SEO School” was so much fun that some people probably bought it even though they don’t care about SEO.

But How To Launch The **** Out Of Your Ebook doesn’t have a lot of personality in it. This is something you would buy just for the information, not to be entertained. Maybe I’m being a little picky in expecting information about product launches to be fun, but hey, that’s what I like.

I found some parts of it far too basic. Some of it is written for people who don’t have a blog yet. If someone doesn’t even have a blog, I don’t know what they’re doing writing an ebook. Then again, I’m just speaking from my perspective. If someone is new to blogging, or not even blogging yet, they’ll find this part very helpful. Writing an ebook without knowing how to leverage a blog would surely be a disaster.

I thought it was too long, and it contained lots of really bad typos. Not to be the spelling police or anything, but typos always jump off the page at me, and this ebook has way more than its share (though the copy I have is three months old, so it might have been cleaned up since then).

Finally, there’s a glaring omission when they talk about AWeber. I can’t believe they didn’t mention using pop-overs and lightboxes to increase your newsletter subscribers. I understand that some people don’t want to do this because they consider it too intrusive, but anyone who uses AWeber needs to at least be aware of these options. Darren Rowse wrote about his amazing results with pop-overs in How to Drastically Increase Subscriber Numbers to Your Email Newsletter.

Overall, I’d say that How To Launch The **** Out Of Your Ebook provides lots of critical information for anyone who sells ebooks (or any other online products, really). If you want to maximize the success of your ebook launches, this is a much cheaper alternative than Product Launch Formula. And it’s half off the regular price until Thursday, February 5th (the sales page shows the regular price, so verify the reduced price at checkout).

In her post Blog Business Plan – Monetization, Marelisa Fabrega pointed us to the Affiliate Masters Course. This is a free 152-page ebook that presents a 10-day course on learning affiliate marketing.

• Day 1: Intro To Affiliate Business Basics
• Day 2: Brainstorm Your Site Concept
• Day 3: Develop High-Profitability Topics
• Day 4: Plan Your Monetization Models
• Day 5: Refine Final Concept And Register Domain Name
• Day 6: Build A Site That Gets The Click!
• Day 7: Build Free Traffic
• Day 8: Build Relationships
• Day 9: Know Your Visitors
• Day 10: Monetize!
• The Road To Success

<sarcasm>I wasn’t planning to do another review right now, but Evelyn and Carla complained that I wasn’t giving them enough books to read!</sarcasm>

Anyway, I didn’t find this too helpful for me personally, because I had seen most of the information before. It’s really geared towards new people (you don’t even register a domain name until halfway through). But if you’re new to affiliate marketing, or thinking about taking the plunge, this is a great way to get a lot of information in one place. I don’t agree with everything they say, but it’s a good starting point.

One topic they mention is the difference between selling (writing sales copy) and preselling (writing a review that encourages people to click through to the sales copy with intent to buy). They say that many people are selling when they should be preselling, and this hurts their results. This was new to me, and it seemed really important. I wish they had gone into much more detail here. But other people will appreciate all the detail on finding niches, keywords, affiliate programs, SEO, etc.

The main thing I didn’t like is that it gives off a very strong marketing vibe. There are many sales pitches sprinkled throughout, though I guess that’s to be expected in a freebie. It also seems a little hyped up and impersonal. My favorite line, for the sleaze factor:

“If you don’t monetize a visitor one way, convert her into dollars another way!”

People are not objects to be converted into dollars!

While most of its attempts at humor fall flat on their face, this one worked for me:

“The key to traffic analysis is to simplify. Forget the 150 different ways that traffic-analyzing software slices and dices hits, visits, pages, page views, and visitors. You simply don’t need to know how many left-handed Norwegians visit your site between 3-4 AM on Sundays.”

Again, great info for new people, but it’s just a starting point. It appears to have been written before blogging had come of age, and something more up-to-date would be helpful.

For people who have moved past this basic info and need something more advanced, Online Business School is a great choice. It gives an overview of six different ways of making money online, not just affiliate marketing. And WordPress SEO Secrets is the best SEO guide for people using the WordPress platform.

But the Affiliate Masters Course has one great advantage: it’s free. Check it out if you need an introduction to affiliate marketing. And if you’re a left-handed Norwegian, let us know in the comments.

Photo by SqueakyMarmot

Well, it’s that time–the end of the 365-day period ending June 30, 2008. Why am I writing a year-end review in July? One, because everyone else does it in December, and for me it gets a little tiring to read a bunch of posts like this at the same time. Two, because I’ve never seen the need to wait until New Year’s to reassess your situation.

