You either need one of two things to make some dough.

Traffic

The first is traffic. If you have traffic then you can make a whole lot of money on the Internet. Sites like Google Adsense are real money makers for people with a whole lot of websites or one website with a lot of web traffic. The clicks really start to add up for those that can get consistent traffic. I used to struggle to meet the $100 threshold each month to even get a payout from Google when I started blogging. Now I am disappointed if I do not make $1,000 or more in Adsense income every month.

PageRank

If you have PageRank, you can get advertisers to pay you for links to your website. Advertisers are always looking for sites that Google recognizes as authoritative. You can make a nice monthly income stream for yourself by renting out some space on your website to these advertisers. It is really easy to do and you will get more opportunities as your PageRank increases.

I have an even easier solution than doing all of the work yourself.

Hire A Professional

Crystal at Budgeting In The Fun Stuff has an advertising service that matches bloggers with advertisers.She has closed more than $100,000 in ad deals for bloggers in the past six months. That is a remarkable figure! She has the names and contact information for a number of different advertisers. She can set you up with a sponsored post or sidebar ad that will bring in some extra income for your website. The best part is that you only pay her out of the money that she secures for you. It really costs you nothing because you would not even have gotten the advertising income without her. I think that it is worth giving her service a try.

All of the methods listed above are really effective at bringing in ad income for website owners. My philosophy is that if you have a website, you should be bringing in money on a monthly basis. Use the methods that I detailed above to start making more income today!

Create Multiple Sites

It is not enough to simply have a singular website and to expect for that to be an income bonanza. You can increase your chances at success by multiplying the number of online properties that you use for promotion. Let’s say that you have one single website and it brings in $100 to $200 a month in income. While that may be a small amount of income, you could multiply your monthly income by creating a number of small sites that produce the same amount of money. Creating 10 websites that each produce $200 a month can result in $2,000 in income. None of your sites need huge traffic numbers to earn that kind of money.

Use Social Media

Social media marketing is a free way to increase the exposure for your websites and to help jumpstart income gains. I have found that social media works well for building a brand and for short term traffic bursts. Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon have all been great websites for helping to obtain new site visitors and to market products that I have to sell. The key to using these social media sites is to connect with an audience that is interested in reading the content that you create and in purchasing the products that you have made.

Start Online Networking

The easiest way to make money online is to get your products and information before the largest number of people that you can. One of the ways to do this is by networking. You have to connect with other users online through as many online portals as you can. You can network with other website owners in your niche and cross promote products. Cross selling can expose your product to a whole new audience. You need to also connect with other individuals using sites like LinkedIn, Quora, and Yahoo Answers. These sites help to increase your reputation, authority, and allow you to interact with others. People are a lot more likely to purchase a product from someone that they know then someone that they do not.

You don’t have to create the iPod. You can use your creativity and energy to create something that never existed before.

Create a tangible product

You can create some new piece of hardware, an app, or some other product that you think the world needs. One thing that Steve Jobs taught is that it does not matter if the public is ready for your product or not, you should create it anyway. You could create some new digital product or technological innovation that will help the world and make you some cash at the same time.

Create a new informational product

You do not have to just turn out the same old ebook that everyone else has made. You can create some whole new form of content that no one else has thought of before. You might also have a completely fresh take on a topic that as already been done before. Sometimes the best ideas are ones that are a completely unique take on an old topic. Jobs did not invent the MP3 player or the smartphone. He took them to a whole different level which revolutionized the industry.

Create your own brand

One of the best things that Jobs did was take brands that were nonexistent and gave them cache. He took a companies like Apple and NEXT which did not exist before him and made them into household names. You can do the same. You can take a domain name and website with absolutely no following and turn it into a big sensation. The key is to have a relentless drive and a passion for excellence to take a site from anonymity into a prominent one.

Become a master in your area of expertise

The three areas that I have found to be the most lucrative for making money online are:

• Affiliate Marketing
• Freelancing
• Advertising Income

Instead of trying to do all three at once, focus on one area at a time. Only move to the next area once you have mastered the previous area. Initially with my site I found that I was able to generate thousands of dollars in income through freelancing.

Freelancing

Freelancing involved writing articles, blogging for sites, staff writing, and helping to market other websites. I relied heavily on sites like Elance and Odesk to find these jobs while my income was low from my own website. This helped to make blogging profitable for me and kept me motivated to keep writing posts for my own site. The thing that I love about freelancing is that your income is limitless.

