There is a lot of information out there regarding search engine marketing and search engine optimisation. Everyone wants to be at the top of Google, and the people who know how to do it are becoming more and more sort after, not only in the commercial world, but also in the blogging community.

Coveting that elusive 1st place Google ranking can become addictive, and so it should, it’s the best free advertising that an online presence can get. However when I say ‘free’ what it doesn’t cost in actual physical money, it makes up for in time.

However if you follow these simple rules, you may not get 1st place, but you will increase your sites visibility in the search engines and in turn, increase the traffic to your site.

• Create a site with valuable content, products or services – as obvious as this sounds, the best way to rank well in search engines for a specific phrase or word, is to provide quality information that the end user will find useful.
• Place keywords in your meta details, titles, URLs, headers, alt attributes on images and include them in your content, but make sure that it does not sound spammy – this will alienate your readership.
• Research Keywords and use the right keywords/phrases to attract your target customers. Use a tool such as Google’s Keyword tool or SEO books free keyword tool.
• Keep your site design simple so that your customers can navigate easily between web pages, find what they want and buy products and services.
• Submit your web pages i.e. every web page and not just the home page, to the most popular search engines and directory services. Hire someone to do it for you if required. However be sure this is a manual submission, do not engage an automated submission service.
• Research Keep track of changes in search engine algorithms and modify your web pages accordingly, so your search engine ranking remains high.
• Monitor your competitors to see what they are doing right in the way of content, keywords, design, navigation, etc.
• Install Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools These are invaluable free tools that allow you to see where your traffic is coming from and any errors with your site that may be hurting your rankings. Analyze your visitor location and their incoming sources whether search engines or links from other sites and the keywords they used to find you.
• Submit articles Demonstrate your industry, product or service expertise by writing and submitting articles for your website or for article banks. This not only helps you be perceived as an expert in your field but also helps with search engine rankings.
• When not sure, hire professionals. Though it may seem costly, it is a lot less expensive than spending your money on a website which no one visits.

This is just a taste what you should be doing to gain rankings within the search engines, there is a lot more free information out there that will enable you to drive traffic to your website and increase visibility.

If SEO is an area that you are interested in and you want to learn more about the technical side of it then two resources I would recommend are SEO Book and SEOMoz. However if you have a specific question then feel free to comment and I will try and answer it for you.

I’ve put together a list of what I consider to be the best ways to earn extra cash but feel free to add to the list if you feel I have left a good program or system from the list.

Online market research & Paid Surveys

Willing to give your view on the Labour Party, answer questions about your sex life, or test out the latest moisturiser? If so, it’s possible to earn £100s a year, without any special skill or talent. You can get paid cash to take part in online surveys, which are often short enough to fill in during breaks at work.

How much? Some surveys can pay £1 to £3 for just a couple of minutes of your time.

Find out more: There are a lot of paid survey sites out there and they’re mostly free to join, sign up and take a look.

Affiliate Marketing

If you run any kind of website – commercial or personal – you can add affiliate links to it and get paid each time somebody clicks from your page. The most popular schemes are Google’s ‘Adsense’ and Amazon’s ‘Associates’ – and don’t cost a penny to install. Of course, if you’re to generate a substantial income through these schemes you’ll need a high level of site traffic, and this can be difficult to achieve.

If you’re sure you can provide site content which will appeal to a substantial number of people then give it a try, but generally it’s not worth starting one up just for the purpose of affiliate marketing.

How much? A niche website with loyal usage could earn £1,000s a year from these links.

Find out more: Join the discussion and read other MoneySavers’ top suggestions or add your own in the Making money from websites thread.

Earn from internet research

Sites such as Any Question Answered (AQA), and Ask118 all work in the same way: a customer searching for the answer to any question, sends a text to researchers – you – who replies with the answer.

YOU select what type of questions you want to answer, and the hours you work. These online jobs are highly sort after and the companies don’t always have vacancies in your chosen subject area – you’ll also likely have to pass a test before you get an interview.

