Online Money Tips

Learning to make money is tedious and mundane. Hundreds of weblogs covering every topic under the sun exist for making money with tips and tricks on how to get started.

Ultimately, if you want to learn how to make a sustainable income while working at home you need to do the research. After wading through hundreds of articles, websites, and hundreds of hours spent, doing the research here is what I discovered.

First: Let me knock out the negatives to any of the various ways you can make money online.

Blogging: Writing is a lot of fun and a great way to be, paid for doing it. However, do not expect to get rich or even quit your day job. The money made from Blogging barely equates to anything more than pocket change, even with the right set-up. That is the downside. The upside is that you are creating a residual income that you will have so long as the blogs remain online.

Ecommerce: The competition is stiff and there are far more websites than there are buyers in today’s economy. The monthly cost of running an ecommerce website does not match the amount of money made. Even with a solid affiliate program and good marketing techniques, building a successful online business is nearly next to impossible.

Affiliate Programs: There are several affiliate programs that come with brand name companies you know and use. However, the downside is that you will spend hours trying to get the HTML banner ads up and running. Furthermore, the visitor to your site must click on the ad, buy something and even then, you will only get a small percentage of what they bought.

Online Auctions: Selling items online at an auction will not make you money. Some online auction charge you fees for: Posting the ad, selling the product, receiving the payment, and then, transferring the payment to you. Getting past that, you will quickly find yourself selling the item for a lot less than what it was actually worth.

Now, that all the downsides have been mentioned, let us look at how to change all these problems to your benefit.

Blogging: Writing blogs is a great outlet for sharing your knowledge but you should take time to think about what you are writing and why you are writing it. Make sure you do have a Google Adsense account, or can get one. Amazon is another great recommendation unless you live in Colorado or North Carolina, which are, prohibited thanks to state laws.

Write about topics that educate, are entertaining and appropriate to all age levels. More than anything else teach the readers of your blogs something new and make sure you link your blogs to other blogs you have written that follow in the same category. This is, known as, “Back-linking.”

Hubpages also allows for this using the, “Suggest Link,” tool. The tool is fairly quick and easy to use and allows you to imbed text with links to your other hubs as well as, hubs that others have written. Not only this, but Hubpages offers 9-12% to you for any ads the reader might click on in the other Hubber’s, hubs.

Another great way to increase your views is to setup an Amazon Kindle account, which will make your blogs available to, Kindle users in America and most of Europe. Germany does not have Kindle yet, but there are people there hoping to get it soon.

Yahoo has an Associated Content site where you can write articles for them. They only pay through PayPal and they are strict on what they will accept so spend time on Hubpages honing your skills before you try out for them.

About.com has job openings and they pay fairly, decent although the upfront pay may seem minor, it is the residual income that, you are after. The hard part with getting a job on About.com is that, you should be a master at the subject and armed, with lots of data.

Ecommerce: Planning is the key to making a great ecommerce website. Even more important is having a unique product to sell. There are countless amounts of products sold online and even information on just about everything is on the internet.

However, Information based on how-to is a great way to make money. If you have learned how to buy Real Estate in America for pennies on the dollar, write a book about it and sell the book through your website. If you enjoy collectibles, buy them at online auctions then re-sell them on your website for a profit.

The key to having any success with ecommerce is having products people want, selling them at a fairly, cheap price and making sure you build at least twenty sites with links connecting every site. Building one website will do you very little good.

Make sure you know how to make databases to keep track of everything you are doing. Have a database for each website to keep track of the important things, not the inventory. Inventory will take care of itself. What you want to watch for is how much money each site is making per month by breaking it down into three categories: Product sales, Affiliate earnings and Page views.

Affiliate Programs: Affiliate marketing is a bit time consuming. Especially when you have to update the banner ads once, a month with many of the affiliate programs available. Seriously, your best bet is to stick with Google Adsense. They take care of banner rotation so you do not have to. However, make sure you adhere to their rules as if you mom just told you to behave. NEVER click on your ads and do not ask your friends to. When they catch you cheating the system, they will pull the plug on you and Adsense really is a great way to make money with very little effort on your part.

If you do decide to use an Affiliate Program, learn more before you bother spending countless hours every single month trying to stay on top of the ads. You are far better off weighing it out for yourself. Affiliate Programs such as, Commission Junction should be used as a back-up plan for your websites if Google Adsense turns you down or takes forever to get you set-up.

Online Auctions: Selling at an online auction will yield little results for you and you may even lose money. However, they are the best place to go hunting for products to put in your ecommerce websites. You can actually turn a nice profit buying collectibles in bulk and selling them off individually.

Make sure you check out the seller’s rating and take the time to read what other buyers have said about them in the feedback section. Most importantly, learn about how the auction website works. What protection do they offer buyers? Do they charge a percentage for purchases? There are a few great auction websites to work with so make sure you learn the ins and outs before you buy anything.

Ultimately, you can make a really, nice income working at home but do the research. Learn everything you can about the internet and the many ways of making money online. Be prepared to work hard and make sure you use all four of these programs to ensure you make the most you can.

Sticking to one will not get you very far. In order to be successful, you will need a combination of all of the above to ensure success. Even then, it takes time for the money to build up to the level you dream of having.

No dream will come true with wishing. You have to be determined, self-disciplined and very hard working. You have to be patient, learn from your mistakes, and keep striving to reach your goals. There will be times when you will lose faith in what you are doing but do not give up. If you hit a wall, look for ways around it and you will succeed.

As time permits, the subjects covered in this article are to include a more in-depth look at each one with solid advice from the masters that will help you find the success you are looking for, in future articles.