If you want to make money on the Internet you’ll find there are hundreds of experts out there who claim they can tell you exactly how to do it. And probably thousands of different plans all claiming to reveal the secret of making money online… it can all be very confusing. So here are three simple ways to make money on the Internet:
1. Email newsletters or ezines
This method has been around a few years now, but it can still be as effective as ever. Create your own email newsletter or ezine. Think of a subject you feel lots of other people would be interested in receiving news about on a regular basis. Hobbies are ideal for this. Or it could be something like music and entertainment reviews, celebrity gossip, sports, culture, politics/the economy or travel – the possibilities are endless.
Set up a sign up page for your newsletter and promote it. So that people who are interested in that subject can opt-in for a subscription. You can use a free service like MailChimp to manage the mailing list. Then, every week or so, write and broadcast your email newsletter. Tips, advice as well as news about your subject all make great newsletter material.
But how can you make money from your newsletter – or monetise it as it’s known in Internet marketing? The most straightforward way is to recommend information products to your readers in return for a commission. You can find suitable products through a marketplace such as ClickBank.
2. Blogging
This is probably my favourite method of making money on the Internet… and it can also be a lot of fun. A blog is basically a diary on the Internet. It can cover any subject you like. Again, hobbies and popular interests are great for blogs.
You can set up a blog in just an hour or so with a service such as Blogger.com. Even better it’s completely free to set up and run a blog!
You can post all your ideas, thoughts and news on your blog – just like you would with a paper diary. Reviews of products and services make great content for a blog too. If possible, try to post several times a week, even daily if you can.
And what are the best ways to monetise your blog? Apart from selling products or services related to your blog subject, other simple, automated ways are Google AdSense and Amazon Associates. With Google AdSense Google will display ads. on your blog and pay you a few pence for every visitor that clicks through on them. With Amazon Associates you can promote all of Amazon’s books and other products on your site and they will pay you a commission on any sales.
3. Curation
This is one of the newest ways of making money online. Normally, if you have a website, you need to keep creating content for it yourself on a regular basis. That’s the way to get people to keep coming back to your website, and to get it highly ranked with the search engines. But just lately a new way of getting content for your website has been devised called curation.
Curation is a method of scanning the Internet for content relevant to the subject of your website. But you don’t just cut and paste it. You carefully select, edit and present it to create your own unique story. Website curation is a bit like what the curator of an art gallery might do… which is where the term comes from.
Once you’ve set up your website you can use curation tools to semi-automate the process of collecting and publishing content. Some of the most popular tools available are ScoopIt, Storify and Bundlr. You can then monetise your site in the same way as a blog – or just use it as a way of generating traffic for a website selling products and services.
And this is very exciting. You can operate these techniques individually or you can operate them together, and maximise their potential. For example, you can set up a blog and invite people to sign up for your newsletter. Or you can set up a curated site and use it to generate traffic for your blog.
This article is only a very short introduction to ways of making money online. If you’d like to find out about more ways to make money on the Internet, and read reviews of Internet moneymaking opportunities, then keep checking back with What Biz Opp.