Making Money Online - The Basics

Making Money Online - The Basics

There are lots of way to make money online but I will focus on the main methods as they the easiest to get started with.

Advertising 

 

This method is used all over the web on most sites. You will probably have noticed these ads every time you go online.  Usually they take the form of a large banner across the top, a large vertical banner on the right hand side or a square somewhere in the text.  Below is an example with two ad units highlighted in red.  One rectangle on the top and one square to the right.

   

Every time a visitor to that website clicks on one of those adverts the website owner earns some money.  It can be anywhere between $0.01 and $100 or more per click!  This is why most websites like Facebook, Youtube, Hotmail, Google and Yahoo are all free to use but make huge amounts of money.  Facebook is worth $200 billion.

The reason they are worth so much is that because of the huge amount of traffic (visitors) they receive everyday.

But even if you have a site with only a few hundred or thousand visits a day you can still make good money, depending on your niche.

The most well known and highest paying advertising network is Google Adsense.  In addition to placing ads on website they will have paid for advertising in Google search results, usually the first one or two results at the top and on the right hand side.

In order to earn money from Google Adsense you will need an account.  It used to be easy to get an Adsense account but it is becoming more and more difficult.  You site/blog must meet a lot of criteria, and if you are from China or India your site must be at least 6 months old before they will even consider it for an account.

When you apply to Adsense someone from Google (a real person) will review your site/blog and decide whether or not to approve your account.

Google Adsense is very strict about the topic of the website which you want to place ads on.  Many topics/subjects are not allowed, they include, but are not limited to:

•  Adult

•  Drug, alcohol, and tobacco-related content

•  Copyrighted material

•  Hacking and cracking content

•  Violent content

•  Other illegal content

You can see the full list here.

Once you have been approved there are a ton of rules which are updated regularly, if you break one of these rules your account will be banned, for life!  And you can't just make another account.

So Google Adsense can make you a lot of money but you have to work for it and be very careful not to ge yourself banned.

There are alternatives but they don't pay nearly as much.  Some of them have to approve your site first and others approve you automatically.  Some alternatives are Chitika, Infolinks, Clicksor, Qadabra.  Infolinks probably pays the most but lots of their ads are annoying pop ups, I did try it for a few days on one of my sites but thought it was too annoying and would drive visitors away.  

I now use Chitika, but the other ad networks might work better for your niche.  The box below will take you to Chitika so you can sign up for an account and start earning money from your website/blog, and yep, that is an affiliate link!

 

 

Affiliate Marketing 

Affiliate Marketing or Internet Marketing (IM) as it is often referred to, is the process of earning a commission for a sale of someone else's product or service.  It is similar to any sales job, Auto salesman, Realtor or Mattress salesman.  They sell an item for their company and earn a commission, 1%, 5%, 10% or more of the value of that item.

Online affiliate marketing is very similar, you promote something, someone buys it and you make a commission.  But the difference is you don't have to be a 'salesman', you don't have to talk to any customers, you don't have to wear a uniform and spend all day in a showroom.  You can do it from home, at a time of the day you choose, with the TV on in the background and drinking a beer, I do.   


Affiliate Marketing is a fairly broad topic so I will break it down in to sub sections.

Ebooks/Guides/Informational

One of the biggest aspects of affiliate marketing is the selling of ebooks/guides, usually they are referred to as 'products'.  Usually these products (ebooks) are about making money online (remember my first post?), losing weight, Forex trading, dating and health.

The biggest and most well known is Clickbank (CB), they have over 40,000 products to promote.  It is free to sign up, the rules are pretty relaxed, you don't need to get approved first and you can start promoting products today.

However Clickbank does have a bad reputation, lots of the products on there are poor quality and Google does not like sites/blogs that exist just to promote Clickbank products.  When I say Google will not like a site I mean they will not give it as much traffic as a site which they see as giving real value and the information the searcher is looking for.

You can make a lot of money from Clickbank, lots of products are priced around $50 - $100 and you often make a 75% commission.  Some affiliate make thousands of dollars a day.  But they are only a few, it is estimated that only around 1% of people who try to promote Clickbank products actually make any money.

