I’m not exactly splurging right now. In fact, I’m a student on a student’s budget – with money going towards tuition, residence, transportation, food, and other various essentials of life, I started to experiment with making money. I was hungry. I couldn’t find a job (unfortunately, summer work is hard to come by nowadays), and I didn’t have a truck to carry around lawnmowers (nor a license at the time).

It’s been two years. I’m studying calculus during summer afternoons, which really screws up my availability in terms of summer jobs (most of my offers were full-time). I also didn’t want to take a chance with marketing schemes, like Vector Marketing, at the time – although it does seem like an interesting learning opportunity, I don’t have the connections nor the experience to really navigate through the world that way. Naturally, I decided to start looking around for online income.

Why Online Income?

A lot of friends of mine don’t believe in making money online. I don’t blame them. There is such an overwhelming amount of scams, false information, and other sorts of dishonesty that can be found on the Internet that can dwindle enthusiasm very quickly. However, making money from the Internet, although sometimes confusing, isn’t really that difficult – once you get started, the possibilities are endless.

photo credit: Peter Hellberg

Online income offers an alternative method of making money – meaning that you can sit at home for probably an hour or two at night, and supply yourself with some extra spending money or bolster your savings. In my world, any alternative method is welcome – and so I adopted online income into my money-making strategy. Besides, online income offers many benefits – flexible schedules, little sacrifice (just time and perhaps a bit of money), and savings on travel-time and gas.

With some simple computer skills, common sense, and experience, I’ve been able to figure out most of the problems with making money on the Internet – and the safest way to do things. Here are three rules to remember:

1. Never pay up-front.

You can’t get scammed if you don’t give away your money. I made it a personal rule to never give away money to any program before I made more back – meaning if I was asked to give away $X, I wouldn’t give any until I made at least $X+5 ($5 is a random number, depends on how much time I put into it, right?). I really play it safe over the Internet, because it’s so easy to get caught up in false promises and such – so keep your money and just don’t bother signing up for programs that need you to pay up-front, before you can start making the money. Some programs are legitimate when they ask for up-front fees, but I just skip them – won’t I miss out? Yeah, but I’d rather have peace of mind as well as the knowledge that I didn’t need to invest anything.

2. Always use Google.

Googling around for experiences with particular programs or alternative methods of making money can save a lot of time and experimentation – I discovered this when I was seeking a method where I could control the entire process, and had an idea of what was really happening with my money. Google is great because it enables us to learn from other people’s experiences (assuming that they are true) – both positive and negative. It also provides access to so many tips and hints, and resources that can save a lot of trouble.

If you ever break the first rule, never break the second. Spend five minutes on Google, and simply type in: “(name of program) experiences”. Open the first page of results in tabs, and pore over the results. Of course, I’d still tell you to give up paying up-front, but if you become really desperate (which you shouldn’t, but I can understand that it’ll happen) and start grasping at straws, at least take a more calculated approach. Don’t let the scammers capitalize on your desperation.

3. Making money isn’t necessarily going to be fun and games.

photo credit: freshwater2006

Making money online can be fun, but it doesn’t have to be. Yeah, you heard me right. If you’re complaining about how making money online is tedious and boring, you should probably go find another job. Making money online is just as much a job as secretarial work and computer programming – and just like how people do their jobs without enjoying it, you will also have to be prepared to take it. If you can’t take it, then quit. Either learn to enjoy it, and make the most of the opportunities you are given (heck, if you’re making money online you should be proud of yourself already), or go find another line of work.

I hope I get my point across. This is serious business.

Methods of Making Money Online

photo credit: matsuyuki

There are many ways to make money online: I’ve mainly talked about programs – structured organizations that use advertising or exploit some sort of loophole in certain programs to make money. The programs paid for by advertising are usually the safer route, but will not make as much money. In contrast, you will also find programs that exploit loopholes or use some shadier side of marketing to make money – these have potential for huge dollars, but again, I would recommend against these due to their more dangerous nature (as well as the questionable legality). Due to my “safer” approach to making money online, I will be examining the more steady and established methods.

