Making money on the Internet often seems like a pie in the sky dream. On one hand you have thousands of get rich quick schemes that always seem to need some of your hard earned cash up front. On the other hand, you have websites like Amazons’ Mechanical Turk where you literally pennies per hour, certainly not enough to live off of. Although it seems hard to see, there is a comfortable middle ground. Many sites offer genuine ways to support yourself using only the Internet and your brain. You probably won’t become a millionaire with this method, but you won’t be in the poor house either. Growth can be infinite, or you may not grow at all. This all depends on your abilities and creativeness.
This method is for the most ambitious, creative people who want to make money online. Search engine optimization is a little understood concept. Basically it entails writing articles that will rank highly in Google and other search engines, so that the most people will see your article.
For example: if one were to type “plasma TV sale” in Google, the search engine would search through ALL of the pages with that phrase. Google is a smart search engine, so it is hard to trick it with fake content, or just posting the phrase all over. Most professional SEO marketers believe that your content should contain 2-10% of all the words as the keyword. So, you would want 2-10% of the words on your page to be “plasma TV sale”.
Another key to SEO Marketing is finding unexploited keywords. If a million people have articles up for “plasma TV sale”, you might want to consider “Samsung model 123 TV sale” in order to find a smaller niche of buyers. This will also increase the amount of legitimate people who want to buy the product because they are searching for a specific page. Good base keywords involve specific models, prices, stores, or discount coupons.
Now you may be thinking, ok I have my articles up, HOW DO I GET PAID!
There are many, many legitimate options for cashing in on your SEO success. 3 of the biggest names in online marketing are companies you know. Amazon. eBay. Google. All three of these companies spend millions of dollars paying SEO marketers for traffic to their sites. You want to check out the Amazon Associates program, which pays you every time someone clicks through one of your links and buys something, usually 4-15% of the total sale price.
eBay has a similar program, paying you for every sale that comes through one of your links.
However, the company that spends the most money for online marketing is Google. You can place something on your site, a link or widget (which is a fancy banner ad) and every time someone clicks through, whether they buy something or not, you get paid. Google also pays additional bonuses for products purchased.
Most SEO marketers use free blogs, like blogger.com, or wordpress.com. On these sites you can create your own webpage in minutes to upload your content to, hosted absolutely free. I would recommend beginners start here. Once you get a little more advanced you can purchase your own domain names at a domain host, like godaddy.com
Just remember – Find a niche for your product, be creative and never give up. There is plenty of money to be made.