make money on the internet

If you are serious about learning how to make money on the internet, I’ve got three powerful words for you: Dominate Your Niche.  In other words, pick a specific area you would like to blog about and make yourself the authority on that subject.  Accomplish this for the right niche and you will make gobs of cash.  Forget the primer, I’m going to give you the whole game plan right now.

Chapter 1: How to Make Money Using the Internet

When I say select a niche, I mean select a topic you have a talent about or have a passion with.  For example, I like to write about how to “make money on the net” so this is what I focus on in my blog.  You can write about anything you want with one caveat, you have to be able to monetize it.  I’m big on examples so let’s churn one out for illustration purposes.  Let’s say you are such an Internet beginner that half the time you need help checking your email, but you know a hell of a lot about American Idol or restoring old Cameros.  This is all need to start making money online.  That’s right, just one talent that you can write about will fuel your new side income from home.

So we have a talent.  Now all you have to do is find out if it pays.  We’ll do this by visiting Google Adwords Keyword tool.  Simply enter in your general keyword and Google will spit back that term and a number of other related keywords that get a varying amount of searches.  On the right side of the main box you will see a little box labeled “match type” with a selector button for options underneath.  Select “exact”.   This will change the number of searches for the different keywords to very close to the actual amount of searches they receive for the month.  Above match type you will see a label called choose columns to display.  Use the selector arrow to select “Show estimated AVG. CPC”.  This will tell you how much advertisers pay Google, on average, for a click to their site for searches turning up a particular keyword search term.

The optimal keyword to be found under would be the one with the most efficient combination of searches and cost per click (”CPC”) as this would produce the most money for you.  (We’ll get to how it will make you money in a second.)  How about a  demonstration just to make this crystal clear?  Let’s say the term “make money on the internet” gets 10,000 searches per month and pays $2.00 per click.  Now assume the search for “making money online” gets 20,000 searches and pays $0.50 per click.  On the surface, which do you think would be the better keyword to base your niche around?  Can you see the answer is A – make money on the internet?  The reason why is all other things equal, A has the potential to make $20,000 (10,000 x $2) and B can only pay you $10,000 (20,000 x $0.50).  Of course, we haven’t added any dynamics to the equation yet, but now you’re beginning to get an idea on the basics of choosing your theme and underlying keywords to that theme.

Chapter 2: How to Make Money at Home

Now that you can see the basics of making money on the net, let’s dig a little deeper.  While the number of searches and the average CPC is crucial, we can’t just base our decision to target a particular keyword string on those factors alone, we must also consider competition.  Competition comes in the form of how many people are competing against you for the same keywords.  So what this means is while A and B definitely look appealing from a numbers stand point, you may want to choose option C that only has 2,000 searches at $0.40 per click.  Although this isn’t as exciting as the numbers listed above, option C can be much more realistic and easier to achieve, thus giving you more efficient money for the time you have invested into optimizing your site.

How can you tell how much competition a site has?  First look at the sheer number of search results.  If this is 1,000,000 strong and growing, you have one elementary indicator the competing websites won’t be a cake walk to out duel.  However, another more telling characteristic is to look at the first 3 pages of search results and see if the title tags (the blue headlines for each search result or very top left hand text on the browser when you are actually visiting a website) read for the exact same terms you want to optimize for.  Let’s use me for an example again.  I’m trying to optimize my site for make money on the internet.  Just by searching the top websites I can see at least half have optimized their webpage for this term so I know getting to the top of Google won’t be as easy than if only a 1/4 of the sites were optimized exactly for this keyword.

These two means of seeing your opponent’s strength that I have discussed are very basic and preliminary.  Other good indicators can are page rank, number of inbound links, the quality of these links, and the keyword density of the page you land on when searching for the term.  These are slightly more than what is necessary for this discussion on how to make money online for beginners and involve downloading software so let’s stick with the preliminary measures to measure what you’re up against for now.

