1000 Ways to Make Money Online

I’ve been at this whole internet marketing thing for over a year now and while I’m nowhere near replacing a full time salary, I do OK and more importantly I have learned a lot.

One of the things that I’ve learned is that you can’t keep checking your earnings. It’s demoralizing or frustrating or both.

I used to have this routine where I would start the time I dedicated towards developing my online business by checking my e-mail and then my Google Adsense, then I would research a whole shit-ton on what I wanted to write about and all of the ancillary details that weren’t relevant, I would go get a drink of something, I would come back and maybe write something and then I would check my Adsense account before going to bed.

What a freaking waste.

My earnings were pretty much always the same between the two checks and they were meager at best. I’d wonder why I wasn’t seeing results and just get frustrated with the whole venture.

Example 2. Early on I picked up on the Amazon Associates Program and they only update once a day. You wouldn’t believe how frustrated that made the insecure side of me.

Well, when it did update and on the occasion that I would make more than 2 sales, I would go to each one and add them up to see how much I made. No sense waiting for the items to ship and getting a real amount.

What I’ve learned

It really took some time but I’ve finally learned that checking your earnings doesn’t result in any improvements. It’s not moving you forward one bit. Don’t get me wrong, I still check them but it’s once a day and only for a few seconds to see what’s working, what’s not working and where I can allocate my time best (yeah, right)

I’ve grown confident enough to know that if you just keep writing your reach expands, your rankings improve and your earnings will grow.

I know that it’s easier said than done and you will eventually get there, but sometimes it takes different people saying the same thing different ways for it to sink in.

Man, do I ever neglect this site? For anyone who does find themselves here, enjoy the read but realize it’s dated.

For those who want to delve into the world of internet marketing (or just want to waste time reading) I would recommend the following sites for the time being:

Making Money on the Internet for Free
Blue Hat SEO
or
AMXpert blog

In the mean time I hope to get back to spouting off about different tactics and strategies that I’ve found successful and finding ways to increase those earnings

Squidoo is another one of the web 2.0 websites that allow you to create a webpage using a whole host of different modules. The idea of making money with Squidoo is that you write a website (called a lens) that is based around a product or potentially an ad and try to get web traffic to your lens. The reason to use Squidoo used to be based on the fact that they ranked well with Google without much work if any. You could put together a lens with an unbelievably big link (or picture as a link) and it would redirect them to an affiliate product. So tons of people would sign up for the usual (hair loss, weight loss, acne) affiliate programs, generate a keyword based lens (that looked like it took 5 minutes to make) and because of Squidoo’s clout they would be getting traffic instantly. The obvious problem is that it didn’t provide anything to the user and once Google caught on they smacked Squidoo around. Now to make money with Squidoo you have to play a bit of a diffrent game.

More about How to Use Squidoo

The Squidoo setup is very similar to Hubpages in that you have a handful of different modules such as the usual (text, video, slideshow, amazon) in addition to others that are meant to engage readers (such as polls, surveys, customizable lists). You can arrange them anyway you want with the idea that you want to get people to care what’s on your page. I think because Squidoo got smacked around, they want you to create elaborate lens that both have meaningful content and are engaging (hence the different modules). Using Squidoo’s modules is a little bit clunky, where you have a standard setup that they provide (often with modules you don’t want) and if you want to add more modules you have to order them up on the side menu and then the page will reload. With Hubpages it’s much easier to move the modules around and a lot faster. Also anytime you need to reorder the modules the page gets reloaded adding to the time it takes to get the setup you want. What’s nice about Squidoo is that you can create a clickable image that will take the user to an affiliate product. For whatever reason people like clicking on pictures; especially when they’re told to do so. You do get a small revenue share from the advertising but it’s really meager and not worth focusing on. Unless you have 50 to 100+ lenses don’t plan on seeing much cash.

