Make Money Online — Introduction

If you use your favorite search engine and do a search for “make money online”, you’ll get thousands of results. The problem with the results is that, while you’re wading through them (reading the snippets or visiting the pages), you’ll find a lot of outdated information mixed in with the not-so-outdated information. There are literally more than a hundred ways to make money online but I’m only going to go over the ways that will always work, regardless of negative influences, and I’m not even going to go over a fraction of them. I’ll be sticking to the things I know.

Types of Internet Marketing

At the heart of making money online is the concept of Internet marketing. Internet marking covers many facets of online marketing and where you fit in the picture will depend on specific factors such as how much money you want to make online, how often you want to make it and how far you want to go with it.

You may find you prefer affiliate marketing or content marketing (what I do) or something else. If you’re operating a business that sells products you control, Internet marketing will enhance your performance.

Advertising Publishing

Unless you’re selling your own products or services, you’re going to be an advertising publisher. This means you display advertisements on your website. When you sign up for certain programs, and you’re asked whether you’re signing up as an advertiser or a publisher, you’re going to be signing up as a publisher.

There is some specific terminology you need to learn in order to maximize your online money making potential. Cost per click (CPC) is the easiest to work with at the beginning because you can visually measure your performance. Cost per thousand (CPM – “M” stands for “mil”, which is Latin/Spanish/whatever for “thousand”) is something you can pursue when you start getting thousands of unique visitors per day.

Advertising Publishing Programs

In the next few articles of this series, I’ll be covering the ways to maximize earnings from Google AdSense, Chitika and Infolinks – I use all three in various places. The rules are stricter than they were when I started doing this a few years ago, but the overall concepts are the same and should work five years from now as well as they do today.

Prior to today, I avoided writing about making money online because of the competition for keywords. I no longer care about that. I think it’s more important to tell you what works and what doesn’t, even if my articles aren’t on the first page of the search engine results pages (SERPs).