Chapter 3: Best Ways to Make Money on the Internet

Remember the Average CPC talk a chapter back.  Let’s talk more about its relevancy to your site.  Adwords is a Google ad campaign that advertisers use to attract targerted visitors to their website.  Adsense is a Google publishing campaign that allows websites to receive a portion of the advertiser revenue when their website draws a click from a visitor.  This is where Average CPC comes into play.  The CPC is what the advertiser bids per click.  You will not get this entire amount.  In fact, because of Google policies, nobody can tell you with any certainty how much you will get for any given click.  In general, however, you can expect to get somewhere between 25% to 50% of the ad revenue depending on how well Google likes the clicks you are getting on your website.  For now, this explanation will suffice on how much you will get paid on Adsense, but there is more complexity on this issue that we will talk about later.

In a brief summary of what we have mentioned above, you will need to pick a topic to write about and then decide whether that subject is lucrative enough to pursue based on the number of searches and how much advertisers are paying per click.  In the next blogs, we will discuss more about search engine optimization (”SEO”) or how to move you blog up in the search engine, designing your blog to make the most money, other ways to monetizing your site, building multiple blogs, writing ebooks for money, free software you can use on your website, and other ways to make money on ther internet.

A lot of complete newbies are asking how to make money on the internet.  My answer is always to start with a blog and build an explosive website from there.  Blogs are simple and you can create one right now from Google’s blogger.com.  In fact, some of the biggest and successful money makers have had sites based on blogspot or blogger (same thing).  The question is how do you monetize a blog?

Previous I have discussed the first step to making money on the internet, talking about different PPC programs such as Chitika, Adbrite, and Google Adsense.  I recommended Google Adsense as the best way to make money online.  This is a great foundation on how to make money on the internet, but we need to expound upon your knowledge to really make $100s of dollars from Adsense per month.  How much does the average person make on Adsense per month?  Probably $5 or $10, but obviously they are not putting in too much effort into their blog.

Once you have got 3 posts on your blog with targeted keywords being sprinkled all over the place (but not too much – maybe 10 times per 400 words), you want to started getting quality inbound links from the best article directories which give you free links on the stipulation you write a 250+ word article for them.  Sometimes the word requirement is higher, but if you’re diligent, you can hammer out decent articles pretty fast.  We’re not looking for Shakespearian prose here, just enough to get past the editor’s approval and have your link giving back powerful juice.  This link must be of “dofollow nature” because your goal is to get higher in the search engines.  Spill over traffic from the article itself is great, but the single best way to make money on the internet is to receive targeted traffic from search engines.

Make sure to hyper link your text using the anchor keywords of what you want your blog to be found under.  For example, I link to this blog using the exact term “make money on the internet”.  When you get a few links under that term, then you will want to add variety and link to yourself under other key terms so your links have a more authentic feel and you can gain popularity in the search engines under different terms.

The single most important factor to you making mony online is going to be if you can harness Google organic traffic.  The beauty is this is free and other sites will probably begin linking to you anyway as an authority source, thus perpetually making you more powerful and putting space between you and your competitors.  Obviously, the more traffic you get, the more people will click on your ads and offer you advertising offers, thus making you quite a commodity and a magnet for even greater passive income.

Remember that this is the best way to get traffic to make money on the internet, but it’s not the only way.  Next blogg, I will discuss Adwords and how to employ an effective adwords campaign to start making more money from your website.

The awesome aspect of the Internet is you can make money from the comfort of your living room.  It’s even cooler when you’re making money from the comfort of your bed… while your eyes are closed!  When you aren’t actually working yet money is still pouring in, this is called passive income and is entirely possible if you have a blog online.  So to all you stay at home moms, out of school teams, or whoever else, blogging could be another outlet for you to make money on the Internet.

You don’t have to be out of work to make money online, you can make a blog one of your hobbies outside of work and still earn money from home.  There are some questions you probably have about some of the “Google Cash” programs or the “how to make money on the Internet” ebooks.  The truth is most of these aren’t worth your money.  I will teach you for free in this blog how to generate income from blogging, but don’t just limit yourself to only making money from a new blog.  There are several ways to make money on the web.

I’m not a big fan of getting money from ebay because they charge so much in fees, it cuts significantly deep into your pocket, especially when you factor in Paypal’s standard 2.9% fee or whatever it is.  I’ve sold a few items from ebay and other than being in the Ebay affiliate program (see: Ebay affilliate reviews), I don’t know how people make a job of selling stuff on Ebay or at least any good profit from it.

