This post is going to go over just the basics about the 'make money online' game. The main reason I am writing this is to give this information out for free because I don't like seeing genuine people being suckered by all the scammers selling ebooks for $97 about how to make money online that will actually never make you any money.

When you get down to it there are only a couple ways that people make money using blogs. The main way to make money blogging is to add adsense ads to you page. The other way people make money is by promoting affiliate products. These are products that you link to with your unique affiliate ID. If anybody uses your link to buy the product then you get commission from the sale. If you aren't going to produce your own product then these are the two main ways to make money on the internet.

If you've fought off all the shysters who prey on the beginners without wasting too much money or time then congratulations, you've made it past a lot of people. The next reason that 99% of people trying to make money on the internet fail is because they chase social traffic. Let me explain...

The only way people are going to click on your adsense ads or buy your affiliate products is if they go to your blog. There are lots of way to get traffic to your blog but there is better types of traffic then others. Another pitfall that people fall into is chasing the social traffic with sites like Digg and Twitter. There's nothing wrong with this if you want people to read your blog but this type of traffic is not going to click your ads or buy your products because they are also trying to do the same thing you are. They know what an affiliate link is and if they do want to buy your product they will just substitute their own ID and rob you of the commission.

If you want to write posts for people to read then great, you are a blogger. But most bloggers don't make any money. Internet marketers make money. The reason for this is that internet marketers write for the machines, the spiders that crawl pages and rank you based on the keywords that you are targeting. Normal people do not go to Digg to search for what they want to know, they go to Google and type in their keyword. These are the people that will click on your ads, these are the people that you want to target because they will make you money.

If you want to impart some of your wonderful knowledge on the world because you think it will benefit us then by all means go ahead. That is a great thing to do. But don't have any misconceptions about striking gold online. The reason for this is that if people are reading what you have written then they aren't clicking your links and they aren't buying your affiliate products.

Internet marketers, at least the ones that make money, don't actually want people to read what they write. The only reason they write anything at all is so they can rank well in the G search engine for their targeted keywords and their long tails. They will actually design the blog to be ugly so that the only thing that pops out is the add they want visitors to click on. This brings me to my next point. You need targeted traffic. Social traffic is not only useless it will actually hurt your earnings potential because if they do end up clicking on your ads they will most likely not buy whatever is on the other side. Google will see that you have untargeted traffic that does not convert well and they will not pay you very much. This is because G's priority is the advertiser. The advertiser is the one that is paying Google, not the person displaying the ads on their blog.

So we've talked about the ways not to make money online: chase social traffic and buy a bunch of ebooks claiming to make you thousands a week without doing anything. Let's talk about how to make money online. And I'm giving you this information for free. I know what you are thinking, there has to be a catch, and there is but you are still going to get this information for free even if this post helps me out at the same time. It's a win - win situation as far as we're concerned.

The technique to get targeted traffic that converts well is to place in the top of the search engine ranking pages (SERPs). And you do this by applying the principles of search engine optimization (SEO). And when I talk about search engines I want you to understand that I am talking mainly about Google. This is because most regular folks use G for their searching needs, and other reasons that I'm not going to get into with this post.

There are two types of search engine optimization techniques: on and off page optimization. First we'll go over on page SEO. When a spider crawls your page it is searching for keywords that will tell it what your blog is about so that it can give people the most relevant sites when they type certain keywords into their search engine. If you have some snappy title that is targeted towards getting social traffic then the G bots are going to have no idea what your site is about. So the first way to rank well with on page search engine optimization is to put your keyword in your URL and in the header title. Then use the long tail keywords for your header subtitle. This will give the bots a good idea about what the rest of your blog is going to be about. Then the bots crawl your side bar. Then they crawl your post titles, your posts, and then your footer. This is a simplified version of the process but you get the idea. So you want to use your main key words and your long tails in your URL, title, sub title, side bar, post titles, in your content, and in your footer. This will tell your bot that you without a doubt what your blog is about.

Now let's talk about off page search engine optimization. This is the most crucial part of ranking well in the search engines. It's smart to focus about 10% of your time on on page optimization and the rest for off page. What is off page SEO? Back links. This is where other sites link to your blog. There is a major difference in the quality of the backlinks you can get. The best quality backlink you could get would be when a PR10 that is relevant to your site links to your blog with a keyword anchored backlink in an article that is also relevant to your site. The worst back link you could get would be from a PR0 blog that is not relevant to your site that does not use a relevant keyword anchored backlink.

This is another reason that chasing social traffic is mostly a major waste of time and energy. They don't understand the utmost importance of getting a relevant key word anchored back link. If they do give you a link it will usually be useless because they will the a phrase like "check out this site. click here." This will rank your site for the term 'click here,' which doesn't help you at all. You want targeted traffic that is searching in G for your keywords so that you will get a high click through rate (CTR) and then they will convert on the other side of the ad so Google will reward you for this type of traffic by paying you more per click.

So now we've discussed how not to make money online, search engine optimization, and why it's important to get the right kind of traffic. Now this is where a lot of people hit a stumbling block. How do you get backlinks? Well let's go over some of the ways.

The easiest way to get people to link to you and to do it with relevant keyword anchored backlinks is to write quality articles with your keyword in your title. This type of back link strategy is called link baiting. A little trick you can do to make absolutely sure that when people use your article that you get a good back link is to put it in yourself. You are going to want to put your link into the first paragraph because a lot of scaping sites will use just the first or the first couple of paragraphs as a snippet of your article so if your link is in the last paragraph you won't get credit for the back link.

Another free and easy way to get good back links is to sign up with online article publishing services like GoArticles or eZineArticles and write relevant content and link to yourself. You are going to want to use the signature area for your link because this is the only part of the article that will allow a do follow link which G will recognize. This is a free and easy way to get your back links.

You can also use services like Squidoo and Hubpages to write relevant content and put a couple of your links in. Unlike Squidoo, Hubpages does not allow blatant advertising for yourself but if you put a key word anchored back link or two in a well written article they will allow that. You can also take a percentage of the revenue from your page, so this is a win - win situation where you want to write good articles.

A less ethical way to get backlinks is to pay for them. There are many services that let your pay and do link exchanges. But if G finds out you are buying back links they will punish you by lowering your page rank.

You can always ask another blog that is in your niche but not a direct competitor to do a link exchange.

These are the very basic elements of how to make money online but if you follow these principles, break through barriers, and persevere you will eventually make money online.