How to Make Money Online From Home – Best Business Models

How to make money online

If you go and Google the phrase “make money online”, you’ll get thousands of results, lots of them sponsored (i.e., ads). If you start browsing, you’ll quickly discover that most of the things you see will mention things that will include payment per hour, like solving online puzzles or similar. This is all legitimate (if the seller is legitimate, which is another subject alltogether), but we’re not dealing with that in this post.

After all, do you really want to change your present job with another job? I mean, you’re getting paid by hour, do you want it to be the same? I said no to this a long time ago.

What I’ll be looking at today is what the best business model is to completely break free from daily 9-5 job. It’s doable, easier for some than the others, of course, but it’s doable. So let’s see what we’ll discuss.

Best Business Models to make money online from home

The two models I like best are being an affiliate and being a vendor. The main difference between the two is that as an affiliate, you’ll promote other people’s products (digital or anything else), while as a vendor you will own a product (or more of them), while affiliates will promote them for you.

Of course, there are more differences between the two, but they are more tech- and expertise-oriented and do not affect the business model itself that much.

Before we go any deeper, let me write a disclaimer: whichever link you click inside this post, it’s likely an affiliate link.

Being an Affiliate

Like I said, being an affiliate means you’re promoting other people’s products. These can be in any form, digital or physical, or even something else. It does not matter.

Amazon

A typical example would be promoting Amazon products. When you apply for Amazon’s Associalte program, you get the right to promote any product that is published on the Amazon network. This oncludes – well, you know, practically everything, nicely sorted inside categories, subcategories and even more subcategories. So whatever product you choose to promote, you get a special link that inlcudes your Amazon ID and yoi start promoting it via your blog, social networks, etc. Every visitor that clicks your link and buys anything from Amazon will bring you certain commissions.

This way, you never have to worry about product creation, stock, delivery, anything. It is all done by Amazon itself. In return, the commissions you get are rather low; I beieve they’re somewhere between 2% and 6%.

Nevertheless, when you promote your links on different channels, the commissions add up rather quickly and people are actually making thousands per month.

Software and tools

You can also promote other products, and some of best selling are certainly software tools. There are several big affiliate networks that let you join and then promote any product they have in their marketplace, like JVZoo, Clickbank and Warrior+.

In those cases you typically need to apply to get approved by the vendor, and this is one of the troubles newbies face when starting. Without approval, you don’t get your links. And without sales, it’s sometimes not easy to get approved, which is the basis to get sales. There are tactics and tips how to overcome this, but it’s not the main topic here.

Commissions you get with these networks tipically reach 50%, sometimes even more – all the way up to 100%. This means that for a product you sell and costs $10, you’ll earn $5. Such products are called low-ticket offers, but there are also mid- and high-ticket offers available. They cost $97 and up, sometimes thousands, and you still get the 50% commission usually.

Pros and Cons of being an affiliate

There are pros and cons when you compare both models, here are the pros and cons of being an affiliate.

Pros:

• You don’t have to create a product at all
• You don’t have to maintain the product, because vendor will do it.
• You can start practically immediately, as soon as you’re approved as an affiliate.

Cons:

• You’ll never build a list of buyers, because only vendors get their data.
• You’ll have to be on a lookout for good products that sell well.
• You’ll have to check the vendors thoroughly, because some are unfortunately not so good as they might seem.

Recommended

The art of knowing what to promote and to whom is what helps people make money online. If you’re new to this, I have a recommendation for you: a training program called Master Affiliate Profits (MAP) that focuses on all aspects of affiliate business in depth. For your money, you’ll get hours upon hours of step by step training, along with the tools and case studies. If you follow everything they tell you, it’s little chance of failure, but you have to be consistent.

Read more: Master Affiliate Profits (MAP)

Being a Vendor

Being a vendor means you have your own product which you can sell in order to make money online. Again, this can be anything, a digital product or a physical product, or even service. These don’t matter beyond choosing the right niche and affiliates.