Another way to make money on the Internet is by taking paid surveys.  It is extremely difficult to find a legitimate paid survey website online because so many are scams.  There is almost always some catch where you have to sign up for something or pay for something or there are no big dollar surveys available to take, etc.  It’s too bad because their really is a need for solid market research but so many of these types of websites want to exploit the situation into more and more money.

Additionally, one unusual way of making money on the Internet is to make websites for other people.  This typically works well if you have contacts within your local area looking for a website.  This involves more offline activity than most of the money maker activity online, but it can be highly effective depending how well you design websites, referrals you get, and how fast you can make the websites and build your clientele.  This type of offline promotion can really help generate online sales through links and testimonials.

How many people actually make money from home?

The number is actually quite small for those who make comfortable wages.  A few people do make a ton of money but most never develop the skill, knowledge, or desire necessary to “make money on the internet”.  The reasons vary.  Sometimes too many scams can discourage people into quitting.  Other times, time commitments prevent people from remaining dedicated.  In more rare situations, events can come up that will require money and/or time, in effect forcing them to vacate their online dreams of starting a business from home.

I actually saw one person today who was supposedly an Internet guru having to sell his website because something came up and he desperately “needed the money”.  Wait, aren’t those gurus with money raining on their website supposed to be rich?  Far from it, these so called experts usually only proclaim to know what they’re talking about to get you to buy their product or pay for advice on money making on the net.

Let’s start this blog from the basic premise of how to make money on the internet and the foundational tips I have for beginners to start generating income from home.

First, you must realize that money won’t just leap off your screen and into your hands. Making money online does take some time to evolve. How fast you can start making money on the Internet depends on how quick you want to learn the fundamentals, the more advanced steps and then the guru secrets. I’m going to show you all of them in this blog, but let’s not overwhelm you in the beginning. I don’t want this to be a project you start and then quit as soon as it gets confusing.

Now let’s move back and start thinking about how one builds wealth in any environment. For someone to start getting rich and growing, they need to have something that separates them from others. Everybody would like more money, but all of us are different and our differences determine why some of us “make money on the internet”, others make a medium amount, and some fail. As you can imagine factors such as knowledge, skill, experience, resources (time and money), intelligence, and work ethic comprise the formula of why some succeed and others don’t. The more of these characteristics you have, the more likely you will make real money on the web.

With that said, let’s move on to the building block of making money on the internet – blogging and adsense.  These two money makers are what I use to earn a side income from home and so these are the tools I will stress you use to “get rich off the internet”.  A blog can come in many forms but in its basic sense it is an online journal.  Adsense is Google’s ppc advertising program that allows you to get paid for every click you receive on ads placed on your website or blog.

There are many other programs that can help you make money on the internet.  For example, Google has several ppc competitors such as Chitika, Adbrite, and Yahoo but quite simply none have shown to deliver as well as Google.  Alternatively, there are different make money online programs such as affiliate marketing and link trading but I don’t prefer these to Google Adsense either.  The reason why is affiliate programs are so hard to convert.  The beauty of adsense is you don’t have to sell anything to get money from the internet.  You just place the advertisements on your website and if someone clicks one, a percentage of Google’s advertising money is given to you.

The percentage of the click Google Adsense pays out can vary, but I’ve found clicks to pay about 30% or less of what the publisher of the ad is paying.  This is not horrible, but the share is certainly not great.  Still, you must consider the advantages Adsense provides you such as ease of access, programming, transacting money exchange, locating advertisers, and so on.  This would be difficult on your end.

So we have the basics on how to make money on the internet.  Start by creating a blog.  You can either do this with your own webhosting and domain or you can go to blogger.com and create a free blog.  I highly recommend that as a beginner, you start with a free blog.  This is because 95% of the techinical setup and difficulty is by passed by the very easy to use blogspot program.  Go ahead and start a blog and play around with the features to get a feel for how you want to set up your blog.  We’ll leave off there and start the second tutorial on how to make money on the internet for beginners in the second blog.