How much? You’ll be paid around 30p per question, and some can take just a few moments to answer, meaning that experienced researchers get up to £2,000 a month.

Find out more: Any Question Answered or Ask118

Get paid every time you spend

Cashback credit cards pay you back a proportion of what you spend each time you use them. Therefore set up a Direct Debit to pay it off in full each month so there’s no interest cost and you can earn. Just use the card for all your normal spending and you’ll make money.

How much? The top cashback cards pay up to 4% cashback for a short period and then a standard 1%. So if you spend £10,000 a year you stand to make £200, just by paying with a different piece of plastic.

Get paid to click

It’s possible to get paid just for clicking links on the internet. This is a by-product of the fact that many advertisers pay websites for sending them traffic (ie. for visitors clicking through to their sites). As noted above, cashback websites give you a share of their ad-revenue; and therefore on the occasions where they’re paid just for sending traffic, you can be paid just for clicking.

How much? It’s not too difficult to rack up £20 a month just by clicking paid links, as long as you’re consistent with the routine; set passwords on screen to make it easier.

How do I do it? Take a look at the paid to click articles on the site.

PS: You can also click and give to charity… See The Hungersite article for more.

Do some freelance work

If you’ve skills in a specific area, you may be able to do a little freelance work on the side. Getafreelancer & PeoplePerHour are project recruitment sites; companies list projects they want completed, and freelancers ‘bid’ on them, both by saying why they’ll be the most suitable candidate, and literally entering their price for the work. It’s free to join and bid on work, but a fee is taken out of your pay for each job.

How much? It depends on the job, the duration and skills involved, and how many freelancers are competing for it. The only drawback is that you might find yourself competing against workers from countries with a much lower cost of living, who can undercut you.

Find out More Elance is one of the best starting places to embark on your freelance career.

How refreshing.

Useful content and completely free. No strings attached. Don’t believe me? Check it out for yourself…

When you go to the page and put your name and email in, you go STRAIGHT to the full 20 videos of solid content. As I said . . . how refreshing.

And how annoying. No, not for me, or for you. I’m talking about the Guru’s online.

Having watched the videos myself, I can tell you hand on heart, I have paid $100 before for products with LESS info. So yep, I’m sure this is gonna annoy the hell out of some of the big gun marketers online.

To be honest I’ve never heard of Steve Peirce before. But that doesn’t matter as the content is great. It’s basically the full run down on how he makes six figures online. The videos go from start to finish as you watch over his shoulder as he builds another site.

You get to watch and copy. It’s a great way to learn, especially if you’re new to Internet Marketing.

Another great thing is the fact that the only expenses are your hosting, which you’ll need for any serious online venture, and your domain name. So around $15 total first month.

It’s one of the simplest ways to make money online and doesn’t involve making your own product, trying to get joint venture partners, expensive Adwords campaigns or website design skills.

Now don’t get me wrong, you’re not going to set this up in an hour. But if you want to make real money online, stop what you’re doing and get over to http://www.CloneCashSystem.com

Put your details in and 30 seconds from now you can start watching the videos. OK, so there’s 20 of them, but take notes and watch them through once. Then get stuck in and take action.

Even I learnt a few new things and I’ve been doing this stuff for ages now.

If you’re new to making money online, you can learn quickly from these videos.

Steve talks you through:

Affiliate marketing : what it is and why it’s the simplest and fastest way to make money online. I agree with what he says entirely.

Keywords : Actual real life examples of selecting keywords for your website. Worth it’s weight in gold as it’s the number one stumbling block for newbies online. In fact some seasoned marketers still haven’t fully grasped these concepts yet.

Niche : A great site for finding niche affiliate products. Hey, I’VE bookmarked it! Real good example of unusual places to find products to sell as an affiliate.

The power of forum marketing : My favourite. What’s the chance of this happening on video? You’ll have to watch it to see what I’m talking about, as I don’t want to spoil it.

These are great videos. Don’t let the amount put you off. Get stuck in and you will learn more from these than many $50+ ebooks.