I have made a few sales but have never really put a lot of effort in to promoting any CB products.  Making money from CB is a real art, I have not mastered it yet so I'm not going to say much more about it.  (My no BS policy).

Services 

There are lots of services which you can promote and you usually earn a commission when a visitor you send to the offer makes a purchase or signs up for a service.
Services can include dating sites, web hosting, loans, holidays/flights/hotels, cell phone contracts and auto insurance to mention a few.

These can be pretty good if they are in your niche, i.e. if you have a travel blog where you write about your experiences travelling around Europe many of your readers will be planning a trip to Europe so you can display adverts for flights/hotels and earn $50 -$100 per booking. The website booking.com has an affiliate program and I would expect all the other major flight/travel websites do too. 

If you have a blog/website about dogs you can display adverts for pet insurance, dog toys, dog food, dog toys etc., you get the idea.


You earn money (a commission) when a visitor buys or books something after clicking on your affiliate link, you don't actually need to 'sell' them anything, you just provide the link to the website and make some money if they make a purchase, unless they are an Internet Marketer themselves they won't even know they clicked on an affiliate.

Now you can just go to almost any website which sells something and scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see an 'affiliate' link when you can sign up as an affiliate.

CPA (Cost Per Action) Affiliate Marketing

CPA Marketing is similar to affiliate sales marketing but usually the visitor won't have to actually buy anything for you to make some money.  The 'Action' in Cost Per Action is usually just downloading a free App, entering an email address/phone number, signing up for a free trail or filling out a survey or entering a competition, these can work well as you often earn around $1.50 per submit. Obviously just getting someone to enter their email address is much easier than getting them to buy something.

There are lots of CPA networks around but the two biggest and most well known are Peerfly and Maxbounty.  Although the offers they have are almost identical I have never made a penny with Maxbounty but am close to receiving my second payout from Peerfly, honestly I don't know why!  
And yes those are affiliate links, I will earn 5% of anything you earn if you sign up using those link, you will not earn any less, the networks will just 'reward' me for bringing a new affiliate to their network. 



Use the links below to sign up to these networks.

www.peerfly.com
www.maxbounty.com




Real Goods/Items

This is the area I have had the most success with, you link to/advertise a real product someone else is selling and make a commission every time someone buys an item.  You will be surprised how many online stores have an affiliate program (scroll to the bottom of many commercial websites and look for an 'affiliate' link at the bottom of the page to sign up).  It is usually free to sign up for an affiliate program and you just have to pop links into your posts and on your websites.

The biggest and the one I have had the most success with is the Amazon Associates program.  I'm assuming you know I am not talking about the rain forest in south America, just in case have a quick look and come back in five minutes Amazon.com 

Amazon sell just about every product you can imagine, whatever your niche there will be a product you can promote and earn commission on.  Commissions range from about 4% to 10% of the sale price, if someone buys a product for $1000 after clicking on your affiliate link you make between $40 and $100, pretty sweet eh?

Now the best thing about the Amazon program is your make a commission on any product which is purchased, even if it wasn't the item you linked to, it happens to me all the time, the run up to Christmas was nice as people were going on shopping sprees, I don't write about Apple products but one person purchased a Macbook and an Ipad and a few other things after clicking on my Amazon link, I made about $75 commission from that one person!

Amazon is so damn good at knowing what people want or are looking for and all you have to do is get them 'through the door', Amazon will take care of the rest and you will start seeing those commissions coming in.

Getting accepted into the Amazon Associate program is fairly easy, you will have to submit your blog/website address and it will be reviewed by a real person, once yo get accepted you can post links anywhere but if you spam you affiliate link too much you might get banned and lose any commissions earned, just be sensible.

Amazon even provides you with a toolbar to share your affiliate links on Twitter and Facebook, so if you have a niche Facebook page or Twitter account with a decent number of Fans/followers (+1000) you could start making money online pretty soon.

I will create a separate post/page about the Amazon program in more detail as there are many tricks and tips to get the most sales.