I’ve found that Squidoo can be picky about your lenses especially if they’re low on content. They will publish 300 word articles as lenses but they poke and prod you to make it more user-friendly. I think there’s some merit to this as the small crappy lenses I’ve put out have gotten shit for traffic, while the ones I spend some time formatting do a little better. You should definitely play around with the layout, but if you’re interested the layout I’ve had the most success with is as follows:

• Stupid Squidoo header that’s already up there. Use the Table of Contents or not; I usually don’t. I do try to add my intro paragraph and some cheesy stock picture. If I’m using the lens for only a backlink I’ll put a link in the intro paragraph.
• Another text module with some decent text. I try to make it 150 – 200 words if I can. Definitely put a picture with a link to whatever product you’re selling and add some instructions such as “Click Image for More Information” or “Click Image to Buy INSERTPRODUCTNAME”. Almost all of my success has been with the Amazon Associates program and it’s easy to find a product or a range of products that you can redirect to.
• Add an Amazon module and just type in the product keyword and let Amazon choose the products. You probably won’t get many people clicking on this module, but it makes Squidoo happy and there’s always a chance.
• Add another text module. More substance maybe another link
• Swipe a youtube video on the subject. It takes two seconds and adds some legitimacy
• You can try an RSS feed if you already have hubs on the subject
• keep the comment or guestbook module. People responding is free fresh content even if it’s just, “great lens. Keep up the good work.” Google loves updated content.

That’s more or less how I lay out my lenses give or take a module or two. Most of the lenses I create nowadays are solely for backlinks. There are a few lenses that I’ve had some success with that I made a long time ago that just started getting traffic a few months back. These lenses were product review type lenses where I took a topic (say bmx bikes) and did a brief review of 5-8 different bmx bikes. These were basically rewrites of the description plus a little bit of commentary peppered in that I got from the reviews. Each module had a picture link and a “Click Here to buy” link that was redirected to an aStore (amazon store) that I was just sort of dicking around with at the time. I didn’t keep very good tabs on it but I found that I kept seeing a “bike” that I hadn’t really been promoting show up in my Amazon reports. Whether or not the aStore format or the lens format (or some combination) was the key I don’t know, but the small amount of traffic I was getting certainly converted well. Just something to think about.

Making Money with Squidoo

Now that I’m nearing the 1K/month mark, I feel a little more confident in saying I know how to make money with Squidoo and the other Web 2.0 properties. Squidoo by itself isn’t that great, especially compared to where it once was, but when used in conjunction with Hubpages, Infobarrel and some of the other sites (and of course time) it all adds up.

The biggest factor in making money with Squidoo or any other platform is that you have to do a lot of writing. Putting decent to great quality writing on these sites is one part but you have to spend time writing for other sites and give your Hubpages or Squidoo sites the links to give them a boost. For instance, whenever I want to promote a product (to make money) I’ll usually start with Hubpages, do a decent quality product review with pictures and good content that isn’t just filler, play with the layout (add a pic and text module under the pic, put it in the right hand corner and make the text look like a caption and you’ll be amazed at your conversion) and overall spend some decent time on it. From there I’ll take the general stuff I’ve learned about the product, the people who use it/looking to buy it, other products that I can compare to it and I’ll write 1-2 infobarrels, 1-2 squidoo lenses, perhaps something on Bukisa (which counts for crap), xomba, associated content, then go for article directories that have revenue share (snipsly, allthatsolive, yousaytoo), then start hitting the article directories such ezinearticles, amazines, articlesupport, articlealley, articlesbase to really beef up the backlinks. If you’re really serious about making some money online, you’ve either got to spend money and have someone else do it, or put in the hours to do it yourself.

If you’ve bought into all of my hype about Squidoo, you should think about joining up. In fact, it’s a good idea to sign up for Hubpages and Infobarrel if you haven’t already. Once you have your accounts set up (should take you less than 10 minutes), pick one topic and write 3 articles on each site with the second two on each site pointing to the first one and the first one on Squidoo and Infobarrel pointing towards the top Hubpages article. This should take you a grand total of about 3 hours and if you give it a little time (close to 2 months you should start to see some results). More articles equals more links equals faster results.

I hope to be putting together a plan in the (not so) near future on how to create a system for making money online for free. It certainly possible to make money spending absolutely nothing, but it’s a lot harder that way. Because I don’t update the blog as much as I should, you may want to sign up for the RSS feed so you don’t miss my awesome system (said sarcastically).

For awhile now I’ve been writing on how to make money online using a variety of different websites and methods. I have to admit when I started out I had a much different vision for the site than I do now. And as I make more money online, I learn about things that do work and don’t work. I learn which people I want to listen to and which people I don’t. All of this shapes how I direct my efforts and the direction of this site. Today, I want to share with you a bigger picture so that maybe some of the readers (or that one person who still gets the RSS feed) can see where I’m coming from and see how I use these ways to make money online and how they can benefit from it.

