Basics of Making Money Online (Part 1)

This is the first series of articles on the Basics of Making Money Online. To the internet uninitiated, there are a variety of ways that one can work from home and earn money online. The various avenues of making money online are paid surveys, advertising income and affiliate programs.

In this entry, I will run through what I believe are the basics of earning advertising income through an online website.

3 Key components of earning advertising income online are:

1. Website
2. Content
3. Traffic

Amongst these 3 components, the most crucial and important of all is traffic, traffic, traffic. Without sufficient traffic being directed to your website, it does not matter how beautiful and user-friendly your website is or how good the content is. A website without any traffic is useless in earning any money online. To make money from advertisers like Adsense, one's website would need a large number of visitors to provide the necessary page impressions and clicks on the advertisements for you to earn enough money.

A website can be easily created nowadays with free tools provided by Blogger, Wordpress or LiveJournal. For example, this current Make Money Online website is hosted by Blogger for free. To create your website or blogs, you just need to register a few details and you will get a unique url (http://nameofyourwebsite.blogspot.com) This is your first website!





Next will be to decide the content to put into the website. This is perhaps the easiest and yet most tricky part. What you decide to put on your website could affect the amount of traffic being directed to your website and thus how much you earn. Content on the website can either be written by you or others. Place a few Adsense ads on your website and you are ready to make money online. The only missing component will be the traffic (visitors visiting your website).Of course, you can just place ads all over your website without any content but that will most probably not create much readership or recurrent visitors to your website.

Lastly, will be the traffic generation to your website. To get traffic generated to your website, there are basically a few ways. Firstly will be through links on other blogs or websites that provides a hyperlink to your website. Secondly, will be through search engines like Google or Yahoo that returns your website as part of somebody's search query. Thirdly, will be through people typing directly your URL to get to your website. Without the traffic coming to your website, you will never be able to make any money online. This is because advertisers usually pay by the number of clicks on the advertisements on your website or by page impressions.

So there you have it, the 3 steps that will get anyone ready to making some money online while working from home. But remember:

The most important of all is traffic. Without traffic, it will hardly be possible to make money online using your website.