Ways To Make Money Online

So I started on my journey of learning all the different ways to make money online and, in particular, how to start a blog. Like I said before, I figured it shouldn’t be too hard for any reasonably-computer-savvy person to figure out. Well, there were some rude awakenings and very frustrating times ahead for me. Read on and note what I went through, so you can avoid the same pitfalls.

Now the cool thing was, it seemed like there were lots of friendly, altruistic teachers out there just clamoring to send you their “business in a box” or their “complete, step-by-step, can’t-possibly-screw-this-up blueprint” for learning how to do make money bloggingonline marketing the right way…right?

“Oh, yes, there is a small fee involved – $97, $250, $995 – but hey, we’ll show you how to make ten times that much!”
(“Uh, no guaranteed income claims, of course,”)

“And, we’ll give you a full 29-days to try the program, with 100% money-back guarantee!”
(Really? I’m still within the 29 days, and I’ve sent you my refund request 5 times…no reply!)

“AND, this method is soooo easy to follow that even a child could implement it, and start making money their first day online
(“and, um, maybe we’ll have a forum, for the hundreds of questions you’ll have, when it turns out to be not-so-easy at all!”)

Yeah, I fell for it, and went through tons of different programs, trying to figure out how to make even $1 online. It turned out to be much more complicated and confusing than I thought. Lots of details to remember and social networking connections to make. My head swam with information overload about keyword placement, LSI-related keywords (what were those?,) writing and submitting tons of articles to hundreds of directories and Web 2.0 social media sites (whatever the hell they were.) Believe me, there were many times I felt like chucking the whole idea.

Oh sure, I learned how to put up nice-looking WordPress sites, how to affiliate with a Clickbank product or a CPA network, how to insert my ads and cloaked hoplinks (don’t worry if you don’t know what these terms mean…we’ll cover it all later) into my review site, even how to do some good up-front keyword research to make sure I wasn’t targeting overly-saturated terms.

Then I put it all together and there my website was. And there it sat. And sat. I just couldn’t seem to get any visitors to the damn thing. I read nine kinds of traffic generating manuals, tried some article marketing, forum posts and blog commenting they recommended. But my sites continued to languish somewhere between page 50 and 5000 of Google, that neverland past page 1 or 2 that no one ever browses.

I was truly about to throw in the towel, when I discovered autoblogging – blogs that posted hundreds or thousands of pages, complete with photos, great articles and auctions from eBay and Amazon, all done for you automatically. I’ll put it bluntly…it saved my internet ass. It not only kept me from giving up, but interestingly enough, I started learning more about what’s important traffic-and-rank-wise, and what truly makes sales, than any of those arcane traffic manuals I read…and I started making some real money!  There are, of course, many ways to make money online, and you are always encouraged to master as many of these as you can, so you are not depending solely on one income method or stream. Purchasing and learning an autoblogging program should not be the only, or even main approach, you rely on. It should be thought of as one (deadly sharp) arrow in your Internet Marketing quiver. But for many newcomers, it may be the ideal place to start. To see why I think so and what happened for me next, go on to my next post.