If you’ve been following along, you’ll notice that I’ve put an extraordinary emphasis on writing articles for making money online. This is a path that I’ve found myself going towards and it seems incredibly easy to do. The start-up costs are truly nothing (if you’re only using web 2.0 sites), the work is generally interesting (although can get tedious) and if you get it right the payout can be beyond worth it. There are plenty of other ways to make money online and just maybe I’ll get around to covering them, but first and foremost I’m trying to kick the day job and that means getting down to business. Unfortunately, writing about how to make money online doesn’t really pay the bills, so my involvement here has waned. If all goes well, I’ll be back to post more frequently with more sites, more comprehensive strategies and better information.

How I Make Money Online

Let me start out by saying I don’t make much money online. It’s been 8 months and countless hours and I still have my day job, I still have a mortgage and I still stay up late at night banging out articles. So why the hell should you listen to me? Well, for the first four of those months I spent time dicking around with methods that I wasn’t good at, or didn’t know how to do well with and I spent a considerable amount of time reading about other people’s success and fantasizing about how I could do that.

I know better now.

I’ve now seen some success and have a basic blueprint that I choose to follow and works for me. That being said, everyone’s different and it may not work for you. But if it does it will save you months of floundering around if not quitting altogether.

The other big thing is that it takes time to make money online. There is no way to make money online fast, and anyone that tells you otherwise is trying to take your money. It requires a lot of effort and while a Herculean work ethic can shortcut some of the time, there’s a natural progression to online success (much of it relying on the search engines) that you can’t avoid.

The ways that I’ve made money online so far has been by writing for web 2.0 sites such as eHow, Hubpages, Infobarrel and to a lesser extent Bukisa. The ways that I make money online is by writing volumes of keyword rich articles that begin by pulling in crazy long tails (stuff that you weren’t really trying for) and backlinking those articles from the other sites as well as from articles directories and basically anywhere you can get a link. I’ve chosen to use Hubpages as the main site that all the links point to because it has the best search engine authority and revenue share as well as additional flexibility to add Amazon affiliate links and position them in places where people will see them (see the make money with Hubpages posts for more information).

The ways that I’ve made money online is by playing the numbers game. If you choose to go with Adsense model, you’ll need a lot of clicks to start getting into the tens of dollars per day. I think my average click is somewhere around 40 cents per click. But if you get enough of those clicks they add up. They way to get traffic is to rank well in the search engines. I’d say that organic search has the best potential for making money and that’s why there’s so much emphasis on search engine optimization (SEO). And arguably the best way to rank is to have a lot of inbound links with the right anchor text. This is where all of these web 2.0 sites come in. Just write a ton of articles on these handful of sites and use the anchor text to boost the chosen articles ranking.

The ways that I’ve made money online include using a strategy that focuses on one revenue source and putting all my efforts into that. I was a little mixed up in the beginning and following numerous different people’s advice I tried a little bit of everything. Then I got some good advice from a guy who knows how to make cash online. So I just focused on using Amazon’s Associates program and try to find products I can write about that people who would visit my site are interested in. The best thing about that is Amazon’s tiered compensation program means that the more sales I make the more I can make per sale.

Plan going forward

There are a number of other things that play into the ways to make money online. In upcoming posts I plan on focusing on how to get the most out of your articles including how to choose articles that get good traffic, how to use internal linking structure to enhance your SEO and how certain sites are good for certain niches, why that is and how you can capitalize on it.

In the next post I plan to write about the revenue sharing site Squidoo and what role it plays in my online money making endeavors.

Because I don’t post that often, you may want to subscribe to the RSS feed. That way you won’t miss anything when I post something 3 months later. That is if you want to.

I know it’s been awhile since I’ve updated 1000 ways to make money online and that’s because I’ve been busy working on several of those thousand ways. One of the ways I’ve been seeing more and more success with lately is Infobarrel. My plan is to give the usual backdrop of the site, write a little bit about how to make money with Infobarrel and gives some anecdotes of how you can use Infobarrel to boost your earnings with Hubpages.

All you wanted to know about Infobarrel

Alright, probably not all you wanted to know but then again that’s why there’s the FAQ section. To cut to the heart of what Infobarrel is, they are another information site where you can write articles that displays contextual ads and amazon affiliate recommendations. Infobarrel uses several familiar types of advertising including Adsense, Chitika and Kontera (you don’t get Kontera money). Infobarrel also gives you a chance to install google analytics onto your articles which will come in extremely handy (see later in the post).

