Is It Easy To Make Money Online?

No, but later yes.

A few of my friends have recently asked about making money online and whether it is worth trying. These are some observations from my experience in the past 2 years.

My first site, I tried to use for commercial purpose was quite hard work to make money from. I invested a lot of time in writing biographies of people. The return was relatively low. The ads had a low click through rate and relatively low earnings. However, it does get a reasonable amount of traffic and know earns about $100 a month. The thing is that because, it gives a low return, I have stopped adding content. Even though I spend no time on the site, it still earns a reasonable amount each month. This is the power of making money online. You work really hard in the beginning, but, then you can earn without doing anything. For the first year, the hourly rate was probably less than $0.01 per hour. With this kind of return, most people give up because why work for $0.01 an hour when you can earn $8 an hour working at McDonalds.

But, after the initial effort of the the first 18 months (and it was a lot of many hours) you can generate a steady stream of income, with minimal effort and hopefully this will be an income source for life. (The first thing I did after starting blogging for money, was to stop my private pension) I hope a blog will be my pension.

Other blogs I started, have a better ability to monetise because they are about finance or cycling products. These niches lend themselves to monetisation quite well because advertisers are willing to pay higher amounts.

Netwriting a blog on writing and blogging is relatively poor at earning money. However, I don’t mind, because I just enjoy adding content anyway. If you want to make money online, I would suggest a different niche to making money online and a blog about blogging (maybe due to the huge amount of competition)

The best bet to make money online is to find a niche, which you enjoy writing about. In this way you can combine a hobby with earning; this is the best motivator to keep going when you don’t make much money.

What Do You Need to Make Money Online.

• Patience. Don’t expect to earn much in the first 6 months
• Willingness to Invest Time. The return is very poor in the beginning but gets better over time.
• You need the ability to write on some topics. You need a unique selling point for your blog. If the blog is rubbish it is difficult to monetise. If you offer something of real value, it is much easier to make money from it.
• Jack of All trades master of none. A good blogger needs many skills, SEO, writing, building relationships, design, e.t.c.
• Focus. To make money online, you need a certain amount of focus. If you blog half heartedly, you will struggle to get established. It is that extra 20% of effort which will increase your return by 80%
• Be Prolific. It helps to be able to write a lot of good content. At one stage I had a 500 pages and i was earning say $1 a day. I thought if I double the number of pages to 1,000 I will be able to earn $2 a day. It’s simple maths but, it does actually work.

• 80 Tips for Making Money Online