Making Money Online

Isn’t this the most popular topic on the internet these days? Let’s look at it through the eyes of a Car Guy for a second. How is it you can make money on the web today if you’re ridiculously passionate about automobiles? The options are limitless, really. It all depends on what you like to do, what you’re willing to learn, and how much time and energy you’re willing to commit to the effort. These ideas can help make you a little extra cash or even a decent living, not to mention the potential to to receive free parts from various manufacturers and retailers. Again, it all depends on you. And it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be a computer geek to be successful either!

Do you like writing? Start a Blog. It’s the biggest trend these days and it’s probably the easiest and cheapest of all to start. But you really have to enjoy writing. To be successful you’ll need to write about something that others will find useful or entertaining and you’ll have to learn how to promote your blogs and yourself. If you’re good at branding yourself and getting people to spread the word about your blog you can see some big profits. It’s a simple formula - you write good articles, you sign up for several ad programs and place those ads in strategic locations in your blog, and you drive as much traffic as possible to it. It’s about 25% writing, 10% implementing and testing ads, and 65% promoting and building traffic, give or take. Look up the keywords “making money online” on any search engine and you’ll see that Blogging pops up quite often, whether it’s someone blogging about making money or people telling you how easy it is to blog for cash.

You don’t necessarily have to start your own blog to make money either. Most sites on the web these days are always looking for new content and some will even pay you to blog. Do searches on Craigslist or on some search engines, you’re bound to find someone looking for a blogger to help them create more content for their site. I know some enthusiast sites that pay $50 for a blog and others that allow you to place your own Adsense ads on your blog for bigger revenue potential. Just start looking around.

Launch a Forum Site and build a community around a vehicle (or other subject) that you’re passionate about. This is a bit more difficult and time-consuming than starting a blog but it can also be more rewarding in many ways. Many of the larger automotive forum sites out there are bringing in buckets of cash for their owners. I know a few that are making well over $100k per year - profit. All you need is a forum script to get started and some extra time. The operating costs are a few hundred dollars per month at most even for a larger site, and you get to pocket the rest - most forum owners don’t like to publicly talk about how much they are making by running a large forum site for fear of backlash from their members.

If you’re an enthusiast of any particular vehicle on the market these days you’ve most likely been exposed to an enthusiast forum for that vehicle already. These forums are virtually just owners groups where enthusiasts gather to ask questions and interact with other owners all in the spirit of a celebrating a certain vehicle platform. I’ve written some articles on Building and Monetizing Forum Communities that should give you some insight as to how it’s done.

You’ll find that there’s a bunch of competition out there for most of the popular cars on the market in terms of community forum sites. For instance, if you’re a Ford Mustang owner you’ve undoubtedly come across a few large scale Mustang forums that already have the market cornered. But one way to get around that is by launching a regional Mustang forum site, or a Mustang forum catered to road racing or autocross. Focus your efforts on building a site dedicated to a certain niche or even the area you live in. Just be careful you don’t target a niche that is too small.

If you’re not a graphic designer that’s okay too. With sites like vBskins.com selling pre-designed vBulletin templates you don’t need to be. It might add a little bit to the startup costs but it will also save you a ton of time.

Are you into photography? Sell your work online. Find all the local car clubs and organizations in your area and offer your services and sell prints to their members. I belong to a local racing club and we have a couple photographers that show up to our events to take photos. They then make the samples available online and announce it in our club forum with pricing - not a bad way to make money from a hobby. Attend some major racing events and see what it takes to get photographer credentials. There’s a great online service called Cafepress that will give you the tools to open an online store and add your work to calendars, posters, stickers, t-shirts, and a whole lot more. It only costs $6.95 per month. I’d also recommend creating a Gallery site to promote your work and generate revenue from selling prints. One of my favorite free Gallery scripts is Gallery2. If you’re not tech savvy consider having someone build a site for you. You can find web developers who will be able to quickly build a Gallery2 site at a decent price. Join some photographer community sites and ask advice from other photographers on how to better promote your work. There is money to be made, you just have to find the right places to promote it.

Sell t-shirts and/or decals online. Again, using Cafepress as mentioned above, you can easily design and sell t-shirts, stickers, calendars, and a whole lot of other products with your artwork on them. You open an online store via their site, upload your designs, you mark them up, and they do all the fulfillment and payment processing. You sit back and collect a check at the end of the month. Of course, you’ll also want to put time into promoting your Cafepress store if you want to make some real decent money. Again, focus on a niche and make your designs unique. The t-shirt business is huge and just getting a small piece of it could mean some nice cash in your pocket. I’ve had great success with Cafepress by using it along side a few Forums sites. It can be a great marketing tool as well as a moneymaker.

Start an online retail business and sell aftermarket parts over the internet. You can do this a few different ways and be successful. Many are going the eBay route and opening eBay Stores. The benefit to doing this is that you get to take advantage of the massive eBay traffic and you don’t have to be tech savvy at all to get started. You simply sign up for an eBay account and start listing your products to your eBay Store.

The other route would be to create your own online store using a shopping cart script - my favorite is OScommerce. With OScommerce you can can create an online store in no time and start adding your products. You can even buy custom templates for as little as $100 and give your store a very professional look right out of the gate. And if you aren’t very tech savvy it’s easy to find web developers who can help get your OScommerce store up and running for you. All you’ll need aside from the shopping cart script is a host (I recommend Liquidweb), a domain name (I recommend GoDaddy.com for domain registration), a payment gateway, and a merchant account (I recommend Authorize.net for the payment gateway and merchant account programs for their easy integration into OScommerce). It might sound daunting at first but it really isn’t too difficult to get set up. All you’ll need to do is start contacting manufacturers to find out how to become a reseller for their products.

Do you like fabrication and/or engineering? Ever thought about creating a product for your car or providing a service for a particular vehicle market? I’ve seen countless enthusiasts start businesses around something as simple as an exhaust system they built or a tuning service they provided to others with the same vehicle. If you want to start small this is the way to do it. You can create a product and start off by selling it on eBay. Or you can offer a service and promote it in some local online forums. The trick is to find where your target market hangs out online and market to them directly. If you sell a product for Mustang enthusiasts find the best Mustang forums and contact them about advertising on their site.

Look into Franchises. This is probably the most expensive option and it’s not really an online money maker but there is potential to use the web to increase your franchise’s revenue. Say you buy (or already own) an automotive-related franchise in your area and you’re putting together a marketing plan. You’ll probably want to try out some online advertising in various enthusiast forums and/or programs like Google Adwords. If you’ve done a search on Google for anything recently you already have been exposed to Google Adwords. You simply sign up for an account, choose keywords that you think your target audience will use to find content on your site, and set the price you want to pay for the clicks on your ads. It’s very effective.

I’ll see about adding a few more ideas to this list as I come up with them. Hopefully these will keep you occupied for a little while and will open your eyes to some new opportunities to make a little extra cash!