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The People We Meet

The more time you spend trying to make money online, the more people you will meet who are doing the same thing, especially when the economy isn’t too healthy. While every individual is different, these people generally fall into one of several stereotypes.

The most common is the rabid affiliate seeker. As a newcomer, you’ll run into a lot of these, since your questions will be of the order of “Where can I make money online?” Their answers almost always consist of little information and lots of links – all of which sign you up as a referral underneath them on various websites. This, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does not answer your question. They’re so concerned with the monetary aspect of things that the idea of making a few extra cents far outweighs any altruistic tendencies to provide actual help.

Also numerous are the slackers and those who are fed up with trying to earn money online. The former are looking for an easy way to get rich with as little effort as possible and, having failed, they become the latter: disillusioned by the work needed. Their responses to requests for help mainly consist of negative comments on certain systems (particularly PTC) and again are not particularly helpful.

Another type of unhelpful response comes from the people who are “better than you”. They’re making money, but they don’t mention the names of any particular sites or methods. They’re generally cynical of the basic systems and, having found a niche for themselves, are unwilling to share it. Admittedly, they will provide a little information, usually vague, but their main concern is to boast over how much they make.

At the other end of the enthusiasm spectrum are the last two types. The first of these are those who are misguided or unoriginal. At their worst, misguided individuals will encourage newcomers to earnestly click PTC site ads for five or six hours a day, in the belief that this is a good way to make money online. They’re not wrong: they just haven’t seen the other possibilities and are stuck in one of the lowest earning cycles available. At best, they’ll suggest building a blog to provide lots of information to newcomers on how to earn. Again, they’re not wrong: this is a useful service, but there are so many sites exactly like this that the chances of another one – yours – being able to raise its head above the crowd and get noticed is infinitesimally small. Unoriginal ideas simply do not make cash. Of course, if you can come up with a new way to present the information (and your referral or affiliate links therein), you may do better than the rest of the (huge) crowd.

Finally, there are the jewels in the crown of making money online: the helpful, informative people. These folks are unfortunately very rare indeed, but when they do show their face, be darned sure you remember them. They pass on their knowledge, they advise, they recommend, they review your ideas and comment honestly, they understand the difficulties and problems. They point newcomers in the direction of useful information and supply background data to help you make your own decisions – even if they think you’re wrong or choosing badly. These people are priceless.

Traffic

With most of the different ways to make money online comes the difficulty of attracting visitors: whether you are attempting to publicize your written work and gain page views, bring visitors to an affiliate sales site or attract readers to a monetized blog, the potential earnings are dependant on the number of hits.

For the serious online earner, one of the most important methods of getting visitors is via SEO – Search Engine Optimization. This is the practice of making a web page as attractive as possible to search engines such as Google. At its most basic level, SEO consists of including certain key phrases at an optimum frequency: for example, if you were writing an article about dog grooming, you would include the key phrase “dog grooming” in every paragraph, attempting to have it repeat every 50 words or so. When the search engine crawler comes by and analyses your page contents, it finds this phrase and recognizes it as being key. The repetitions ensure that your page shows up as high as possible on the list if someone searches for “dog grooming” – on the first page of results if possible.

SEO is a very technical matter and, since I’m no expert, I won’t try to cover all the aspects of content, meta content, page titles and everything. There are far better resources available on the web for people who are interested in this subject. Have a look at the ‘Resources’ section later for suggestions.

Another option for bringing visitors to your site and thus increasing the chances of making money online is that of social networking. This activity basically consists of ensuring that your web page’s address shows up in as many places as possible where online social interaction occurs. In other words, placing it prominently on your FaceBook and MySpace sites, registering your blog with services such as Technorati and BlogCatalog, dropping an Entrecard on similar sites in the hopes of a reciprocal visit or using publicity services like Digg, Twitter and StumbleUpon to show the page to anyone who happens to notice it.

The results of social networking depend very much on how active you are as a networker. Someone who visits and comments on blogs, mentioning their site, who pings blog directories every time a new entry is made, who shares all their articles and content on the publicity sites and so on will generally get more visits than someone who only bothers with one or two services. The basic premise here is this: to make more money online, you must be as visible as possible (without being annoying!).

Continuing in the visibility vein, another way of improving your hit rate is to ensure that your primary earning site is included anywhere you appear online (with your earning persona). Put it prominently in your profiles, in the signature of your forum posts, refer to it regularly in your blog: the more places that URL appears, the more chances there are of someone clicking it.

Resources

Firstly, anyone seriously considering SEO absolutely MUST read Peter Hoggan's superb Free SEO Training Course For Hubbers. Most of his other content is top-notch as well - remember when I mentioned those jewels in the crown of earning online? Bingo!

For the bloggers among you, I can suggest a quick stop at BlogAdviser, which covers a lot of the helpful basics.

If you're really serious about blogging for a living, then I'd personally recommend avoiding all the get-rich-quick guides. Instead, invest in ProBlogger (see Amazon link at the bottom): I've read it and it's excellent. Covers everything in a sensible, helpful way rather than spending thirty pages telling you how to sign up at Blogger and is written by two guys who learned the hard way. It costs a lot less than most of those schemes, too.

Once you're set up, Technorati is essential and there's a bunch of directories like BlogCatalog and Entrecard.

There are also traffic exchanges such as LinkReferral and BlogExplosion, but be warned: these will break the AdSense terms of service and get your account banned (which is why they're not linked here!). If you're not using AdSense or just want traffic, they're viable options.

Social networkers will need to head over to MySpace and/or Facebook.

For bookmarking and sharing your content, you'll probably want accounts at Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Twitter.

Final Thoughts

Making money online is not easy. Earning a salary online is even harder. It is possible, however, with some good research, hard work and a little luck. Leave behind the illusions of quick riches, look behind all the marketing nonsense and you will find solid ways to bring in a regular income, even if it’s only enough to pay for your Internet connection, beers and pizza occasionally.

This guide is by no means complete, as I mentioned at the outset. It is, I hope, accurate. If there is anything you feel is missing, overlooked, misrepresented or otherwise needs altering, please let me know in the comments of any part of the guide.

My intention here is to help you make money online, not to send you charging off in the wrong direction. I hope that, in some small way, I’ve achieved that. Good luck and remember: if you like something online, click an ad to show the author that their effort was worthwhile.