Making Money Online – Full Free Guide
January 6, 2009
If you are debt, sometimes, instead of looking for a a second job, debt consolidation services and taking more loans, you can do two very hard-to-implement-in-reality, but incredibly useful things:
1. Cut down the unneeded expenses.
2. Start making Money online.
While cutting down the expenses is not always easy and requires a lot of self-discipline, especially when you go shopping with your credit card, making money online requires nothing but dedication and a few hours of your time every day. Of course, if you want to becoming an online freelancer you’d have to dedicate ALL your time to the computer, which might not suit all of you, but if you really struggle financially, starting a few websites can help you with paying your bills. What I started to making money online, it went very slow and the few dollars I was making monthly hardly inspired me to continue with this making money online idea, but with time the online income started to feed me, cover my bills and buy me things I could not afford before, like a monster TV, new computer, awesome furniture, traveling… Today, I am grateful to all those who taught me how to develop my own websites, and all the advertisers who believed in my online projects and practically speaking — I still live on their expense.
This guide is for beginners who has never earnt anything online yet and are going to start from the very very bottom. This is very long article and you have plenty of material to digest here, so I suggest to bookmark this page and read bit by bit whenever you have time. So, let’s go step by step…
How to Get paid?
This is first thing you need to determine. There are really not many options that most leading money-making programs would offer you.
1. Check sent by air mail. Google, Adbrite, Commission Junctions and some other leading companies prefer to pay by check to ensure your address and identity indeed matches the one you gave upon registration. You need to make sure that in your country and bank you will be able to deposit foreign checks in US Dollars.
2. PayPal.com. I highly recommend to set up PayPal account, as it allows you to receive and send instant payments securely. Some companies such as PayPerPost, PayU2Blog and ReviewMe only pay via PayPal and do not provide any alternative method of payment. Moreover, you can receive donations, get paid from client with Credit Card and cash your earnings directly to your bank account.
3. Get a free prepaid card. A few years ago I got a prepaid card, which practically saved me from all the mess of payment methods as I had no credit card in my local bank.
What Types of Websites’ Platform Bring Revenue?
1. Forums. Forums, unless we are talking about ultra successful boards with over 50,000 visitors daily — will NOT bring much revenue. If you want to start up your own discussion board, do it for fun but remember it’s A LOT of work. Regular members will visually skip the ads, and the abnormal amount of hits will result in misleadingly low CPM from advertisers point of view. If your aim is money — forget about running forums.
What types of FREE forum platform are available?
2. Static XHTML website. While as a webmaster who aspires for excellence I’d say build a regular HTML website, if you want to make money off your site — forget it. Imagine you built 100-pages-site and someone purchased sitewide link from you? That’s quite a lot of work, not to mention the maintenance. Let alone putting static HTML website online requires knowledge in website building, which you might not have.
3. Blog. You are after big green, start a blog hosted on WordPress (known as WP) platform. The advantage of WordPress over other blogging platforms is due to being so popular, most plug-ins (such as Text Links Ads and inLinks) are optimized for WP. The advantage of blog over other CMS in general though, is that you can make money reviewing sponsored products. Sponsored blogging currently makes most of my revenue and I highly recommend it (will expand later on in the post).
What types of FREE blogging platform are available?
4. CMS (Content Management System). There are plenty of them, starting from regular CMS website platforms and up to social bookmarks websites (Pligg and the likes), continuing to endless varieties of them.
What types of FREE CMS platform are available?
5. Social Bookmarks Sites. You might get inspired by the success of Digg, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us, but… there are countless thousands of Social Bookmarks websites floating around planet Earth, about which no one knows. No one will bother and waste time submitting pages to an unknown site, so this only have a chance if you already have domain with massive traffic. Then again, monetizing such websites is not easy and you may just end with a heap of Viagra stores submitted.