If you want to freelance on a part time basis then you can make $1,000 to $2,000 a month. If you want to freelance on a fulltime basis then you can earn $3,000 and up every month. It all depends on how aggressively you go after freelancing jobs.

Advertising Income

Earning advertising income seems really hard when you do not know what you are doing. That is because you have no idea what keywords will make you money and how to effectively target the right traffic. You have got to invest time learning about the proper keywords to target for your site and then spending the time to create quality content that relates to these keywords. This is how search engine optimization and great content work together to make you money.

Your online income can really rise when you figure this out. When I first started blogging I struggled to even earn $100 a month. I would have months of making like $8 to $10. I was really excited the first month that I made $25 a month. Now I make more than that daily just using ad networks. That does not even count selling ads myself and selling ad space on my website. I have gone from desperately searching for ad income to turning away lots of ad offers everyday.

Affiliate Marketing

If you want to get affiliate marketing to work then you have got to have traffic. Affiliate marketing is all about volume. The more people that visit your site, the greater the amount of income that you can make. Conversions are typically very low with affiliate marketing so you need thousands of visitors a month if you are going to make some real cash.

Let’s say a site has 10,000 visitors a month. Most people assume that would equate to 10,000 sales a month but that is not the case. You would be very fortunate to convert even 2% of that traffic into actual sales. That would mean making 200 sales on a monthly basis. You could make a nice living selling 200 products a month.  If your site only gets 100 visitors a month and you have the same conversion rate then you would only generate 2 sales a month.

The key to affiliate marketing is to get the maximum amount of targeted traffic that is interested in your website’s subject. Your goal is to convert at least 3% of this traffic into sales. Unless you have a lot of traffic to your site then affiliate marketing will be incredibly disappointing for you.

Those are the three main areas that I have used to make money online and it has worked well for me. I am sure that it will do the same for you too. (Learn how to make money blogging from my ebook).

The secret to making cash on the Internet that no one tells you about is that you have to work at it. You have to devise the perfect strategy that works well for your niche and your website. You might have to try a bunch of different ways to make money online before you come across the right one for you. A lot of blogs claim that they can teach you how to make money but what worked for one site may not necessarily work for you.

For example, you might try your hand at affiliate marketing but unless you are a trusted authority on a topic then you will probably not do well with affiliate sales. Ad sales work great as long as your site has some traffic. If not then you might have a hard time breaking $100.

How do you find the best way to make money online for you?

You need to take an honest look at your site and ask yourself the following questions:

• What market do you reach?
• What do most people come to your website for?
• What money making strategies are working for similar sites?
• How much money can you realistically expect to make from your site each month?

Once you have answered those questions, use this three step approach:

•  Find your target market
• Develop a product to present to this market (books, software, advertisement, affiliate programs)
• Market your product tirelessly

For my own websites I had no idea how to made money using the Internet. I tried things like PPC ads alone and affiliate marketing. My results were horrible because I did not know what I was doing. My site was not set up properly to benefit from these methods. I decided to take the time to reinvent my websites and I figured out a better strategy that would make my sites more successful.

I invested in a better theme, wrote better content for every site, and focused more time on the activities that would bring in money. I stopped focusing so much on making money tomorrow and spent time building my site into a long term business. I focused heavily on marketing and promoting my site to my target market. It took a few months to see the results of my investments but it eventually did pay off.

The lesson that I learned is that you have to be willing to invest in your websites. Invest time, money, and energy in your sites, Making money blogging does get easier once you have mapped how you are going to do it.

Create compelling content

I am not talking about the kind of content that every website has. I am talking about content that is so unique that readers cannot find it anywhere else. If you write a post on a topic like “How To Buy A Car” or “How To Save Money”, then you are going to have a tough time trying to get people to read this content on your blog. Established websites have covered topics like this over and over again. You are going to have a hard time getting people to visit your site when other sites outrank you for this topic.

Try something original like writing on “Why You Should Not Worry About Saving Money” When people see titles like this, they will read the article just to get your take on the subject. They will often leave comments about how original your take is. It is better to be original with a new blog then just a carbon copy of a site you own.

Build an online presence on other websites

It does not matter if you are a staff writer or a guest poster, you need to get exposure on other websites if you want to get traffic. When I first started my site I applied for a ton of blogging jobs. I worked as a staff writer for a bunch of sites and produced a lot of content for other blogs. This helped me in a variety of ways. I was able to build my writing resume and generate traffic back to my own sites through the bio box.

