7 Ways to Earn Money From the Internet

Before going straight into how it is possible to generate an income from the internet, I will start first with discussing 2 mechanisms that you need to have in place, before thinking of earning money from the internet.

1. You need to work hard and consistently towards having good content on your blog. This guarantees regular traffic to your blog, because your readers are curious what your next post is about - what they are going to learn from you.

2. Build an e-mail list. This is usually an 'opt-in' box, where your readers will fill in their name and e-mail address to give you permission to send them a regular newsletter, such as weekly, information about a product, on educational content, a tip for them, and so on.

These 2 tools will give you leverage - since now you have built traffic, attention and an audience to your website, it is time to convert that into money.

7 ways to earn money from the internet

1. Affiliate promotions. This is one of the ways that I personally like of earning money online. So to give you an example, let's say that there is a piece of software that I like and use for my business. I have personally bought it and use it regularly myself. I will write a review of it with links to the software's sales page, and when my readers will click on this link and buy the software I will earn a commission for promoting this product.

You can actually promote anything - a physical product such as a book, a downloadable e-book, a subscription service, a software, a system, and more. It is basically anything that offers an affiliate program. For my part, I prefer promoting stuff that I personally use, but you can also choose to subscribe to affiliate programs, without actually buying the product, and selling them through your blog.


The advantage of this is that there is no physical product to move, since your 'job' is to direct your traffic to the product's sales page, and the company will take care of the rest. You are given an affiliate ID which is unique to you, which will look something like this:?333695 - with the first part being the product's website and the second part being your affiliate ID, so you will earn a commission when people buy from your link.

Now if the product is a one time payment, you just get a commission once, but if the product is actually a subscription based service, then you are actually getting a commission every month. And each product will have a different percentage. However, all this adds up, especially if you have a successful blog.

Affiliate marketing uses the concept that word-of-mouth from the customer is the best advertising. So they actually reward you for promoting their product for them.



Can have a successful blog on a particular topic, such as fishing, go to ClickBank.com (a retailer of e-books and digital products) and Amazon.com (a popular online superstore), search for products which are relevant to your topic, example fishing, and sell the products on your blog.

2. Once you have an audience, you might want to consider having people sponsoring your blog. You would get paid for adverts that are placed on your blog. You can come up with a service where you have different packages that you offer to people who want to place an advert on your website. For example a monthly fee for an ad on your website - different prices for the size of the advert and the place of the advert on your blog. The advantage of this is that you have complete control over the adverts.

3. Another way is to go through other sites, where in a way they will place the adverts themselves for you - the only problem with this is that you don't really have total control over the adverts and the companies. Such sites include:

* Google AdSense that enables you to display relevant Google text ads and earn a commission when people click on the ad,
* TextLinkAds.com place static text links on your blog, and finds the sponsors for you,
* Chitika.com puts little advertisements on your blog and you get paid if people click on the adverts. Great for people who have blogs with topics such as computers, electronics, digital cameras, etc.
* WidgetBucks.com puts advertising on your blog, similar to Chitika,
* Kontera.com puts hyper-links inside your content. So actual words in your posts will become advertisement. If people click on the links, you actually make some money.
* Commission Junction is like an affiliate network. You will find people who want to advertise their products or services, you'll place their advert on your blog, and you will get a commission for each sale, each click or each lead you send them.

4. Writing paid reviews or a blog post is another way of generating money online. This does not necessarily require that you have your own blog. ReviewMe.com is a broker that finds people who want to find paid reviews from bloggers. You are paid for writing a review about someone's website or product. With PayPerPost.com you are paid to write a blog post. It's a good way to start making the first money, if you do not mind writing about something that in a way you are 'forced' to write about.

5. Become involved in a multi-level marketing (MLM) company, and earn money by selling a product and by recruiting people. The products can be anything - memberships, vitamins, insurance, gold, etc. The only advice that I would give is to choose a company that reflects your values. With such companies you are usually given a generic website and basic marketing training. I would strongly recommend building your own website (a self-hosted blog) to brand yourself and have a unique presence on the internet, and to learn how to market effectively to once again brand you as a leader in your niche. If you are selling products, you can add a cart to your blog.

6. As you travel down the lane of internet marketing, you will find that time and experience has been a great learning curve. And you might decide to start selling YOU. Using the knowledge you have gained, you might want to start writing ebooks and selling them. Or you could also venture into selling your services such as training new entrepreneurs on how to succeed online, or consulting businesses on website building and search engine optimization,... The list is endless, and the potential of internet marketing is huge and untapped - so you never know where the road will lead you to.

7. Another point worth mentioning is that you can build an online presence to promote your offline business. Let's say you have a small restaurant, and you build a self-hosted blog where you brand you and your website. The blog can have the recipes of items off the menu, calories of each meal, recommended wine pairing for each dish, conversations you can have with the chef, ratings of each meal, comments and suggestions from customers, videos teaching people on how to cook, and so on. This kind of blog for sure will generate a vibrant online community, which will in turn market the restaurant, and bring in more business.

I totally believe that as a platform, one should have a self-hosted blog - which can be considered as your store online or as your business, where you can brand you, market yourself, add a cart, place ads, communicate with your readers, and more. It's worth noting that without a self-hosted blog most of the above won't work. However, if you don't have a blog, don't let that stand in your way towards your financial freedom, as creating a self-hosted blog is quite easily achieved with a little bit of training. Once you have a blog in place, and a little bit of good content, then focus on building an audience through marketing strategies such as Article Marketing.

In the beginning, when you are new to making money online, focus on one or two of the above 7 strategies, and no-matter-what you have to make them work for you. The trick is to be consistent, and to keep testing and optimizing each system. Once you have one strategy in place and it is working for you, then keep at it while gradually introducing another strategy. Eventually test all the 7 systems to find the best combination that works best for you. The internet is a huge marketplace with huge potential. Enjoy the ride.