Making money online is totally possible, and feasible, if you know what you’re doing. There are many legitimate ways to make money online, while there are also many scams out there which claim you can become a millionaire overnight. The truth is, making money online takes time, discipline, effort and commitment to reach your goals. It’s highly unlikely that any of the ‘easy ways to make money’ online are worth the time and expense. If they were, everyone would be making money online and getting rich.

With this in mind, there are several things you must learn and master before you can really start making money online, and this article is going to attempt to demonstrate the knowledge you must have and the steps you must take to earn money online. I will also outline several different methods for making money online, with a blueprint for each method. The number one thing you must keep in mind throughout reading this article is that we are making the assumption that making money online revolves around getting organic traffic – a tried, tested and true scenario that most internet professionals rely on.

Do Your Research

The first thing that any professional internet marketer does is keyword research. While some people advise that you are better off focusing on your own personal passions, the truth is that making money online has less to do with what you want and like, and more to do with what the world wants and likes. Just like with a brick and mortar business, research is imperative to being successful online.

Before you even determine how you are going to make money on the internet, you need to know who your audience is, how big it is, and how feasible your methods will be. You must have the proper knowledge and information about your target market before you can set up your business model and start earning money. There are several ways to approach keyword research, and it is advisable that you use as many resources as you can to maximize your earning potential.

• Use Free Keyword Tools. Do a Google search for ‘keyword tool’ and you will find a lot of great resources for your research. Essentially, you will use a keyword tool to figure out how competitive your keywords are, how much traffic you can expect certain keywords to get from search engines, and how difficult it might be to rank for your keyword. If you are serious about making money online, you will not overlook this step.

• Find Related Keywords. If you are a beginner, chances are that the keyword or keyphrase that you picked has either too much competition, or not enough traffic. In the worst case scenario, the keyword or phrase that you chose can have the misfortune of both issues. This is where related keywords and phrases come in handy. One of the best tools for related keywords and phrases for making money online is Google Wonder Wheel. When you do a search on Google, look on the left column of the search results pages for the wonder wheel link. The wonder wheel will suggest related search phrases based on the one you searched for – you can then click on those phrases, and get even more related phrases. Now, make a list of 20-30 of these keywords and phrases, and run each one through the keyword tool you used in step 1.

• Pick one keyword to focus on, and use related keywords. Now that you’ve checked your list of potential keywords, you will want to choose the one which has the ratio of traffic to competition. This means, the keywords most likely to help you make money online are the ones which get the most traffic, but have the least competition. This keyword or phrase, and its related words and phrases from the Wonder Wheel are the ones you will build your entire body of work around, to maximize your chances of making money.

Later on in the ‘blueprints’ section of this article, I will explain some basic figures for good keywords that you can use, depending on how you intend to be making money online. Just like with any other business model, what works for some doesn’t work for others.

Create Content

Obviously, if you are going to focus on getting traffic, you have to have something to point your traffic to. Creating content is the most important step in making money online. You have to do a lot of hard work during this step, but it will be worth it in the long run.

Creating content means writing. Creating content means uploading images. Creating content means sharing videos. Any form of media that you can use online will give you an advantage when it comes to making money. Now, the most important thing to remember is that to make money online, you have to be found and get traffic. For most people, writing content is going to be the backbone of your business model. While it is completely possible to make money online without ever writing a word, it’s well out of the reach of most people. Be honest with yourself: do you really have the ability to take brilliant, stunning photographs that people can’t resist searching for and showing everyone they know? Do you create amazing videos that millions will want to watch? More than likely, the answer is a stern ‘no.’ Anyone can write compelling content with enough time and practice. That is why it is the most widely used and relied on form of information online, and why you will be using it throughout your ambitious attempts to make money on the internet.

• Create content that is unique in every way possible. This doesn’t mean that you have to invent some entirely new piece of writing. It’s probably true that everything that can be said has been said already. When it comes to making money online, uniqueness is one of the major keys in ranking well in the search engines. Do not simply copy and paste other articles from around the internet. If you are using PLR articles – STOP! It doesn’t take very long to hash out ideas and information, while at the same time creating content that is worded entirely different than other articles and information online. It is perfectly reasonable to do research, and to even model yourself after one of the top Google positions for your keyword. Just make sure that you are changing the information as much as possible, and make sure you are adding as much of your own information in every piece of content you create. You don’t have to write an epic novel, but when it comes to making money online, being thorough is key.

