Is Making Money Online Easy?

Many people wonder if making money online is easy. In all actuality, it is. The deeper actuality is that it is not easy at first. When you first begin making money online, many people think all they have to do is start a website or a blog, slap some advertisements on it, and presto, you have made money. Unfortunately, this is not the case, even for the luckiest person in the world.

Simple things that you need to know:

1.) You MUST know what SEO is. This may sound simple if you are an advanced internet marketer, but to be 100% honest, I had no idea what that meant or what it was when I first started online. (By the way, SEO stands for search engine optimization. In other words, making sure your website is optimized for the search engines.)

Why is this important? Let's get down to the real basics of things. If you have a website that you want to make money on, you need to first have traffic (visitors) coming to your site. Obviously, if you have no traffic, you will have no revenue, period. SEO is the practice of optimizing your website so that the search engines (google, yahoo, msn, etc.) know exactly what your site is about, so when people are searching for information, the search engines can show your site.

SEO is quit complex, and you should learn as much as you can about the topic. One very important thing to remember- while optimizing is key, so is making sure you don't OVER optimize. That's right, you can have a perfectly optimized website and get penalized (de-indexed, poor ranking, whatever). Make sure you really do your homework about this part.

2.) How to get backlinks to your site. This is just as important as SEO, and actually it kind of goes hand in hand. Let me explain a little more:

Let's take Google for example. When someone types in work from home, Google's robot does their magic and "sees" all the websites that have those keywords in them (keywords are just the words that your blog is targeting). As long as you are properly optimized for that keyword, you can potentially be shown on Googles first page of search results. The second equation of Google's decision of who to put on the first page is by determining which site has more "authority". By authority, I mean who has more quality backlinks, who has more original content, who has been around longer. These 3 things are not the deciding factor, but they do weigh in for a little. I'm getting off track here. The point of number 2 is so you can understand you must get back links, and you must promote your site. An excellent way to do both is by writting articles.

You can write articles and submit them to article directories, with a link back to your site. Just do a search on article directories and you'll find quite a few to pick from. For every article you write, you will have a backlink pointing to your site (as long as you include it), and this is called "link juice".

3.) HTML, hosting, affiliate programs...the list goes on. You don't need to know all html, but it does help to know some basic codes, such as hyperlinking and nofollow. (Hyperlinking simply makes a few words turn into a link- very helpful when trying to link to another website. Nofollow is simply a code that tells the search engines not to give any "link juice" to the site you are linking to.

Hyperlink code: (Delete the astrix before the a)

<a href="website address here">Your desired text </*a>

No follow:

rel="nofollow"

So in answer to the question "Is making money online easy?" It absolutely is, and it's incredibly fun. It does take a while to learn everything that you need to learn to be successful, and chances are, you will certainly make a lot of mistakes. With every mistake comes a lesson, so learn from it.

You can find so much information on the internet, so go for it. I recommend taking it slow, learning what you can on one subject, and then implement it. For example, learn how start a blog (use a free one when you are starting- go to wordpress or blogger), and then start it. Then do some research on SEO, and then optimize your blog. Then go ahead and do some research on how to market your website, and then market it.

I want to point out that you can find a lot of the information on the internet for free, and you can also spend money on priceless information. Just don't get suckered into buying every product that claims they'll teach you how to make money online.  You want to make sure the product is what you are looking for, and the information is going to be valuable to you.  Do your research before you buy money making products also.  They are not all the same, some are good, some are bad, and some are great. 

Are you seeing a pattern here? The key here is research.  :) 

In conclusion, the world of internet marketing is a vast pool of wealth, just make sure you are prepared to dip into the knowledge pool also! Don't let anything discourage you. Once you learn the basics, you'll grasp the concept and be on your way to the money pond.