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.