The internet is full of ways to make money, but we all know that. Obviously sites like Facebook.com, ESPN.com, and Amazon.com produce income, but what good does that do for a regular person who is trying to get started? If you had to create a site like THAT to make money with the internet, none of us would ever do it – I certainly wouldn’t.
What we need is a method that a normal person can follow. When I first started getting interested in making money with the internet, that’s what I was looking for – a method that I could learn even though I was starting from scratch. When I first started investigating how this would be possible, I was making $6 per hour plus commissions working at Radio Shack. I didn’t know the first thing about putting a web site together and Icertainly didn’t know how to get traffic or make money with one.
My journey began about five years ago and my sites are now producing more than $40,000 per month and I honestly believe that there are a lot of people out there who could produce a similar result within the time-frame I did it on. If you have found this article, you’re a huge step ahead of where I was, because you have a person who’s willing to tell you how it’s done. This article will explain in detail how I went about creating my very profitable online business.
How I Make Money Online, In A Nutshell
For the most part, my online business is based around providing people with free information. I set up simple websites that teach people things. Most of the time I know absolutely nothing about the topics I write about beforehand – I have to learn them to be able to set up these simple sites.
For example, my research tools (more on that later) tell me that about 880 people per month search Google for the ‘cost of lasik surgery’. Right now I have no idea how much LASIK costs, but I can easily find out with a few phone calls. Once I have this knowledge (which is easy to get), I can put up a simple web page that explains the range of what LASIK costs. If there aren’t too many sites trying to do the same thing, Google will start sending me traffic and that traffic is where the money comes from.
Once traffic starts to come in, it’s fairly simple to make a profit. The easiest way to make a profit is by installing ads that get you paid for each click. Google has an awesome program called Adsense that does just that, it pays you each time a person clicks on an ad. The amount they pay you depends on the topic you’re writing about – with LASIK related topics you can expect to get $1+ for each click you produce.
On average, you can get between 5-10% of the people who come to your web page to click on an ad. That means that bringing 200 visitors to a page in a month would produce 10-20 clicks, which would produce $10-20 in revenue. Bringing 2,000 visitors would create $100-200 in revenue and bringing 20,000 visitors would create $1,000-$2,000 in revenue. Bringing 200,000 visitors would create $10,000-$20,000 in revenue.
I spend most of my time finding profitable topics to write about, doing research about them, and then creating web pages about them. When I started out, I knew absolutely nothing about setting up websites. This took a while to learn because I didn’t know where to start. Fortunately, it wasn’t as hard as I thought. I believe that most people can learn how to set up simple sites without too much trouble.
I found that the easiest way to set up a website is by setting up a blog.
What Exactly Is A Blog?
According to Wikipedia:
A blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.
In plainer English, a blog is a website that shows the newest entries at the beginning, usually on the homepage. This website is a blog, and for that reason you will always find my newest writing on the homepage, at the top. As you scroll down, you will find the other entries I have written, newest to oldest.
What Are Blogs About?
There are blogs about everything! This blog teaches people how to make money on the internet. There are blogs about sports, news, fitness, cooking, humor, teaching, parenting, celebrities, and everything else you can imagine.
Blogs are a great format for news sites. Since blogs show the newest entries first, readers can easily find the most recent news stories. Bloggers (those who blog) post news about every industry, and provide their own opinions on the subject matter.
When blogs first started, they were created primarily to be online journals, but have now evolved into websites about anything and everything.
If I created a site about LASIK, I would try to find related topics that people were trying to learn about. Here are some of the possible topics that people are looking for:
- cost of lasik
- custom wavefront lasik
- lasik eye surgery risks
- lasik eye surgery complications
I could easily create a lesson for my site on each of these topics by doing a little research.
How Do People Make Money Blogging?
Blogs can develop quite a following by people interested in the blog’s industry. Popular blogs can get thousands of hits per day. Gizmodo, Engadget, and Perez Hilton are three mega popular blogs which all get hundreds of thousands of visitors per day.
The traffic of most blogs is converted to money through advertising. That probably sounds difficult to you if you’re new, but it’s actually really easy. The primary revenue streams of most blogs are:
- Ad-Boxes
- Google Adsense – Anyone can sign up for this service and it’s 100% free to use. Google will display ads on your blog and pay you when they get clicked on. This is by far the easiest way to make money with your blog. If the other methods don’t make sense right now, that’s ok. You should stick to Adsense until you get your feet wet.
- Yahoo! Publishing – Yahoo’s version of Adsense. Yahoo’s version is also free to use.
- Contextual Ads – These are ads that are displayed throughout the text of your blog. If you look closely through my pages you will see links that are double underlined. These are actually ads and if you hover over them, a little ad-box will pop up. The contextual ad company will pay for clicks on the links or the ad-box.
- Affiliate Programs – Many bloggers sell products and services for other sites and receive appropriate commissions. There are tons of sites out there that offer free, affiliate programs including:
- Text Links – Bloggers can sell links from there pages to other websites. Most bloggers that use this kind of revenue stream use a company called text-link-ads.com. Their service is free to use and their company will sell the ads for you. The sites that purchase them pay monthly, and you get paid monthly.
- Direct Sales – Some bloggers sell their own products and services.
How Much Can A Person Make With Type Of Business?
That’s really tough question to answer. Some people make more than $500,000 per year and some make $0. The difference is obviously knowledge and work ethic. You have to learn HOW this business works and you then have to do the work. The amount a person can make with a blog depend on a lot of factors including:
I think that most people could produce at least $1,000 per month with this type of business. Many people possess the talents necessary to make a LOT more. I know quite a few people who make four and five figure side incomes this way, and others who make six figure incomes. I personally make all of my money this way and it works out great for me.
In my opinion, creating simple websites is the easiest of all the methods of making money online, at least for beginners. It is also a stepping stone for those wishing to move onto more difficult online, money-making methods.
How To Get Started
I would probably start by reading some of the articles that I’ve written here on CourtneyTuttle.com. One of the more important articles for you will be mine on starting a blog. It will help you out with some of the technical aspects – getting your site set up, etc.
A lot of the skills that you’ll need to learn can be learned here for free. However, if you need more support or if you would like to fast track your learning, we have a paid membership that makes things a lot easier to learn. To make things as easy as possible for our paid members, we created easy to follow lessons in video format. We show you how to find topics to write about, how to estimate how much income they can produce, how to set up simple websites, how to build traffic to them, and virtually every other step of the process.
The biggest selling point of our membership program is that you can cancel your own membership – at any time. If you have decided that you have learned all that you can from us, you can simply log in to PayPal and cancel yourself.
We give the first month’s access to the full program for the ridiculous price of $1. If you decide that you would like to stick around, you can maintain your access for $33 per month. If you would like to learn more about our program, you can read more about it here: The Keyword Academy Pro.