Remember there is nothing for sale here. Just go and watch the video it’s free.

For example, you could offer memberships to users who need articles for their website. The memberships would need to be renewed every few months or so. Every time someone renews their membership = You make more money.

The profit potential for this kind of business is quite high. It doesn’t cost much to provide your members with informational items, but you could charge them a nice amount to access them, giving you a profit that keeps on giving.

What skills are helpful?

Marketing skills will be the most helpful. Driving those internet users who are looking for your offering to your site to purchase your memberships is what will make you the money. Having some knowledge of running a website could be useful as well (to keep your site running smoothly for your members.)

You may want to have some knowledge of the products you’re offering. For example, if you’re offering articles to your members, you should know what makes a good article and how they work for the different purposes.

What tools are needed?

You will need a high quality website to handle the demands that the membership site will bring and you should provide excellent service should something go wrong with the site. There are some membership site management software programs that can help you get one set up and running for less than $100.

Content for the site is another tool you will need. You need to provide your paying members with fresh content to use regularly. It could be in the form of written articles, software programs or even online games, depending on what you plan to give your members.

How do you get started?

You will need to plan your membership site beforehand.

• What do you plan to offer your members?
• Will it be content, software etc?

When you have made your decision, then come up with a new and different angle to provide your consumers.

You could provide content in a specific niche, like nutrition, or you could offer a certain kind of written content – whatever it takes to provide internet users with a fresh angle/niche. This helps you stand out from the crowd of competitors out there.

Next, get your membership site created with a shopping cart feature to handle the payments for the memberships. The membership management software programs should come with all you need to accomplish your business. All you would then need is the content to give to your members.

The most important step will be to market your membership site to get people to find you. Make sure you research and learn some SEO and SEM techniques.

Membership sites can offer you a means of earning a residual type income. If people are satisfied with what you give them, they will have no problems handing you their money to keep renewing their access to your site’s content.

The most impressive part about HighProfits.com has to be its youth. Still relatively new to the affiliate market, they have hit the ground running offering affiliates an array of incentives to peak their interest and get them promoting at full speed.

Logging onto their website, the first thing to catch our attention was the sites easy navigation system. It was incredibly easy to use, making the appeal of such a network hard to resist.

Everything you could need to know about HighProfits.com and their resources was presented to you on a silver platter. And when it came to experimenting with their resources, their accessibility made getting started all the more efficient.

HighProfits.com connections to NATs software plays an important part in achieving that; offering affiliates the means to track successful and unsuccessful referrals, advertisements, surfer location, program and campaigns all in one go.

They essentially remove the obstacle of having to trail through your traffic and conversions, and instead offer affiliates their statistics in concise activity charts and interactive graphs.

I found this feature particularly enticing, in terms of inviting new affiliates to their network. The quality you can gain from their affiliate network is incredible.

Next on the list has to be HighProfits.com resources. As an affiliate first starting out, creating your very first website can feel daunting, but HighProfits.com have got that angle covered too.

All of their products – and we do mean all of them – come with a multitude of banners, reviews, articles and email marketing tools to ensure you get the best in leads and traffic. Their offering of odd-sized banners is particularly intriguing allowing consumers to access custom made banners to suit their website.

If you are looking for strong commissions,
look no further.

Depending on the product/ program you choose to use, with HighProfits.com you can make commissions of 30-70%. And considering their low $100 payment threshold making a profit from market affiliation will be no problem with HighProfits.com at the helm.

The community aspect to their affiliate program is also interesting. Whereas many affiliate programs adopt an outlandish perspective of setting their affiliates loose once they have created their own website, HighProfits.com incorporates a completely different viewpoint.

Instead they uphold a strong parental presence, lending their affiliates a helping hand on their website whenever they need it as well as keeping them posted about changes in marketing trends.

And this viewpoint has had a powerful impact upon the success of their affiliate program. With such constant communal support affiliates can acquire the best in affiliate representation, and know that they have got the network backing to make it a success.

