Earn Money Online
The Internet is full of opportunities for those interested in making money online, whether we’re talking about businesses or individuals. The online environment allows entrepreneurial individuals to set up a small business that can survive and even thrive, unlike the real world where monopolies give many new enterprises almost no chance at all.
When it comes to earning money online the scope of the business is the key factor that decides whether it will work out or not. Most of the popular segments that interest the bulk of people have been already exploited by major brands, so it’s really tough nowadays to set up a profitable small business that sells books or music for example — Amazon, Apple and many other top companies dominate these e-commerce areas.
However, the Internet is a huge place that has enough room for a lot of businesspersons, especially if we’re talking about small-scale money making through blogs, advertising tools, or social networking websites. So whether you’re just an individual interested in making some extra money to supplement your job income or the owner of a small business with an Internet presence who wants to grow little by little, there are five online money making opportunities that can serve your purpose: blogs, Google’s AdSense, Facebook, Twitter, and e-books. We’re going to take a look at each of them.
Earning money by blogging
Blogging has become really popular in the last few years. People enjoy sharing their thoughts and experiences with others, and blogs help them to do it quickly and easily. But blogging is also an effective way to make money; it’s like a small online business that’s easy to start and maintain. In addition, it also tends to be quite fun.
Blogging has some advantages over other small online business opportunities, including the fact that you only need little money to get one running. Unlike with a website loaded with SEO content, with a blog you don’t really have to worry much about high hosting costs or dependencies on other parties for maintenance. It usually does its job while remaining an uncomplicated website.
Also, once you’ve figured out how to make your blog profitable you’ll continue to make money even if you don’t update its content periodically.
Where to start – Hosting
Many new bloggers start with the two popular free blog hosting websites, Blogger and WordPress. These provide decent hosting services and are often the best solution for beginners. They are simple to use and offer comprehensive guidelines, allowing you to get your blog up and running in no time. However, if you’re really keen on making money with your blog you’ll need something more.
You can find WordPress and Blogger at:
Running a blog under a domain name purchased from a web hosting provider gives you greater freedom than WordPress or Blogger, a freedom which you’ll need if you wish to be successful in the long run. Free blogging solutions force on you conditions and terms that can hinder your blog’s development.
You can purchase a domain name and set up a web server that will host your blog with as little as $20-25 per year. It’s a modest price for the freedom you’ll get.
Three affordable web hosting providers:
Setting it up – Subject, name, theme, layout
Your blog will be the medium through which you’ll share your thoughts with others; it will need a subject that reflects who you are. If you expect your blog to be successful you’ll need to be enthusiastic about the topic it will cover. You’ll have to write about things that grab your interest, those that you are familiar with.
Successful bloggers talk about their daily lives, their jobs, their passions, their beliefs, and so on. You are in no way restricted to these topics, but all in all you’ll need to blog about a particular subject that is a significant part of your life. If you’re really interested in a topic yourself, then it will be much easier to present it to others and arouse their curiosity.
The domain and blog name, theme, and layout have to be in accordance with the subject you’ve chosen to write about. Free templates are available on the Internet and are great resources for a new blogger. A graphic artist can design a custom template as well, but you should only get in touch with one after you’ve become an experienced blogger.
You can grab Blogger and WordPress templates at:
Maintaining it – Writing
Some bloggers write little and frequently, others quite a lot but rarely. There is no universal rule about the length of your blog entries; you’ll have to find your own style and pace. Three- or four-hundred word entries are usually good to start with. You have to remember that blogs are personal; because it’s first and foremost about you, everything that makes up the blog, its subject, name, theme, layout, and content all have to reflect that.
Spreading the word
After your blog is set up and you’re at ease updating it regularly, you’ll need to attract readers. You can do this by yourself in a variety of ways, without additional expenses:
- submit the blog to popular social bookmaking websites where readers will discover it
- write small, accessible articles related to the subject of your blog which have at the end a link redirecting to the blog, and post them to article directories
- send emails to all the people in your contact list with a description of your blog and a link to it
It’s often hard to attract faithful readers in the beginning but if your blog is well written and interesting to read then things will gradually work out.
Five popular article directories:
- http://knol.google.com/
- http://www.goarticles.com/
- http://articlelinksdirectory.com/
- http://www.articlesfactory.com/
- http://www.amazines.com/
Social bookmaking sites:
Making money
Once you have regular visitors you can really think about making money with your blog.