• Create content people want to read and see. While it’s easy to come up with ideas and create unique content, determining whether or not people actually want to read what you’ve written will be paramount to your success in making money on the internet. At this point, you should have already done your keyword research, and you should have a good idea of how large your audience is. Even if you’ve found the perfect keyword and skyrocket to the top of the search engines in one night, your success is not guaranteed. People need to like what you have to say. Write information that is easy to read and understand. Include images and interesting content as much as possible. It might even be beneficial to include a video or two. Anything you can do to make your content likeable and interesting will help you reach your goals and succeed in making money online.

Again, once you reach the ‘blueprints’ part of the article, you will learn a few methods for creating content specific to your internet business model. When it comes to making money online via content, consistency and patience are key to your success. Now, we will analyze the third step required to make money online – and perhaps the most challenging step for beginners.

SEO

You’ve done your keyword research, and you’ve created some stellar pieces of content. Now you have to do the work to get your articles spread around the internet and to the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages). When it comes to making money online, many people struggle with SEO. There are many businesses out there which charge hefty fees to complete this step for you. There are also a lot of products geared toward teaching you the ‘secrets’ of SEO and rising to the top of the search engines. The truth is, SEO is not as complicated as many people make it out to be. It is simply time consuming, and takes a lot of work for just a little improvement and success; however, making money online often involves the reward of passive income, and the time you put in today will pay off greatly throughout the future. SEO is divided into two parts: on-page and off-page.

• On-Page SEO. Once you’ve done your research and created your first article, there are a few things you must do before publishing your content to ensure it is optimized to be found and understood by the search engines, which will maximize your chances of making money online. On-page SEO is easy to do, and you can be up and running in just a few minutes. First, you need to make sure that the keywords you are targeting are emphasized in your content. Your keywords and phrases should make up between 1-3% of all the words in your article – this is known as keyword density – and the article should still be readable without sounding too promotional. You can find and use free keyword density tools by searching Google for ‘free keyword density tool.’ Next, you want to make sure that your keywords stand out amongst the other content on your page. The title of your page should include your keywords and phrases – it should also be used in the H1 heading tag on the page. Your meta description (typically, the first 150-180 characters of your content) should contain your keywords and phrases. You should underline, bold or italicize your keywords several times throughout your content (but not every occurrence of the keyword), and you should make use of H1-H6 tags with your keywords as well. Finally, your content should be added to a sitemap for your website, and the sitemap should be submitted to the search engines. Make sure that your content does not have too many outbound links. By following these few simple rules, on-page SEO should be simple, quick and help you earn money online easier. If you don’t understand any of the terms I just mentioned, do a Google search for them – most of it is simple html.

• Off-Page SEO. Here it is! The coup de grace of making money online. Off Page SEO is also known as link-building or back-linking. This is the most daunting, time consuming and challenging part of making money on the internet. A few years ago, it was easy to rank high in the search engines with just a few links. Today, it’s much more challenging. Let me jump right out there and get this out in the open: there are no shortcuts, software that ‘does this for you’ will hurt you in the long run, and spammers never win. Off-page SEO involves getting high-quality, relevant links to your content. Many people are under the impression that submitting their site to 1,000 social bookmarking sites, creating 1,000 forum profiles, or commenting on 1,000 blog posts will do the trick. It wont, it doesn’t, and even if you get some results from this method, it won’t last long. Making money online revolves around high-quality content and organic traffic, and there is nothing organic about using software to try and cheat the search engines. To maximize off-page SEO, you must try to get relevant content on other websites to link back to you, using your keyword as anchor text – anchor text is how the link reads, if you don’t already know that. The easiest way that this can be achieved is by creating even more unique content that wont make you any money, and publishing unique versions on many other websites. Then, you will build links and awareness to those articles so they can be found by the search engines. This part is simpler, and can simply involve using a bookmarking site or a site like Amplify.com. Once they have been indexed, they will begin to pass some authority to your own content. This entire strategy is known as ‘article marketing’ and is truly one of the best ways to rank well in the SERPs. Don’t take my word for it – learn how to do competition analysis of the top-ranking sites for any keyword you search for in Google. Use a website like backlinkwatch.com to analyze their backlinks, and many times you will find 100’s of articles pointing back to their own content. Now do a back-link check on those articles, and you might find even more links pointing to those. This is how it’s done, and the best tactic is to build a few links per day over time – if you do them all at once, you risk the chance of looking like a spammer.

As you can see, there is nothing fast and easy about making money online, and you may be wondering: for all the work it takes to rank just one page of content, is it even worth it? The answer is yes, because the income is passive and your efforts continue to pay off with just a little bit of maintenance. Maintenance means updating your own content to keep it fresh, and building more links (a few at a time) as often as needed to keep your top position. Although it’s slow in the beginning, the trick here is to rinse-and-repeat. After a period of time, with many high-ranking pages of content, your work will be justified as you continue to earn more money. If you can utilize the spirit of perseverance, you can make a full-time living doing this.