6. Directories. This is a good platform for making money and requires zero content creation on your part, however, there is always a “but”. To get someone to pay for a listing in a PageRank Zero directory is from very hard to impossible. Advertisers pay to either for traffic, but that means your site has to have crazy traffic, or for PageRank, while Google is of course strictly against it, high PageRank directories won’t die out so fast. This means, you would need to accept free listings until your directory will gain some PR, and if you won’t manage to get at least PageRank 5 (not that it’s any easy), your porcelain piggie will have to go to sleep with an empty stomach.
So, these are the general directions, while as you can see I recommend WordPress platform the most. Next step is deciding on hosting plan and domain name.
Where to Host Your Website?
As a beginner mogul you will face a few obstacles here.
The Problem with Paid Hosting Service.
While paid hosting service as itself is highly recommended, beginners have a problem. First of all, not everyone has spare 100$+ to invest in annual hosting plan without any guarantee you will be able to get it back, since you never made money online before and can’t be certain about your success. Check out the cheapest hosting plans out there first.
The Problem with Free Hosting Service.
There is no “good” free hosting service. If it’s free, it has to have a catch. Either slow server (means your website will take forever to load), or bad uptime (means your site is going to snooze often) or they will add frames, pop-ups and other adverts to your pages. You plan to put your own adverts, means you don’t want (or in some cases – cannot) have third party Adsense advertisements. For instance, you cannot run Google Adsense on a free host that already displays host’s Adsense in a frame. It’s very hand to find a compromise, and eventually you will come to the conclusion that you waste too much nerves on the free service you get provided with.
So, what can you do?
Since most free hosts will not allow you to host scripts and won’t offer you FTP access, I suggest if you are unwilling to invest before you get to see some fruits of your labor — get a free host without adverts, that will allow you to upgrade to paid host later, such as – Ultra Website Hosting. Alternatively, you can set up a blog for free at WordPress or Blogger. On the other hand, if you feel you can spare $5 – $10 a month on your website, just do a little research on good hosts, ask friends, see where your buddies host and go pro. For a comparition of cheap and good hosts click here.
Piggie Bank’s Super Deal:
This blog is hosted on Hostgator’s dedicated server, but we strongly recommend DreamHost, and therefore I have a super deal for our readers. 97$ OFF annual hosting plan + domain name for FREE. In order to get this discount you need to input the coupon code LORELEI in the sign up form. This offer is only valid for free members who sign up with Dreamhost and pay with Credit Card (not PayPal).
Creating Content
Before you even consider milking the Internet (regardless the path you choose), you MUST fill your website with some unique, decent content. You can copy and paste free articles from free articles databases… But, forget it. It will not be unique content and Google might punish you for having duplicate content, moreover if you want to blog for money, you must not have free articles re-published, so no matter how you look at it — there is no perspective for long term profit. This means, spare time, site and write! It’s up to you what the website is going to be about, write on subject your are passionate about and can tell the world something new. Try to create timeless content, that will be interesting to people of all ages now, and in 10 years from now. By this, I don’t mean philosophizing about the outer space, but also not just documenting how you watered your plants today.
Once you think you finished your website, or if it’s a blog – filled it with some initial content base, go and double check it. Run spell check, add meta tags to pages, make sure you won’t have broken or unfinished pages or other funny mishaps your visitors might point out at.
Promote Aggressively
While most webmasters still skip this advice or worst of all — overdo it, in good measures I’d still very much recommend to promote BEFORE applying to various advertising networks. You need traffic not only in order to get clicks on your Google Adsense adverts, but also for some networks who will require certain Alexa Rank, which allegedly gives a good idea about your traffic stats.
Add Alexa Widget to your pages. This will help to “log” every visitor which will help to pull the Alexa Rank higher (the lower is the number, the better). Read more on Alexa Rank in my previous blog posts.
YES! Start Applying for Approval!
