Making money online?

When I worked out of Makati for an international company I had to have a company-sponsored work visa, show my college degree, and make sure I would be doing a job a local could not do. That was 2007, not sure of the requirements today.

 

Nice one! :D

This is similar to comments I have made on other threads about starting a business and hiring family. Rather than hiring incompetent family, you would be better off giving the business a real chance by hiring the best you can find. Then just give the profits away to the family for doing nothing.

Internet marketing or promoting products or services generally refers to "affiliate marketing."

Affiliate marketing generally involves generating traffic to promote products and services to using one of two forms.

1) Generate organic traffic through content marketing. This could be a blog, informational site, video or any other content people might be interested in.

The problem is that generating good content is highly time consuming and not easy. The odds might be against you as well. You might create a site for X subject and the traffic never materializes.

Often people who are successful doing this stumble on traffic by luck. They start out as a hobby and don't necessarily set out to make money.

People who are looking to make money from the beginning usually run a large number of attempts by hiring out cheap services to build the sites and create the content. This isn't cheap in the end though.

Going from zero to decent income with organic traffic can take a long time and requires a lot of effort. Usually it's best to use this content to promote your own services and products rather than affiliate marketing.

2) Paying for traffic and running that traffic through your income funnels. The idea is that you spend $x on traffic and hope that enough people click through on your ads and buy something that you make more than you spent.

The process is usually like running experiments. You create a small campaign with creatives (landing page, ads, images, etc) - buy the traffic from certain locations (Facebook, Google, etc) and then run that traffic through your campaigns. Most of the time you aren't going to be profitable at the beginning, so you make tweaks. You change your demographics that you are targeting, you change your ads and you mix-up your landing page. If you can break into a profit, then you can scale the campaign up to as much traffic as you can buy and run it until visitors get blind to the ads and quit clicking.

Often you would run this on your card, buy the traffic, get paid by the affiliate program, free up space on your card, rinse, repeat. Because we are talking internet scale, this can create quite the roller coaster. You could spend hundreds per day, or thousands per day. As you might imagine, you need to be keeping a close eye on your campaigns and continuously tweaking things to make sure you are getting as many clicks as you can while your card is being hit for traffic.

This is not cheap. You have to start with a good budget to buy the tools and other resources. Even if you are experienced at this, you will lose money at failing campaigns before you hit a winner. Unfortunately, there is no 100% reproducible method which will always work, or bigger fish with more resources would squeeze you out. You might be making money one day and then losing money the next.

It's a grind. To make good money you have to be always building and running campaigns. A campaign which took x hours to develop might be good for one week or one day. You also have to learn some of the basics of web development to put these things together.

Your budget is one of your major constraints. Once you hit a successful campaign, you make money by turning cash. You might be able to make a 20% margin on one campaign, but it doesn't go far if you only have $500 to run through it. And that's assuming you can run that entire $500 through it rather than spreading that budget between 5 campaigns - some making money and some not.

Not all affiliate programs are alike. Amazon may only pay out once per month. You can't be waiting over a month for a payment when you need liquidity. If you can build up trust with the affiliate program manager, then some programs may pay more often, like weekly.

You need a large number of affiliate programs to choose from. There is a ton of competition out there promoting everything imaginable, so you need fresh meat and variety for your experiments. That means sometimes you might be promoting shady products. You can't just promote Amazon and Ebay all day, you won't hit your margins.

Again, it's a roller coaster and I would rather promote my own products or services. At least then I would have a more sustainable business.

Another option is to simply buy a business which is already successful. You can buy a site making $xxx monthly income for multiples of that income. This is probably the best option if you have the budget. I wouldn't suggest this if you haven't been able to build an income generating site yourself though.

Then there is the force of luck. Some will stumble on success right away. Though overnight success and luck usually only comes after months or years of hard work.

 

There are special laws for this. If your business is making 100% of the income from abroad then you don't need part Filipino ownership. If you run the business out of a free economic zone (these are all over the Philippines) then you can get a tax holiday. I don't know what qualifies as running your business from these places, but I'm going to look into setting up a mail drop in a virtual office. I imagine these sorts of services exist in a free economic zone somewhere.

http://www.peza.gov.ph/

 

@Job vs Business

In the U.S. - a job is a W-2. If you aren't working on a W-2 then you don't have a job. Income which doesn't belong on any other form goes to a schedule C, which is a sole proprietership. A corporation is a separate entity. Corporate income isn't necessarily yours until the corporation pays you. Simplistic examples and probably not totally correct, but I think I caught the basic idea.

@Working on holiday

I don't know if this site is an up to date authority.

http://www.philippineconsulate.com.au/visas.html

"Holders of Australian passports can stay in the Philippines for thirty (30) days or less without a visa. The reckoning of the 30 days begins on the day after arrival in the Philippines and this visa-free stay allows for regular tourism and business meetings."

I also found this.

http://www.immigration.gov.ph/index.php/faqs/visa-inquiry/temporary-visitor-s-visa

Temporary Visitor’s Visa is available to foreign nationals who are traveling to the Philippines for these common purposes:

Pleasure – for holiday or leisurely stay

Business – may be of commercial, industrial/professional character but must be temporary in nature e.g. those who are attending international conferences, here to negotiate contracts and attend business meetings

Health – provided not contagious, loathsome and/or dangerous diseases

@Physical location while working remotely

Even working from a certain location doesn't mean any transactions at all have happened in that location. When I work, no transactions ever hits the Philippines. I work with people outside the Philippines and money is sent to U.S. based banks / services. There would be no paper trail of payment that the Philippines could access.

Of course, the law is designed to protect jobs for Filipino's. In my case, the work is totally out of reach of the Philippines.

@Free Economic Zone

Personally, I think this option is interesting as a potential tax avoidance strategy for a small business. For example, the tax holiday is temporary, but I imagine many small businesses would just close out and create a new business. I have had a business owner here tell me he changes the name of his businesses every X months for tax reasons.

I would have the business pay all expenses that I could get away with and then take a minimal withdrawal for myself. That minimal withdrawal is what I would have to pay taxes on.

The U.S. requires that you have a "tax home" or else you are still in the U.S. tax juristiction. You would have to prove that you are paying taxes elsewhere in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes. You still need to file for taxes and you still need to pay after you reach a certain threshold.

I don't know how taking profit from your corporation works. It's different for different structures and of course different in each country. In that case, you would be drawing money for a Philippines corporation, so you would need to have the proper visa and pay Philippines taxes.

If I didn't want to go through the effort of paying myself, then I would probably just hire someone like my girlfriend as a shoe polisher and have her pay for everything.

 

If you are working online, put your company abroad. Foreigners don't declare money they earn abroad.
I recommend Hong Kong. No corporate tax if you have no income sources from Hong Kong, or sell anything manufactured in Hong Kong, or have employees in Hong Kong.
You apply for offshore status on an annual basis when you file your annual report.
If you don't live in Hong Kong, you don't pay income tax on income from a Hong Kong company.

 

Being in an online business is like any other business in that you need to know what you are doing. If you have no skills and no experience then your chances of success are infinitely small. Being a business person requires a totally different mind set than being an employee, which I have been both. If it was easy everyone would be doing it.