How to Make Money Online – Part 1: Planning

If you do a quick internet search on making money online you will soon find yourself overwhelmed by a mixture of highly copied information, companies claiming to make you the next internet money making millionaire, or information that give you hope only to snatch it away leaving you in a discouraged mess once you try the techniques for yourself and don’t get the results claimed online. So you want to know the real secret to making money online? Well it is simple. It is just like making money in the real world, its planning, its dedication, and most of all its hard work. Yes you read that correct, hard work. Making money online is not easy, and it’s not quick and anyone that says otherwise is not being honest.

My backstory

When I first start out making money online, the first thing I though was this was going to be quick and easy money online.  I thought that I would be making at least $100 a day more or less.  And it was above all going to be easy money for little or no work.  Was I ever wrong big time.  I started with a plan of doing a mixture of blogging and writing articles to make money online.  At this point in my first month I barely managed to scratch 50 cents.  This was very discouraging for all the work I put in and the time I spent working at making money.  Then I realized that to continue the way I was going would not produce good results so I switch tactics and adopted a few new techniques and now, the money I make online is more than 10 times better than when I first started out.  That is why I decided to share my experience and knowledge with people that are in the same situation as I was; an amateur online trying to make money without a clue.

How to Make Money online:

Step 1: First you need to understand that if you are serious about making money online, that you are treating it as a business, your business. This means that you should then ask yourself two important questions 1. “What type of business am I going to create” and 2. “What am I going to market?”. You need to discover your “niche”. Your niche is the thing that you are going to focus on marketing. For example, if you decide to blog on sports for instance, then sports would be your niche. It is recommended that you do research in to the ideas that you have. You need to see if there is a demand for what you are planning on pursuing, if not then what is the point of trying to enter a market where there are no customers. You need to see how saturated your niche is. If the niche you want to pursue is too saturated, then it would be difficult for you to come as a beginner and try to take internet traffic away from the bigger competitors in your niche. I highly recommend selecting a niche that is under provided for.

Step 2: The next step is choosing your medium of money making. Once you know your niche and what your content is going to be about, the next step are the “who” is the “how”. Your options are as follows: Blogging, website content, advertising (pay per click), internet videos, writing publications or file sharing. Now I will touch on a few of these methods.

Blogging works best if you are publishing constant updates of information on a daily basis. If you plan on providing help and how to tutorials, then blogs are not what you would want to use, websites work better for this purpose. A good recommendation of a blogging site is Blogger.com. They are owned by Google and are the people that give the “.blogspot.com” addresses. Blog.com and LiveJournal are also great places to start your blog as well. However, for a beginner I do recommend that use either Blogger or LiveJournal as Blog.com can be overly technical and confusing for beginners.

Advertising is definitely one of the more popular methods. How this works is by paying you for clicks on ads that you have placed on your blog, website, etc. Google AdSense is one such example of this. There are many others as well. There are other advertising services that work on a link intermediary method. That is, they act as a link to your links, and you get paid for the number of click on those links. There are many companies that offer this service but the one I do recommend using is Linkbucks. You can register for an account here. There are other companies that offer this service as well such as Linkbee, Adf.ly and ClickBank to name a few but I have not had much experience with these.

Internet videos are another avenue that can be taken as well to making money online. Big name internet celebrities such as Fred, Philip DeFranco (Sxephil), Nigahiga and the Michael Buckley from the "What the Buck Show" are examples of people who are making money online from posting their videos online. They are all on the top of the online money making list with rumored 6 figure incomes from their internet videos alone. More information on this will be discussed in detail later on.

File sharing is another way of making money online, can be one of the quickest ways without much constant user as the other methods. How this money making method works is by you uploading various types of files such as music, e-books, software, pictures etc to sites that host the files and pay you based on the number of downloads that you receive. Sites such as Hotfiles, Ziddu, File Factory and FreakShare offer this service of pay per download file hosting. My personal recommendation is that you use Freakshare as they give you the most amount of payouts for your uploads. The problem with this method of money making is that it inevitably leads to persons uploading copyrighted materials to these sites for others to download. This is illegal and not recommend because the entire purpose of entering the arena of making money online is to do it in a legal and sustainable way.

Continue to Part 2: Branding (Coming Soon)