12 Legitimate Ways to Make Money Online

March 29, 2008 | 2 Comments

There are many blogs, articles, products, training sessions and programs that you will find on the Internet, the moment you search for ‘making money online’. However, most of these do not really give you a good grip of the various ways of making money online along with a practical list of the various sites you can sign up with to take things further.

This article is an attempt to make things easy for you so that you can identify the online money making opportunity that you want to explore and start the process immediately. There are twelve opportunities listed below which you can use to make money online. Each opportunity has a brief description that allows you to identify whether it is something you would like to venture into. The specific references will help you to get started.

1. Blogging – You can make money by creating a blog based on a specific nice that you have identified. You can either create your blog on blogspot, delicious, twitter, facebook or stumbleupon or host your blog on your own server. Other than picking a relevant and in-demand niche, you will also need to feed your blog with good quality SEO content, create word of mouth and attract traffic with attention grabbing titles and topics. Some sites like creamaid and payperpost will actually pay you for every entry that you submit. As your blog starts to get traffic, you shall see marketers in related industries flocking to you to place their ads in your blog.
2. Affiliate marketing – Affiliate marketing is all about getting traffic to your site and ensuring conversions. You can join networks like clickbank, commission junction, CPA networks, Amazons Affiliate program and linkshare. All you need to do is join in, select the products that you will market and ensure conversions. Every conversion that results from your online marketing efforts will give you a commission (some of which go upto 75% of the value of the product). The new and smaller ones on this block are sharesale and cost per action.
3. Online marketing – This concept is similar to that of an affiliate program but when you are an internet marketer, you are actually creating affiliate programs of your own. In most cases, online marketing is more holistic in nature where you employ strategies like SEO, social networking, blogging, ebooks and forums to sell your products.
4. Revenue from ads – Making money by attracting ads on your website is one of the easiest ways of making money. All you need to do is to create a website and adopt strategies to attract traffic to it. If you have opted for services like google adsense and yahoo publisher network, you need to include a javascript into your site which will allow adsense or yahoo publisher to feed in relevant and contextual ads. Every time some one on your site clicks on the ad, you get some monies based on the amount the advertiser is paying google or yahoo for the click. The way to increase steady revenue from this option is to choose to create your site based on a competitive niche. This allows you to get higher revenue because competitive keywords have a higher bid amount in google.
5. Sell your expertise – If you have expert information about a niche that you feel other people can benefit from, use forums to market the same. You will need to establish yourself as an expert by participating actively, posting comments and answering queries on specific topics. Once you have gained the trust and credibility of the visitors on the forum, you can use your signature to market your link. Your signature can be linked to your site where you may be selling products, training videos, training sessions and programs for a fee. Some forums that you can start by exploring are ether and bitwine. Make sure that you do not spam or else you will lose credibility and maybe even your login with the forum.
6. The SEO expert – Given that online marketing has become so important for businesses, everyone needs the service of a SEO strategist. You can therefore sell your SEO services to other online marketers. There are two aspects of SEO – onpage optimization and offpage optimization. Onpage optimization requires you to understand concepts like keywords, metatags, rich content. Offline optimization requires you to target backlinks and press releases.
7. Uploading videos – Creating home videos, travel videos or a short film can also earn you money online. You can also use it to generate free promotion for your business. Sites like youtube, metacafe, break and revver allow you to upload as many videos as you want. If your video becomes viral, it will generate promotions for your business in more ways than one. Some sites also help by attaching the video to an ad and paying you every time it is clicked.
8. Freelance – Many companies outsource work to professionals as they grow up the value chain in internet marketing. It is not uncommon for people to outsource their content writing, code creation and other such needs. You can become a professional at rentacoder, clicknwork or elance and start making money by bidding and completing projects. You could also pre-write some stories or tips or articles and send them to sites like readers digest or associated content. They pay for the content is it is approved and published.
9. Sell your stuff – it actually does not get simpler than this. All you need to do to make money is to sell articles that you do not need online. Sites like Amazon seller, eBay and overstock allow you to post the details of the things that you do not need. A good description and a photograph help. You will find that there are many takers for the things that you bought and never used or gifts that you were given that you had no plans of using ever.
10. Free online shops – If you do not want to be limited to random items that you want to sell but want to formally start selling customized or unique items, signing up with free online shops is a good idea. You get to showcase your products on their site and can start selling your homemade or cottage industry items immediately.
11. Help people fill job slots – If you visit h3, indeed or SpotAJob, you will realize that there are many job postings that need filling up. If you can provide the right contender of the job and your suggested candidate lands himself with a job, you could earn a large sum of money. This works in a manner similar to employee referrals, except for the fact that you don’t need to be an employee to refer a candidate.
12. Review products – Another option that you can exercise if to write reviews for various products and earn money as you do so. It is ethical to state that you are reviewing the product for a fee so that it is evident to the reader that it is promotion content that is being read. However, that does not stop you from making your review persuasive or convincing enough to allure click through and buys. Some of the sites that pay for such reviews are softwarejudge, reviewme and loudlaunch.

Surely, after having gone through the list, you would have realized that some of these opportunities are relatively easier to kick off. However, the easier ones also have a limit to the amount you can. earn. The scope of affiliate marketing is far higher than just blogging or freelancing and opting for an online shop is likely to be far lucrative than getting rid of your junk on eBay. If you are looking to grow, and grow really fast, then you must invest some time to train yourself and invest in some good reading before you embark on your successful journey.

Written by Vishal P. Rao of Work at Home Forum.

Posted in Make Money Online

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