I just realized I haven’t publicly posted an update, but as promised, back in mid-September I picked one person to coach 1 on 1. We’ve started the first week of October and will proceed until we reach a $100 / month for 3 months in a row. If we fail to do that, I will stop the coaching session on October 1st, 2019. Just as explained in my invitation.

Out of the people that signed up, I decided to coach Aigerim Bektemirova, a young lady from Kazakstan. She is currently working as a freelancer, mostly helping with mail marketing campaigns. That’s how I meet her a couple of years ago when we briefly worked together. The furthest she got with starting an online business is with a dropshipping business on Shopify. She shut it down after 3 months as it was wasting much more money, then it was generating.

How has the coaching with Aigerim started? And how can you start making money online?

Pick your passion that is enhanced by your skillset

I already wrote a huge post about finding your passion, and I really think it’s very important to find your purpose. Your reason. If you don’t have that, forget it, it will be hard to get out of the bed. Not to mention when some hardships come along, and hardships will come. But, as experience has taught us, passion is not enough. If you are passionate, but you are incapable… or to put it more bluntly, if you are an idiot, then you are just a passionate idiot. I think we’ve seen many of those in the world. So we need to have at least some level of expertise.

We don’t have to be an expert, or a guru or a ninja which in most cases (not all, but most), are just constructs fabricated by the world. You at least have to know a little bit more than the rest of the world. If you walked into a crowded cafe, can you with certainty say that you are the most knowledgeable about topic X? If so, that’s enough to get you started. Here’s a true story that will make you think. If you haven’t watched a movie inspired by a true story, “Catch Me If You Can, with Leonardo Di Caprio”, this will be new to you. Frank Abagnale said that “he worked as a sociology teaching assistant at Brigham Young University for a semester, under the name Frank Adams.“. This is interesting because this man was a con artist, and the college (obviously) denies that they hired him. However, he said that he was a teacher, and the way he was able to teach was that he learned the lesson just a little bit earlier than the students.

So, step 1: Create a list of ideas, products, companies, niches of your passions and preferably enhanced by your skillset. What is the thing you are doing on a Saturday morning? What are you daydreaming about? What was the topic you were talking about that other people weren’t excited about as much as you were? What was it that people were asking you to help them with? Is there something that people are constantly asking you? Once you have a few of those, it is time to hunt for keywords.

High demand, low supply

Same as anything else, this is valid for the traffic to your website. You are looking for high demand, low supply (or low competition). Depending on your skills, you may choose different sources of traffic. The strongest are search engine optimization, social media, email marketing, and paid traffic acquisition. Conversion or monetization comes next, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I always start with SEO for numerous reasons, and since you are reading this, I’ll assume you know them. I’ll also assume you know that SEO splits into on-page SEO and off-page SEO. But before doing any on-page or off-page SEO you need to do the research. Keyword research to be more specific. Here’s why.

You want to know what people are searching. What problems are they looking to resolve? And where the solutions (displayed on the Google’s SERP) aren’t up to par. That way, you can create a superior: product, content, solution, recommendation, video, photo, enter your favorite word here ___________. There is absolutely no point in creating something that nobody needs. No point.

There are several tools that help you find keywords that are being searched a lot, with low competition. I personally use KWFinder, but, since I personally know the founder of LongTailPro (and you can read the interview with Spencer Haws here) I can confirm that both tools get the job done. For an in-depth comparison come back here on a later date I’d love to do a KWFinder vs LongTailPro post when I find some extra time.

These tools show you how much keywords in your niche are being searched, and how good the current top 10 results are. This is exactly what I explained to Aigerim today. How these tools work, and how to find good keywords for the niches she is passionate about. Hopefully, Google keeps allowing various SEO SAAS providers to scrape their SERP, so we will have these insights. Use them while you can.

Step 2: Find keywords that are high in volume, but with low competition. There are tools that tell you just that (mentioned earlier). Bonus tip. Keep in mind there are “purchase intent keywords”. Imagine someone holding a credit card in their hand, and they are ready to buy. They just need to find this one last thing before they do. Something like “Cheapest place to buy product x” or “product X coupon”. If you can’t find that, try to go lower on the scale where the buyer is still exploring options. Then we use keywords such as “Product X vs Product Y” or “Product X review” or “Best in category for product x”.

That’s how you start making money online

The process explained above won’t bring you any money. I know that’s a hard pill to swallow, but that’s where you start! You have to decide what you want to work on, and which keywords you want to rank for. If SEO is not going to be your primary traffic generator, then the process of starting will be a little bit different. We will leave that for another time.