Guide to make money online!

I often receive the question:

"What's the BEST method of making money online?" or "What's the best way to get to $X,000 per month online?"

If you're really looking to make money online and you're just getting started, it seems like a reasonable question - after all, you don't want to waste your time on something that's NOT the best method, do you? You want the best, fastest, easiest method to make the largest amount of money online possible.

If you've ever asked that question, let me give you an important piece of advice... There is no BEST way to make money online. There are SO many ways you can make money and build a business on the internet and they are all very different disciplines. If you're just getting into this stuff, you're going to be coming across a whole lot of these methods and all of them will be telling you they're the best... There's eBay, Pay Per Click Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Writing Content, Surveys, Niche Marketing, Blogging, Article Marketing, Adsense, List Building, Product Creation, JV Partnerships, Ebooks and so many more.

So how does knowing this help you? It helps you because it lets you change your question from... "What's the best way to make money online?" to "What's the best way for ME to make money online?"

Already you're on a much better track. How do you know what's the best way for YOU to make money online? You need to know about yourself. Each of the methods above require specific skills, attitudes, and strategies, some of which you will be good at and enjoy, others you'll be terrible at and hate.

Here's an example:

Blogging is a great way to make money online. But to make money with blogging, you need to do a lot of writing. You need to write content, write articles to promote your site, write guest posts on other blogs, and more. If you aren't good at writing (and you don't have money to outsource) blogging may not be the best option for you to choose in making money online.

Pay Per Click marketing is a great way to make money online. But to make money with pay per click marketing, you have to spend alot of time researching affiliate programs, and setting up ads, with minimal contact with other people. If you're a people person, you're soon going to get bored and quit sabotaging your own success with this method.

The best thing to do as someone starting out in online marketing is get a SMALL sampling of many of the different methods available for making money online in search of one that really fits with you.

Then when you find something that you feel like you're good at and you enjoy (and here's the key)

You STICK WITH IT!

The only other mistake you can make than choosing the wrong method for you, is choosing the right method, and then changing your mind among the methods so many times that you never make any progress on any method!

But that's the subject of a whole new post.

Finally, here are some guidelines for finding what method could work best for you.

• If you already have a great deal of knowledge in any particular field (I mean ANY field) you could be sitting on a million dollar information business.
  

• If you're a great writer and love expressing your thoughts and knowledge, you could be the next super blogger and make a fortune.
  

• If you love research, spotting opportunities, and "trading" (buying low selling high) you might find PPC marketing fun.
  

• If you have existing experience with Ebay - you might find it easy to transition a hobby into a full Ebay business.

Difficult times often call for desperate and difficult measures to earn that much needed income. With the advent of the internet, earning is no longer as difficult with the availability of various modes to earn tangible income from virtual transactions. Note these tips on how to make money online, and start generating income in no time.

1. Explore your online money-making options.

The internet is a lucrative hub of information that points not always to plain entertainment but also to useful income-related activities. Check the internet for a multitude of money-making options, from online marketing and advertising of your products of other people’s products, to offering writing, editing, graphic, or clerical services. If you are wondering about how to make money from the comfort of your own home, these full time or part time online ventures are perfect for you.

2. Invest on your interest and skills.

If you find yourself more passionate in the sales and marketing aspect of your online activity, pursue it in depth to master the details. Explore related activities. For online content writers, you can also earn from blogs and essays, as well as from other SEO activities.

3. Follow through and expand!

The question of how to make money online will be easily answered once you dedicate yourself in mastering your chosen venture. For affiliate marketers, you can earn more by expanding your site to cater merchants selling a variety of products. You can employ other marketing tools to maximize visitor count and site visibility such having keyword-rich contents and expanded links. Before you know it, you could be your own boss in your affiliate program. These tips on how to make money online are guaranteed to help you earn as much as you can over the internet.

If you want to blog to make money then you must know what you want your blog to be about. Blogging is a wonderful thing that the internet gave to the people so we can all share our ideas and knowledge without having to pay for it.

The first thing you want to know is what topic you want to blog about. It could be anything at all and the more specific it is, the better results you can get. I will explain why in a second. So it would make sense to blog about an interest or passion you have. Maybe you enjoy playing guitar so you should blog about guitar lessons. Trust me it works wonders.

Now once you know your topic you must research to see what the balance of supply and demand is. Meaning how many people want to learn about this topic, and how many websites are providing the information. I find the most efficient way of doing this is to use a keyword tool. You should go to Google and use their Adwords tool. Type in your topic and be specific. Then go down the list of keywords. It makes it so easy a little kid can do it. It is best to pick a keyword that has a lot of people searching for it but not as much competition. That means if you use that keyword that must be relevant to your topic. You can eventually get a lot of those people who want to learn about the topic because you will be one of the few supplying it and your blog will get ranked high on SEs. Make sense? So use a few keywords that have little competition but a descent amount of people wanting to learn about it. Use them in your title, keywords section, or description. That is what blogging to make money is all about!

