We’ve all been hearing how the credit crunch is hurting small businesses that need to borrow money to make payroll. We’ve also seen over 700,000 jobs lost this year instead of 1.5 million created. The price of gas is high. And. Everything feels a little spooky. Chances are your financial situation is tightening like it is for millions of people around the world. Some people will ride it out. Others will take on a second job. Some will turn to the internet.
I hope you find this useful.
How Can I Make Money Online?
I always tell people it’s easier to save money than to make it. When it comes to making money online, the best stuff is free. Rule #1 is you can’t buy success when you’re starting out. No eBook, guru or work from home that costs $19.95 to get started is going to show you the road to riches. If they had the secret, they would do it themselves. Please save your money when you are starting. After you have the basics, there are opportunities to spend small sums of money that will have a positive ROI. But you’ll need to have a firm grip of the basics before any of that is appropriate.
If you want to make money online without spending a dime, you need three things. First, you need at least one monetization vehicle. Second, an area of expertise or the ability to do deep research. Third, the ability to market a piece of content.
The key when just starting out is learning. The good news is the best online resources that can be applied to making money online are free.
I believe the best monetization vehicle for just about anyone starting out is AdSense. AdSense will pay you for every time a legitimate person clicks on an ad served on your website. It’s free to signup for AdSense, and they pay their publishers as reliably as anyone. Again, you should never pay. AdSense is free and there are no secrets to making money with AdSense. You just have to learn how to put ads in a page in a place people will click on them. If this doens’t make sense to you. Just look at how AdSense ads are placed in HubPages. These are the little text ads that say “Ads by Google.” Anyone can get an AdSense account from Google by signing up through HubPages. Again it’s free.
Step #2 is being able to research or have knowledge about something you can write about. This takes a lot of commitment and isn’t easy. The only advice I can truly give is to make an original piece of content that is so thorough and detailed, that if you compared it to any other article on the internet that everyone would agree that your page was the definitive guide online. Follow this rule. Make the very best page of a topic on the internet. If you do, people will come. If this is confusing, go to about.com and find your favorite topic. Read the articles there and pay attention to the topics they write about. Pay attention to how they use words and phrases that people search using google to find. Then look at Wikipedia. See how WikiPedia links article after article together and how they all relate to each-other. This is what you need to do. You need to go very deep on a subject. Link all your pages together and when you link your pages, you need to use the keywords and phrases in your links. Just like WikiPedia and about.com do. If you want an example of a Hubber that makes over $100 per month for nearly the last two years, you can see James Montgomery’s series on Rolex Watches. He has made 50 Hubs. He gets about 500 visitors a day and has made well over $100 per month for almost two years. If you were to take 50 designer sunglasses, or 50 styles of shoes, or 50 designer purses and create pages as detailed as James’s you to would earn a $100 per month. Read James’s Hubs. Pay attention to the titles of his hubs and the style of his writing. He uses facts, he interlinks his hubs, and he has made them very useful. This is the secret that’s really not a secret.
After you have one and two down, it’s time to learn about online marketing. I suggest doing steps one and two first, before tackling this. Many people leap to marketing in the hope of finding a shortcut. The truth is there is no shortcut. If you want to make money from AdSense, and sustain it, you have to put in hard work. When you do, it will pay off over a long period of time. Look at James again. 50 Hubs. He’s made over $2,400 dollars, but it took two years. He may very well earn another $2,400, but it’s going to come in chunks of about $100 until the point his hubs are no longer relevant.
When you’re ready to learn about online marketing, learn about natural search engine optimization at webmasterworld – real experts there will answer your questions for free about getting traffic from search engines. Read. Read. And. Read. Ask questions there and listen. Natural search engine optimization is free and is the single most powerful tool for a person learning to make money online. Again. Don’t pay for natural search help. Don’t buy links. Don’t spam Digg or Reddit. Go to webmasterworld. Read the forums. Ask questions. And learn. That’s all there is to it.
If I can reiterate one point. When you are just starting out online, you should never pay a dime out of pocket until you have some success. Use AdSense. Create your own content. Learn natural SEO.