Writing for other sites will help you to bring exposure to your blog and can result in a flood of traffic. You need to network with the big blogs once your site has been around for awhile. Look for blogs that have substantial amounts of traffic and ask about writing opportunities. If you can get your posts in front of thousands of people then you can get some residual traffic. Once they visit your website, it is up to you to keep them there with great content.

Focus on linkbuilding

Most bloggers will tell you that you do not need to worry about getting links back to your site. Just write and the traffic will come. That is not always true! A website with no links to it will have a hard time gaining rank in the search engines. You need to focus on building links and doing this the right way. I am not a fan of spamming forum profiles or blasting a bunch of links at a site to grow traffic. I believe in gradual link building.

Social bookmarking, syndicating, guest posting, commenting, and some linkbuilding services can help you in the process. Submit some press releases and send your best posts to big time websites. It is always good to use white hat techniques that are acceptable to the search engines. You will have to devote some time out of your day to build links if you want to see some site growth.

These are the strategies and techniques that worked for me and I know they can work for you as well!

I will continue this series with 3 more things that you can do to grow your blog.

I continued with my Build My Rank strategy of taking time each day to write posts. I did wind up missing a few days of posting this month to BMR as my schedule had gotten hectic. I was still able to post 24 days this past month. I missed 6 days and the BMR network was down for one day this month so I was not able to add any posts that day. (That was aggravating!)

I spent 1 to 2 hours at a time working on SEO for my websites this month and the bulk of that time went to Build My Rank. I decided to write as many posts as I could every time that I logged in. This way I would have plenty of posts queued up and ready to run. The maximum number of posts that BMR will schedule to go live in a day is 10 so the extra posts made up for the days I missed.

Is Build My Rank still effective?

My answer is still yes. I am very surprised at the long lasting effects of the network. Most private SEO networks lose their power over time. BMR has still been effective for me. I think that the fact that BMR has to approve a customer’s site before it can be added helps. I have seen people try to add junk sites before and they were rejected by BMR for not having enough content or their sites having too many links pointing to just one site.

BMR also protects the integrity of its network by only approving unique content. This does take extra time but it is worth it. A lot of Internet marketers wish that BMR would take spun content but if the company did it would dilute the power of the network. You would have a bunch of Internet marketers spamming the networks with tons of duplicate recycled content that did not make sense.

I still have a 100% acceptance rate on Build My Rank. This is not hard to achieve. You just need to take a few minutes to write an original post. I was able to write more than 300 posts this past month and my results were impressive. I had been working on one keyword for months and was finally able to get into the lucrative top 3 ranking. My indexing rate is at 99% which is an outstanding indexing rate. I have many other keywords with Page 1 and Page 2 rankings.

One of my sites has really benefitted from the service as the rise in the primary keyword has helped my site amass 6,000 pageviews a month. This may not seem like a lot but the site was struggling to draw in 300 views a month before. The new growth has been a pleasant surprise.

As I mentioned previously I started to target new keywords for a few sites since I wanted to expand my keyword list. I have only written a few posts and my newest site is already on page 8 for a competitive keyword. This site is so new that I am slowly adding backlinks to it. I want this site to rank the right way and not risk throwing a bunch of links at it at the same time. Build My Rank is one of the few networks that is effective enough that you can point it directly at your site.

Let me be clear about Build My Rank. The company’s service works but it does take time like any good SEO service. If you plan on writing 5 articles and ranking on the first page of Google for “make money online” then you should save your money because that isn’t going to happen. High competition keywords will take lots of posts to push your website up the search engine rankings.

If you have a website that already has a nice mixture of links BMR can provide the link juice that pushes you over the top.

BMR + Well Optimized Site + Diversity Of Backlinks = Lethal Combination

 The Importance Of A Blog

Business websites typically have a tough time getting organic search engine traffic because the sites are static. Static websites are not Google friendly as a lack of content will keep the Google bots from crawling your site and indexing your pages. This means that your site will have a poor presence on the web as your competitors will consistently outrank you. You have two ways of approaching this problem.

Hire a SEO specialist

You can hire a SEO specialist to optimize your site and engage in some off site SEO. A SEO specialist will build backlinks to your site using a variety of strategies that will help to keep your site ranking in the search engines. SEO specialists will use networking, guest posts, articles, social media, and other tips to help your site rank. You can keep ranking as long as you have someone dedicated to your SEO needs.