So once you have an excellent topic that has a good (we will call it) supply/demand ratio you have got the hard part over with. Now time to blog to make money. Write a lot of rich content about your passion or interest and let your fingers do the typing. Content is King! You also want to make sure you post regularly. Just do at least one post a day.

Now in order to make some money you want to post some ads relevant to your topic. So the easiest ways to do this is to find companies that produce products relevant to your blog. Sign up for their affiliate program and use their banners and the link you get and post on your blog. Also get some Adsense, and do not worry because Adsense automatically has ads relevant to your site. So that is just a simple outline to blog to make money.

Finally you are going to want to spread the word about your blog. There are several ways of doing this. Post articles just like you would in your blog to article directories like e-zine articles. Go on forums that have something to do with your topic and leave a comment with your link at the end. Basically just go to as many SEs and directories as you can and post your link so people will visit your site.

I will explain my experience with a little humor. I was selling online nationally before Google even existed. It was a time when cell phones still came in large black bags the size of a small shoe box. If you're scratching your head because you don't remember those trust me, it was a long time ago.

Over the years I have watch the internet take many crazy twists and turns, but I will admit it has been a fun ride. I hope to give you REAL insight about making money online.

Starter Rules…

1) Find Your Passion
A friend of mine started a deer hunting website a few years ago. It was a "fun hobby". He enjoyed working on it because it was a "passion" and he was an expert. People came to the site because they enjoyed it. Soon he had over 100,000 people a month coming to his website and it now generates him over $1200 a month. The same applies to you. If you don't enjoy it, it won't work.

2) Would You REALLY Buy it?
If you wouldn't buy something and don't TRULY believe in the "product or service" why would you expect others to do the same. A "program" designed to make money will net you nothing. A great product or service will.

3) Is there a Large Audience?
A friend of mine loves soccer. His kids play and he coaches. He ordered training videos from http://www.SoccerU.com and loved them. He found they had an affiliate program and he posted their banner on all his sites. Guess what? None of his sites were "soccer sites". However, everyone from bank presidents to janitors have kids in soccer. Soon he was generating enough income to pay for his kid's soccer expense. Don't get too narrow.

4) Keep Your Goals Low
Start off thinking you're going to make $10,000 next month and you'll be down in the dumps very soon. Use your efforts as a learning experience to start with. Set your goals VERY low. Make $10 the first week, and then double that the following week. The one thing I have learned is that "learning" is expensive.

Making a NET PROFIT, not just sales…

Finally I think you should make sure that you try and make a net profit. Now, having said that, most people forget to add in their time.

Let me explain. If next month you put in 80 hours into your "new internet business" and made a profit of $600, would you be happy?

Well if you spent $250 on program costs, hosting and advertising that would leave you with a net profit of $350. Divide that by 80 hours and you are getting paid $4.37 an hour. Do this for 5 years and you made $14,800.

Now go get a part-time job making $8 hour for that same period and you would have $38,400.

My point is pretty simple. If you need some extra income, the web is not always the best solution. Find your niche and it will work. Simply "do it to do it" and your better off getting a real job. Pick your passion, fall in love with it, and STICK with it.

A niche simply mean a sub-market or a portion of a market. Whether you want to start a content site to earn AdSense income, get into affiliate marketing to promote other people product or start an online business to sell your own product or service, you must first find a profitable niche.

Only after you have decided the niche market you want to focus on, you will know what topic and content to write for, what affiliate programs to join or what product to concentrate on and then build the website to make money online.

So, identifying a profitable niche is the foundation. It is the essential step you must take to start making money on the Internet. Thus, you need to take time to learn about it. There are two good ebooks that can guide you in this topic. They are Niche Business Essentials & Niche Profit Blueprint written by Jean Philippe Schoeffel . These e-books contain a lot of tips and ideas on choosing profitable niches, marketing your website and generating income for your niche website.

You may download these e-books free at http://www.nichesinabox.com/2. The content and information of the books will definitely help you to succeed in making money online with niche marketing.

There are many ways you can make money online, one way which you may not have considered, but where big money is possible, is by buying and selling domain names.

The idea is simple, you buy a domain name e.g. ZitBusters.com, you list it for sale, at the industry auction sites such as Sedo or Afternic (or possibly even eBay) someone offers you a vast amount of money for it and you sell it. Well, that’s the idea, the reality is somewhat more prosaic.

