Aspergers and Making Money Online - Part 3

This is part of a series of posts of my experiences online. Click here for part 1 and part 2

Around October 2013, a year since I began my attempts to make money online, I got rather frustrated by my lack of progress and thought that there must be easier ways to make money faster.

I spent a whole week off work doing google searches on things like 'best way to make money online' etc, to try and find the best program or system. You find get an awful lot of online 'noise' when you do this - there is a complete lack of objective information but a load of individuals who know a bit about ranking their sites on google, trying to say whatever they're involved with is the best business for making money online, and calling everything else a 'scam'. The only way I felt I could try to determine the truth of the matter is by looking at what the majority say.

In the end, I joined some program for $5 that would supposedly give me a step-by-step system. Unfortunately, once I had joined, I got to about the second step, which I think to do with setting up a custom made website, and the instructions weren't clear. I had questions, but there didn't seem to be any means to contact anyone to get answers, so I couldn't really go any further.

I also discovered a program called Wealthy Affiliate (WA) which is still popular today. It's basically a membership site which teaches you affiliate marketing. I am not here to make any judgement upon WA, except to say that when I signed up for my free trial, I didn't find it that easy to navigate. I asked in the chat room about some of the other programs I had seen recommended on websites, and the only answer I got is these were 'scams'. What I do understand now, which I didn't at the time, is most of these websites I saw in the search engines were created by WA members, who were following their training to create 'review' sites for various make money online systems, and direct visitors to 'my number 1 recommendation' which is WA. I am not saying its a bad program but just because so many people recommend it doesn't mean its outstanding.

Another fundamental problem I uncovered around this time, which I can only now see retrospectively, was that in so many programs designed to make you money online, there is no real product of value being sold. You are simple selling a system that you can make money from when people buy the system from you and sell it to others. A few people make a lot of money from these types of systems, however if there is no real product of value at its core, its a business model built upon a foundation of sand.

A Proud Moment

Around late 2013 I was moving away from the Asperger niche, and looking to see if I could go into the 'make money online' niche. After all, it's a far more profitable niche than Asperger issues with more keen buyers, and by this time I felt I had a certain amount of knowledge. It was around this time I had my first affiliate sales, albeit very small ones.

I discovered a $4.95 dollar product called Simple Traffic Solutions (STS), basically an e-book which taught you various way to get visitors to your web pages. You could earn 50% commissions from the sales of STS when people purchase through your link, and I managed to make a few sales. There was a forum on the membership I had joined to, and you could post a banner as a signature link on your posts. I copied one of the banners from the STS affiliates site, and made a few small sales. However what was quite an achievement was getting onto the top affiliates leadership board!

I came third and fourth two months in a row, and earned cheques for $75 and $50 respectively! After January 2014, they stopped the affiliates competition, and it was probably because this was an old product that no-one was promoting anymore and getting significant sales from, hence me getting a prize with just a few sales in both months! But a proud moment nonetheless, in amongst all the struggle.

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