They have all of the usual rules (proper grammar, original content, no porn, yada yada) but they also have a couple of additional requirements. The first is that they want you to create an article of at least 325 words. This requirement is useful for two reasons:

• It keeps the integrity of the articles on Infobarrel higher because it deters small, spammy, “I only want the link” articles.
• Google tends to respect longer documents. Not saying you can’t rank for short articles but, in general, the longer the article the better. This also gives you a chance for some more long tail keywords.

The other requirement they have is to keep any external links out of the first paragraph. In fact when it comes to linking they require that you do it contextually. I had a hard time with this at first; I would use call to action phrases such as: “Click here to learn more about…” or “Check out these…”. This is frowned upon because it blatantly calls visitors away from their site and if they don’t have visitors they don’t have money. I’ve even been called on using the asides such as: “Infobarrel is a great way to make money (More Infobarrel money making tips)”.

Just so you don’t have to struggle through the review process as much as I did my advice is to use links like this: “Infobarrel is great way to make money online and with a little help from some money making tips, you can make some serious cash.”

The other important thing to note about Infobarrel is that they have a review process to make sure you’re following the guidelines. If you do everything I’ve said above you’ll have no problems. Just makes sure that you only have two links that leave IB and that they’re not in the first paragraph. If for some reason you are denied, they’re nice enough to tell you why and give you a chance to fix it.

Sign up for Infobarrel

How to make money with Infobarrel

Because IB is so similar to places like Hubpages, the methods for making money with infobarrel are pretty much the same. I can’t emphasize enough about doing a healthy dose of keyword research and on top of that competition research. Part of the reason to use Infobarrel or Hubpages as opposed to your own websites or blogs is that they have existed for many years and have built up the reputation in Google’s eyes that has gained respect when it comes to ranking in the search engine. Using Infobarrel, you can take a topic, say bicycle seats, write a 5-600 word article on it and watch it rank on the second or third page. This makes getting to the front page so much easier (and the front page is where the money is).

There has been some issue in the past about ad location with Infobarrel and they’ve switched stuff around. I would argue that the ad location isn’t as important as most would think and that if you write a good (meaning long, on topic article) you’ll get plenty of long tail traffic (using the example above long tail keywords would be black bicycle seats, bicycle seats for kids, bmx bicycle seats, etc.). Just keep that in mind when writing the article.

Part of why writing on these sites will get you good search engine rankings is that these sites (commonly referred to as authority sites [although Web 2.0 sites are far from the only authority sites]) have a lot of “linking power” or “link juice” that is passed along to either sites within their domain (i.e. www.infobarrel.com) or sites out of their domain (a.k.a. your webpage). So if you were following along at home you may have created a hub or two because of my make money with Hubpages series. If this is the case, you could easily construct a similar, on-topic article and plant a link that would send some “link juice” to your first article. This will help improve the first articles ranking in the search engine.

This will work internally as well. So let’s say you wrote an article entitled “How to install a bicycle seat” and you casually mention some of the above long tail keywords (black, for kids, and BMX). Upon checking your google analytics account, you realize that there has been a large number of searchers that found your site using the term “BMX bicycle seats”. While it’s really good to know this, what’s better is you can write an additional article on Infobarrel on bmx bicycle seats and link back to the first one (How to install a bicycle seat) using the term “bmx bicycle seats” and that first article will get a better ranking for that term. While this isn’t a great example because the first article isn’t trying to be an article about bmx seats, you could see how to apply this. Perhaps something like “How to make money online using Hubpages” being linked to the article “How to make money online”?

I wonder if this is something I’m trying?

Why I think you can make a ton of money with Infobarrel

So if you believe all of my ramblings and you’ve read down so far, you’re doing well and you might just be thinking about signing up for Infobarrel if you haven’t already. Let me tell you a little about my crackpot theory on why I think you can make a ton of money with Infobarrel.

I need to start with a brief history lesson. Back a few years ago, Squidoo was a power house on the internet in terms of ranking well in the search engines. This brought a lot of people over to their site looking to make money online. They would create some ridiculous page (meaning bad), slap it up there, rank and make mad cash. I’m not sure how it all transpired, but eventually Google gave Squidoo what was affectionately known as the Google slap. After that, Squidoo lost some if not most of their mojo and the people who were making money had to find some other way to do it.

Almost a year ago Hubpages was the next greatest thing. You could do some of the same things, but the important part is that you would rank easily. Then things got out of hand and it’s still debated whether they got the Google slap or not, but Hubpages aren’t nearly as powerful as they used to be (partly because of the 30 day hubchallenge).