Read more here: How to choose a niche

When you have the knowledge about a certain topic, whatever that is, you can create a product about it. The product can be anything – a training, a special report, a full ebook, a check list or similar. This process is not easy, at least at first, when you have to struggle with the needed steps. But still, you’ll have your product created eventually.

Now, what you need is an army of affiliates to promote your product for you. Affiliate recruitment is also somewhat specific, because you need to let affiliates know about why your product should sell well and let them make money online by promoting it, with as little work needed as possible from their side.

Once you get some affiliates promoting your product, you don’t have much to do anymore, apart from maintaing the product if neccessary. Affiliates will take care of promotion, while you will give them a commission and pocket the rest without any additional work.

I know, this sound scarry and wonderful at the same time. The product creation part is usually the scarry one, but here I can only give you one advice.

Do not invent hot water.

The stupidest thing you can do is believing you know more about this business than the people already successful and go in all alone. There are many successful marketers that already succedeed and make money online in thousands using this business model, so all you have to do is actually repeat their steps.

One of the best things you can do is actually join a training or – even better – a membership that will have the assets to teach you the process. Sure, it might cost you a thousand at first (usually less), but think of it this way. You’ll pay it in any case, the difference is whether you’re paying with money or your time. As far as I’m concerned, I always try to pay with money. You can always make more money, but you can never get more time. Remember this.

I can surely recommend Online Success Coaching, a training program created by John Trormhill, a Clicbank Platinum Seller, thet focuses exactly on that: how to create lucrative digital products extremely fast using AI. With the tools included, you should be able to create your first product literally in hours, not months.

Read more: Online Success Coaching Review

The most important difference compared to being an affiliate is that you’ll have your own product to sell. This means you also get to decide the pricing model and get buyer’s contact details (email), so you can promote other things to them again later.

Basic idea

The basic idea is probably clear to you – create a product and sell it under your own brand. There are more steps included however, and most are described in this book called From Zero To Profit. It’s a comprehensive guide that will show you the steps needed to succeed in one of the best businesses today. It’s available for the price that you can’t get a coffee for, so grab it and dive in the business.

Download now: From Zero To Profit

Pros and Cons of being a vendor

When you decide to make money online using this model, like with affiliate business, there are the pros and cons of being a vendor.

Pros:

• You get to build your buyers list, because every buyer gets added to your list.
• You can recruit affiliates that will sell your product for you and do most of the marketing.
• You can sell your product for a long time with minimal efforts.

Cons:

• You’ll have to create your product, whether from scratch or by using PLR products.
• You’ll have to maintain your product and do all aftersales support.
• You’ll earn less, typicaly 50% less (affiliate commissions) per sale, but with lower marketing costs.

Recommended

Right now, I cannot imagine a better training to make money online than John Thornhill’s Online Success Coaching program.

It dives deep into three subjects: Creating a product, Finishing the product and Marketing the product.

The training relies heavily on using AI, which shortens the product creation cycle dramatically; whatever you would create manually in a week, can now be created in a few hours. Additionally, Online Success Coaching includes 30+ professional AI tools that automate various tasks as much as possible. While AI is an absolutely unbelievable upgrade to the “old ways”, I strongly suggest to be careful.

John also gives every member an exclusive 3-day sales support, where he will mail your product to his 100k+ email list – practically guaranteeing sales.

Learn more: Online Success Coaching

Being Both, Affiliate and Vendor

What includes all the pros from both business models is doing them both.

This way, you’re able to make money online by promoting affiliate products, as well as get affiliates to sell your own products to their audience.

Of course, there are also the cons to both that are joined. But since many cons of affiliate marketing are pros for vendor marketing and vice versa, you’ll find your way to make money online much easier if you do both.