Making Money Online – Blueprints

As promised, here are several simple blueprints for making money online with estimates of traffic, time and return on investment. These are in no way set in stone, but come from my own experiences and observations. More info may be added to these as time goes by.

Making Money Online With eCommerce

• If you have an eCommerce website set up already, and your design and navigation are simple, clean and effective, you can expect a conversion ratio of between 0.5-3.0%, depending on your market and what you are selling. This means out of everyone who visits your website, 0.5-3.0% will buy something. Now, to earn the amount of money you are looking for, you must determine how many people are interested in buying whatever you’re selling, and the price of the items you are selling. If you are selling something for $20 and want to make $20,000 a year from it, it means that you will need anywhere between 34,000 to 200,000 visitors. If you can secure a top position in the search engines, and estimate that 20% of all searches will go to the number one position, it means you will need between a keyword with 170,000 to 1,000,000 searches per year to attain your goal, which means you are looking for a keyword with 15,000 and 100,000 searches per month. This might not be attainable for even the best websites for a single product – therefore, create an online store with many products, each optimized to be found and ranked high by the search engines. It’s a lot easier to get 1,000 visits per page across 34 pages than it is 34,000 visits to one page. The estimated time involved to get to $20,000 per year in this scenario is around 6-8 months, assuming you work full time. That doesn’t mean you’ll earn $20,000 in six months, it means after six months you’ll be earning enough to start making $20,000 per year online. You can shorten the time and make more if you sell more expensive products with low competition and a high conversion ratio – a difficult but possible scenario. eCommerce is one of the most steady methods for making money online if you have the patience and put in the effort.

Making Money Online As An Affiliate

• If you want a quicker method for making money online, Affiliate sales may be right for you. When you attempt to make money online as an affiliate, you are sending people to a website full of content which already exists using a special link that you earn commissions with if one of the visitors you send buys the product. Depending on the product, the conversion rate, the price of the product, the commission rate and number of affiliates you are competing against, affiliate sales can be hit and miss. Some people are very successful, while others seem to fail time and time again. To be honest, making money online as an affiliate may take years to truly figure out and be successful at. Many times, it involves building a list of people you can email and refer to buy something. It also involves creating content that ranks high in the search engines, simply to send someone to another website to buy something. One of the best tactics is to choose several products to promote, and promote them all equally to see which products you get the best results from. It’s also a good idea to only promote products that you like and believe in. It’s a lot easier to convince people to buy something if you can easily explain the benefits of doing so. Some people who have been in internet marketing for several years are making millions per year with affiliate sales. If you get lucky and pick a product which converts well and you are able to be a top seller, you might expect to earn a few hundred dollars per month with affiliate sales. A good tactic is to set up a website or blog based around the keyword your product is about, drive traffic to it, and promote your product as much as possible. Rinse and repeat. Using the same formula mentioned in the eCommerce blueprint, you could expect only half the number of people to buy because they have to visit another website. You will need double the traffic to earn the same amount in the same period of time.

Making Money Online With Advertising

• The most widely used method for making money online is with advertising programs, such as Google AdSense. Even with the smallest amount of traffic, it is easy to make SOME money online with advertising because it only takes a click or impressions to earn small amounts which add up. Making money online with advertising is also one of the best forms of recurring income because you will continue to earn as long as people continue to visit your content. You have a few options for earning this way. You can create your own keyword targeted website, start a blog, or join a revenue sharing website. With your own website and blog, it will take some time to get off the ground and gain enough trust from Google to be ranked well. Making money blogging or with a website also requires all the administrative duties of on-page SEO and web design. However, the benefit is that you will earn 100% of all the ad income. Revenue sharing sites are one of the quickest methods used for making money online. Websites such as the one you’re on display your own ads a certain percentage of the time. In this case, 70% of the time. However, you have the benefit of the on-page SEO being completed for you, and audience already built, and a network of people you can utilize to improve your content and share it across the internet. Revenue sharing sites also have referral programs – so, like affiliate sales, you can make money online by referring new members. The benefit here is that you earn money from someone else’s work. So, if you can refer a really good writer, and you earn 25% of the ad income from their content, you can easily start making money online in a short period of time. However, the same rules typically apply: you have to create compelling content, link to it, rinse and repeat. Making money online with advertising may be very popular, but it’s not for everyone because it is completely reliant on content and ranking well in the search engines. A very small percentage of people make a full time income this way because they don’t have the motivation to stick with and continue working hard for small sums of money. However, over time, those small amounts add up and continue to multiply exponentially, making it worth your effort. Assuming the average click through rate is somewhere around 1%, and the average amount received per ad-click is between 5-20 cents, you should either aim for the highest traffic keywords possible, or for dozens-hundreds of low-competition, low-traffic keywords and try to rank them all.