To sell the domain names you buy, you will probably need to actively market them i.e. find the e-mail addresses of people that you think may be interested in your name and fire off an e-mail. If you’re lucky or the name you have is an obviously excellent name then you will get an answer saying something along the lines of “How much do you want for your name?”, which is when negotiations begin.

So what is an ‘excellent domain name’. Generally, they are dot coms (dot coms are worth around ten times as much as dot nets) and they are generic e.g. shoes.com, beer.com, business.com.

How much are generic dot coms worth? Well, the highest sale so far in 2008 is Fund.com which sold for the tidy sum of $9.9 million, Invest.com came in at number 5 and sold for $1.015 million, NewlyWeds.com on the other hand was number 53 and sold for $130,000. Sales are reported every week over at DNJournal.com where you can also see a list of the highest selling names of the year.

You may have seen the iReport channel on CNN. Where did they get the name iReport from? They bought it from self-styled ‘Domain King’ Rick Schwartz for $750,000. Rick Schwartz is one of the most successful and well-known of the domainers in the domain name industry. Other big names to look for are Kevin Ham, who has a portfolio of domain names worth around $300 million, Frank Schilling, Sahar, Rick Latona, Yun Ye who sold his portfolio of domain names for $164 million and many more. All these guys have interesting tales of how they got to be where they are by simply buying domain names, hanging on to them for a while then selling them on for a profit.

So what sort of names should you buy? As mentioned above, generic names are the best but of course most of the dot coms are already gone. So if you want a good generic name you may have to buy it off the person who already owns it. Alternatively you can wade through long lists of names that are dropping (i.e. not being renewed) at places like TDNam and Snapnames. Or of course you can try and discover a gem that no-one else has registered (very difficult as all dictionary word dot coms were registered long ago).

A word of warning, some registrars are unscrupulous and if they see you have looked for a name but not registered it, they will then ‘reserve’ it for you, by which they really mean block it and sell it to you for an inflated price. Do a search on network solution front running. Godaddy are the biggest for registering domains and they seem to be OK, but if you do find a good name that isn’t registered you would be well-advised to register it quickly as there are very few secrets on the Internet. The price for registering a dot com is around $10, but do a search for ‘discount codes’ and you will probably find coupons that will give you a 20% discount. If you use the code 199TEST with Godaddy you should be able to register a domain name for 99 cents, but it only works once. Bear in mind also that there is a 5 day ‘grace period’ and if you change your mind registrars will often cancel your domain name and refund the fee if you ask nicely.

More words of warning, steer clear of trademarked names i.e. stuff like Google, Microsoft, Armani etc... you will only cause yourself a lot of trouble.

While waiting for your names to sell you can either develop the name into a blog or a site or you can ‘park’ them . Parking them is a simple way of creating a page with some ads. on which may or may not bring in some money while you wait to sell your domain. You need to sign up with a ‘parking’ company. The easiest one to sign up with is Namedrive. In an interesting development Google has decided to set up its own parking service. This after previously criticizing parking companies as offering no value and being of no use etc.... Now that Google has set up its own parked pages it appears that parking domain names is cool. Go figure. (From what I hear though, most domainers are not recommending Google’s parked service due to the many complications involved.)

For more information about the whole domain name business you can visit forums like NamePros. To see what sort of prices domain names have been selling for check out DNSalePrice.

This is only an introduction to domain name trading but it gives the basic ideas. There are people who have made millions from domains, and in my opinion successful domainers make lots of money but it does take a lot of work, particularly if you are just starting out.

Make money blog!

Make Money Online With A Free Blog
Blog or weblog is simply a website with continuous updates on a particular subject or topic and the latest post will stay on the top. For instance, If your blog is about motorcycle. You can post the latest news and announcements from motorcycle manufacturers, discuss about the latest models of motorcycles and the best components used for producing motorcycles. You can create a blog absolutely free by joing Blogger.com. Creating a blog with Blogger.com is easy as you don't need any technical knowledge and you can have your blog published within an hours.

There are several ways you can make money with a blog:

Place revenue generating Ads on your blog
You can join Google AdSense program and start earning advertising revenue from your blog.

Sell Other People's Stuff
You can promote your affiliate programs by placing the affiliate links and banners on your blog and earn commission whenever someone clicks through an affiliate link or banner to your merchant's website made a purchase.

Sell Your Own Product
Blog can be used to promote and sell your own products too. You can write about your products' features and benefits on the blog.

Sell Products or Services Online
You can set up an online store to sell a wide variety of products. However, it will cost you few thousands dollars to start an e-store. One way to start an online business with minimum capital is deal with drop ship wholesalers. So how drop shipping works?

