I've spent a good portion of 2009 trying to make money online. I may have stepped into the "business" a little too late in the game, but I don't quite know yet. I for sure have found both the hardest and easiest ways to make money online.

One of the hardest ways to make money online is writing. There are millions of people out there who plunk away at their keyboard (just as I'm doing now) thinking that what they are writing is pure brilliance and a is work of art. My guess is that their writing only gets seen by maybe a couple hundred people. On top of hardly anyone seeing the work, they pray that their readers click the ads that they have embedded into their site/blog/hub. They also pray that they get enough hits so they can brag to future employers who actually want their talent.

One of the easiest ways to make money online is answering questions. If you view my other hubs, there is one that compares the two major online question answering companies. I have worked for both companies and earned over $100 from each, though I chose to only continue with KGB.
Working for these two companies earns me about 4-5$ an hour (which is good considering I'd be playing computer games otherwise) which supplements my part time job fairly well.
The work, however, is monotonous. Looking up questions online to send back to a customer over and over is similar to nails on a chalkboard. Sadly, I am forced to continue this work as the unemployment in my current town is about 18%.

Since I labeled the second example as "easy" I should let the readers know that the application process for both ChaCha and KGB was lengthy, and there was a lot of non-paid training involved. Once a person does get hired though, it is a solid online job.

Since answering questions online is considered "easy" for the average Internet user (myself), and I'm still getting paid, why am I even writing this Hub?

Well I wanted to bring up another possible easy way to make money online: E-books.

I have a buddy who works at a mom and pop computer store in a small town not too far away from me. Last month he actually got cut down to 20 hours a week at work. They pay him pretty well to repair computers, but since his hours got sliced in half, he isn't able to support his family as well as he would like to.
I told him about ChaCha and Kgb but he despised the idea of answering hundreds of questions in his spare time. He would rather spend time with his family.

He decided to invest a little money in a URL from GoDaddy.com and he created an E-book to help the non-savvy computer users. You can visit his site if you don't mind the honest plug for my friend: www.tunemeupscotty.com
His E-book is a simple, step by step guide showing a person how to tune up their PC. He charges 10$ via paypal and emails them the .pdf when he receives the money.

I asked him last night how his business was going and he said it was slow to start but this last week he was selling 1 book a day. That's not to shabby in my opinion. $70 a week for writing something once sure beats my 17-18 hours of answering questions for the same amount.

So what did he do to market his site?
Besides trying to word his pages for Search Engine Optimization, he printed up some pull-tab style flyers and canvassed the area with them. That's it! He made $70 this last week just by putting some flyers up in his area to go to his site.

I guess making money online IS easy. You just have to figure out what you want to do.

My next task is to emulate his idea and create an e-book to sell. I probably will go the eBay route instead of a website, but we will see how easy it can be to make money online.