That is great news if you are a big business and can afford to pay a specialist but most small businesses cannot. There is the cost of a salary, healthcare, and benefits which is simply too much for some small businesses to pay. If you cannot afford a SEO specialist then you need to look for another option.

Create a blog

A blog is the easiest way to do SEO and to keep your website ranking in the search engines. This takes a little more work but costs a lot less. A blog will give the search engine bots the fresh content that they are craving. Your company’s website pages can stay static while the blog on the same site keeps updating. This gives you a way of targeting the keywords that you need to attract new business.

An added benefit of blog creation is the fact that you are providing your site’s visitors with new information. You never know what reader of the company’s blog may become a customer of the blog. A small site with just 10,000 visitors a month can reap 200 additional sales each month with just a 2% conversion rate. That is an extra 2,400 product sales a year just by taking the time to post some content on your blog a few times a week.

Now you can see why an onsite blog is such a valuable resource for small business owners.

Creating A Niche Blog

I have been wanting to create a review website for awhile now. I have always read how Internet marketers are making extra money from these sites on a monthly basis. After reading another post about this at the Warrior Forum I decided to take the plunge. I sat down crafted out a plan for a review website and started a site. A review website will not take up anywhere near the time that an informational blog takes on a daily basis.

My plan is to write 10 to 15 review posts total. After thatI do not plan on writing anymore. This new site is in the sports arena and exists for the purpose of helping to sell sporting goods. My plan is to stock the site with original honest reviews of products and place a link to Amazon so that visitors can purchase the product.

I plan on making money from the site though commissions from Amazon Associates and ad revenue. I figure that the site should be able to generate $500 to $1,000 a month in passive income for me. It will take some time to reach these numbers but I am in it for the long haul. It will take doing some SEO to generate traffic to the website.

The website was pretty inexpensive to start. I paid $15 for the domain name and $40 for a solid review theme. I considered paying someone to build the website but I figured that it would be faster to do it myself. I also thought it would be a good learning experience to create a review blog from scratch myself. I have created every single blog that I have except for one myself.

It was not easy in the beginning but I learned a lot about how to develop a website so that it is the way that I want it. I have also learned how to grow traffic internally. All of my sites started with no traffic and now have consistent daily traffic. I have no doubt that I can make this review website a winner as well. Over the next few months I will document my experiences with my latest website and let everyone know how it goes.

I learned that I was not alone. The irony of SEO is that the bloggers that create the best content and could benefit the most from SEO are not that good at SEO. Most SEO experts that are great at optimizing websites and building backlinks are better at tech stuff than actually writing content themselves. So, what is a blogger to do for SEO?

1. Learn about SEO

Most new bloggers do not have the cash to hire a SEO firm or a SEO expert. A good SEO campaign could easily run thousands of dollars a month. SEO is not that difficult to learn. It just takes a lot of time and research. You have to spend the time learning how to build relevant high quality backlinks. There are lots of free resources available online that will teach you about SEO. (ebooks, forums, websites)

You can start getting guest posts, writing for other sites, and join blog carnivals. These are all ways to get free backlinks without paying a dime. The links will take time to appear but the efforts are well worth the time.

2. Do it yourself SEO

Software tools and SEO services are the best friends of the budget conscious blogger. There are tons of SEO tools that can help to build traffic for your website that can be purchased for under $100 a month. Services like Build My Rank, Article Marketing Robot, Unique Article Wizard, and SEO Blueprint are just a few of the services that help with SEO efforts.

You will have to do all of the work yourself but the results are worth it. I have found that these tools work much better than automated tools that give your site a bunch of spammy links. Doing it yourself takes time and cost a few bucks but is often the best option for the budget conscious.

3. Outsource your SEO needs

The easiest way to do SEO is to outsource all of your SEO needs. You can hire a SEO expert or SEO firm but be prepared to pay some cash. A good SEO professional can charge anywhere from $500 a month to $10,000 depending upon the work involved and services performed. The benefit of hiring a SEO company is that you do not have to do anything.

SEO companies will handle keyword research, social bookmarking, article submissions, and content creation. This removes the burden of growing your site from out of your hands and places it with the SEO firm.

The SEO method that works best for you will depend on your knowledge, time, and budget. Remember that SEO is not a one time quick fix. You need to start with quality content and use SEO to get the content before the maximum number of people possible.

Photo by: Sean MacEntee