(Click here to go back to the start.)

Category Three: Work

Moving on to the third category, we come to the ‘work’ sites, for want of a better term. Making money online is not often an easy route to riches, but for the really dedicated (and hopefully a tiny bit talented) individual, this style of earning can provide an actual salary. Yes, enough to live on. Before you get all excited, remember that to do that you’ll be working pretty much full time, as you would in a real world job: there are few people who get rich while sitting around drinking coffee all day – and they were usually rich to begin with!

There are three main types of work site: writing, blogging and other online jobs. Earning money online by writing can be a very rewarding experience for many people. It offers the opportunity to express ideas and share knowledge, and it can bring in not only a regular but also residual income. For those unfamiliar with the term, residual income is the money that rolls in every month without additional work, like royalties on music and so on. The first thing with writing online is to find appropriate sites to showcase your work. This is definitely easier if you are a native English speaker or have excellent English writing skills, but there are several sites that will accept documents, articles and reviews in any language. Make sure you read the terms of membership.

Some writing sites charge a membership fee. The value of this lies with the individual, but given that at least three or four of the most popular sites are free to join (and pay out reliably), unless the pay-site is providing a significant or unique extra service it may not be worth investing. Making money online as a writer is based on two general forms of payment: per view or per article. Most new authors will begin with the per view model until they have built up a reputation on their chosen site and can begin requesting payment for work written to order. In general, the sites offer free submission of content which is then categorized and published: visitors to the site log hits against each article and a certain sum is paid to the author for every 1,000 views (usually a dollar or two). While this won’t make a huge amount of money, it is the basis for the residual income part of the work – those articles don’t disappear, they continue earning a few cents or more every day for years to come. The more articles there are, the more income. Articles average around 500 words.

Per article payments mostly come in one or more of four ways. The first is through building a reputation on a writing site and submitting in a ‘marketplace’ format. This is where a publisher asks or submission to a particular title and chooses one or more responses from whoever replies. Secondly, there are ‘up-front’ payments where a site pays out a small sum calculated on the possible earnings of an article. Writers generally need to prove their worth before they are eligible for this sort of money, due to the risk taken by the site. Thirdly, many writers work through article ‘shops’ where summaries of their work are presented and publishers browse, choose and purchase, much like any other online shopping. Finally there are ‘bid’ sites which work the other way round: publishers post their job and accept bids for the work from freelance authors.

The things to check when writing online are the language and style requirements, of course, but also what rights you retain on your work as the author. Some sites keep all the content, taking full rights of ownership as soon as they purchase your article. Others allow you to redistribute the piece yourself (and generally pay less). Yet others allow you to choose what rights you retain and even set your own prices.

Sticking with the ‘work’ category, we come once again to blogging. The difference here is that of making money online by writing, creating and maintaining your own blog on its own URL. Rather than relying on someone else’s setup and income, the serious blogger can increase their revenue by building their reputation enough to actually make a business of it. This is neither a short-term nor a simple proposal: producing interesting content over an extended period of time is difficult enough in itself, but adding the prospect of garnering ad revenue first-hand as well as via third-party systems, earning extra income from public speaking and the many other routes available to the well-known blogger increases the workload dramatically.

In today’s market, this kind of reputation is not easy to come by. There are thousands, if not millions of blogs on the Internet, so finding an appropriate niche is absolutely essential – one in which you can show your knowledge and passion, become an accepted authority and for which you have the stamina to continue through months and months of hard work. It’s a full-time job.

The final entry in the ‘work’ category is the one that’s quite difficult to cover in any depth – other online jobs. It’s vague by design: every week, someone somewhere thinks of a way to convert another real world task into an online version and goes looking for resources. Almost anything you do online can be done as paid work: the trick is to find someone willing to pay for the activity. Sample jobs include data entry, posting on forums, writing blog comments, proofreading, translation, coding, web design and online personal assistants.

If you are seriously considering making money online with one of these methods, it is extremely important to verify the sources and ensure that the job sites give as much assurance as possible for payment. In most cases, the contract is between the provider and the individual: the site is in no way responsible. Keep your eyes open and a dash of paranoia in hand. Be prepared for disappointments and an occasional employer to disappear before payment. Start small and work up to the bigger jobs, once your qualifications and ability are established.

