How Can Retired People Make Money on the Internet?

Much has been written about making money on the internet. I know, because I am one of these writers. I have been an internet marketer since the beginning. Now that I am approaching "seniorship" I have been asked many times by friends about to, or already retire "how can a retired person like me make money on the internet like you?"

Well, it's not that easy. First, you will need some computer skills - most folks 55 and over that I know have some skills - but many don't have enough to jump into the internet marketing world. Sure, you could sell stuff on Ebay. Not a bad thing, but that would take a lot of work.

If you are thinking about starting an internet business after retirement - think again. And again. It takes some skill, hard work and constant care and feeding. However, it is possible. And I'd like to go over the basics of one strategy that might work for you.

There are several ways to make money on the internet, some takes more work, others can be set up on somewhat of an autopilot. I guess the dream is to have hands-off income so we can travel and the money comes in no matter what we do. If you rely on this approach for your pension until you die - don't. Things change all the time and as I said - some care is needed.

However, there is one method that stand a fair chance of working - if you do it right. And that is blogging.

Yes, it's true. Blogs can, and do make money. However, probably over 90% of blogs make very little money. Most blogs make probably less than $50/month. That's not an income. The other 10% makes anywhere from that to $40,000+ per month. One blogger I study is John Chow. His method to monetize a blog is, as far as I know the only way to really make it big. Basically - you write about something that really fascinates you and you don't mind writing an entry once a day at least. Then you market the blog to get traffic - and ask people to subscribe by email to your posts.

Once you have hundreds, if not thousands followers and their emails - you find related products and sell it to them one-on-one via the list. You become an "affiliate" of different products and get commissions every time one of your subscribers buy it. I do this quite a lot. John proposes to do this right from the beginning. NOT put ads on the blog. John calls AdSense "the welfare system of bloggers". He said you just can't get enough traffic to make any real money with ads. That's true, I know exactly how much traffic I need to make every dollar. It's a lot.

You make money by gathering tons of interested people's emails - give them the information they crave and then sell them services and products. That's it in a nutshell, so if you are retired and want to make internet money - that's certainly one way to do it.