When I say “the year in review,” I mean regarding this blog and my life. A bit self-centered, yes, but this post will definitely apply to you if you’re trying to escape the rat race or you’re interested in making money online.

When I look at my life, the only major challenge I care about is escaping the rat race. What I mean by that is making a living (and preferably a good living) from an occupation I enjoy and have control over. This means everything to me. If I have any other problems, they’re so small that I’m not even noticing them.

I recently worked with a career coach who had the insight and the guts to say that I’ll never be happy in any job. Of course, I already knew that, but it’s good to have professional confirmation so I know for sure what I’m looking at. So what will I do about that? Well first, here’s my situation:

- I make a moderate salary as a software developer. It pays the bills and lets me save some money, but it’s certainly not going to let me retire tomorrow. Most importantly, I really don’t enjoy it. It’s the best job I’ve ever had, but employment just isn’t for me.

- Thanks to years of somewhat extreme frugality and compound interest, I make decent passive income from stock mutual funds. In the long run, this will be by far my favorite income stream, because given enough time it will result in a lot of income with basically no work. But for now, it’s not really that much. Furthermore, it comes mostly in the form of unrealized capital gains, so I can’t get the money out without selling and paying taxes (and I don’t like paying taxes).

- My next biggest income stream is from being a part-time network marketing consultant. This was doing well and growing for a while, but lately I’ve been struggling as new competitors have flooded the pay-per-click market, eager to set money on fire. I won’t bid more than 35 cents max for a click, but top bids for one important keyword are over $11! That can’t be profitable for them unless they’re really ripping off their customers, but it’s shutting out those of us who won’t play that game. I’ll have to see how this plays out. I have a more or less neutral feeling about the work; it’s way better than a job, but I can’t say that I actually like it for reasons other than generating income without having a boss.

- One income stream that I started 7 months ago is this blog. The income is extremely low, so don’t fall into the trap of thinking that blogging is an easy way to make 6 figures. But though the income is low, it’s growing steadily so far (with the exception that my blog income was down in June after being way up in May because of the 28,000 visitors to 10 Reasons Japan Is Better Than America). And it’s so much fun. I’d be incredibly happy if I could do it full time.

So back to what to do about the rat race. Here are some possibilities:

1. Do nothing.

Just do what “everyone” does and stay in the rat race. I believe that some people honestly like their jobs, but that’s sure not me. For me, taking the normal route isn’t an option. Even if I don’t succeed in any of the alternatives, I couldn’t forgive myself for not trying.

2. Find a higher paying job.

The idea with this strategy is that if more money is coming in, I can save more and retire earlier. Better than option 1, but far from ideal. I’d like to do a little more work for a little more money, or a lot more work for a lot more money, but in my experience, climbing the ladder means doing a lot more work for a little more money. And I want to enjoy the journey, not just the destination.

3. Find a part time job.

This is similar to #2. More money for more work, only the extra work is with a different company. But I haven’t been able to find any part time jobs in software development. I’m not necessarily restricting myself to that, but I sure don’t want a minimum wage job.

I did come close to getting this to work when a company I worked at went out of business. Someone started a company to service the clients that were left behind, and they wanted to pay developers $70 – $90 an hour for working nights and weekends. It would have been great, except they didn’t get as many clients as they wanted, and they ended up needing only one developer (who wasn’t me).

4. Make a decent income outside of a job.

Now things start getting interesting. I think making a modest income without a job is way better than making a high income with a job. This blog is a perfect example of a way to make money without a job, but I’m a long way from making any real money, let alone something to live on.

So far, I haven’t done much monetization. I put some AdSense ads up, but AdSense doesn’t pay much, and I’m making even less than other blogs with the same amount of traffic. I think this is for three reasons:

- I got most of my subscribers when ProBlogger linked to The Zen of Blogging. They’re likely to be bloggers themselves, and bloggers tend to show ad blindness.

- Search engine visitors like to click ads, but I’ve only recently emerged from the Google sandbox, so my search traffic has been essentially nil so far. And I still seem to be sandboxed for some keywords that I know I should rank well for (and in fact, I do rank well for them on Yahoo).

- I’ve refrained from putting ads in the best hotspot: the upper left corner of the content. Many successful AdSense publishers do that because it gets the most clicks, but I figured that since I don’t have search traffic yet, there’s no need for it. Besides, when I use an image, I want that to appear at the top, not an ad.

But to have a good chance of making money from a blog, you need to look beyond AdSense.

