The truth about making money online is that if you try to make money online then you won’t make money online. The term make money online reflects the desire of making money  online easily which is not going to happen. You cannot make money online by trying to make money, you have to earn money online. Millions of dollars are generated in revenue just by showing others the dream of easy money online. Free money, easy money, make money online, no work money are terms which many fall for easily but many a time either those clickbank products worth $97 do not work or require a great deal of hard work to make them work for you.

I happen to be blogging since the past 15 months, not at seekdefo but at a blog where I blatantly copy pasted hacks and tricks. After many months of honestly posting stuff I averaged only 200 page views per day. The solution I thought could be copy pasting and I lifted from forums and all other sources.

My traffic soared and I thought that it was good since I believed that traffic is money. I was wrong!! Not all kind of traffic is money, not all people convert well and publishing tricks and hacks for getting free calls and data my blog had turned more of a waste basket. A mediocre blog is a liability. The guys there wanted all things for free and wouldn’t buy a thing.

  From 15 months as a blogger and visiting lot of other blogs over these many  months I learnt one thing and that is how to really make money online. Seeing lot of clickbank products, testing lot of ad networks on my blog, trying different monetizing strategies, reading e books, making John Chow’s site my Bible, heck even selling articles for $5 I realised the art of making money online and below I will share what I learnt.

There were more failures than successes maybe 99 times I failed   but then I learnt things because I did not settle and am not settled.

What kind of blog should you run?

The easiest and hardest method of making money online which any idiot can try is blogging. But a great percentage of bloggers are failures, the reason being they do not have a profitable niche, the reason being that they do not have a business plan, the reason being that they do not treat blogging as a business.

My advice after seeing profitable blogs is to run multiple niche blogs on health, fitness, diet, insurance, car loans, automobile, debt etc.

You may say that you are not interested in those topics but if we learn a lot of stuff about something then interest comes. Secondly when you see that after running a blog for so and so many months you are barely paying your hosting charges then you will realize the benefit of this advice.

The above approach is what can be called affiliate marketing in a box. Creating niche and micro niche sites on monetizable topics. The high cpc words can be sought out form Google keywords tool. It takes some months before search engines can bring any traffic to you but then traffic comes if you go on.

To bring traffic you need not depend on Google alone, you can rather reach out to your market by guest posting. Guest posting for the sake of guest posting will not bring any traffic. For people to move out of the inertia of sticking to their only source of great information( the site where you have guest blogged) there should be an incentive to visit your site. Great content attracts them.

Posting great content many times on the same website attracts then to you even more. So the best way to guest post is to make yourselves more visible on the host’s website. Read John chow.dot com is hijacked which describes this strategy in detail.

The money is in the list

The things I have learnt may seem obvious to some but then I will describe to you the most efficient way of doing them. The money was is and will be in the list but how would you build your list. I discovered two ways of doing that.

The first one makes use of the viral technique of guest posting and making yourselves visible before an audience whom you had no way to see earlier. The next step is making these visitors permanently yours.

This can be done by having an opt in page on your blog which offers a cool free product like a free webinar, e book or theme.

It depends on what kind of list you want. If you want a list to which you can market info products then a ne book on making money would do you good. If you are seeking bloggers then please give them a free cool theme.

The second strategy is what I perfected from Anup of moneymakingmodes. He sold 500 copies  of an e book on building backlinks by forum marketing.

Anup was active(hyper active) on a forum called imtalks.org and he released an e book on building backlinks and creating a business out of that like selling high PR links. He asked  the experts of the forum to review his work for free and boy he got amazing reviews. The e book went like hot cakes.

But then the story is not over. You can fast track your list building efforts by 10x times by forum marketing.

Create a hot product in your niche and market it with clickbank or anything which allows affiliates. Since you are new on clickbank not many will be interested in promoting your product but then you have a cool product and you can contact guys like Anup offer a 100% commission who will then sell it for you on forums and when the person has made the purchase re direct them to an opt in  form which they must fill  in order to get that product.

The price of the product should be $5 and you must offer 100% commissions for the trick to work. In return you will get a high quality buying list who are comfortable with spending money online.

Once they are on your list you can market anything to them. They are all yours. Read my post on the the importance of an email list in surviving panda.

