Learning Stuff About ‘Making Money Online’ Category


Ways to Make Money Online -An Introduction

For some years now I’ve been looking for ways to make money online. I personally have tried a number of ways, and I’ve also been planning certain projects which I believe have huge potential.  In this post though, what I want to do, is give an introduction to this subject and highlight the general ways one can go about making money online. The specifics will come in subsequent entries. Hopefully you’ll find something here useful that can supplement your more secure plan to become a millionaire. I will now list 9 ways I’ve seen people pursue this goal, 2 of which I would not recommend.

1. Adsense.  How this works, is, you set up a website that has a substantial amount of textual content. You can then place some code on your site which will then display ads.  You get paid when someone either clicks on an ad, or when a certain number of ad impressions are made on your site.  Google is the most popular site which serves these adsense ads. But Yahoo also has a programme, and so does kontera.  Now if you are able to set up a website that gets a lot of visitors, then you could possibly make a decent amount of money through adsense.

2. Other Ad Revenue. Adsense is a form of revenue from advertisements. With adsense, you are going through a middle man. So someone goes to the trouble of getting advertisers to submit their ads and collect the money, and then they in turn provide you with the ads, and share the revenue with you. In the case of google adsense, google acts as the middle man. If you have a site that gets enough web traffic, you could have the advertisers place ads on your site directly.  This would allow you to earn more on the ads than going through the middle man.

3. Affiliate Programmes.  Essentially you help someone sell his product, and you get a share of his revenue. So for example, one might produce a manual or maybe some kind of software and want to get it sold to as many people as possible. To achieve this, the owner is willing to allow you to participate in the sale of the product, and in return give you a certain commission on the sale.  There are literally thousands of products in this category where you can select what best suits you. If you’re able to set up a page that gets enough visitors to make you enough sales, you could earn a decent living this way.

4. Selling your own product. Instead of helping to sell another’s product, you can create your own and promote that instead, or in addition to your affiliate’s. It doesn’t even have to be an electronic product. For example, Amazon.com sells books online.

5. Selling websites and/or domain names.  Websites can be considered virtual real estate. Depending on how much you’ve developed your site, and the potential revenue of it, would determine the value that you could sell it for. You can also sell domain names. People have made a ton of money by reserving a highly sought domain name, and then reselling it to those who have special interest in acquiring that particular domain name. It is not likely that you’ll be able to sell one these days for the exorbitant amounts that a number of them have gone for in the past. However, depending on whether the name has been indexed by the search engines, and how old it is, along with other factors, might give it some value that would allow you to sell it for a decent profit.

6. Creating a service website. If you don’t really have a product to sell, you could consider selling a service. Your imagination is your limit here. Setting up a service website might require considerably more work than if it were for a product. But it all depends on the service you’re providing.

7. Online trading. There are many companies these days which allow you to set up an account with them to trade stocks or forex. You can spend the time learning how to trade successfully, and make a decent income from this. Quite likely however, you will need a decent amount to start with, to give you some cushion to make mistakes.

The following two ways I do not recommend. But I’ve observed others do this:

8. Begging. Yes, you can carry begging online now. Just set up an account to receive funds, like a paypal or e-gold account, and ask people to deposit something to it.

9. Scamming. This is worse than begging, but it is far more popular. This is where most if not all high yield investment programmes (HYIPs) fall. Someone claims he can give some incredible returns on your small investment, and probably starts paying you, but will eventually stop before you make a profit, or before most in the programme can make a profit. You might make some money here if you’re lucky, but the ones who would be making a living from this are the scammers.

So there you have 7 broad legitimate ways to make money online, and 2 ways to watch out for.  I intend to do more posts to provide details on some of these ways, to help you successfully profit from implementing them.

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