I've made $100 a day online before.

For seven days.

And those days were spaced out over the course of two months. It was from a cable TV affiliate program I'd signed up for, and it was the easiest money I've ever made in my life: copy and paste code in the front of a local pizza website.

I've tried for about five years to find that magic niche that will get me that kind of money again. I've lost all that time, but I have gained insights as to what did and didn't work. Here are some of the things I will be doing to get close to that amount of money again:

1. Do websites cheap or free for existing businesses and pepper them with banner ads. Let's face it: with all the Web 2.0 tools out there now, $60K/year web careers are being reserved only for the ultra-skilled class of web builder who knows Flash, DreamWeaver, Quark, ASP, Photoshop, AdSense, and other apps and platforms I can spell out by throwing a handful of Scrabble tiles across the room. Most small business owners have a little leeway to pay a web guy, but they realistically won't want or need a hyper-corporate Flashfest to promote the soup of the day. This can be ideal for people who do can do adequate web design with PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS. For those having problems with web training and resources, http://w3schools.com and http://oswd.org provide a wealth of free information and templates.

By starting their own online presence, with hardly a business to go with it, most people are going to be looking at several weeks of social networking, door-knocking, and forum posting before they get the time of day from the Internet community. By partnering with a local business that has its fans just waiting to see what it can offer online, a web designer can grab good traffic (and proportional ad revenue) early instead of howling all by him or herself into the national web scene.

2. Blog faithfully. I used to blog for less than a nickel a week. Seriously. But thanks to Problogger,net's book, I've refined my techniques, and realized that reader interest is not generated at any specific number of incoming visitors. It's what those visitors will do, in whatever numbers, when they like your site enough to keep coming back, and when your content is in tune with your advertisements. I'm still in shock over making $10 in a single day through all my writing. After getting my first payment of $109 that month, I immediately started slacking, and revenues have fallen accordingly, but I am going to be getting my readership back up and providing them with the best content I can as thanks for coming back.

3. Get multiple streams of income through content creation. Write it, or script it and build it in Second Life, I've come to see that what I create has an enduring value, and new people keep returning to it. It helps to write about or sell a product directly, but writing in itself can be enough to generate a decent bottom line if it's consistently done and promoted. Lulu.com, Zazzle, CafePress, ClickBank, BitPass, and more: there are dozens of specialized markets for content one can likely make daily.

4. Use free online promotion more effectively. Much of the rewards from my efforts are defined by traffic. If I could get a thousand visitors a day to my HubPages hubs, I could almost kiss my day job goodbye. And the thing is, there's no reason I can't do it... or get two thousand, or five thousand, or more.

One thing I do need to overcome first is what I call networking paralysis. It's when I have one Twitter account, one MySpace account, and so on, and none of the accounts reflects my revenue projects completely. I'm stuck halfway between being a blogging resource on my Twitter account and being a Second Life info source, and something is going to have to give.

5. Stick to one or two projects and don't let them out of my sight until I diagnose what's wrong. I made the mistake of trying a hundred different applications, platforms and products. It was like going down a giant smorgasbord, repeatedly grabbing a bite of something, and spitting it out before I could even taste it. To make use of my business tools, I will need to learn them in depth. If you're using a super-quality service like Aweber, for example, and you're not raking in the traffic you need, you need to promote and re-promote that part of your operations until something sticks. Forums are everywhere for helping you reach your full potential and most don't cost a dime.

6. Consult the Small Business Association (http://sba.gov). At the heart of a successful online campaign is a solid business plan. Without one, there is no effective resource management and a medium disaster or two can wipe away the whole project.

So, while you may be able to focus on the heavy revenue hitters like John Chow (http://johnchow.com) posts on all day, you will first need some infrastructure and a business plan to identify, research and maximize your own strengths.

Good luck!