Making money online is hard and requires a lot of work. There - I got that out of the way - so if you are looking for the easy answer you can stop reading now, click off somewhere else and go do whatever it is you thought you were going to do when you came to this page. But, if you are genuinely interested in how to make money online – keep reading.

It seems everyone and his grandmother wants to jump on the making money on the internet bandwagon, but if it was as easy to make extra money at home online as a lot of the advertisements claim, there would not be so many con artists selling packages to teach people how to make money on the internet.

The simple fact is that most people who attempt to earn money online fail, and they fail for a few simple reasons. Firstly, it is much, much harder than most people expect and are led to believe by all the millions of “online money making opportunities,” being sold. Secondly, there is an awful lot of bad advice out there, and it is almost impossible to tell the good from the bad unless you try it for yourself. First piece of free advice – never spend any money on anything except web hosting and domain names until you know what you are doing – unless I advise it of course.

99% of people who try making easy money online will fail, and a large proportion of the 1% that does succeed will do so by selling useless advice to the 99% that failed. There is no easy money to be had. If you think there is, you are going to fail, and you are probably going to be suckered into paying for a system or scheme that does not work.

But, there are ways to succeed and I am going to share some of them here. Some of these I have learned the hard way, others I have not learned myself, but I have taken advice from other people I respect and whom I know make money doing what they do. There is more than one way to succeed, but there is no best way to make money online.

The direction you choose will partly depend on your skills and interests. Take it from me that it is far easier to write about and promote something you genuinely have an interest or belief in than something you do not. First some basics, then I will get into specifics. And if the next few paragraphs sound like Greek to you - worry not, by the time we are finished you will be speaking the MMO (making money online) jargon like a pro. Unless you speak Greek, in which case, they will sound like ancient Latin. Unless……

Ways of making money online:

If you are intending to make money writing online, one option is to write for other people rather than try and write your own content for your own website. Unique content is valued more highly by the search engines so there is always a demand for content that has not been published all over the internet. But – in many cases, the people doing the buying are con men, scammers or otherwise unwilling to pay reasonable money for a day’s work.

A lot of employers consider a copywriter or blogger as to be slightly less important than a photocopier and will pay accordingly. But, there are some good ones, and there are places to find writing jobs that pay well. Rather than make a huge list here, I have added a set of links to resources to find writing jobs here on the right. Explore these pages and I am certain you will find something to suit.

Do not be too shocked to discover that there are employers looking for writers to write 500 word articles and want to pay $2-3. Ignore those people. Do not listen to anyone who asks for free samples. Rather than do that - set up your own free website at wordpress.com or blogger, or here at hubpages, post a few samples of your writing skills and send them a link to visit those samples. Repeat - do not send blind samples to any one - ever. This is one of the biggest scams on the internet and I was bitten by it a couple of times when I first started. You will never get paid and these people are just looking for free content - if they can get 2,000 writers to send them a free 300 word sample - that is 2,000 articles they do not need to pay for.

Also - do not be too shocked when you discover just how large a proportion of the people offering writing jobs are not looking for writers - they are looking for free content. Deciding not to bother applying for jobs where there was a request for free samples to be sent to a Gmail address was one of the smartest decisions I ever made. Even at the so-called "authority," sites such as pro-blogger. Trust me - they do not care if their job board is full of con men - they just want to get paid for the ad. Remember - throwaway email address + wants a free sample = lying sack of shit who deserves to have his testicles crushed.

I make a good portion on my online income by writing for other people. I have done so since I began making money online. I currently write a luxury homes blog for a company called Niche Properties and there are other commercial writing and blogging jobs available. To be employable in this field, you must already have a successful blog and be able to demonstrate knowledge in the subject area.

Hubpages is one of the many revenue sharing sites on the internet. Basically, the way this works is – you sign up for a free account, you write articles here, and hubpages shows advertisements on the pages you make. They claim 40% of the page impressions, and you get the other 60%. So – if a visitor clicks on an advertisement or buys something from an advertiser – you share the money.

