A Beginners Guide to Making Money Online

By editor3 on November 12th, 2009

If you are serious about making money online, there is noting that can actually strop you. Of course, that doesn’t mean that making money online is as easy as getting your salary cheque. As you would appreciate, when you decide to make money online, you are likely to venture into some activity that would not be a permanent job. Rather, you are most likely to land up being your own boss, a self-employed smart “Netizen” who knows what to tap into and how to go about it.

Well, those are just two of the major criteria that may be expected of you, the prerequisites for you to make money online. To be sure, making money online is serious business and is more of a long-term idea rather than a short-cut as some popular perception may be. It requires persistence, perseverance and a knack to score goals at the right time – merely standing at the goal post and waiting for the ball to be kicked your way wouldn’t help you score an actual goal. So, what is the path ahead for making money online?

Step 1 – Prepare to be on your own: That is the mental part of the program to make money in the internet. The first thing that you need to know as you venture into your online enterprise is that you are not covered by any guarantee. You do stand a chance, to be fair, to make it right in the internet, but you are alone and you need to fend for yourself. If you have made this as a conscious decision, then you have cleared the first test and you are ready to start.

Step 2 – Decide what do you want to tap into: You need resources. You can not keep creating content out of thin air. After you have demarcated your area of action, you would have to chart out your action plan. “How do I get a steady stream of resources for my contents? Do I have the innate strength to go the distance? Do I have the right sources that I can tap into?” If you can not answer these questions to your own satisfaction, you would be well advised to sit back, take a deep breath and do some reality checks, if you are proceeding in the right direction. You need to have a passion to excel in your chosen area of action and field of expertise. You have to bank on your own knowledge bank and you should have sources to give ideas that would let you explore your functional speciality.

Step 3 – Decide how to go about it: You have decided to be on your own, you have the required knowledge and expertise to excel in your function. Now, how do you go about doing what you want to do?

If you are sure you can get the contents out, you have to decide where to get them out. You have options here: You could create your own blog or site with a proper domain name that you could start off with and weave your contents around. Blogs can be hosted in Blogger or Wordpress of other such publishing platforms. If you have a domain name, you can use your blog as a sub-domain for your website. Here, of course, you need to build from scratch and build a database. You would have to, in most cases, persevere for at least 6 months before you can think of monetising your works.

The other option is to go for Publishing Platforms that let you create your own pages as part of their domain names. There are various platforms available, such as Hubpages.com, which let you create your own pages and let you publish content. The idea is particularly interesting for people who are not techies basically, but have the interest to and ability of publishing original content and have the urge to make money out of them. These hubs, which would be the pages you create, would be that of the publishers – you can not lay claim to the pages and you would not have ownership to them.

However, you do own your contents. When you have substantial content, your publisher places Ads strategically next to your contents, which would fetch you money. You do have to make sure, however, that what you write is not what is already available and you stick to your chosen area of expertise. If you want to go on for a while without getting bogged down by technical stuff and if you are not really bothered about owning the pages that you have created, this could be a good way to earn online.

You need to make these decisions and go through the mentioned 3 steps to make sure if creating contents and making money online is really going to be your cup of tea. If you get a positive answer to that instinctively, the game is yours. Go Play!