Firstly, there are programs that share advertising revenue with their users. Basically, companies are paid a certain amount per pageview (as a hypothetical example, $0.01). In this case, the company can choose to share a percentage of this $0.01 with the user per pageview – probably $0.003 or so. That way, the more pageviews a user receives, the more money they make for both the company and themselves. This is how methods like MyLot and Yuwie work – I can personally attest to having used MyLot, but with a dissatisfied result (too little money for too much work).

photo credit: bodycoach2

Based off this advertising model, many writing programs offer generous payoffs for well-written content. If content offers value and is well-written, then many people will enjoy reading it. The website will receive many pageviews (from Google, or general readers of the site); because of this increased amount of traffic, there will most likely be an increase in impressions in ads – which should hypothetically result in more clickthroughs on ads and more advertising revenue for the website. The website will, again, share this revenue with the user who wrote this well-written piece of content. This is how programs like Associated Content and Helium work. One piece of advice – if you plan to make some serious money with these programs, you will need to have excellent control of the English language, and you will also need to be persistent and consistent in writing your articles (the more articles you have, the greater the amount of cumulative pageviews you will receieve, the more money you get – assuming they are all well-written). Oh, and you have to be of 18 years of age.

Secondly, one can skip the other programs and create their own program. By this, I mean one can start a website and try to get their own traffic, make their own deals with advertisers, and create their own content. This option – while still legitimate, is riskier than the other methods previously mentioned – however, again, they offer much more reward. This is because the previous methods are all established and have many more resources and experience than one single person would probably possess – however, they also consume a lot more as the middle-man, which is why the rewards for users are scarcer through these programs. If one decides to start their own website and hits the jackpot, they technically get to keep everything (of course, hosting costs and domain fees still need to be paid).

The model for this custom-program is entirely up to the creator – while many writers/marketers/bloggers create their own websites, many solely rely on advertising revenue as their source of income. This has both benefits and costs – while advertising revenue is usually quite easy to come by (it all depends on traffic), advertising revenue can be inconsistent when traffic is inconsistent. Thus, the creator will have to craft other methods of intaking money – usually by offering specialized services. It’s also comparatively more difficult to gain traffic and make deals with advertisers (because of the traffic issue), and so if one doesn’t have a passion for entrepreneurship or is faint at heart, this method might be inappropriate.

I’ve already mentioned this method, but it’s probably among the least mentioned in MMO (make money online) spheres – and this is the matter of specialized work. People pay good money for themes, designs, and programs nowadays – so if you are technically savvy or have previous experience with programming/design, you are at an advantage. Get your skills back and start making money by promoting yourself. This method is also quite difficult to start up, as the web is filled with competitors – but I suggest keeping your rates low in the beginning (or work for free) and building your portfolio and popularity, all the while gaining traffic towards your portfolio/website (which I recommend for promoting your services). This is also just the beginning – people nowadays look for everything online, from counseling to outsourced work to healing – so if you have any sort of expertise that can satisfy some sort of demand (preferably in a field with as few competitors as possible), then do it.

Also, when one has their own blog or website, they are able to start writing sponsored reviews. These reviews do pay quite handsomely for the amount of effort required, but I highly discourage anyone hoping to gain credibility and long-term profits from taking this method – if your blog had a sponsored review, a reader like myself would scoff and never visit again because I would have lost all trust for you. Thankfully, not everyone is like me, and I’m sure that your traffic won’t take that huge a hit – but at the same time, the trust will be much more frail once money is involved in the review. Don’t do sponsored reviews. If you do, please disclaim that the money is going towards maintaining your website or paying for your reviewing efforts, and not towards swaying your opinion – justify yourself, and I’m sure the audience will understand.

photo credit: Exothermic

Thirdly, affiliate programs nowadays pay quite generously – basically, if one can convince another person to purchase a product from a certain website through an affiliate program, the website will pay the convincer a certain percentage of the price of the product. Typically, this needs to be done on a large-scale basis for it to work effectively.