- A drop ship distributor is a wholesale company that will ship one product directly to your customer.
- You don't need to pay for an item unless it is sold.
- You don't store any inventory.
- You don't package and ship merchandise.
- Your customer pays the retail price for the product to you and you pay the cost of the product to the drop ship distributor. The difference is your profit.

Drop shipping system makes it affordable for anyone to start an online business due to the benefits it offers. EBay is the best place for you to start selling your products with drop shipping system. One strategy you can try is sell the similar items to the one that have attracted several bids in eBay. For instance, say you have opened an account with a cell phone drop ship dealer and ready to sell cell phone on eBay. You found that a Nokia 8810 cell phone have attracted 7 bids, so what you can try to do is list the similar item immediately with lowest price possible. Of course, there is no guarantee that you will make any money with this strategy. There are many more auction selling ideas you can find from the Internet which can help you make a steady income on eBay.

Be a Freelancer
There are many freelance job sites consist of a long list of freelance job contracts. These freelance sites usually offer the following jobs:

1) IT jobs (web-design, Jawa, PHP, script-installation, programming, graphic design and so on)
2) Writing & Editing Jobs
3) Administrative support (Data entry) & accounting services.

You may join several freelance sites for free and start bidding for the projects and contracts that are right for you. You can also make extra money writing articles and essays. There are places and websites where you can sell your articles and essays for a price anywhere between $5 to 25 per article. Furthermore, there are forums and blogs offer to pay anyone who post message and article to their websites.

Be an Affiliate
Affiliate makes money online by selling other people's stuff. An affiliate earns commission whenever someone sent by him/her to his/her merchant's website makes a purchase. Clickbank is one of the best places you can find an affiliate program to join because it is the largest e-book store and contains a ton of merchants looking for people to sell their e-books. The main task of affiliates is promote and advertise their merchants' websites (affiliate links). One method to promote affiliate program is advertise on Google. To advertise on Google you'll first need to open a Google AdWords account. You can start advertise on Google immediately after paying $5 account activation fee. Your cost of advertising is calculated in pay-per-click (PPC) basis. This means that Google will only charge you whenever someone clicks your text ad.

Paid Survey
Taking online paid survey at home is an easy way to make money online as you don't need any special skills and knowledge to complete paid survey job. In order to increase the money you can earn, you need to join as many market research and survey companies as possible. However you can't expect how much money you will make monthly because you have no idea when a paid survey invitation will send to your mail box. Thus it is not an ideal way to make a wage but a great way to make some extra income for paying your monthly bills

There are millions of sites out there and it is impossible to remember all of them. But who says you have to remember them. But who says you have to remember them? You can bookmark it using Del.icio.us and come back later.

Social bookmark is an excellent way to share any blog post or videos that you find interesting. Internet marketers and search engine specialists know this very well and they have spent a considerable amount of time to leverage the system for their business.

There are hundreds of social bookmarking sites available out there and it would probably take more than a few hours just to submit them to 100 of social bookmarking sites. You might not have the time to do it yourself so how do you still get the backlinks for your sites? Simple, just outsource it to specialist who is providing social bookmarketing service. They might have the network of friends who will like your story and help to increase your rating.

A backlink from social bookmark is considered as a do-follow link and this increase your ranking score on search engines. If done correctly, you target audiences will bookmark your website too and your backlinks will increase exponentially.

You can take advantage of social bookmarks by using your targeted keyword for the bookmarks title. This is an excellent way for you to increase your link popularity.

You need to be creative with your title and tag your website with your targeted keywords. So this will lead other to your website when they type in your keywords. This can be the difference of having a number of backlinks from your own bookmarks o massive and instant traffic to your sites. This can help you to save hundreds or even thousands of dollars from paying for PPC campaigns just to get targeted traffic to your sites.

But you will have to make sure your submission is relevant. Don't even think of spamming your own links because that might be counter-productive. You are given about 100 words in the description section but that doesn't mean your should include your keywords more that once on it.

Other members might not be happy with what you're doing and flag your submission. You don't want that to happen because it could be getting your account suspended.

Internet marketers understand the power of social bookmarks and they will not hesitate to outsource the dirty job of building backlinks from these sites. After all, it is impossible to do it by yourself when you have 20 blogs that you update on daily basis.

Social bookmarks can also be a great source for you to find relevant information that you can use to grow your business. Who knows you might stumble upon a site that provides WordPress olugin that you don't even know for your search engine optimization campaign.

Author Bio
Chester Chen discusses about Internet marketing strategies on his blog. Be sure to visit it on daily basis to learn how you can increase your profit without burning your pocket.

Make Money Online!