Make Money Online

How To Earn Money Online With A Simple Blog

Looking for a way to earn money online that does not involve start up costs? Try starting a blog.

Blogs (more correctly known as weblogs) began as a form of online journal for people who wanted to write about themselves, their families, their vacations, hobbies, pets or whatever without going to the trouble and expense of setting up a static website and learning hypertext markup language (HTML). Before blogs were invented, you had to know HTML to have any kind of website.

But with a blog, everything is much easier. You can sign up somewhere like blogger.com or wordpress.com and they have templates that you can just go ahead and use out of the box. Pick a topic and a name for your blog, choose a template that you like and start writing.

Since you want to earn from your blog rather than just pouring your heart out to the world, you need to do a little thinking before you select your subject. It needs to be something that you are interested in so that you stay motivated, but there also must be related products that people are willing to pay for. Without this, nobody will want to advertise on your blog and you will not make any money.

So you need to find what is called a ‘hungry market’. This is a group of people who have a problem, need or desire that can be solved by the information on your blog and the products that will be advertised there. For example, people who want to lose weight; people trying to save their marriage; keen golfers who are desperate to improve their swing.

You need to be sure that your market will be prepared to pay for the solutions that you or your advertisers offer, and not expect to get the information for free. For example people often look online to find the definition of a word they do not know, but they will not pay for that. You also need to be sure that your market has money – the more the better.

Golf is a popular topic for websites and blogs for this reason. Golf is an expensive hobby and golfers are used to spending money on equipment, club membership and information to improve their game. You can probably think of other similar money spinning hobbies.

Your blog will be found by visitors faster if it is very specific. After you have your broad subject, there are many tools that you can use for keyword research to find words and phrases that people are searching for and which do not have too much competition.

You do not have to worry too much at first about finding products to promote. You can simply sign up with Google Adsense and run their ads on your site. This saves you having to look for individual advertisers. Use the time instead to fill the blog with plenty of posts and build links to it by leaving comments on other relevant blogs, rewriting your blog posts and submitting them as articles to directories, etc.

If you do not like writing you can build a great blog that is based around photos you took, royalty free photos that you download or videos that you can embed from YouTube.

Later you can find products to promote as an affiliate and you will probably find that this is more profitable than Adsense, especially if you have an opt in form on your blog so that you can collect visitors’ email addresses and keep on emailing them about the products you are promoting. But all of this takes time. Adsense is a quick and easy option while you are getting started.

Having your own blog on a subject that interests you is a great way to earn money online while having some fun at the same time. 

Tags: earn money online, blog, make money

Legitimate Work At Home Jobs: Paid Surveys?

Are you searching for legitimate work at home jobs online? You are certainly not alone. The massive spread of the internet along with reductions in other industries means that plenty of people are coming online looking for ways to make a little extra cash to see them through to payday.

This huge demand, together with the anonymity of the internet, means that unfortunately there are some scams out there. It is easy to be swept along with a site that offers you the opportunity to get rich for a small initial fee. Often though, the initial fee turns out not to be so small. The opportunity may be harder to profit from than you expected, or may not even exist at all. When you ask for a refund, there may be no response from the promoter who could be in another country where laws are not so strict.

However, there is nothing new about scams. The internet may expose us to more of them just as it exposes us to more of everything, but bogus money making schemes have been around since money was first invented. One of the best known offline scams was the envelope stuffing scheme. If you see an ad for making money by stuffing envelopes (‘just send us a $5 bill’) don’t do it! You will probably just be told to make money by placing the same ad yourself.

Paid surveys are a money making opportunity that you will often see advertised online. They work because companies are prepared to pay ordinary consumers to fill out surveys of their preferences or purchasing patterns. They may also be paying for your email address. You will usually sign up with a network who will manage the scheme and send you links to online surveys that you can fill out. You earn credits for each survey you complete. After you have a certain number of credits you can convert them to cash.

Most of these schemes are legitimate but you should read the small print to check what you will get paid and how much you need to do before you can withdraw cash. Be careful of schemes where you have to pay to join or buy a list of survey companies. These may be useful, but you will have to work more at first just to make back the money that you spent for the information.

There are schemes that you can join for free. Here you should have nothing to lose except your time so you can try it out and see how much you can make.

Similar schemes may pay you to read email or click on advertisements. These usually earn you tiny amounts – a fraction of a cent for each click. It can add up but don’t expect to make big money unless you manage to sign up a lot of people under you. Usually you will earn a small commission on their clicks as well as your own.

Paid survey opportunities are most profitable if you live in the USA. Most of the highest paying companies will only pay to a US bank account or residential address. If you live elsewhere in the English speaking western world (e.g. Canada, UK, Australia) you may be able to find similar opportunities but they usually do not pay so well. If you are in another country you probably will not find anything.

There is a big advantage to looking for home working opportunities online and that is the existence of many internet forums where you can chat to other people who have experience of the different programs that are available. Search for ‘work at home forum’ or something similar. At these sites you can check out any paid survey opportunities that you are thinking of trying, to make sure that other consumers have had good experiences with them and that they are legitimate work at home jobs. 

Tags: legitimate work at home jobs, home jobs, paid surveys, make money