Which products are the best to sell

One thing is true: it is actually easier to get 1 customer for a $497 product that 100 customers for a $5 product. You’ll need much less advertising, but instead you have to have something that’s harder to get – trust. If someone like me promotes a $497 product, you’ll likely be much less interested compared to when someone you trust already will offer it to you, right?

If you have a product of your own that you sell for $497 or more, there are also better chances of getting more affiliates into your marketing plan. They have better chances of making more commissions, and they know it.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with promoting low-cost products. You’ll simply find that earning enough to live on it will be much harder, because you’ll simply have to make more sales.

Tools you absolutely must have

There are some tools that are an absolute must, no matter which business model to make money online you ever choose. These include:

• Autoresponders: software that will let you build a list of contacts and mail them anytime with additional offers, like Aweber. This is what’s absolutely needed for email marketing, which is still the best model to sell online.
• Landing Page builders: If you want to promote anything, you’ll need pages where you want your visitors to land upon clicking your ad, for instance. For this, you can use just about any page builder, including WordPress with a good theme, like Divi. There are also specialised solutions available, like Convertri, Groove or OptimizePress that make many things so much easier.
• Checkout (Cart) tools: unless you plan to work with affiliate networks like JVZoo or Clickbank that have their own checkout systems, you’ll need somethimg that will enable you to collect payments. Again, it can be a WordPress website with WooCommerce installed, but you’ll soon discover that specialized tools like ThriveCart or Convertri are a much better solution, simply because they are so powerful and reliable in every aspect and need little work from you. WooCommerce on the other hand is cheaper, but much more complicated to set up and sometimes can go wrong, just as any WordPress website can.
• Delivery platforms: When you sell digital products, you’ll need a way to deliver these products to buyers. While you can use even a simple WordPress File Upload, you must know that this is not secure – anyone can access it, as soon as your link goes public (and it will, believe me). In order to give access only to the people who actually paid for your product, you’ll need a platform that can protect it from unauthorized access, such as Groove, ProductDyno, OptimizePress or ThriveCart.

Product Creation tools

In order to make money online and create digital products, you’ll need some tools, of course.

Basically, to create simple products like ebooks, reports, cheat sheets or something similar, something like MS Word is enough. It’s enough, but not exactly what you’ll want to use daily for these specific tasks.

What I mean by that is that Word is a great tool, but as any universal tool, it gets pretty messy when you only want to do one task. Plus, it’s not much of a design software, and you want your ebooks to look awesome, right? In general, the prettier they look, the better they will sell.

So some specialized tools are in order, and here I’ll give you some.

• Ebook creation: you can write your book in any software, including Word or Notepad. But when it comes to ebook design, you’ll need something like Sqribble, for instance. This software can actually build your ebook from sources like docs or even web pages and based on the template that you can customize. When done, you simply download the PDF version and publish it whereever needed.
• Ecover creation and design: Ebooks need covers. This is something Word is particularly bad at, but you can use softwares like PhotoShop to create them. This, however, brings another set of problems, because you’ll have to have Photoshop, and then you’ll also have to learn how to use it. Again, specialised graphical solutions are much better, even cheaper. Some of them include softwares like ClickDesigns, or even eCoverly, if you want to include animated cover for even more exposure.

You can also use AI to create products with, but be careful. While it seems all powerful, it’s also a bit problematic regarding SEO results, because search engines tend to rank it lower than natural posts writen by humans.

If you want to reach as far as possible, I’d suggest you join a specialized training (such as Online Success Coaching) that will not only give trusted AI tools, but also the full training about how to use them properly. It’s a very attractive option, because this way you can create products in hours, not weeks or even months.

Marketing tools

For marketing, you’ll need to consider everything possible – blogs, social networks, forums, whatever you can put your hand on.

There are many tools that make creating graphics for social networks easier, because tools like PhotoShop are a bit overkill usually. Some of them are ClickDesigns and DesignBeast, both capable of everything you’ll ever need for web graphics.

