I found myself in the situation of having to explain exactly what I do for a living to my mother.
You make websites.
Right.
So people pay you to make websites?
No I make the websites for myself.
So where does the money come from?
I talk about and recommend products and services on my site and if one of my readers goes and buys one of the products. I get a commission.
Ahhh…
For example, if I talk about a book I’ve just read and link to that book on amazon, I can earn 4% of the sale price if someone buys that book after clicking on my link.
But how do people find your website? [an extremely insightful question! Top marks for my mother]
There’s 2 major ways of getting people to your site. The first is to make your pages be about something really specific (niche marketing – although I didn’t call it that for my mother) If google or other search engines can recognise that my page is about a particular subject it will show up in the listings when someone searches for it.
So if you’ve a website about Japan, you might have pages about Tokyo and Osaka and google knows that your site is about Japan… [her first steps in understanding SEO]
Right..
You could then recommend travel companies or guidebooks and get commissions when a reader buys after reading your site! [ding ding ding - we have a winner 
]
Exactly.
I then explained that you could also pay for advertising to get people to your site. I asked if she’d ever noticed the listings on the right, in green that show up on google.
Yeah, I don’t usually click on them…
I wasn’t sure if it’s good or bad that my mother ignores advertising online but I explained that you can pay to have a link to your site in those listings. Your ad can be listed for thousands of searches within minutes and you only pay if someone actually clicks on the ad.
Then you only need to make sure that your earnings from commissions are bigger than your costs for advertising.
And that was it. She sat back and said, with a smile on her face
“Now I know what you do for a living!”
Knowing my mother she’ll have taken over my niches and outbid my keywords by Friday.
Have you ever had difficulties explaining your internet business to friends and family? Have you found that they don’t believe it’s possible? Let me know with a comment.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
haha, I know exactly how this is. My mom was not real sure at first what blogging was, let alone how to make money from it. Once I broke it down enough times, she understood what a blog is and what we can do with them.
I still have these discussions with friends and family. Worse part is I cannot get them to visit my sites or become loyal followers, even though they are my niche. I think they figure if he built it- what does he know? He ate dirt when he was five.
@NDN – You ate dirt when you were 5? I’m never going to any of your websites…
just kidding
I have tried to get some of my friends to visit my sites and they later found that they had clicked on my adsense ads over and over again because they were
Sometimes it’s OK that they don’t know anything about your sites, just show them the money.
@Justin, thanks for your comment, good to see that mothers can figure this stuff out, even if it might take a while…
I have that problem everyday. Since I am a very young internet marketer no one my age understands how I make money. My family thinks I am being scammed and no matter how much I try to explain it they still don’t fully get the point.
Buy ayy I had a hard time understanding myself at first =]