- You can use AdSense from Google to display contextual ads that will be clicked by visitors and will earn you a small income for each click.
- Once you’ve built a reputation you can sell ad space and make agreements directly with those businesses interested in advertising their products and services on your blog. Usually they’ll contact you.
- You can put your blog for sale and receive a significant one-time payment, a portion of which you can reinvest in a brand-new blog.
Earning with Facebook
Facebook is the largest social network on the planet at the moment. It’s the place where people from all over the world, of all ages and of all backgrounds, socialize. It’s an excellent platform for meeting people who share your interests.
Facebook stands out from other social networking websites because its advertising restrictions are indulgent. This means that a Facebook user profile can be used to promote a small business efficiently and often, with great success. But it doesn’t have to be necessarily a business; it can be a blog, a website, and pretty much anything else you can think of.
Setting up your account
Facebook has a huge user base for many reasons, one of which is its accessible interface. It’s easy to set up an account; more difficult will be to present your services or products in the right light.
You need to target a specific user group and to showcase your offerings to it in an attractive way. The most important thing to consider when advertising your business, blog, website, or whatever else you have, is your scope. The Internet is a really big place and the vendors and service providers in it are numerous. That’s why, in order to be successful, you’ll need to focus all your energy on a particular niche and to stick with it until you master it. Your choice has to be of interest to you directly; otherwise it is unlikely you’ll be able to invest in it the effort needed for long-term success.
If you have a blog or a website, you can use Facebook to promote it and increase the monthly number of visitors it receives, by making people aware of your web presence and arousing their curiosity.
The Marketplace
The Facebook Marketplace can help you sell your second-hand stuff. Its posting restrictions are quite lenient, meaning that you can purchase low-priced items that fit your niche while they are at a discount at a local store and then resell them for a profit. The Marketplace gives you the possibility to reach a lot of potential buyers quickly and without much hassle.
Free promotion
The bottom line is that Facebook is great for promoting freely whatever you have to offer. Just make sure your Facebook profile showcases the key aspects of your website, blog, or store by keeping it updated.
Making friends on Facebook is easy, and, if your business really offers what it says, then constantly enlarging your circle of friends is sure to promote it and ultimately boost your profits.
Twitter and money making
Together with Facebook, Twitter is at the moment the leading social networking site on the web. It enables millions of people from all over the world to share “tweets” (short messages) with their followers. While Twitter started as website for people who want to easily communicate with their friends and family, the overwhelming popularity it enjoyed made it one of the Internet’s new money-making opportunities.
You can make money with Twitter by promoting products and services, either your own or those of others. In the latter case, you’ll act as an affiliate.
Getting started
Twitter is free to use. After you’ve created an account you’ll need to increase the number of followers you have. This is imperative if you want to use Twitter as a money making opportunity because when you’re promoting things the greater the number of people you can reach the greater your chances of being successful.
Currently it’s not difficult to get ten- to fifteen-thousand followers on Twitter in a few weeks. You just have to be active and to make sure that people learn about your presence on Twitter. With fifteen-thousand followers you will be able to reach quite a lot of people with your advertising. Selling to only one or two percent of them will be just enough to keep you going.
Affiliate marketing
If you’d rather promote other people’s products and services rather than your own, then affiliate marketing is the right thing for you. It can offer a steady income while requiring little work.
If you don’t have any connections to businesses that can make you their affiliate, then you’ll have to find an affiliate program offered by online companies that is advantageous and flexible. It won’t be hard to find these programs: almost all online companies have an affiliate section on their website; but it will take some time until you filter them out and find the few partnerships that will best reward your efforts. The most effective thing you can do is to note down all interesting affiliate programs you can find and then sort them out. Don’t complicate yourself with more than two or three at the beginning.
Once you’ve made your pick you’ll have to contact the companies offering the program and send them a link to your Twitter page. Once they take a look at it they will let you know if you’re in or not. The larger the number of followers you have, the higher your chances of being accepted.
For successful promotion of products or services on Twitter you’ll need an attractive ad. Keep it simple and make sure it represents what you’re trying to sell. Sometimes you don’t even need to sell what you’re advertising to make money; it can be enough if people click the ad.
