Making money on the internet - it's a numbers game

A lot of people sit around and wait for something good to happen. You know the type: "When I win the lotto" or "I can't wait until Spielberg calls." And then there's us. The ones who spend a lot of time trying to discover how to pursue our passion and make a little (or a lot) of scratch (aka: how do I make money from the Internet?).

I'm certainly not an online marketing superstar, but I do okay. Why? Because I try lots of different approaches to writing, blogging and selling online, then stick to the ones that seem to work. In sales, the more calls you make, the more deals you get. In online money making endeavors, the more things you try, the more likely some of them will succeed.

Here's a few to consider, if you don't already:

Can you make money with Google AdSense?

Although you are at their mercy, Google's AdSense program works pretty well for me. Once accepted into the AdSense program, you log into their interface, set up channels (to help you track your ads), choose an ad size, get the code and paste it into your html. Then the good robots at Google generate ads relevant to the content on your page.

Of course, this works best if your content contains the words that make the robots pick the right ads, but that is another problem to address.

I am lucky enough to have some pages which get 50,000+ visitors per month. Those ads, because of the reasonable traffic and click-through ratio make up the bulk of my Google AdSense money.

The downside of AdSense, of course is that you cannot choose specific ads and really have no idea as to which ads are working or how much they pay. I have had AdSense ads pay as little as a penny per click, as well as over $20.

One of the other negatives about AdSense is that they can change the rules whenever they want, and it may adversely affect your revenue. Or, visa versa, I reckon.

Fiverr.com can pad your revenue stream five bucks at a time

In a nutshell, fiverr is another niche finding situation. Find a niche that works for you (singing in your underwear or creating great graphics) and you'll get some orders. I write articles, scripts and some graphic design on fiverr and it has been a pretty nice little additional revenue stream. Read my review of fiverr.com here.

Make money by creating website, after website, after website

If you know how to create and promote websites, you're ahead of the game. You can purchase domains, create new sites, monetize them in a variety of ways, and even if it isn't all that successful (until you find the one that goes viral), all you really need is to make five or ten bucks a month to cover your costs.

If you're looking for a cost-effective hosting solution, I strongly recommend HostGator.com. Not only will you pay less than five bucks for hosting, but their interface will walk you through designing the site as well.

In some cases, I have a blog and a web site with essentially identical content. Check out HookedOnDroid.com and http://hookedondroid.blogspot.com to see what I mean. This affords me the opportunity to put affiliate ads, Adsense ads, independent ads, etc., on two separate sites.

Another method of generating revenue is a review site or blog. One of my sites WalkersForSeniorsReviews.com is an example you can use as a model for your own ideas. Simply put, you want to find products that people are actually buying and reviewing (positively) online, write reviews of a number of the top sellers, and provide a link to where they can actually buy the item.

Of course, you'll have to promote and optimize each of your sites individually, but like I said, it's a numbers game. The more opportunities you have to make money, the more money you're going to make.

Sell ad space on your sites

This is kind of obvious, but not so easy. Before you can solicit others to buy ad space on your pages, you'll need to be able to show reports as to how much traffic you are getting and prove the relevence to the potential client. Once you have all your ducks in a row, you can get a lot of ideas as to potential advertisers by observing the kinds of ads that just show up with Google's AdSense. Then, email them with a proposal and see what sticks. I have picked up some relatively high paying advertisers using this method.

Affiliate ads

There are so many affiliates out there it's mind boggling. Amazon.com of course is one of the main players, but there are thousands of others. You could go through the trouble of applying with every website that you'd like to be an affiliate for (like jcp.com, Target.com, Lowes.com, Macys.com, Ebay.com, etc.), or you can get an account with a company like Viglink which will essentially hook you up to all of them (and lots more).

Without going into all of the details here, Viglink makes it so that if you add their javascript to your page, any time you mention any one of thousands of affiliates they have, it will become a hyperlink which is tracked, and you will earn a commision for any sales that occur. If you use a service like Viglink.com, you have to adjust your writing so that you give attention to words that will turn into hyperlinks, but this is a very good way to monetize your pages without even thinking about it.

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If you want to be successful making money online, I think you need to be either really lucky, have an amazing, one-of-a-kind idea, or put in lots of time and build up your traffic and revenue slowly. I pretty much do the latter.

But, hey, the way I figure is, if I put up 10,000 web pages that all make one dollar a month...I'm making $10,000 per month.

Back to work.