I make money on hubpages. I have been working on increasing the amount I make lately, and I currently make around $1,500 a month. I will continue to work on this and I do not see a limit to the amount of money you can potentially make here. I have tried several of the other sites that offer some kind of revenue split, but as far as I am concerned, hubpages is the only one worth bothering with.

The others might be good for backlinks or networking (MMO stuff – don’t worry), but the only one I am comfortable recommending for an income is hubpages. They actively protect their reputation and value by discouraging spammers and bad content.

Like anything – it is not quite as simple as just opening an account and writing some poetry. To make money here, you need to do some work and there are resources here about how to make the most from hubpages.

Yes - you can make money blogging. There are several ways to do this and I have a few examples here to share with you. I make a good deal of my money blogging by writing other people’s blogs although I also make money from my own blogs. There are several approaches to this, and if you want to make money from your blog you need to be clear where that money is going to come from. These are your basic options.

• Write some one else’s blog or posts and have them pay you
• Write a blog on a commercial subject that will attract pay per click or pay per impression advertisers
• Write a blog on a commercial subject that has affiliate product sales that will pay you a commission
  
• Write a blog that attracts enormous volumes of traffic and sell banner advertising
  
• A combination of the above

John Chow. A few bloggers even make money blogging about how much money they make blogging. John claims to be making $40,000 a month by blogging about how much money he makes. I have no idea if it is true – but if you want to see some of the most aggressive internet marketing techniques in action – pay him a visit.

Dark Roasted Blend. Avi Abrahams started DRB in October 2006, and it took off almost immediately – and kept going. It is now ranked 21,310 by Alexa. Dark Roasted Blend gets 50,000 unique visitors a day, has 27,000 subscribers and is in Technocrati’s Top100 sites. They now have a team of writers, and Avi works full time on this, minimum 8 hours each day: managing images, editorial work, answering emails, advertisements, etc. In Avi’s own words, “the project started to generate profit pretty early, but it's not a big money, just enough to keep me doing it fulltime. We are hoping to expand with more posts and categories pretty soon, however, so this should result in increased pageviews and revenue.”

DRB is one of my absolute favorite blogs and if you want to waste a few hours looking through their superb content – pay them a visit. So – there is more than one way of making money with a blog and I have written a step by step guide to making money with a blog that there is a link to in the resources box on the right.

This is a common expression in the online marketing world. Content means just that – the content of your website or blog – words, videos, music clips, whatever. Good content should rank higher and get more traffic than bad content. I have had to change my tune a little about this subject. I still believe that content is King, but without the Queen of keyword research and the Prince of link building, the King will fail. I speak from personal experience. At one point in time, I sat down at a keyboard and wrote without doing either keyword research or creating any backlinks.

I am lucky enough to be able to do good research on a subject and write witty, informative work that people enjoy reading and linking to, and I was satisfied that I was getting enough views and making enough money from what I wrote that I thought I did not need to do any keyword research or promotional work. Then I spoke to Misha, another writer here at hubpages and whom I trust to tell me the truth - and we compared notes.

We both joined hubpages at around the same time and when we discussed it we both had around the same amount of page views, and Misha was making more money than me. At this time - I had 150 hub pages and did no keyword research and very little promotional work; and Misha had 15 hub pages and spent all his time doing keyword research and promotional work. This gave me pause.

“I think there are two things essential to the success that new and not so new hubbers are completely missing, unless they came from an Internet Marketing background. The common advice you keep hearing is “keep building more and more high quality hubs, and success will come”. I don't have anything against building more and more quality hubs, it is the foundation of the success, no doubt, yet it is not enough.