Overall, I was thoroughly impressed with HighProfits.com. Their ability to offer the most novice of online marketers the support they need to create strong commission generating websites means no one is at a loss in this intimate network. They are all winners.

It’s a much longer process, but the time you invest in this make money idea can net you a lot of cash. Not only that, but there’s also more than one way of doing it, as you’re about to find out.

There is an ever growing band of people who have figured out that flipping websites is a great way to build up skills, knowledge and an impressive income at the same time.

The basic idea starts with you looking for a topic/niche that performs well online. Once you have a successful website on that topic (which you’ll do in one of the following two ways) you can offer it for sale to someone else for more than you paid for it (hence the potential profit)

The first way to do this is to start from scratch by;

• selecting a domain name
• building a website around it
• increasing the traffic to the site
• making conversions from the traffic you are recieving

This can take some time as you will need to get the site indexed in Google before you can take advantage of the amount of search engine traffic that can come your way.

The idea is to build a site that has real money making potential, as well as being able to generate a greater volume of traffic. You can do this by integrating elements such as Google Adsense, affiliate links and paid advertising into the site – and in some cases, paid memberships as well.

The second route to follow is easier – but requires a bit more research on your part. If the idea of building a site from scratch doesn’t appeal to you, or you don’t have the technical knowledge to set it up, then this method should be the one to try. The trick is to look for a website that someone has built which is getting a reasonable amount of traffic. Keyword research will reveal those subject areas and keywords which are popular online, and it is these kinds of websites you should be looking for – something that will ALWAYS be pulling in traffic.

The fact is that you can’t simply pick a great domain name and stick a few articles and affiliate links on a website and expect it to make money. It takes time and effort, and that’s why websites which have the potential to do really well end up failing – It’s not so much the site as the owner in many cases.

If you make a reasonable offer to that owner for their website, the chances are good that they will be only too pleased to get shot of the site. And that gives you the chance to get in there and really develop it in order to build on the traffic and potential it already has.

After a few months – when you are earning a dollar or more every day from your website – you can think about selling it. There are a number of websites and forums that have sections for flipping websites to other people, and depending on the profits you are making and the traffic you are getting you could make anything between a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars by flipping just one site!

Once you’ve made a success of your first website, you’ll have no doubt learned a lot from the experience, it’s now just a case of ‘rinse and repeat!’ There is no limit to the number of websites you can flip at any one time, although don’t forget you need a few months to go by before you make your first sale since you need your websites to develop before you can flip them. Once you get the ball rolling though you can expect to be selling one or more every week!

Make money reviews will usually list other chances to earn cash online, apart from survey sites, in case you find questionnaires dull or tedious. Make money reviews have plenty of options to help you to make money online. However, you will need to check each offer out, as occasionally even a specialized list will have a scam. Affiliate programs are one of the next most popular choices. Once again, you do not have to have a website to participate, although having one can help. They help you to make money online by providing you with a unique link, through which any new customers generate you a commission income.

Affiliate programs offer you a money making opportunity providing you put in a little effort and spend some time online. Affiliate programs are the best to make money from if you enjoy hanging out in forums, at online communities, and chatting on message boards. Simply slipping your unique commission link into your signature at the base of each message you make can lead to several interested parties clicking through and if they buy, they will be making you richer. If you find that you are not getting enough people take interest in your signature, you can casually mention the offer or product of the company you are affiliate to. This should generate some added custom providing you do not go overboard or sound pushy.

One idea for a money making opportunity is to combine the two.

Several survey companies will provide you with a commission payment of between one and ten pounds for each new member that signs up from your recommendation. This is a great way of making you richer.

It is possible that both survey companies and other companies other affiliate opportunities will supply you with a free widget. If you do not want to bother with getting a website, you can still make money online by inserting your widget on your profile page at community websites. In this way, you do not have the expense or hassle of running a website, yet you can still get hundreds if not thousands of people consider clicking through your widget, making you richer if they proceed. It is often easier to direct people to your profile page than talk about a wonderful money making opportunity.