1. Google Adsense – contextual adverts, get paid per click. Start off with them, as being the most popular, trustworthy and easy to implement program, I’d recommend to read their TOS carefully before applying and before taking any liberty to modify their code or implement it on pages you might not be eligble to. Adsense bans dozens of accounts daily for fraudulent clicks, so be extra careful with them. Never click your own adverts (not via proxy, not from another computer) and don’t suggest visitors to click in anyway. Google Pays only with checks or International Transfer, however, not working properly in some countries’ banks, in mine for instance, it was impossible.
Alternatives to Google Adsense?
- You can try Adbrite [paying by check], however, they are less popular than Adsense and naturally have a smaller pool of advertisers as well as less variety to customize ads format. Apart from regular contextual adverts, they offer also text ads, banners, full page ads, inline ads, and InVideo.
- Another option is Kontera [paying by check], though in order to even qualify for being their publisher you need to have a minimum of 250,000 pages views a month. I used it for 30 months and discontinued due to the low revenue it was producing, however, this might work must better for you.
You can run all the 3 of them together, but never overdo the ads, it might have negative effect on your visitors and will result in loss of revenue, rather than development of heavy returning traffic.
2. Commission Junction. Affiliate marketing network, by far the biggest on the Internet. This will require a lot of creativity and activity on your part, as you get paid per sale or lead, not click. They pay by check and you need to verify your VAT ID, and while customer’s support could be better and implementation of the code could have been easier, I’d not recommend it unless you have really sharp elbows.
3. PayPerPost – sponsored blogging Network, for blogs only. Biggest network for advertisers and bloggers, huge potential but again, sharp elbows are a must since YOU grab the reviews you want, and having 60,000 fellow bloggers around the world sitting and waiting for each campaign to come out doesn’t help much!
Alternatives to PayPerPost?
- PayU2Blog – Paying with PayPal, each assignment is 5$.
- PayPerPost – Very popular with huge marketplace but low prices, starting at $2 per post.
- Blogsvertise – Slightly less popular, paying with PayPal, better potential for higher PR blogs.
- ReviewMe – Marketplace and direct reviews,
- SponsoredReviews – Based on bidding principal, winning (lowest) bid gets to review the advertiser.
- Smorty – Small advertises circle, but can help you make a few quick bucks.
- Bloggerwave – European small network, small pool of advertisers, however, you can get 10$ for blogging about them.
However, there are many other ways to make money online quickly. I’ll list a few of the most common ways.
You could sell products on an auction site such as Ebay. This is probably what most people think of when you talk about an online business. This is a good way to make money, but there are some things you have to be aware of. Selling on an auction site is by no means a sure thing. Your item may not sell and you won’t get back your listing fee if it doesn’t, you also need a source to provide a steady stream of products to sell unless you are overstocked with second-hand items from your waredrobe.
Another very popular way to make money online quickly is with paid survey sites. There are several ways these sites work, one type involves you completing various offers. Some of the offers are free, some you will have to pay for. You can make money almost immediately on some of these sites. The downside to survey sites, though, is that you probably won’t ever make a full time income. This is a better idea is you only want to make a few hundred dollars a month.
For a full time income, I recommend affiliate marketing, which takes a lot of time to promote but eventually pays back best. This is simply when you sell someone else’s products for a commission. Most affiliate marketing marketplaces will give you a free replicated website when you sign up to promote a certain product. That means you can have a website to send people to and a product to promote and it’s all absolutely free. The company that I have used successfully (Comission Junction) gives you the whole package. You start with your very own website or emailing list, your choice.
These are all good ways to make money online. But no matter what method you choose there is one important factor you can’t forget: marketing. No matter how great your product or service you need a steady stream of qualified customers or you won’t make any money. Even if you have the absolute best website in the world, you won’t make any money without customers who are eager to buy your products. I know this probably sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised by the number of people who think they can just put a website online and the customers will magically appear.
Prepare for Discouragement
Yes, just be prepared that your first month wont bring in million dollars. Maybe not even 5$.