6 Ways to Improve Your Climbing Form. The equation is pretty simple: you are going to have to move your mass to the top of the hill. But the only way to get better at riding uphill is. Sell stuff in a new way: Reimagine how to go to market by creating new revenue streams, channels, and ways of creating value. This can be as simple as moving to a subscription model, or as.

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When you read about overnight millionaires and web celebrities enjoying ridiculous salaries, it’s hard not to fantasize about building your own wealth online. However, you probably also dismiss the idea as an outright impossibility. And that's too bad, because most people don’t realize how realistic the notion of making money online really is.

Related: 4 Crucial Steps for Creating a Profitable Online Business

Sure, you might not get rich, but you could earn a significant stream of passive income from a website -- maybe even enough to serve as your primary source of income. By using today’s technology and online resources, you'll find that it’s possible to build a website for free. And, all you need to create one that's profitable is a little bit of effort and a unique personal experience to share (which you probably already have).

4 Steps to making money online

You might already realize that building a website is easy, but making money off that website is the hard part. You can sell specific products and services to earn revenue, but if you want to use your experience to make money, there’s a four-step process you’ll need to follow:

Choose a niche with a significant audience. Your first job is to choose a niche that has a sizable and dedicated potential audience. You’ll want to be as specific as possible here. For example, don’t just target “men.” Instead, target “male parents ages 35-to-50 interested in _______.” This may limit the total number of people you can target, but you’ll increase your content’s relevance for that audience, and you’ll be able to grow faster as a result.

Put time and effort into your onsite content. Next, build up your site with the most detailed, valuable, insightful and original content you can. This is the most crucial step of the process because, without that content, you won’t be able to retain an audience. Learn the basics of content marketing, and produce content consistently -- at least once or twice a week.

Related: 25 Ecommerce Conversion Hacks to Make Your Website Profitable (Infographic)

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Promote your content using audience-building techniques. Next, you’ll need to start promoting yourself. Submit your content to news sites, guest-post on outside authorities, optimize your site for search engines and get yourself involved on social media. There are hundreds of ways to increase your content’s visibility, including paid options like advertising, so dig in deep and spread the word about your blog. Eventually, you’ll be able to build up a big enough stream of traffic to fuel the rest of your plan.

Monetize that traffic. Once you have a reliable audience in place, you’ll need to find a way to monetize that traffic. This is easier than it might appear on the surface, as there are dozens of ways you can make money from a site that’s already seeing lots of traffic. For example, you could start selling products or offer consulting services, or you could sell advertising on your site. You could even use affiliate links in some of your blog posts to earn passive revenue that way.

Building a site from your own experience

Once you understand the process, you next need to decide what types of personal experience you can draw on to create a blog.

Write reviews of products or services. First, you could write reviews of products and services that you already use. For example, Snoring HQ produces reviews of a number of different products designed to help users stop snoring. People almost always look for third-party neutral reviews of products and services they’re considering buying, so this is a valuable opportunity to build both visibility and user trust.

Offer career or technical expertise. This may be the most conventional item on this list, but you can use your own career, technical or professional expertise to educate other people on a specific subject. For example, Tim Wackel, a sales expert, has used his advisory blog to achieve massive popularity. When you have this type of site, your best bet is to choose a highly specific niche; most all-purpose general advice has already been dispensed, so you’ll need to find some topics that haven’t yet been explored.

Share personal stories. Don’t underestimate the value of personal anecdotes -- as long as you can keep up a consistent stream of them. For example, you might share examples of the things that happen at your workplace behind closed doors, or you might detail the experiences you have with your crazy neighbors (keeping their identities anonymous, of course). Or, you could just take a humorous slant on daily life -- as long as your ideas are unique.

Give tangible value to others. Finally, you could use your experience to give your users some kind of measurable, immediate value. For example, the Krazy Coupon Lady offers a number of coupons, deals, discounts and other monetary incentives for readers. You could easily start a site like this from your own personal endeavors in saving money; all you'll be doing is sharing that knowledge and experience with other people.

Once you’ve identified a unique experience that you can share with others, your process for making money online is relatively simple. That doesn’t mean your task will be easy; in fact, it might take you months or years of hard work to build a reputation suitable enough to produce a steady stream of revenue.

Related: 5 Secrets to Increasing Customer Retention -- and Profits

However, if you’re passionate about what you’re doing, it’s an opportunity too valuable to pass up.

The term “innovation” is often associated with geniuses turning startups into gold mines — the next Google, Apple, or Amazon, with products no one even knew they needed. Private equity firms place hundreds of little bets on these startups, hoping one produces a windfall that covers the rest. These bets on the next growth engine often depend on luck more than insight.