Lastly, there are many survey companies that would pay excellently for your opinion or thoughts. I’ve never really enjoyed this method as much, because I find that I don’t qualify for many surveys or the effort isn’t worth the payout. However, money is money – I’m aware of a friend who received a whopping $50USD cheque for completing a series of surveys. Not bad, right?

In case that wasn’t enough for you, here’s an article on Dumb Little Man with 40 ways to make money (there’s a link at the bottom of the article to the second batch).

What Methods have Worked for Me?

I’ve experienced the most success with creating my own website. Two summers ago, I created http://cutedge.org to record my thoughts on technology and gadgets – in a year, I had $50-60/month coming in. This wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great – I had realized that I went into the wrong niche. Unfortunately, not enough of my information was original (how original can one get with technology?) – and none of my content was timeless, but rather just breaking news posts and opinions. In fact, I look back in retrospect and I’m surprised I got paid at all. However, this just goes to show that even a wrong step in unexplored territory can end with reward. I’ve gotten around this lack of creative/original content by deciding to focus more solely on reviews – after all, this is the only way to distinct myself from the rest of the technology crowd.

This isn’t to say that my website has been a walk in the park – my current revenue weighs in at a mere $24.50/month, based solely on advertising. I’m ashamed to say that my passion had died down early, and that I was writing strictly for the income for at least several months. Needless to say, this became evident to both readers and advertisers, who fled from my half-assed writing. Never, ever, let your passion die. And if it does, you better resurrect it as quickly as you can.

photo credit: DigitalAlan

At the beginning of my making money online journey, I had experimented with programs on a daily basis. Again, I never broke my first rule, so I limited myself to more steady and less rewarding programs – one I experienced mixed success with would be Helium. Helium is a website powered mainly by a strong community and a huge amount of writers – and it functions on the advertising model as mentioned before. The more pageviews the user gets for a certain piece of content, the more money he/she will receive. However, with this said – to this day, I maintain an 80%+ (sometimes I get updated to a 90%+) average on all my articles, and I’ve made probably $2.00 using this method. These articles have been there for two years – plenty of time to collect pageviews. The majority of money I made – a whopping $5.00 – was for the apparent sale of one of my articles. Great, $7.00 in two years. However, this is not to say that anyone else can’t pull it off – my articles tended to be denser and filled with more research – and thus, although I ranked well, my articles were hard to write and were in more competitive fields. I quickly grew tired of letting other people decide my popularity and decided to start my own blog.

As for another method, myLot – which seemed like a scam at first – is actually legitimate in that it pays for one just to post around on its forums; this program is sponsor-based (look at all those sponsors on its sidebar and tell me it’s not). However, again, I experienced mixed success – although I did receive some income, it was very little; for three-four days of hard posting and searching, I received a $10.00 payout. I was greedy, so I decided to skip myLot and look for the bigger bucks.

Where should you start?

Start with research. Generally, I’ll advise you to Google “Make money online” – however, there are many articles littered with affiliate links (which is how they make money – you have been warned – and yes, sometimes I will plug in my own affiliate links after disclosing them), and so might be written in the interest of enticing people to join certain programs. Those reviews will not be written totally objectively; don’t trust them. Hell, if any of my articles have affiliate links, you should think twice – I usually am not the type to go back on my integrity (as I hope you’ll see), but money can do crazy things to people.

I’ll also advise you to try a process which you can control and get to know well; although I’m not a big fan of controlling “everything” (I watched Fight Club for my third time two nights ago, and sometimes I feel like I just have to let go of the wheel), money and business is an aspect of life where I vowed to stay on top of. There is no ‘relaxed’ approach that I will approve of – especially not when it comes to your finances!