Guide One

Guide One Overview:

This guide will introduce you to some of the key concepts to earning money online. This guide assumes you know little to nothing about making money online, but have a somewhat decent understanding of internet terminology. Most of the terms will be defined, but if you find yourself not understanding what a term means, please do a Google search on it to better understand it.

Guide One:

The first thing you need to figure out is what you actually want to do. Yes, we all want to make money, but HOW do you want to make this money? This is 2013, and there are a LOT of different ways to earn an income online. Do you want to do a data entry type of job? Or perhaps you like writing, maybe you want to be a Blogger. Are you just looking for a little extra income? Maybe a few different survey / GPT (Get Paid To. More on that later) sites are what you're looking for. Below I'll list a few different options for you to consider when you're just starting out. Remember, right now you're in your infancy of starting out online, and the first thing you need to do is establish a presence.

Different types of opportunities:

Data Entry: I personally feel that mTurk (Amazon Mechanical Turk) is one of the best sites out there for Data Entry gigs. There's just so many different things you can do, not all of which actually are data entry. 

The Pros:

• Make your own hours, work as little or as much as you want.
• High potential for earning. I've had days I've earned $80 on there.
• You get paid by direct deposit, and can request it whenever you want (as long as the withdrawal is over $1.00)
• Wide variety of things to do, so if you get bored with one thing you can move to another.
• Several amazing online communities that post jobs that are worth doing, such as Reddit's mTurk page, mTurk Forums, and Turker Nation

The Cons:

• Pay rate fluctuates a LOT. Some days I can easily make $50 with minimal time and effort. Other days it's a real struggle to get to $20, and takes a lot more time than it should. Looking at hourly rates, sometimes you might only be making $2-3 an hour. Other times you could be making $15-20 an hour.
• The good work goes fast. If something is paying well from a good requester (The person that posts the jobs) they tend to go really fast. This isn't the case ALL the time, but it does happen more often than not.
• Can be extremely boring at points. Some times, you might just be moderating images for an hour or two.
• 10 day waiting period for accounts to be fully activated. During the trial period you cannot withdraw your earnings, and are usually limited to doing 100 things per day.

Survey / GPT Sites: This is actually where I started when I first got into making money online back in 2010. Ever see the commercials on TV for Bigsight? That's sort of what we're talking about here. The thing about Bigsight tho, I believe, is that you don't actually take any surveys on their site. They just refer you to other sites that you sign up for and take surveys on. The kicker is that, when you sign up through a referral, the referrer gets a portion of what you make added to their account. You still make the same as you normally would, but the referrer gets credited (usually 5-20%) of what you make as well. GPT sites sometimes have surveys on them, sometimes they're just clicker sites. The only one of these I still use is Neobux just because of it's potential to earn money through referrals. Additionally, you don't need to actually refer people, as you can rent referrals and a few other things.

The Pros:

• Usually extremely easy to do.
• Relatively low payouts for most sites (Usually $1.00)
• Don't need a bank account (usually) as you can withdraw your earnings to Paypal.
• Surprisingly high earning potential for minimal work.

The Cons:

• Pay usually sucks.
• Takes a long time to actually see decent earnings.
• Paypal is usually the only option of payment in cash, and they take a percentage of everything that is sent to you through their service.
• Mindbogglingly boring.

Blogging: Do you like to write? Maybe blogging is something you can get into. Blogs, by themselves, don't make money, but you can monetize a blog to provide revenue for you. There are several ways to monetize your blog, but the most common way is through advertisements. If you've ever seen ads on a website before, they're making money from that. One of the main reasons people get into blogging is to make money from it. Unfortunately, in 2013, there's pretty much at least one blog for everything, so it's hard to break into. However, with determination, good writing, and great content, you can make it in this field. For more information about blogging, check out my guide to blogging (COMING SOON.)

The Pros:

• Very high earning potential. There are people who are professional bloggers and earn a living doing it.
• You get to write about something you're passionate about. Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life!
• Once you get the hang of it, it's pretty easy.

