Ways To Make Money Online

There are easy ways to make money online, and there are hard ways to make money online. But what are the BEST ways to make money online?

Well, the good news is that some of the best ways to make money online are actually some of the easiest -- if you let your website do all the work for you.

The hard ways to make money online usually involve developing your own product, such as a software program or a tangible product -- something that can take years and often needs a lot of start-up capital.

Then -- with a tangible product like, for example, designer clothing -- you might have storage costs for your supplies and stock, staff costs, and other overhead like shipping and handling.

On the other hand, the easy ways to make money online typically don't involve selling a tangible product that you need to store and ship, and don't need staff to run the business. The easy ways to make money online also keep overhead to the absolute minimum.

And what makes this possible is automation.

Automation basically means putting the actual day-to-day running of your business on "automatic pilot" -- leaving you free to grow your business.

You can automate many parts of your business, including:

• Customer service: You can use email "autoresponders" (automatic emails sent in response to email queries) to reply to customer questions with a comprehensive list of frequently asked questions -- and the answers to them.

• Order-taking: An e-commerce website processes customer orders securely and automatically, even while you sleep!

• Order-fulfillment: One of the best ways to make money online is to sell an electronic product like an eBook. Your orders can be fulfilled without your lifting a finger. Once customers have completed their order, an email automatically goes out to them and links them to the page where they can download their purchase.

• Email promotions: Because it commonly takes up to eight contacts with a prospect before they actually buy from you, you can use email to promote your business for you through a series of autoresponders.
  
  In fact, using automatic email in this way is one of the best ways to make money online. It saves you hours and hours of time that would be better spent thinking up good ideas for the promotions themselves.

An automated website is your 24-hours-a-day, 7 days-a-week, 52 weeks-a-year salesperson that doesn't take holidays, ask for a raise, call in sick, or quit to take a better offer.

And automation is not only one of the easy ways to make money online, it's one of the best ways to make money online -- period! For more on automation, see IMC's newsletter archive.