So you finally decided to start making money online by producing your own content ? That's good. Welcome in the club. I already preached a lot about producing good content and having a strategy, so I won't come back to these topics here.

A common pitfall for new web content producers is to spend too much time finding tools, using them for a while, find out that they're not using the right ones, change, migrate, or miss important opportunities because they miss some tools at key moments.

This comes from my own experience, and I learned some of these lessons the hard way. All time spent to change e-mail, blog-platform, hosting, test various byproduct services is time away from the core task: producing good content.

It's true that content is anything, but even the better content needs to be presented and formatted to have chances to reach its audience. Whether newbie or toasted web content producer, you'll find here things I use in my daily online activities.

Many factors contribute to make you identifiable online, the two main ones being your domain name and e-mail. A domain like "www.YourDomainName.com" is much better and looks more serious that something like "YourSubDomain.XXX.com", where xxx can be blogspot, wordpress, or any other. You'll have to pay for that, but it's really worth it.

The same applies for e-mail. Would you really do serious business with someone using a gmail.com or hotmail.com address ? e-mail address is even more important as your screen name (if you don't use your real name). Chaning it after you started to promote it is really hard, so take time to think about the address you want, and stick to it.

As your address will be publicized, you'll certainly get tons of spam. This comes with success - on some of my adresses, I get more than 500 spams per day ! Select a service provider with good spam filter, and don't use any personal e-mail. You don't want to mix your online activities and your private life, don't you ?

To buy your domain, you can use NameBay, and if you want full hosting, have a look at GoDaddy. If you prefer to go for subdomains for your first experiments, the classical are Blogger and Wordpress.

Creating online content is a serious thing. Don't expect to simply upload three pages and get millions of dollars back the first week. Most of time, nothing happens after your press the "Publish" button. Getting known takes time, and it's a hard task.

There are many sources of good advice available online, and one all have to learn from the others. Amongst my favorites, Problogger is unavoidable, skelliewag is also full of good tips, and DailyBlogTips is certainly worth time reading. As self promotion never hurts, you can also find some of my tips in another of my hubs: 9 in 1 - All My Tips For Writing Killer Hubs (bonus included).

Learning from the others is the best way to save time and avoid common mistakes - no shame in that. Some call it "Building on shoulders of Giants".

To promote your content, you'll use social networking sites. There are tons of them, working on various principles. Some are based on votes by other readers, submissions, and crossed-evaluation.

When I started blogging, I tended to register and work with as many of them as possible, up to a point where I was spending more time networking than producing content (you know, the only paying activity...).

My personal solution to that problem is to use ShareThis, just like HubPages. Did you notice the green "Share it!" icon at the end of each hub ? By clicking on that, the reader can submit the page to his / her favorite social networks, or simply send a link to someone per e-mail.

Not only ShareThis allows for integration in all social networks at once, but it also avoids to have a full collection of icons on each page.

Unless you sell products of services, your money will come from your traffic. The most popular and easy way to change traffic in money is to display ads. When visitors clicks on the ad, you ge part of the money the advertiser paid.

Services like google AdSense offer so-called "context sensitive ads" - the ads will be selected to match the content of your site, making them more relevant to to your visitors.

Even if AdSense is clearly the leader, there are other options, like AdBrite and BidVertiser. Widgetbucks is slightly different: it displays products in a widget to be included in your site.

If you look for further alternatives to AdSense, THE reference is this "Biggest List of AdSense Alternatives" hub from SunSeven.

If you don't like the concept of ads that you can't select, you can also use Amazon Associates Program to display products from Amazon that you select. If your visitors go to amazon via your widget and buy the selected items, you receive a commission. The same kind of program also exist with eBay Partner Network.

If you're really reluctant to displaying ads, other options are possible. If you have a photo gallery, you can monetize clicks on your photos by submitting them in Shareapic and get paid each time one of your visitors will click on your pictures.

revver offers a service similar to YouTube, but they display ads on and after your videos, and pay you a part of the revenue back. If you go this may, be sure to respect all copyrights - revver won't accept a video with a music for which you don't own the rights.

You certainly have a logo for your online business, don't you ? DId you think of selling clothing or other items (mousepads, aprons, mugs, calendars, ...) decorated with your brand ?

You can do that with Printfection, or CafePress. Lulu specializes in printed products like calendars, books, photo albums, but also offers services for digital products, online or by selling media supports.

The base price is always predefined, and you can add the profit margin you want on top of that. Note that if you simply want to promote your brand without making money out of that, you can set a zero margin.

Do you know what an RSS feed is ? If not, you should google about that, or read the RSS article in Wikipedia. Many promotion services are based on RSS, because it makes automation easier.

I personally had good results with BlogBurst. What they do is place blog headlines or full posts in mainstream media. Finding my posts in the reuters website for example is always good for traffic.

Another interesting tool is BlogRush, which uses a widget to display links to other blogs on your site. Each time your blog displays the widget, you earn credits, and for each credit, your own posts are displayed on other blogs.

Most blogging platforms offer basic feed services, but there more to RSS than simply having a feed. With FeedBurner, you can have feed statistics, but also offer e-mail subscription, and automatically ping services like technorati. As the address of your feed will be by feedburner, this is a choice to make at the very begining of your project, to make sure your feed readers get the right address.

If you want to display contents of other blog's feeds on your own, you can use google reader clips. This is not always seen as an elegant thing to do, as it's not exactly content creation. On the other hand, it offers a good service to your readers. In my humble opinion, the best way to do that is to syndicate headlines only. Doing that, the authors you syndicate will receive the traffic they deserve.

The best way to produce better content is to know which part of what you already published had most success. It's also important to know where your traffic comes from, particularly when you want to evaluate how efficient your promotion is.

statcounter offers a very comprehensive service for free. The only limitation is the number of detailled records kept in the database, but the overall statistics are always kept. If you need details on more recent visitors, you can then upgrade to a paying service.

Another reference in that domain is google analytics. Personally, I find it a bit too complex for what I need, but I still use it parallely to statcounter on some of my blogs.

Now, you can start building your online content while profiting of my own experience. But if you had to remember only two things, try to memorize that:

1. Good content is the key to success
2. Money comes as the result of work only - no magic trick

While you're here, you should have a look at another hub of mine, about the easy way to make money online.

Now, take the time to put all the services you need in place, and kick-start your online career ! Good Luck !