The Cons:

• Hard to break into. You have to find your niche (your topic or area that you want to write about.) There's a blog for everything now, heck you can probably find a blog on the proper technique on power washing your poodle.
• Income is based on traffic. So if you aren't getting any traffic, you aren't making any money.
• It's up to you to create your traffic. You have to do the footwork to publicize your blog. People aren't just going to find it without proper advertisement of it.
• In my opinion, to effectively make money blogging, you have to spend money on a domain name (a website address, such as www.Google.com) and a hosting service (a service that hosts all the information and content of your website.) This can be quite cheap, and you can usually register a domain name & get a month of hosting for under $20. I, personally, like Go Daddy (if you use referral code WOWexoserv, you'll get 35% off your order!) for all of that, just because you can do everything right there. There are other options too, such as Host Gator.
• You'll need to understand a bit about design to create an effective blog. There are a lot of templates out there, so it's not nearly as hard as creating your own website.

Affiliate Marketing: Personally, I like this, but other people hate it. A large variety of online storefronts have affiliate programs. I, currently, only use Amazon's. This is something that someone with sales experience could really excel at, as there are people that make a very large amount of money via affiliate programs. The way it works is you get a referral link to a product, and if someone clicks on that link and buys it, you get a commission from that. The commission rates vary depending on the site and how much sales traffic you bring them (I make 6% off Amazon sales,) so the potential for earnings is pretty high. For more on Affiliate Marketing, please check out my guide to it. (COMING SOON)

The Pros:

• You're your own boss. If you have a good mind for sales, this could be a great opportunity for you.
• It can be an "autopilot" (just set it up and it runs itself) type of revenue. I have a few links to relevant things on one of my sites, and it brings in money each month. I don't really do anything with it anymore.
• Huge potential for earnings if you put in the work to market products.
• Some companies, such as Amazon, credit you for everything purchased if a buyer enters their site through your referral link. Example: I link a product for green fuzzy socks, and someone clicks it. Then they decide they don't want the green fuzzy socks, look around and find purple fuzzy socks with pink polka-dots. They love the pink fuzzy socks, and they buy them. I get a commission for that, because they went through my link originally, even though they didn't  buy the green fuzzy socks I originally linked.

The Cons:

• Depending on the program, you might not get paid for a month or two after you've made the money. A large majority of programs only pay once per month.
• If you don't properly link a product and someone buys it, you get zero.
• Some purchases are capped at a specific commission on sites. For example, if a site has a cap of $35 on electronics, and someone bought a $10,000 HDTV, you only get $35 dollars.

Other Avenues: There are a lot of other avenues to make money online. Unfortunately, if I covered all of them it would take years to write about. I wish I had that kind of time, but I don't. A few other things that I either currently use or have used in the past are PPD (Pay Per Download) sites and URL shorteners. With PPD sites, you are paid each time someone downloads a file you host on the site. Depending on which service you use, you could make, on average, $1 each time someone downloads your file. They'll usually have to complete a task, such as download a piece of software, or take a quick survey, to download it though. URL shorteners are another way to make money, but don't pay nearly as much. How these work, usually, is you type a URL into the shortener. It then shortens the URL to something smaller, such as http://adf.ly/YVFqu. Go ahead, click it, it won't bite. You'll go to a redirection service, type in a Captcha (which isn't always there) and in 5 seconds a "Skip Now" button will appear in the upper right hand side. Click that, and you're on the page that it was linked to (in this case, my blog.) You also just made me $0.005. Looks like nothing, but it can add up pretty quickly.

The Pros:

• Semi-high earning potential, provided you put in a lot of work.
• Can also be an "autopilot" type of revenue, if you have a website that gets high traffic linking in to a download or linking through a URL shortener.
• Very easy to set up.

The Cons:

• You need traffic to download or go through the link to make money. This usually requires hitting forums heavily, or having a moderate to high traffic website/blog.
• Earning potential could be absolutely nothing for the first month or so.
• If you don't have something relevant to download, no one is going to download it!

I'd like to thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope you've found it helpful and informative. This is the first guide of many in your journey to making money online. As always, if you have any questions, please leave a comment and I'll respond to you as soon as I can. A link to a lot of sites can be found in the "My Method" tab!