Meanwhile, every company aspires to be as innovative as these startups. Many companies invest in or buy them, unsure what they’ll yield other than the halo effect they may overpay for, made worse by the fact that most don’t align with the company strategy or meet a market insight. The same is true of ideas: Knowing which to fund without making random bets is key. But according to a series of three surveys conducted over six years by Maddock Douglas, the consulting firm where I work, while 80% of executives know that their companies’ success depends on introducing new products and services, more than half agreed that their companies dedicate insufficient resources to support innovation. (For more, see Brand New: Solving the Innovation Paradox, by G. Michael Maddock, Luisa C. Uriarte, and Paul B. Brown.)

Innovation is a word that’s been attached to finding new ways to grow, and every corporation needs to grow year over year. But the first step to generating real growth is to understand where it comes from. We believe growth has been made unnecessarily complicated, so we’ve boiled it down to six simple categories with corresponding examples from Apple:

• New processes. Sell the same stuff at higher margins: Cut production and delivery costs, automate for efficiencies, cut fat in the supply chain or manufacturing, and utilize robots.
• New experiences. Sell more of the same stuff to the same people: Increase retention and share by powerfully connecting with customers. An example is the Apple Store experience, which many would argue is as compelling as the company’s products.
• New features. Sell enhanced stuff to the same people: Add improvements that drive incremental purchases. An example of this is every new phone Apple releases, with better cameras and so on.
• New customers. Sell more of the same stuff to new people: Introduce the product to new markets with needs similar to your core, or to markets where it might address a different need. For Apple, this goes back to reaching the mainstream rather than the design community.
• New offerings. Make new stuff to sell: Develop a new product — not just enhancements. Find new needs to solve within existing markets, or invest in a new category. Think HomePod or the iPod.
• New models. Sell stuff in a new way: Reimagine how to go to market by creating new revenue streams, channels, and ways of creating value. This can be as simple as moving to a subscription model, or as transformative as Apple’s creating iTunes.

Deciding which ways to grow needs to be intentional — not driven by luck. Innovation budgets are finite, so allocations of your scarce resources should reduce risk and focus on the best bets. It needs to be balanced for maximum return the same way a retirement fund needs to be balanced among high and low risks and rewards. For example, consider the following innovation budget allocation model:

The model above shows the relationship among these six simple ways to grow, in the context of the four quadrants of the portfolio (evolutionary, differentiation, fast fail, and revolutionary), each of which gets a percentage allocation of the innovation budget. Note that:

• New processes fall outside the innovation portfolio (no budget allocation).
• New experiences and new features are in the evolutionary quadrant (about 40%–60% of the budget).
• New customers are in the fast fail quadrant (about 10%–20% of the budget).
• New offerings are in the differentiation quadrant (about 10%–20% of the budget).
• The combination of both new customers and new offerings are in the revolutionary quadrant (about 5%–10% of the budget).
• New models can fall anywhere in the portfolio.

This same allocation model applies to investments in growth. Some ways to grow are easier than others. Cutting costs with new processes to improve margins is low-hanging fruit. It isn’t on the level of startup innovation; it’s just a more innovative way to do things. We don’t consider it part of the innovation budget because it doesn’t create value in the market, only incremental growth and continuous improvement.

The easiest goal in the innovation pie is to maintain relevance to your core market through enhancements — with new features for your current offerings or the experiences that deliver them. It’s easy because it focuses on a market you already know and on products you already know how to deliver. A company will seldom question allocating the largest portion of its innovation budget to these activities (40%–60%).

A smaller portion (10%–20%) is allocated to reaching new customers with what you know how to deliver. This low-investment, fail-fast, test-the-waters approach is more akin to how a private equity investor might approach innovation, making many small bets and quickly abandoning those that fail to get traction. The key is fast experimentation through lean, agile approaches.

Another 10%–20% is likely to go toward differentiation — developing new offerings before the competition does. These are things you’re not sure how to deliver, but you know the market wants them, making it worth trying to figure out. Efforts like these carry greater risks but promise greater rewards if you’re first to market.

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That leaves the smallest portion (5%–10%) for focused bets on revolutionary, high-risk opportunities with new offerings to new customers. In this quadrant, you focus on a big idea, using agile approaches to break it apart to see which elements drive value through continuous assessments of desirability, since you don’t know for sure what the market values (even the idea itself). If you continue to clear hurdles, you stand a chance to launch a game-changer that fills an unmet need. You just have to test and experiment quickly.

New models — new ways of delivering — can fall anywhere in the innovation portfolio, as do build, buy, or partner decisions. Knowing the type of growth that your initiatives represent and their place in the portfolio helps determine which to pursue and how, including acquiring a startup that may hold a key to the puzzle — intentionally identified by targeted criteria, which are de-risked by researching and identifying unmet needs in the market.

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Knowing how growth happens, and the best ways to focus your organization’s efforts to grow, is as critical as allocating investments across the innovation risk-reward spectrum for maximum returns. Doing so works better than placing random bets on the latest startup in the hopes of getting lucky. Or worse, betting on one silver bullet that misfires.