Eventually you'll get found, and build a readership, and even start making some pennies out of it. Eventually is the operative word here. It will take you years to start making anything worth writing home about. If you want a real success in an observable amount of time, like making a living out of Hubpages in a year or so, you have to spend a good chunk of your time on 1) making sure you write about a popular topic using keywords people are searching for and 2) building backlinks.

This first is called keyword research and should be the foundation of all of your work. If you get it wrong, there is no way you can make good money out of a particular hub or webpage. There are plenty of methods and tools for doing keyword research, just experiment with them and find which one fits your personality best, then stick with it. But don't cut corners on this one, it is a foundation, I am not kidding. You use its results both in writing your hub, and in promoting it.

Now, backlinks. Nothing fancy about it, those are just links pointing to your hub from other pages/sites. All search engines count backlinks one way or another to decide which page is better then others and rank the site with the most as being “better” than all the other pages for a given keyword. Backlinks are the heart of any ranking algorithm, including google’s.

There is no way around having them if you want to be on the first page of search results for your keywords. If you write worthwhile text, it will get backlinks on its own. Eventually. In a few years it likely will be enough to propel you to first page rankings for not-so-competitive results. If you want this to happen faster, you have to work on backlinks, period.”

I hate agreeing with this, because I have had some pretty good successes with doing no keyword research and very little promotion. But – I also had a lot of failures. For every one page that worked, I probably have 10 that did not. This is where the frustration comes in for a lot of people (including myself) who approach making money online from a writer’s perspective and is another reason why most people fail. I like to be read. I love it when people read my work and leave me a comment or tell me how clever I am. But – that will not pay the bills.

Either way - this made me think – what if I combine the two approaches? Do some keyword research, write killer content and then aggressively build links. Which is what I now do. I now make money from every page I write rather than every tenth page. I do still write some of them just for fun as well.

The simple fact is that – unless you are being paid to write it - there is no money in subjects that have no commercial application. None. You may well have a fascination with cornflakes that resemble famous people’s profiles, but you are going to have a tough time monetizing that subject. It may also be that you own the most popular cornflakes-that-resemble-famous-peoples-profiles blog in the history of blogging, but the three visitors you get every year are not going to spend any money on anything so you are not going to make any money. Simple. This is where the keyword research comes in. Before you decide what to write about or buy a domain name.

A step by step guide to making money on the web:

Keyword research is a whole subject on it’s own and I am not going to go into great detail. There are other people who do a better job of explaining how to do keyword research, and this is a good place to start – The Keyword Academy. Two guys run this site and make their living online and by teaching people how to research potentially profitable keywords and then promote the word afterward. I use their technique to do the research, but I have my own arsenal of promotional tools – some of which are the same as theirs.

There are two basic components to finding profitable keywords. 1. How many people are searching for a particular term and how much are advertisers prepared to pay for an ad click? 2. How many other people are competing for that term. Once you have determined a keyword that you feel could be profitable, the next step is setting up a website to target that term. What you will then end up with is lots of small niche sites that can make money. Go – check out the KWA, sign up for their services ($1 up front then $33 a month afterwards) and learn how to do it. Worth every penny.

Once you have grasped the basics of keyword research you are going to decide that you need some automation to the process. Also – and I am not knocking the KWA - you are going to realize the limitations of using their system exclusively.

And the limitation is YOU. Take a look through the niches you have set up and I would like to bet there is a pattern and the pattern is decided by you for all the wrong reasons. There is only one reason to set up a niche website to make money with – and that reason is – to make money.

Whether you are aware of it or not – and I have done this myself – you are influencing the decision as to what niche to get involved in for any number of reasons that are unrelated to making money. Perhaps you hate soccer or synchronized swimming. So what? That is not a good reason to not research in the first place or not set up a site in the second place.

But if you use an automated system such as this one – Niche Horde – you can take you out of the equation to an extent. I have now set up several dozen sites and pages that I would never have considered even researching without this piece of software. It does all the research for you from finding a niche to telling you exactly how competitive that keyword is and I was shocked at some of the untapped niches out there – that I would never in a million years have found.