An additional note: at the moment, the ‘ForEx’ market is very big. That’s ‘Foreign Exchange’. ForEx will not be covered in this guide, because it’s a real-world stock market job, in effect, and I am in no way qualified to give any kind of guidance on it. Stock- and share-trading have been available on the Internet for a long time now and, in my opinion, are best left to the experts: to people who have the experience and knowledge to juggle all that information. If you’re comfortable in that market, all power to you!

Category Four: Marketing

Remember all those emails saying how you can earn thousands every week by making money online from the comfort of your own home? The vast majority of them are talking about marketing: specifically affiliate marketing. It’s one of those weird situations that seem only to exist because of our ultra-modern, product-focused world. People selling the job of selling to people who will sell more sales…

Firstly, before we get onto the actual affiliate marketing system (or affiliate sales, it’s pretty much the same thing), let’s look at those get-rich-quick schemes. I have a natural cynicism that makes me wonder why anyone on a six-figure income would suddenly become altruistic enough to offer the same opportunity for free to people they’ve never met, thus cutting into their own market share. As far as I can see, the system works like this: they get you to sign up (for free), then hit you with a small cost. A part of this cost goes to them – which is how they have that six-figure income – but you get a ‘plan’ or a ‘book of secrets’ of how to do just what they’re doing: sell that book or a similar product to other people hoping to get rich.

Quite apart from my having a problem with this at its most basic level (taking advantage of people who have little money – predominantly those desperate for the extra income), it’s generally a smoke-and-mirrors way of performing affiliate marketing. I’m not saying the products they offer are useless, but in my experience all but a tiny snippet of the information in them is available elsewhere on the web, for free and in better detail. I strongly suggest, as I did at the outset, avoiding any system that requires up-front payments. Time in research is frequently a better investment.

Anyway, back to the affiliate system. There are two sides to this coin: sales and marketing. Affiliate sales earns money online by you, as the salesman, building a web site that promotes a particular product or products. For each individual sale made, the actual owner of the goods gets a certain amount and you, as the affiliate, pocket a percentage. In the example of a get-rich-quick ebook at $100, you may get anything from $10 to $60 – it depends on the product seller. The biggest online catalogue for affiliate products is ClickBank. They have millions of products in dozens of categories: simply subscribe to the site, choose a product, promote it and they will pay out (to the owner and you, the affiliate) for every sale that goes through them.

The marketing side of the coin is the generation of traffic to your sales site. This is the time- and effort-consuming part, as you will be writing, reviewing, posting on forums and discussion groups, blogging and using any and all means to bring more potential customers to your site. Traffic generation is covered later on in this guide. As far as affiliate sales are concerned, they are potentially the best way to make money online, bar none. A successful sales site making commissions off a few customers a day can provide some serious income. Bear in mind, however, that it’s not easy: there’s a lot of work involved in generating interest and maintaining all the other sites that point to your seller. Competition is fierce as well, as one would expect.

If all that’s too much work, including basic marketing in your site is still possible. Google, Yahoo, Kontera and other companies run keyword-based advertising systems that can be built into almost any kind of web site, though are better when used with keyword-focused articles or reviews. This kind of advertising is, however, very dependant on your visitors clicking the ads. On average, a site gets anything from 1% to 5% click-throughs (though mostly down at the 1% mark), so you’ll get a few cents for every 100 visitors or so: this can convert to quite a nice, regular income on high-profile sites, or a little extra cash almost anywhere. Keyword advertising is probably the easiest way to make money online, as it uses your existing content to generate commercial possibilities, meaning that your work is limited to setting it up once and leaving it running.

As an aside, be warned that most advertising systems monitor where clicks come from: hitting your own ads to generate revenue is generally against their terms of service and they will shut down your account post-haste if they catch you doing this. The same goes for grouping with other people using these systems to make money online and clicking each others’ links to generate false revenue.

There are some other ways to earn money online as well, including such things as MLM (multi-level marketing), pyramid systems and the like. Most of these are well-known and have a reputation for being untrustworthy, so they won’t be included in this guide.

On to Part Four: The People We Meet, Traffic, Resources and Final Thoughts