Other than that, what you can absolutely use is some solution to automate social networks posting, maybe even create posts for you. One such software is FranknAI, which can create and even schedule up to 365 posts for you on multiple networks. The idea here is to save time, because posting daily on several networks will drain your will to do marketing very fast.

Funnels and Landing pages

Last, but not least, is a tool to create landing pages and funnels that you’ll need in order to make money online and promote your products. Again, you can use a simple WordPress installation for most of these, but think of it. In order to get people to convert from visitors to customers, your pages will have to look good and make it simple to include links and checkouts. With pure WordPress, this would be a nightmare. Possible, but not recommended.

The tools I’d recommend are the tools I use and know a bit about. Each of these have a little bit different target use, because they’re different, but in general each can do almost anything you need. Take a look.

Convertri

Convertri remains my choice for many tasks, becase

• it includes a true WYSISYG editor (pixel-perfect),
• it creates the fastest pages of any systems,
• it includes Checkout functionality,
• it makes it very simple to integrate tools like autoresponders (like Aweber).

Here’s an example of one of my sales pages created in Convertri. Take care of loading time…

Read more: Convertri

Groove

Groove.cm became a real player during the last few years. It’s an all-in platform that includes page buider, checkout system, their own email autoresponder, and many more modules. I’ve signed in their FREE offer (that’s still active, by the way!!! Look HERE) for a year a month ago and am currently learning what’s needed.

My first impressions are very positive, although a different interface always creates problems, because it takes time to search for some things.

My plan is to use Groove as an ecommerce platform, and I’ve planned to create my first store within a month. Also, email functionality (autoresponder) seems very interesting, but I have yet to test it to see whether it fits my needs.

Read more: Groove – Run your business absolutely free for a year!

OptimizePress

OptimizePress is technically a WordPress plugin that turns boring WordPress site into a funnel building machine. This includes all sorts of funnels, like lead funnels and also sales funnels with any number of pages you need (front end offer, upsells, etc).

Iz also includes training sitest capabilities, which makes it possible to build trainings and classes righ inside WordPress. Its Checkout functionality replaces WooCommerce in a lot of ways, but it’s targeted towards building single-product funnels rather than full ecommerce sitest.

You can see an example at one of my lead funnels on this very site HERE.

It’s incredibly fast, considering it’s built on WordPress, and very easy to handle once you get to know the interface a little.

Read more: OptimizePress

ProductDyno

ProductDyno is not a page builder per se, because it has milited capabilities here. Instead, it’s more a delivery platform for any kind of digital products.

ProductDyno is easily integrated with networks like JVZoo or Clickbank, but also with page builders like Convertri or Groove. I’m actually using it to deliver certain products that are being sold on pages built in Convertri, and it works incredibly well. Once customers pay for the product in Convertri Checkout module, they’re immediately and fully automatically added to a membership in ProducDyno and given access to the product, training or other assets as defined in the sales page.

It can also be used to create learning sites, because it supports the e-learning modules and everything one might need to create them, including videos.

Read more: ProductDyno

Conclusion: Make Money Online From Home

When planning to make money online from home, there are a number of options you have. However, most of them will only replace one job for another, meaning you’ll continue to sell your time for a wage of some sort.

If this is exactly what you want to avoid and get away from, you have better options – becoming an online marketer, doing affiliate marketing or becoming a vendor and sell your own products. To be perfectly clear, there is no magic button and if you want to make money online from home, you’ll need to invest some time and possibly also money, mostly for tools and advertising.

But as opposed to regular online jobs that pay per hour, you can achieve much greater outcome and be much more self-timed when you do these marketing promotions. Provided you dive deep into it and get even just moderately successful, you will find yourself having much more free time, while still earning more.

Remember: No amount of tools and spending can make you really successful in the make money online niche (or any niche, actually), unless you work for it and sacrifice some things in the process. And when success comes, you’ll know what to do to repeat it and scale up.

Good luck!

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