Ways to Make Money Online

Allow me to make an outline of the ways that I have researched, and mostly tried, in making money online. My way isn't the only way - there are thousands of other possibilities. But for the sake of some perspective, I'd like to enumerate them:

1. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing, in its simplest of definitions, is known as advertising someone else's product and being paid on commission per sale. Affiliate marketing rules the internet, and is one of the reasons why information in the internet is at such a great volume.
In order to start with this, you must be able to find an affiliate company that you are willing to sell, and that you would believe a lot of people would buy. Look for something that would interest you personally - as a consumer. A good place to start with would be ClickBank. It acts as a third party that ties up affiliates and sellers to ensure payment process safety. As a marketer, try to find something that is easy to market.

Search on the best trends of the day, the top searches that come out of Google and Yahoo. Chances are, these are good niches to start with. An even better niche would be one that would have only a little competition in terms of advertisements. With little competition, bids like these would be a lot lower. Look them up, and if you found only a few ads to them, then you've probably found the right one. Try using Google Adword keyword selection in order to find out about the best keywords of your desired niche. You can then advertise through various ways, such as through your own blog articles and by posting ads (both free and paid). Traffic exchange sites could work, depending on your niche and on the site interface.

Article marketing is another good way of promoting your affiliate link. All you have to do is to write an article, not necessarily about the product you're promoting, but somewhat related to it. You could post it on free posting sites such as Go Articles, EzineArticles, and Associated Content. A good article would allow people to link your article to their own blog, and will therefore get you more chances to promote your affiliate link. How? By posting your affiliate link in your profile page. Make more articles, and then you will be able to get more links to your affiliate link. Associated Content even pays you per view of your article.

2. Pay-to-Click Websites

Pay-to-Click sites are controversially famous. They are either wonderfully stable and successful, or they are unstable websites that eventually run out of money because someone hacked into them or the website owner stops paying funds. You've probably heard of the fame of Neobux as a million-dollar payer to thousands of clickers, and the notoriety of Bux.to for scamming an equal number of people. Still, one cannot deny that there is cash in paid-to-click. The advantage with pay-to-click is its simplicity. It gives you just about four or more advertisements to click, for usually about 0.01 USD per ad, then you're done for the day.

The challenge of pay-to-click is getting referrals to sign up under you and to get that referral clicking so that you could earn a commission from that referral's click. It's a lot like multilevel marketing, except that you don't have to pay for anything. You really just have to promote, promote and promote your referral link so that other people will sign up under you. You could use the same methods as with affiliate marketing through blogs, posting articles, advertisement links and traffic exchange, but you could also use referral exchange websites. Referral exchange websites trade referral links wherein the principle is "I sign up under you, you sign up under me." It depends on how much effort you're willing to put into it that would allow you to get more referrals.

3. Get Paid to (Post, Blog, Review, Survey) Websites

Closely related with Pay-to-Click are the Paid-to-Post, Paid-to-Blog, Paid-to-Review and Paid-to-Answer-Survey Websites. Different websites have different principles behind them, but usually, the rates are relatively higher than that of Paid-to-Click. It's a no-brainer. Writing is harder than clicking.

A few websites like MyLot and Peoplestring pay you to be active in their websites for a small fee. Just keep posting discussions, reviews, and other means of working the site, and you will receive residual income. Both of them encourage promotion through referrals, so you'd also earn income from that. Other sites like Slicethepie ask you to review music pieces with a few lines of your opinion.

Then again, other websites pay you to advertise their products on your blog by writing a good review of their products. Very similar to affiliate marketing, except that you are paid a fixed price for that single article, and not for every sale of the product that was made through your review and your affiliate link.

4. Article Writing and Freelancing

One of the most common ways of freelancing is through writing. Some people earn online for a fee of being paid per article or a set of articles. Eventually, they are able to establish themselves in the online community as an efficient and effective writer. There are two means of earning through writing. Article marketing was mentioned earlier. And then there's ghostwriting.

Ghostwriting is where your articles are bought by the demand made by the hiring party. Your rights to the article are then removed, and the employers make use of it as they desire (post it in their blogs, submit it to their teachers or companies, whatnot). For this, they give you a set price, for example, on a 400 word article ranging on $5 to $15 at a starting price. An established writer would make much more.

Here's the kicker: Once you've got a project that promises to give you a lot more, say, $20, for one article, you start outsourcing. Other people would write that article for four to seven dollars, so you tap them and ask them to write for you by posting your own jobs for a smaller fee. The terms are the same - they write the article but remove their rights for reposting and all ownership goes to you. Then you copyread it to make sure it would be acceptable work to submit in your name, and you sell it to the employer. All ownership goes to the employer. You have then become the middle man rather than the one who does all the work.

4. Adsense and similar tools

If you've got a website with pretty good traffic and content, then Adsense is for you. Adsense is a good source of residual income. You basically ask Google to approve your website and your account, then you will be able to monetize your website by posting their ads on your blog. Google then pays you for the number of click-throughs that other people make on the ads you have posted. The payout rate is at $100. Just remember that you would not be approved by Google if you're planning to use your blog in posting referral links - it's against their policy, and will get you banned. Still, there are other sources of advertisement publishing such as AdHitz and the like. I personally use AdHitz to monetize - they allow posting affiliate and referral links in your website without the fear of getting banned.

6. Stocks and forex

If you're the kind of person who's willing to take monetary risk for a profit, then forex is for you. But always be careful in where you invest your money. A lot of sites out there will be advertising forex robots that probably don't really work. Research and Google the site very well, look at forums and reviews about that site, and if you've found nothing but good feedback, then that probably the time to jump in. One site that I've researched is Verifield, which has a very good reputation among its users of giving payments as due on time. I personally have an account, and have seen the seriousness of how it works, but I haven't invested yet because I have yet to create a Liberty Reserve account to invest with. But as a rule, always take care whenever someone asks you to invest in their website.

Throughout these various methods of earning, it is always handy to have a reliable money transferring system. You would most definitely need a credit card, an online transaction handler such as PayPal, and a bank account in which to deposit your earnings.

Feel free to post comments, questions and suggestions on this article. I wish you luck in your own online earning venture!