My crackpot theory is that there’s always going to be a flavor of the year when it comes to these sites, and based on my Infobarrel earnings, and some of the things I’ve seen in the search engines, I think that IB is poised to be the next big money maker. That being said you’ve still got to put in the work to rake in the cash. If you’re serious about trying to make money online, take everything I’ve mentioned above and write yourself 100 well-tuned articles. Do it as a 1 month challenge. Do it as a 3 month challenge. No matter what, just start cranking out articles and you will see a return.

I think it’s only fair to mention that there seems to be a strong correlation between my earnings and my articles hitting the three month mark. Take that as a caveat if you want to. But know that you can start raking in some cash writing for Infobarrel.

Sign up for Infobarrel

If you’re wondering where eHow comes in to all of this, I’m not quite sure. I’ve thought about eHow a lot and I think their communist approach towards articles has helped them to sustain their ranking ability. I know that a number of my articles are hitting top 10 in the search engines without any effort to improve their rankings. In fact, I’ve tried to write follow up articles on Hubpages and Infobarrel and they still don’t come close. They’ve changed things up a little bit, but I still think they are a viable diversification strategy to Hubpages or Infobarrel (which both use Adsense).

This is the third post in a series to make money online using Hubpages. Check out the first two posts if you need to catch up:

Hubpages and the Secret to Making Money Online part 1
Hubpages and the Secret to making Money Online part 2

Time for the part that everyone loves to live vicariously through. Now that it’s been nearly two months, how did I fare at the hubchallenge?

Just to provide a brief recap, the hubchallenge was a contest posed several months ago to build 100 hubs in 30 days. The idea was to generate a substantial income just by doing proper keyword research for topics that have money making potential and grabbing long tail traffic. I decided to do the same task several months later and after much of what made Hubpages so successful.

My Hubchallenge Results

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This is the second post in a series to make money online using Hubpages. Check out the first post:

Hubpages and the Secret to Making Money Online part 1

This is a long one so get settled in

How to Make Money Making Hubs

With this post I wanted to give a few tips on how to make hubs that will make some money. In the previous post, I mentioned that there are three main ways to make money with Hubpages: Contextual Ads, Amazon Affiliate Links, and Ebay Affiliate Links. The key is to pick a method starting out. You can utilize all of these monetization methods but, in my opinion, it reduces the effectiveness of the hub and your style of writing and layout are going to be geared differently depending on the method.
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Suckered you in with that title didn’t I? So here’s the deal: I stopped the usual “blogging” about making money online for awhile because I stumbled onto something that really resonated with me. My plan was to keep going along with the make money online article sites and I knew that I wanted to do Hubpages next but the problem was I hadn’t really gotten anywhere with the site. I threw up a couple of half-assed attempts at hubs and waited for everyone to come pouring in.

In doing some research I stumbled across Make Money Online with SEO’s Hubpages Challenge. The author, Ben K, went on to explain his experiments with Hubpages and how he made $40+ dollars per day. The basis of the Hubpages 30 day challenge was to create 100 hubs in 30 days and was originally proposed by Court of The Keyword Academy back in May of 2009. From this point on I was hooked and decided I had to try it. I proceeded to devour the rest of Ben’s blog learning so much from it and really gaining a lot of inspiration. Well a month (or more) went by and I didn’t quite hit the 100 hub mark but I will go on to talk about the 100 hubs challenge and my experience in subsequent posts. There’s a lot of information I’ve learned and plan to share and I now have a clear game plan on what I’m going to do.
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To my 3 loyal readers: I just wanted to drop a quick note to tell you that I haven’t abandoned this blog but I’m working on something big. I plan to write a couple great posts once this is done.

When I started out on this blog I thought it would be real easy to just crank out descriptions and strategies for ways to make money online. Then I got distracted. Should have figured.

The plan is to periodically review the ways to make money online and examine the difficulty in getting started, money making potential, and skills or tools required. Below you’ll find the first 10 ways summarized. I tried to start out with ways that cost little or nothing to get started. Let’s get down to it.

1. Selling your stuff on eBay

I won’t waste your time describing the online auction giant; all you need to do is have something to sell. The best things about eBay is that they’re hurting for new customers so they’re enticing people with 5 free listings per month. As far as earning potential goes, consider this: powersellers make $1000/month. Silver powersellers – $3000/month, Gold – $10000/month. The very fact that they have these ratings means that people are doing it (btw, Titanium powersellers make $150K per month. Haven’t seen one of these yet). Getting there is going to take some work. No one is making $1000/month on stuff they have laying around so you’re going to have to find something to sell, preferably wholesale.
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