Over the last ten years or so, people have been going crazy over the thought of making money on the internet.  It seems so easy and there are people who are making money without even spending a dime.  Of course, there now a lot of competition and making money online isn’t that easy but it’s still something that you might want to consider.  Let’s have a look at some of the options out there:-

Write Articles
Many website owners want new and fresh content on a regular basis to keep visitors coming back.  The problem is that these website owners often don’t have a lot of time to write the content themselves.  This is why they outsource writing to freelance writers.

If you enjoy writing about all sorts of different topics then you could make money doing this.  Of course, as with any other business it can take time to build up a reputation for quality and customer service.  Many make the mistake of pricing themselves too low to begin with and they “burn out.”  This is certainly not a good long-term strategy.

Naturally, if you live somewhere like India then you might feel that the cost of living is so low that you can afford to price yourself lower than those living in Western countries.

Whatever approach you decide to take it’s essential that you build up a portfolio so that potential clients can see what sorts of topics you can write about and so that they can see the quality of your writing.  You could create a free blog at Blogger and then add articles you fell reflect your writing skills.

Then sign up with companies such as rentcoder.com and odesk.com as they will help you find clients and deal with the billing side of things.  Make sure you present yourself professionally and respond to enquiries promptly and politely.

Blog Commenting
One of the popular techniques for doing SEO on a website is to leave comments on what’s known as “do follow blogs.”  The problem is that website owners don’t want to do the work themselves so choose to pay someone else to do the work for them.  As a result there are a number of companies out there who offer blog commenting services.

The problem is finding do follow blogs to comment on and if you have never done this sort of thing before it’s really confusing to know where to start.  There are a few software applications on the market that help you find do follow blogs but the problem is that they usually use Akismet as an anti-spam measure and if you leave too many comments too quickly all of your hard work can be for nothing.

However there are many blogs that don’t have any anti-spam measures in place and it’s very easy to leave a link with your comment.  There are lists of such blogs being sold on Digital Point Forums which you can buy to make it easier for you.  Finding these kinds of blogs requires a lot of work and sometimes blog owners shut down comments because they are fed up with spam and this is very frustrating.

If you want to make money using this method it’s a good idea to do blog commenting for your own websites first to get a hang of it and it isn’t recommended for the beginner.

Make Your Own Website
The problem with offering services such as writing articles or blog commenting is that you have to keep doing it in order to make money.  Basically you have a job.  Whereas if you create your own website you will find that once the money starts coming in from advertisers you will continue to enjoy that money for potentially years to come.

As good as this sounds there’s still a lot of hard work involved.  However, in order to get the ball rolling you need to first of all come up with a theme for your website.  A good place to start is to think of problems people have in their lives that can be resolved by purchasing products or services.  Here are some ideas:-

• Acne
• Cellulite
• Termites
• Moss
• Rust
• Weeds

You then need to see about buying a domain name with some of the keywords in it.  Go Daddy is a very popular place to buy web domains and there are many different discount codes listed on many websites you can use to get a cheaper price.  Personally I have found that the discount code emma30 works very well.  You will then need to buy hosting for your website and this can be bought from HostGator at a very cheap monthly price.

If you don’t want to spend any money you can set up an account with Word Wolf.  Not only is it free to set up an account here at WordWolf, the domain already has a lot of authority in the search engines so you will find that visitors to your articles will start arriving very quickly.  Which in turn will help you earn more money.

You will also want to sign up for Google Adsense as they will display ads on the website.  When a visitor sees an ad that is related to your articles and click on the ad, you will get paid.  Please note, that some “misguided” website owners click on their own ads in order to try and make more money.  This is a very bad idea as you will simply get your account banned and any money that is owed to you will be returned to the advertiser.

Other Ideas For Making Money On The Internet
If you have skills in website design or graphic design then you can offer your services to people who lack the skills that you do.  How much you charge will depend on how good you are however if you have a look at other websites offering the same services you will be able to have a look at their prices.