Check out the website here - Niche Horde – watch the video and decide for yourself. Absolutely worth the $97 a year as far as I am concerned – it made that investment back in 3 weeks with 2 sites. I do not recommend this until you are comfortable with the KWA lessons and feel you understand what they mean. This software is useless without an understanding of the the information you are being given.

Domain names are generally not expensive - $10 or so for a typical name. They can be expensive of course and some people make a living online from buying and selling websites. The domain name Sex.com sold for $14 million in 2006 – the most expensive domain ever sold. This can also backfire – I know one gentleman who has 10,000 domain names relating to real estate, and he has been unable to unload them since the “credit crunch,” started demolishing the industry.

A website name or domain then needs to be placed online somehow and the way this is done is to buy a “hosting account” with an Internet provider. There are thousands of these people and what they basically do is rent you space on one of their computers which is connected to the Internet and allows visitors. It is a bit more complex than that, but not much. You could – if you wished - host an Internet site on your own personal computer – but I wouldn’t recommend it. I have used quite a few of these providers and I can heartily recommend BlueHost or Hostgator. I use both of them and have been very happy.  Great customer service, very little downtime and 24 hour support. You can sign up here for Bluehost. Or you can sign up here for Hostgator. 

First job at both pf these hosts is to see if the domains you are interested in are available. You will know what I am talking about after doing the keyword academy’s research lessons.At some point in the future, you will also discover the benefits of having more than one hosting account - that is for another article.

This part will depend on the sort of content you are providing. It may well just be text, but you might also have chosen to include photo galleries or video-blogging as your theme or niche. It may also be that you just add content once and leave it, or you may have gone another route and be adding content all the time.

Backlink building is a bit like drug taking in professional sports. Everyone else is doing it so you have to as well. In a perfect world, the best-written content would naturally generate the most incoming links and all my pages would be the highest ranked pages on any given subject.

But, it is not a perfect world, and there are a lot of people trying to get their pages ranked above yours for any given term and they are prepared to cheat to do so. Which means you have to cheat also. And yes – I consider artificially creating links to your sites to be cheating, but if you do not do so, you will not get found. I have also discovered that the occasional perfect page that generates a lot of links naturally far out performs any thing that was artificially ranked, but that happens so rarely as to be not worth doing if your goal is money.

There are a number of tools available to do this and you are going to have to invest one of two things – money or time – or a combination of both. There really is no getting away from this aspect of the job. At some point in time – and trust me – earlier is better than later – you are going to discover that you are spending too much time and not getting enough results. You are then going to decide you need to outsource some of this work.

Rather than have you get to the point where you are working 10 hours a day and not seeing a big enough return – sign up for these two link building services.

OneWayLinks is a blog network that you add a blog to. Their software will post articles with outgoing links in to your blog, and in exchange, you submit articles to them that will be posted on other people’s blogs. This totally works and is one of the most effective ways I have found for creating backlinks. The cost is a minimal $7 for the fist month and then $47 per month after. Worth every penny and has a 60 day no questions asked guarantee. If you use it correctly, it will be paying for itself well within 60days. Sign up to 1waylinks here.

Linkvana is another network that works slightly differently. You submit short articles with links embedded into them and they will post them out on a massive network of blogs that are well ages and spread out around the world. A little more expensive - $147 per month, but there is no limit to the amount of posts and links you can add. Also worth every penny and from my experience this was paying for itself after just 3 weeks. Absolutely worth the money and if you have done your research properly will more than cover the costs within a couple of weeks. Sign up to Linkvana here.

No kidding - once you find a profitable niche and/or approach - do it again. And keep doing it until you find a more profitable approach. Obviously, there are also other ways of making money online, and I will be exploring those in another article. Although – if you make money online and wish to share your experiences with me for that article, please drop me a line through my profile page. Good luck out there.