How do you make money with a website?

To my point of view, one of the most prominent thing on the Internet these days is:

I want to make money!

Although many people are happy with just their regular job and use the Internet to work faster, play games at home, and find delicious recipes, there is a large number of people who think of the Internet as a money making machine. Well... it indeed created quite a few millionaires and will continue in doing so.

But...

You have to look closely at what you really need to do to get there:

Make money!

Whether on the Internet or otherwise, making money is a matter of running a business. If you do not know anything about running a business, you probably want to look into that first. It takes dedication and time to run a business and come out with a positive balance (i.e. actually make more money than you spend.) If you don't feel like running a business, then you probably want to stop right there!

What I want to emphasis is the fact that many think that having a website and ranking high on search engines (especially Google) will give them money. That's far from the truth1!

You need one important thing to make money: a product.2

However, just having a product for sale is not enough. Any company needs a certain amount of marketing such as your sales letter on your landing page, and at least one method of advertising. If you count on SEO only to gain customers, you will have to be overwhelmingly patient or have a product that has an incredible demand and only a few of you selling it!

So if you already have a business, you definitively want to have a website to let people find you online. If you are thinking about it... think that first you need a business idea, then a business plan, and only then do you need the website. And yes... this means you're not going to be able to get there in a few hours and start seeing money pouring in your bank account. There may be systems out there that pretend that such is possible, in most cases, the person selling such system is the one getting rich3.

Note: Yes. That magnificent drawing is from me. 8-)

• 1. Although there was a time when Google AdSense and other similar advertising could give you quite a bit of return, this type of online advertising doesn't work as well today. There are exceptions, of course. For example, in the Real Estate world, you can still make quite some cash with a single AdSense click.
• 2. With time, you may have multiple products, but remember that it is much harder to sell 1,000's of products than just one. Having just one, you can focus on it. Once you are finished with one, it sells and makes you money, you can move on to the next.
• 3. Getting rich may be a little much, but for sure they'd happily get your $47, or is their deal $97?