Why You Aren’t Making Money

Posted by RP

May 22, 2008

There’s a question guaranteed to get the attention of a lot of my readers here … mainly people who are interested in learning how seniors and retirees can make money online.

Recently I had an exchange via comments with a nice lady who mentioned she was writing for helium.com, making very little money at it, and also that she had "tried making money with a website’ but had not succeeded.

I’ve been waiting for a response from her so I could possibly help in a little more detail, but nothing has come in yet. Doesn’t matter though, I can write up a couple very well-known and yet well ignored bits of advice that will help her and anyone else in a quandary over how to make money online, or even if they can make money online.

the short answer is, yes, indeed, you certainly can. You can also make money even if you have no money to invest. I have a number of affiliate programs that I promote here, and some are a very good deal … or I wouldn’t have them. But none are essential to what you need to do if you are serious about making a buck, online.

Here is a formula that will work, in a nutshell.

Find a problem and solve it.

Simple as that. Tons of article like this begin with things like starting a blog or joining an affiliate program or even writing for some site that may you a tiny pittance of what your work is worth ..after you make money for them, that is.

It all misses the point, however.

The single most important thing you can do is find a problem that people want to solve … nay, that people feel they need to solve.

Go to the free, no signup-required Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Remember that AdWords is the part of Google that makes their millions … that is, the advertising that they sell.

Now I could say I let my three year old nephew make the notations … the circles and numbers on this snapshot, but I’ll just say even a three year old can follow them … ignore the window dressing and let’s get to the meat:

Make sure the results are tailored to your location and language. Use the US unless you have good reason not to, because US users outnumber all others by a huge percentage.
Click the box to get words or phrases.
Type in the words "how to", fill in the one-time "Captcha" spam prevention window. Then press the "Get keyword Ideas" button, and Google will search a few seconds and return a list.
Select a currency and give an amount … $50 USD or more so you can see the highest-priced selections as well as the cheapest.
In the drop down for columns, select the "estimated Average CPC (Cost Per Click) to display

Now, if you click on the CPC column label twice, you’ll see the results sorted in order of the amounts people are actually paying to advertise these words. Note that to get a top position in adverting "how to refinance" people are paying up to $14.47 per click. Do you think they are throwing that money away, or are they making more than $14.47 per click?

Scroll down the list. these are the top 200 "how to" items people are actually paying money to advertise. How many of them do you know "how to"? How many of them can you speak on or write a couple-hundred words on? There’s you problem to solve.

If you can’t find anything that catches your fancy in this list, repeat with phrases like "how to stop", "how to lose", "how to make", "how to win" or "how to succeed".

These are a thousand or more proven "problems" people have every day and search online for … and people make money, solving. Pick one that you know how to solve and then we’ll decide how to make money solving it.

Good way for an experienced senior or retiree to start learning to make money online?

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