Forums such as Digital Point Forums can be very good if you are starting out and want to build up a customer base.  You can also register with freelance websites like rentcoder.com, elance.com and odesk.com.  They will take a percentage of what you earn but they have loads of clients who are looking to outsource loads of tasks.  Spend a bit of time looking around these websites to see what’s on offer.

Conclusion
Don’t think for a moment that any of this is easy.  There are people walk blindly into making money online only to find that they give up when the don’t start making the money they hoped for.  Of course, if you have lost your job or have been forced to have some bed rest then it’s something you can try your hand out.  You don’t really have anything to lose.  Make sure you don’t get sucked into any scams.  There’s no need to spend a lot of money to learn how to make money on the internet.  Of course, there are some very good tools on the market which can help speed up certain tasks, but to begin with you don’t need to spend any money at all if you don’t want to.

Choosing your keywords and writing your articles is only a percentage of what you need to do to make money.  If you’re serious about making money online you need to learn about SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  This blog post will cover the basics of what is known as off page SEO.

Basically in order to prove to the search engines that your website is legit and full of great content that would be useful to it’s searchers you need to have other websites link to you.  Basically it’s like getting votes in an election but the difference is that not all votes are equal.

Now before you go getting as many sites to link to you as possible you need to understand a little thing called anchor text.  Anchor text is simply the text used when one website links to another.  Most people who don’t understand anchor text for off page SEO purposes will simply use things like “click here”, “visit Bob’s blog” and such like. 

However if you are wanting to rank for specific keywords this won’t help you much at all. Instead you want to make sure that you use the keywords you are wanting to rank for.  For example, here is the prefect anchor text for linking to the home page of this blog:  how to make money online.

However be careful because if we suddenly got hundreds of links with the above anchor text we could get into a bit of trouble with the search engines who would penalize us.  It simply looks a bit fishy.  Instead we would request people use a variety of different anchors such as:

Making money online
How to make money with a website
Earn money from the internet
Make money
Ways to make online money

OK, so for the sake of example, let’s say you have an article titled “How to Stop Your Dog Barking,” you would want to think of other things that people would search for or you could even do a bit of keyword research.  So here are a few examples:-

stop dog barking
stop dog from barking
how do I stop my dog from barking
dog training barking advice

You want to vary the anchor text because it look more natural to the search engines and also because it will help you to rank for these keywords too.

Not wanting to get too bogged down by this aspect what you need to know at this stage where you are able to get these links.  You will get some ideas here:-

Article Directories

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of article directories on the internet.  One of the most highly-regarded is ezinearticles.com as they receive loads of submissions every day and many of their articles rank very highly for some competitive keywords.

It shouldn’t cost you anything to submit to these directories however with so many to submit to you could take days creating accounts and submitting your articles.  This just doesn’t make financial sense as time is money.

So in order to speed up the process you will find that there are many companies who offer software and membership services.  The prices all vary greatly depending on what features they offer

Web Directories

These are simply sites that list websites in different categories with a description.  They don’t hold an awful lot of weight in terms of SEO but they are pretty simple to acquire and add a bit of variety to your incoming links.  Again, there are a number of software applications out there that offer to make things much easier for you.

Social Bookmarking

There are lots of sites that allow people to create account and submit sites that they like.  The idea is that people can see your bookmarks and find sites that could be of interest to them.  Also, if a sites gets lots of people bookmarking it, it will possibly appear on the home page providing extra exposure.

We’re not really interested in having people find our sites via social bookmarking, we simply want the back links.  Again, there are some companies who have created software to make this really fast and easy.  Probably the most popular is Bookmarking Demon.  It’s not all that cheap but you’ll get upgrades for life and it’s very quick and easy to use once you get to grips with it.

Often you if you read blogs and websites about SEO, you will come away thinking that it must be really difficult.  The truth is that often people make it seem more complicated than it really is.  If you stick to the basics as described above you should be able to do pretty well.  Also, bear in mind that it can take the search engines a while to rank your website well.  So the work that you do today could take weeks or even months to take effect.  Don’t let that put you off, just be patient and have faith.