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Photo Courtesy: larry-lewis.com © Josh Gosfield/Corbis

For many people thinking about earning money online, there’s always these huge question mark about how to get started. I’ve always maintained that selling services is the best way to get started online. It could very well be your bread-and-butter earning mode, while you can eventually move into affiliate marketing, e-commerce projects, or any one of those million ways to make money online.

I assume that it is selling services that you are interested in. Here are some surefire, effective ways to start marketing yourself effectively:

Set your prices first ( it isn’t as easy as we think) 

There’s a whole science relating to your product/service value, customer perception, and consumer behavior behind this one simple aspect of pricing your services. Earlier, in the era of Ford’s Model -T car, it used to be a producer driven economy.

I set the price. You buy.

Today, it’s a capitalistic, consumer driven economy. From “Price”, we moved into “value”. Base your pricing on value that you provide for your customers. The higher you price yourself, the more justifiable this pricing element is. For instance, if you were a content writer or a freelance writer, you could charge $5 – $10 for your clients and write ( by re-writing or re-hashing) the same articles or blog posts you’d find elsewhere on the web.

Alternatively, you’d price your services at $25 per hour and actually do research to write powerful pieces of content that works for your clients ( and you have results to prove that). Apart from this, you can also provide your clients other services such as Social media Management, email marketing,etc., by setting-up their accounts and maintaining them.

You get the drift, don’t you?

Get on Social Media, aggressively. 

I define “Aggression” on social media as a relentless level of enthusiasm. The yearning to give more, to contribute, to enlighten, to share, and to solve others’ problems. Aggression is mistaken as a rampant license to promote, pitch, and sell your services directly; it’s not going to work on popular social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Linked In.

Get social today. Start giving your time each day to share with others, promote their content, etc. Retweet others’ tweets, communicate with them, let them know that you know what you are talking about and yet, you just want to help.

Start with the Freelance Job Boards 

If you set yourself up, create profiles, and start bidding on Freelance Job sites such as Elance, Odesk, and Guru. It will usually take some time for you until you land your first project. The key is to bid on enough projects and do it the right way. Look at this post on how this freelance writer does it on Elance.

The freelance job boards can be a source of continuous income for you. I don’t recommend using only these boards as your source of income though. Try to develop your channels and develop more sources for your business. You can easily do this with the help of a free CRM software such as Base, from Future Simple.

How have your experiences been so far? Do let me know in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you.