What are you gonna do?

OK, so let’s kick off our new series here on Virtual Earner: Make Money Online.

As I said in the introduction, there are things you have to do if you want to make money online.  So, the logical place for us to begin is at the beginning, right?

So the logical first step for you to take is to decide what you want to do online to make money.  I mean, in “real life” when you are young you generally make a decision of what kind of work you want to do.  Maybe you want to be a plumber.  Maybe you want to be a salesman.  Maybe you want to be a writer.  Maybe you want to work in retail.  The same thing for making money online, you gotta decide what you want to do to make that money!

Let’s look at a few things you could do:

1. You could write.  Start a blog or some kind of website where you can write, and make money doing it.  In my “real life” examples, I said that maybe you would want to be a plumber.  Let’s say that you did go out and become a plumber.  Well, for your online business, you could write about plumbing.  You could write articles explaining to people how to make certain repairs in their home.  Better yet, you could make videos showing how to make the repair, and then you set up a blog, write about it and show the video on your blog.
2. If you said that in real life you wanted to be a retailer, why not start an e-store (an electronic store) on the internet?  You could sell products to people online.  Well, that opens up another decision – what kind of products will you sell.  That’s another discussion, though.
3. Did you strive to be a salesman in real life?  If so, maybe you want to get into affiliate marketing on the Internet.  With affiliate marketing, you can pitch products and get a commission every time that somebody buys your pitch.

See what I mean?  For virtually every “real life” job, there is something you could do online that would tie in with it!

Hey, some of you guys might be saying something like:

Hey, Bob, I’ve been a plumber for the past 40 years and I’m tired of it!  I don’t want to be a plumber anymore!  Forget that idea!

Well, a couple of considerations there.  Firstly, if you have been a plumber for 40 years, then I am pretty sure that you know a thing or two about plumbing.  You are, my friend, an expert in the field of plumbing.  I am not saying you need to go clean out dirty pipes again or crawl through flooded crawl spaces.  No, doing it online is going to be different.  Maybe for the video, you might have to do it one more time to shoot the video, and that’s it!  After that, you have all you need!

Now, if you want to do something online, the very best thing you can do is something that you have expertise on.  That will give you instant credibility.  But, if you are honestly saying that your plumbing days are over and you want to get as far away from it as you can, I understand that too.  Find something else that you are an expert on.  Or, become an expert about something.  When you are an expert, that is when you stand to make money the best.

OK, so this article is not about plumbing, even though we’ve talked a lot about plumbing.  But, what I am saying to you is that your first step toward making money online is going to be to decide what you want to do online.  Do you want to sell stuff?  Sell physical products?  Get commissions for selling other stuff?  Write about stuff?  You need to decide what you want to do, and then you will be ready for the next step in our journey.

Remember, only you can decide what you are good at, what you will enjoy doing and such.  I can’t decide that for you.  You choose something that you would enjoy doing online.  Don’t worry about how you will make money with doing it – we will talk about that later.  Just decide what you would enjoy doing, then let’s move on to the next decision.