There you have it – perhaps the longest article about making money online you’ve ever read. I will continue to update this article with tips and tricks over time, so bookmark it and check back often. Do you have any methods for earning money online that I didn’t mention? Sign up, sign in and leave a comment. You can start making money online today right here at Seekyt.

Tips

• Writing about current events and offering humorous and unique opinions is a great way to gain a lot of attention and go ‘viral.’
• Going viral is one of the best methods for making money online. Although it can be difficult to ascertain, viral traffic can have a lasting effect on your reputation and influence level on the internet. This is exceptionally effective and plausible for the ‘Advertising’ and ‘Affiliate’ models of making money online.
• If you run out of ideas to write about, try writing reviews of new hot products available on Amazon or other internet retailers. Not only are there massive numbers of people who will want to read your review, but you can also leave affiliate links to the product or alternative/complimentary products and earn money online if someone buys it. Amazon has an associates program that you can use to compliment this type of content.
• Use Social Networking and Social Media to compliment your strategy for making money online. By building a reputation and gaining the interest of thousands of unique people, you can leverage traffic from an audience which has already been built. Twitter and Facebook have millions of users, and anyone can find at least several thousand members on those websites who might be interested in what you have to offer. Be sure not to spam them – offer high quality advice and information, and occasionally offer a link back to your product, service or monetized content.
• By becoming a source of information on Social Networking websites, your reputation can exponentially grow, as your customer base expands rapidly. Imagine 1,000 interested fans sharing your links or retweeting your content to their own massive groups of followers. Keep up to date with current events and trends, and offer interesting and informative insights and information. It’s easier to build a base of followers than you think.
• Set up a schedule and a strategy based on what you have learned, and based on what works for you, and stick to it. Making money online takes a lot of work and time, and so the more work and time you put into it, and the sooner you get started, the quicker it will happen.
• Beware of information overload. Making money online is only possible if you apply strategies that work, and stick to what you know. There are thousands, or even millions of pages of content and products out there to teach you the tricks to getting on page one of Google. The truth is, they all teach the same thing: create content, be an affiliate, use SEO, choose good keywords, etc.. The time you spend reading and trying to figure out which plan to use is time that could be spent making money online. This article gives you all the basic information you need to get started.
• You can start making money online with eCommerce with websites like Etsy.com and other small goods shops. While you are much better off having your own website, sometimes the established audience of buyers who may already be looking for your product can help you make some sales. Link back to your own website and try to refer buyers to your own store from online stores like Etsy and Ebay.
• Are you a talented programmer or web designer? You can earn money online by offering your services on outsourcing websites. Sometimes, you will have to compete against low-wage bidders from foreign countries, but some people have successfully built serious careers or made a nice side income by offering their talent to other webmasters.
• Just because buying ‘Get Rich’ products is a waste of time and money doesn’t mean they don’t have their purpose. No matter how useless the information is, there is always a market for information teaching others to make money on the internet. If you have ever had the opportunity to read these ebooks, you know that most of them contain the same information, rehashed and edited over and over again. Consider creating a product like this, building a website around the product, and hiring affiliates to sell it for you. If you can provide good information, you’ll do even better.
• Since making money online revolves around traffic and conversion, it’s a good idea to spend some time building a following and creating an image for yourself before you promote yourself. Many people have been successful at making thousands of connections on sites like Digg and Stumble Upon. If you have the network of people behind you, you can receive thousands of visitors a day through word of mouth marketing. However, getting the connections is the difficult part: it requires making comments, submitting popular content, voting for others’ content, and interacting. Put the ‘social’ back into social bookmarking and social networking, and you’ll see an increase in your success.
• If you rely on AdSense or other advertising networks to make money online, the goal is to provide enough content to rank well, but not enough for the user to simply close the page or browser after reading your article. Ads are supposed to present useful information for users, so it’s important that the reader feels that they can get more information from relevant ads on your site. Therefore, keep your content to the point, and don’t write extremely long articles that give every detail of information away to the reader. This is one of the many secrets for boosting your ad CTR (click through rate), and maximizing how much money you will earn over time.
• It is possible to make a lot of money online with Advertising, but it may be out of reach for the average person. Don’t limit yourself to one ad network, and don’t limit yourself to one website when you are just starting out. Take advantage of as many ad networks as you can, such as AdSense, Amazon, and Chitika, and create content on as many websites as you can. Making money online with advertising i