Is it possible to make money on line

Following an article I wrote about the future of the web and as a consultant for several websites, I was bound to make a research about possible income sources on the web. When the American say “to make money” they mean a lot of money. The truth is that one can indeed make money on line but not big one however a little pension from the side would be lovely.

As a consultant for a several new websites, I had to make a full research about potential income sources on line. As this was a part of an old article I wrote here I decided to share the knowledge with you. If you are interested in more details and you want to get into it, I also created a software where I place the reliable income sources and update them often. You can get the software from http://www.not2pay.com/mmaker.exe . There are several type of income a user can make on the web:

The first group is meant for users that has no websites

1. Content providing – like writing articles on come4news, successful videos in Metacafe and so on. While Come4 news is interested with articles the American PayPerPost is interested in ordered articles, a kind of promotional articles.

2. Social Network affiliation – A social network is successful only when it has millions of users but grew so much that I personally get 3 invitations to 3 different networks a day. In order to make it more attractive some social networks decided to share their income with the networks leaders, something like “Bring your friend and we will share the income with you”. The percentage you gain require you to build a huge network and your own users to build their own huge networks and so on...

3. Be paid for clicking advertising – this is a tricky one, yes you are paid for clicking advertising something like 1 cent per ad. The basic service is free and allow you actually to make 10 cents (i.e 10 ads) a day, if you want a total access, then its a premium service (another American invention). And you have to pay for it. But then if you have 5 minutes spare a day its a nice way to waste it.

The second group is blog/website owner but before this some notes:

Just to make it clear a Blog was not designed to be a diary. It was design to be a dynamic method to create a website and upload content, the fact it looks like a diary is because it has a calender and everything is ordered chronologically.

To gain the maximum of these income sources you better have a Domain (Yourname.com, yourname.fr or whatever). Once you have a domain there is a need to host it somewhere. If you have no idea how to build a website then here comes the blog system, install it and from here on you just have to post your entries.

Installing your own blog system is not simple, especially when most of them works with databases that require more knowledge most people do not have.

Complicated ? Not really, within my search I located a perfect blog system with no need for to much knowledge and I am using it myself.

Anyway... lets go on:

Once you have a website/blog you have a media to put advertising on, Unlike ordinary medias you don't have to hire salesmen to sell advertising, there are plenty of advertising agencies that has a customer base that will allow you to place their ads on your site and you will be paid for it.

There are several calculation methods:

1. Commission (pay per lead) – You will be paid a percentage (usually quite big) from the sales generated by visitors that came from your web sites through the ads. Sound nice but sales does not come that easy and you have to find the right product ( a good example is a customer of mine, She wrote a book about unique hotels and hostels around the world www.hebergement-insolite.com . The website I built her was supposed to promote the book sales, so in this case we placed Amazon advertising that sell this specific book).

2. Pay per click – you are being paid for every click the user clicked on an advertisement. The google Adsense service is the best and the most reliable here but its not the only one. Interesting fact is that people tend to click more on text based ads rather then fancy graphical banners

3. Pay per impression – If you have a website with plenty of traffic then this is the best way for you, however when I say plenty of traffic I mean huge amount of traffic. You are been paid for every 1000 impressions and between 1-5 cents. The advantage of this one is that its like an automatic pilot, you don't have to do anything just let it run, and there are method to increase the impressions considerably

Important fact: American worth more ! I don't like it either but a click of an American user cost much more then a French one. The same with Impressions.

Another important factor is how to be paid. Most services will pay via paypal therefore you will need a paypal account, its a smart tool but sometimes a little complicated to set. Google can pay with a check to your mailbox and or a direct transfer to your bank account. Some agencies are not so friendly with non American users, some are just for American user.

You can download the software and start making some pocket money as if you will reach to a position that you make big money then someone will probably buy your website very soon. In the future i am planning to write some tips of how to increase this income. Good luck