RevTwt
Another Twitter money-earning possibility is RevTwt, a platform specialized on cost per click advertising. It’s still all about promotion but it can be more straightforward than affiliate programs.
All you have to do is join up RevTwt and wait for them to examine your Twitter profile. If you have enough followers they will accept you and then put an ad on your profile page. When people click it you’ll receive a fixed amount of money. The rate can increase in time if your promotion is done efficiently.
Check it out at:
Using AdSense to earn money
https://www.google.com/AdSense
AdSense is an advertising tool from Google that enables you to generate a stable income from your blog or website. It’s easy to use and, once the initial tweaking is done, does not require much of your attention.
AdSense is great for generating passive income — the proof of this is the impressive number of people from all over the world that use it with their websites and blogs. However, while AdSense is really popular and for many a decent source of income, only those who know how to use it to their best advantage can truly exploit its great money-making potential.
AdSense for beginners
Once you own a blog or site you can register an AdSense account free of cost and display ads on it. The AdSense ads are contextual, meaning that they will be relevant to the content you have on your site and to the area in which it is based. So if your blog or site is about weddings, then the ads will promote products and/or services that have something to do with weddings, say firms that cater food for special events that are located in the area where your are based. This dynamic way of advertising is highly successful. Your AdSense account gets credited with a certain amount of money every time your visitors click the ad.
Using AdSense successfully
The more people click the contextual ads, the more money you make. In order to get a significant number of clicks every month you’ll need to make sure that the ads are well integrated into your site. Remember though that you’ll first need an attractive website or blog that receives visitors every month and that has gained a small following.
Usually the most efficient way to integrate AdSense into your website is to eliminate the borders of the adds, so that they blend with the content, encouraging people to click them. This can be done either discreetly, with the aim of preserving the aspect of the website while making clear that certain areas are dedicated to ads, or more craftily by putting the adds really close to the text body and choosing similar fonts, so that readers get tricked and click them unwillingly.
A step further
Continually adding SEO content to your website and making sure that the contextual ads are well placed is about all you can do to keep the AdSense income stable. This is often enough if you’re after a small profit or if you don’t want to complicate your life too much.
However, to maximize your AdSense profits you’ll need more than one website. You can build a chain of websites centered on a subject which is of long-term interest for people, such as how to live a greener life. By contrast, you can also set up a few linked websites that focus on a particular event that generates a lot of buzz for a specific period of time, such as the 2012 Olympics in London, with the sole aim of gaining a quick profit. Keep in mind though that in the latter case once the event has passed the interest of people is also going to fade and your monthly visitors will drop considerably.
Tips for your linked websites:
- Regardless of their subject, your websites will need to have a lot of search engine optimized articles, i.e. content with a certain keyword density.
- Place your contextual ads on attractive positions. Experiment to find what works best.
- Don’t forget to redirect visitors between the linked websites, to boost your income.
- In addition, you can also add affiliate links to you websites that redirect visitors to various offerings from online companies.
The websites, once up and running, will be relatively easy to manage. Just make sure that you add new content from time to time.
Earning money online by selling E-books
There is quite a business at the moment with e-books on the Internet. E-books are so popular online that for almost all interesting subjects there is a plethora of them available for sale. However, starting up and running a business that’s centered on selling e-books can be difficult at times because of today’s competitive market. Therefore choosing the right niche or the niche you are very strong at is of outmost importance. Supplementing your blog or website income by compiling articles about the topic you cover most into an e-book is accessible to anyone who is willing to put some effort into it.
If you maintain a website or blog on a particular subject, let’s say for example new-gen gadgets, then it’s quite likely you are familiar with the topic. Why not use your knowledge and put together a tiny, easy-to-read, and affordable e-book that sums up what your website or blog is trying to get across? There are plenty free publishing tools that can help you put together the e-book. Then, once it’s done, just put it up on your website and blog at an affordable price and use PayPal as a payment processing solution.
Tips for your e-book:
- The length is important. People are unlikely to buy something lengthy unless they know it’s well worth it. A short e-book, say less than thirty pages, is much more accessible.
- Write on a subject that is popular and that you happen to know a thing or two about. The e-book has to be informative.
- Ask a low price for it. If you’re reasonable when it comes to pricing you’re more likely to make greater profits than if you’d try to sell a costly e-book.
OpenOffice can help you put together your e-book:
PayPal can help you with payments:
