Learn how to make money online

Because of high interest and visits to my "Guide to making money online" guides I've decided to refine and extend it.

There are 4 ways to make money online:
1. Sell products or services on a website
2. Sell products or services by email
3. Make money on other people's sales.
4. Make money selling ad space, or largely known as making money with your website or blog

The fastest way is by becoming affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a widespread method of promoting a website, in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber or customer provided through his efforts. It is a modern variation of the practice of paying finder's-fees to individuals who introduce new clients to a business. Compensation may be made based on a certain value for each visit (Pay-per-click), registrant (Pay-per-lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay-per-Sale).

Another way is by signing up with an advertising network such as AdSense, AdBrite, Bidvertiser, Advertise.com, ClickBooth and so on…

Depending on your traffic you may need to invest a little in your website or forum by buying a good webhost, doing link exchanges and advertising your website. Once your traffic is on the desired level you can become an affiliate and/or publisher.

This is the first step and you need to decide where you stand. Do you sell online services or maybe you are just planning so, do you own a website and want to make it profitable or you are just planning on doing so…
If you are like most out there who own a website and want to make money from it these are some basic requirements you need to make in order to monetize your website or blog:

1. Develop an interesting and user friendly website
2. Optimize your website
3. Increase your website traffic with SEO
4. Maintain and post fresh content on your site as often as you can

1. Developing and interesting and user friendly website

If you are planning on monetizing a website it needs to be interesting and user friendly for visitors. This motivates the visitor to return back to your site. You need at least intermediate HTML knowledge to create a website. If you do not have the proper knowledge I suggest you get professional developer to build it for you.

2. Optimizing your website

This is basically a part of the developing procedure. Main thing you should consider is having more than 70% text on your website and the other 30% being various codes (html, php, flash etc…).

Putting Meta tags is also very important, although Google search engine doesn’t need the Meta description tag it still helps at least in explaining your website content to a possible visitor.
Title tag: Here is where you put your website name

Keywords tag: Here is where you put keywords that are specific to your website and explain it best. You should start with “big” keywords and move to more specific ones, make sure you start with the best identifying keyword. Do not use more than 13 keywords as your site can get penalized and actually get lower search engine results with more keywords, instead focus on those 13 keywords or even less keywords if you can.

Description tag: Explain your website. Make sure you start with your website name.

3. Increase your website traffic

There are numerous ways to increase traffic. Such as submitting your website or forum to search engines, advertising it, link exchanging, optimizing your website keywords and text, adding link on various forums to your website and so on…

-Submitting your website to search engines

Instead of looking to put your website to as many search engines as you can loosing time and patience, you only need to submit your website in the top 3 search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN/live search.
The best way to do this is by actually going to each of these sites and submitting. Do not use automatic submitters or third-party sites as it’s only a waste of time and there is better chance to index your site faster if you directly submit it.

-Advertising your website

Sometimes in order to get something you must give something. You can call a little advertising as an investment in your website for huge returns. Here are some advertising networks where you can advertise your site: AdBrite, Google AdWords and so on… But instead of paying a lot of money for a quick traffic boost you need to take it the slow way. This means that you need to put 50$ dollars advertising money. Choose the best audience; for example is you have java games website you need to advertise your website to some similar group, in this case another java games websites, flash games website or general games websites. You should choose minimum payment. For example if you put 20$ dollars a day you'll get around 60-80 visits but if you choose 3$ dollars a day you'll get around 15-25 visits, though you will be advertising your site longer. So you do the math but the best choice is 3$ a day and this way you'll get more visitors per week and plus the longer you advertise your website the more people will see it and know about it. Even if they do not visit it through the Advertisement they can still visit directly by url.

-Link Exchanging

This is quite easy. What you need to do is find some site like yours with similar content and then contact the webmaster/administrator of that site. Make an agreement and you both link your sites. Note only exchange links with sites similar to yours who have less or worse content than your site. If this is the other way around you may lose visitors. Link exchanging may also increase your pagerank.

-Optimizing your website keywords and text

The easiest way to find out the best keywords for your website is to use Google AdWords program that scans your website and shows you appropriate keywords for it sorted by relevance.

Optimizing your text means that instead of using general terms for writing something you use specific words.

For example if you are running Xbox360 games website instead of writing console games you write “Xbox 360 games” in the description of your website as well as the news, review or other text you have/want to put on your website!

-Showing your website

One of the free and easy ways of getting visitors is by putting links in your forums signature and posting little on the forums. This is a slower method and does not produce many returning visitors, in fact it will produce only around 5-15% returning visitors but it's easy and simple to do it and will boost some new visitors to your website!

-Innovative ways to increase traffic on your website

For some time now there are newer ways of showing your website. These are innovative and interesting ways but you can expect some increase in traffic.
The first way is using video hosting websites such as Youtube, yahoo videos, Google videos and so on... You need to create/edit an interesting video, something that will attract more people. For example you can do a slide-show type video named "TOP 20 best cars for 2006". You then choose your own best cars pictures and share it online.

Second way is using social and communication websites such as Myspace, hi5 and so on... You can do this is number of ways. First you need to put a picture of your website in a banner form on your main profile page, second is to put a website image in your image gallery, third is to post your website link in all your comments and last but not least is to email all your Myspace "friends" telling them about your website.

Third way is websites such as: digg, delicio, diigo, furl and so on... This is when you have some stable traffic on your website. By making users post your website contents on these websites you'll get even more traffic to your website, or alternatively you can post your site content on these pages yourself.

4. Maintain and posting fresh content on your site as often as you can

Make sure you maintain your website at least once in two weeks. This means checking for wrong codes or just getting rid of the extra codes.
Posting fresh content on your site is crucial to keep visitors interested. Fresh content also increases your site’s search engine ranking.

After doing all these things you need to put ads on your site. Whatever advertising network you choose, you need to find a good place to put your ads. The placing of ads is very important.
ADS place/s should be highly visible. This most certainly means do not put ads on bottom of your page. Place them top of your site. It can be left, right, center it just needs to be top. You can also place a smaller ad zone in the area where you post your content. You could experiment at first with different ad places, different ad colors and stuff until you find the best fitting position.