On infolinks, clicksor, bidvertiser and other crap- What really worked for me?

I used many ad networks in my quest for online income. I will not discuss Google Adsense for two reasons. Firstly they rejected my application since my niche was non monetizable and secondly for newbies Google Adsense is the best, there’s no second opinion to that.

However Google reserves the right to play soccer with your life if you place all your trust on Google alone.

As far as I am concerned infolinks, clicksor, bidvertiser all do pay but even though my traffic was above 1k I could only make a few cents per day which resulted in the obviously predictable result of making it to the payday in exactly 2 years.

That is their trick. Keep the payout sky high so that no one, except the very best reach it and the very best do not need them at all.

The only advertiser which worked for me was Adf.ly and I managed 106 referrals to their network and a 25% cut of what they earn. It comes somewhere near to $5 per month. Not much but significantly better than all other non reachable networks out there.

Making money on a small blog, try sponsored reviews

For small blogs, the best way to make something online is doing sponsored reviews. I did a few of them after signing up to sponsored reviews and pay per post and got something like $1 to $5 per post. No matter how small your blog maybe they have advertisers for you.

Mostly the content will be un related but then you will get an income. I got around 2 to 3 offers per month.

Pay per download sites,$1 per download

Though many sites have sprung up with the same idea I trust only fileice and I cashed out $50 from fileice. If you can find out and upload files which people search for and are not easily available then you have a chance of making money with these sites. Their pay per download is high because people have to complete a survey before downloading the file.

Some files that I marketed on forums are IDM crack, kaspersky keys etc.

Get $50 to $100 per article

The reason why people offer articles for $5 on fiverr is that they do not seek out places where one can get paid a good amount for an article. I searched out such places after writing 800 worded articles for $5 because I desperately wanted a change and I got what I wanted. For a quality 500 word article you can get as much as $100.

People pay guest posters who give them quality articles and I decided to try it out.

Some sites are

Freelanceswitch.com which accepts articles on freelancing plus a PR 6 backlink

writersweekly.com articles on making money with writing, they give $60 per article

readlearnwrite.com a website on reading and writing

The Renegade writer, wp web host($100), rock solid finance   etc.

All these sites pay $50 per post

Join freelanceswitch as a member by paying $7.Writing gigs which pay as much as $250 per post will be your reward.

One free resource for the same is the problogger job board where killer jobs are snatched within the wink of an eye.

You can also freelance as a designer, app developer or coder.

There are design and wordpress tutorial sites which pay $100 to $1000 per post if accepted. Yes the subject demands research but then you won’t make money online by trying to make money online. You have to earn it.

Write e books and publish them on Amazon

Hunger games a novel which surpassed the sales of the Harry Potter series sold more as an e book than its  printed counterpart.

There’s an exploding business of writing a books which is growing by the second. If you have knowledge about anything you can write an e book and publish it on Amazon Kindle. My first e book which is a list of the most amazing gigs you can find on Fiverr has already been submitted for review.

Arbritage- Sell fiverr gigs at other places

This post is not about earning pennies from anywhere on the internet and I am not asking you to waste time on Fiverr but do something else.

From Fiverr what came on my mind was  the fact that you can some of the most amazing gigs worth more than their rate at Fiverr and sell them elsewhere, places where people would pay more.

This is called arbritage. You can also increase the number of products by employing many people and sell that collective work for a huge profit.

I confess that I do not know the exact mechanism but then there’s an e course which tells just that and you can make $200 or more within  hours of arbritage.

Start your unique business and get traffic and sales from forums

Get active on a few internet marketing forums and help others. By helping others I mean finding a niche where others are seeking help but not getting much help. Learn and research about that niche and when you have become an expert create a sales page offering a service related to that field in the signature link.

Since you are an expert now many people will want your advice and you can thus make money.

My speciality is writing e mail newsletters that inspire people to but products and that is what I offer on forums.

Another way how I make money is by buying premium vpn accounts for people who do not have a paypal account and charge a commission on each sale. Yet another way is to offer those people an approved Paypal account with  a method I learnt from an e book for $3.

What’s yours?

The world is your oyster. You decide what you make of it.

 

image credit earningdiary.com poptens.com