I often see questions on forums asking 'How can I make $100,000 online'? Sometimes the amount of money in the question changes, and frequently the people asking the questions want to make it in one month. But the bottom line is that these questions are from people who are desperate to make money and have  believed the lie that it's easy to make money online.

So, I thought I'd write an article with a headline that was deliberately provocative to promote some discussion and show you that it is possible to make money online, just usually not in the way that many people imagine.

It costs money to make money

Whilst it is relatively cheap to buy a domain and some hosting, you need more than that.

You need a strategy - a plan!

And you can't have a plan unless you have some knowledge about the business you're trying to run.

Forget the claims of making thousands of dollars online with no experience. To build any lasting online business, you need a plan and you need to know what you're doing.

And there's a cost involved in doing this. There's a monetary cost - things like hosting your domain, buying a Wordpress Theme, setting up an autoresponder etc, and there are non-monetary costs such as the time you'll spend learning how to do things and making lots of mistakes.

If you've got a dream of making money online with no effort- forget it. It won't happen.

You wouldn't expect to open up a shop without some plan as to how you'll make money, so don't do it with your online business.

There are no shortcuts

Whilst I believe that marketing on the internet is a major business opportunity, it's hard work.

• There's no magic formula to get to number one on Google.
• You can't make video go viral - people do that for you.
• Getting traffic to your site is hard work. You can write the best content, but people still need to find you.
• Once you get traffic to your site, getting them to comment is the next step.
• Blogging is time consuming. You're not setting up an affiliate site and doing nothing - you're constantly writing, commenting on other blogs, reading etc.
• There's no magic formula for success (at least not one available for less than $1,997!).

So here's how to make $100,000 online

OK - there are numerous ways to make money online - PPC advertising, flipping domains, selling Amazon products etc. This article isn't about that.

If you're like a lot of people you looked at the title and thought to yourself "I'd love to make $100,000 from blogging, but I can't see how I'd be able to do it."

The point of the article is this - it's possible to make lots of money if you break it down into multiple ways of making smaller amounts of money.

So, to make $100,000 online you need to:

• Find one client who will pay you $100,000.

If that's too hard how about:

• Find two clients who'll pay you $50,000.

OK, maybe that's not possible....yet. How about these options:

• Find 10 clients who will pay $10,000.
• Find 20 clients who will pay $5,000
• Find 50 clients who will pay $2,000
• Find 100 clients who will pay $1,000
• Find 1,000 clients who will pay $100
• Find 2,000 clients who will pay $50
• Find 5,000 clients who will pay $20

You may even find this list a bit daunting at this stage in your blogging life. That's fine. Your goal may not be to make $100,000. You may just want to make $1,000 this year. How will you do that?  Do you need to sell 50 products at $20 each? That's slightly less than 1 a week. Is that possible?

What to sell

What you sell is almost as important as the quantities you need to sell.

I firmly believe that the way to add value as a blogger is to create your own products. Package up the knowledge that's in your head and create products that are valuable to people.

I suggest you create two levels of products:

1. Lower cost products such as e-books, videos etc that cover particular topics. With these products most of your effort goes into creating them. Once they're created, you don't need to put in much more personal exertion other than promoting them.
2. Higher cost / tailored products. Examples include 1-on-1 consulting or group training. This is more specialised to the individual needs and allows you to differentiate your product more. Because it's more differentiated, it becomes more valuable to your clients and you can charge more for it. There's more effort involved in creating and delivering these products - for consulting work you need to physically deliver the training.

Another option is to promote other peoples' products as an affiliate. If you haven't got products to sell now, find ones you believe in and start selling them.

You can make $100,000

So, back to our examples above.

Maybe at this stage you don't have a $50,000 product.

You possibly don't even have a $5,000 product.

But you should be able to create a $20 product. Or find someone else's product that you can sell as an affiliate.

Take some time to map out ideas for products that you can create at various price points. Although it may take you a few years to actually get them to market, it gives you a plan and a strategy, and enables you to break down your big goal into a series of small steps.

What about you?

Do you have other ideas on how to make $100,000 online.

Do you disagree with my view that there's no easy way to internet riches?

Leave a comment below and let me know your thoughts.