Consulting

In Skellie’s post A Practical Guide to Earning Six Figures: Re-inventing What You Have, she presents an idea that I found interesting:

“Consulting carries a high per-hour rate and is highly customizable. Aside from traditional types of consulting (SEO consulting, branding consultations, etc.), there’s nothing to stop a talented World of Warcraft player offering consulting to players who want to increase their skills…”

This caught my eye because my research project for my master’s degree in computer science was on Warcraft! I guess I have a master’s degree in Warcraft, if you will. So, does anyone out there need a Warcraft consultant? However, I’d need to update my knowledge, since my project was on Warcraft and Warcraft II, and I know nothing about the latest release.

This particular angle might not work, but the whole coaching/consulting/freelancing deal is certainly worth considering when you realize that a small blogger can make more money from one hour of consulting than they could from a year of AdSense.

Paul Piotrowski is a newcomer to making money online, making only $7 in March. But he made a whopping $1,528 in June! What I found most interesting about his June 2008 blog income report is that he made $600 from blog coaching. This shows that you can make money from consulting even before you’ve built up a reputation. Because of his posts, I believed that Paul was knowledgeable about making money online even before he had actually done it himself (just like I think I’m knowledgeable even though I haven’t done it yet). And because other people believed he could help them, he got some clients. Because of those clients, he has made what I would consider the start of good money online. And now that he’s done it, he has a reputation that will bring him more clients with less effort.

Ebooks

I’ve written two ebooks so far: The Zen of Blogging and Memoirs of a Gaijin. Both of these were free, and while I think I could have charged something for Memoirs, I felt better about doing it for free, even though it was a lot of work. But now I think it’s time to move on to paid ebooks. They take a lot of effort to write, but I think that when shared with the right person, they can be far more valuable than free posts or even real books. And in return for providing that value, you can be paid. Furthermore, by offering an affiliate program, you give your readers a chance to make money from recommending your ebooks. This is definitely something I want to pursue.

Freelancing

Freelancing is not really something I’ve considered. People call it a business, but I’m not sure how it’s that different from a job. You can work from home on your own schedule, but you still have a boss (or many bosses), and you might have limited control over what you do. It can also be hard to find work.

Let’s use freelance blogging as an example. When Skellie said in Freelance Blogging for Side Income: My Top 10 Tips that even a newbie freelance blogger should never write for less than $50 for a 500 word post, some people thought that rate was much too high to be realistic. Professional freelance writer Monika Mundell said “Prospective clients get shifty at the thought of paying $15 for 200 words and I’m only dreaming of being paid these rates.” (However, it wasn’t long before Monika reported being paid $50 for a post.)

Let’s say that you manage to snag what some people consider a fantastic rate of $50 for a 500 word post (which is supposed to take 2 hours to write). Even if you get that rate, that’s only $25 per hour, or $50,000 a year. And that’s only if you’re able to find enough work (4 posts a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year), and you’re able to write enough on whatever topics you’re given, and you’re able to write these posts in 2 hours. This post I’m writing now is going to take way longer than 2 hours. Of course, it’s way longer than 500 words, and I’m watching Jurassic Park in the background, but still…

In spite of these potential problems, I was considering doing some freelance blogging. But I couldn’t commit to any kind of schedule, like 5 posts per week. At this point, it would have to be a “write whenever you like” kind of deal. As I was wondering how to find someone who would pay $50 per post whenever I could come up with something, I noticed that one of the Anywired commenters gave the name “Michael Martin.” I clicked through for no other reason than because I thought maybe it was Michael Martine and he had just misspelled his name. Well, it was actually a guy named Michael Martin, and you wouldn’t believe what post came up: Hiring Blog Design Writers, $50 per post! I’m not sure how many posts I can write about blog design, but it’s certainly worth a try.

Being a programmer, I’ve looked into freelance programming, but I haven’t found anything. On RentACoder, I saw a lot of people with tons of skills trying to underbid each other for tiny jobs. I sure don’t want to spend hours searching for a 30-minute job at a low rate. If I were going to do this, I’d want something more permanent, like a long-term contract or a part-time job, and I haven’t been able to find one.

In A Practical Guide to Earning Six Figures: Reboot Your Career, Skellie said a friend of a friend earns over $200,000 by working 3 months a year in a difficult and obscure programming language with little competition. Sounds like an amazing deal, but I don’t suppose you happen to know what that language might be, do you?

Here’s to 2009!

As we begin the 365-day period ending June 30, 2009, I’m renewing my efforts to make a living online. Are you trying to do this too, or are you already doing it? Leave a comment and let us know how things are going for you!