Just getting them to your page allows them to see for themselves the offer of the host company. It is likely that you are not alone in wanting to earn cash, and that many people straying onto your page will go further and help you whilst helping them.

When done correctly, article marketing can be a highly effective, and inexpensive way of promoting your home business. There are many free methods of advertising on the Internet that are not very effective, but writing and distributing articles is a surefire way to get your Website noticed and a great way to make money writing online.

You have the option of submitting manually to the article directories and there are forums that accept articles too, or you can purchase a directory submitter to do the job for you.

When it comes to writing articles to make money you do not have to be an expert writer, you merely need to put down in print your views or experiences.

The object of writing and submitting articles is to draw attention to your Website, so be sure to complete the Author’s Resource Box carefully, with your name, copyright clause and of course your Website address, so that anyone who reads your article can then go on to view your Website.

By submitting articles you will also be building up back-links to your website and this will help with your search engine ranking as well. Choose your keywords carefully and be sure to place them strategically in your article without spamming. Do not turn your article into an obvious sales letter otherwise you will find some, if not most, directories will reject your article.

As requested by one of my readers I have compiled a list of High page rank article directories, some take a few days to authorise and publish but some can take anywhere up to 3 months to get published – so patience is a virtue when dealing with article marketing.

Better still, it’s possible to get cashback without even needing to spend; those who are dedicated can make £100s a year.

How Do Cashback Sites Work?

It’s really simple – Set up a free account with cashback sites such as Shop Money, log-in and then click on the product you’re interested in. When you make a transaction such as buying something, it’s recorded and you’re paid cash for doing so.

Why Do They Pay You?

Cashback sites take advantage of the way payments from one website to another work. They list product retailers, and when you click through to the websites, they get paid for ‘providing leads’ – in a similar way to how most web-adverts and affiliate marketing programs usually work.

Yet with a cashback site, when you’re logged in, the revenue raised from your click is attributed to you so the site can pay you some of the money it receives for the lead.

The Top Cashback Sites

TopCashBack :: One of a few sites paying out 100% of the cashback it receives – Most of the other 100% payers keep the first £5 you earn a year; it doesn’t.

CashBack Kings :: Set up by Rpoints – a reliable cashback website – Cashback Kings was created to compete with the 100% payout cash back sites and is easy to use and runs smoothly.

Shop Money :: Shop Money is a well established UK based cashback website which offers one of the best rates of cashback currently possible. The site is very well designed and easy to use, and has thousands of members already using the site to earn cashback on their Internet shopping.

I did a ’step by step’ post a few weeks ago outlining the nuts and bolts of starting out taking surveys for money, but have still recieved a few messages asking me if it actually works.

Most of the companies I have joined that promise you will be making $20,000+ per month have been scams. But you can make money with paid surveys – you just need to know which companies have the highest payouts and the best resources for you.

Now, I want to share a little tip with you. The place you are going to make most of your money is by doing focus groups. Focus groups are where you call into a conference call and give opinions and thoughts about products and services. That is all there is to it. They are lengthy, but well worth the time investment. You can make anywhere from $50-$100 from just one focus group. I usually get one or two of these per month because they are not as common as regular surveys.

Now, how much can you really make doing surveys for money? This is totally up to you. Some of the surveys that have high payouts are pretty lengthy, so be prepared to answer a lot of questions. On average, for each survey you complete you will get around $15-$20. Some pay higher, and some pay less. On a monthly basis, if you do surveys 5 days a week, and do one focus group per month, you can realistically make anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000 if you do 5 surveys a day, 5 days a week. This is not bad for a few surveys each day, but if you don’t have that much time to commit to it – then yes – your payout will be lower.

So, does taking surveys for money really work? My answer is YES. If you know how to get quality surveys and know where to get them, you can easily earn about $1,000 per month.

One survey review site I have come across is Paid2Review.co.uk – ALL of the programs they promote are legitimate work at home business ideas and have been tried and tested by the site owners them selves. So if you haven’t chosen your cash survey provider, take a look at Paid2Review.