Wednesday, March 5, 2008

How To Make Money Online Without Money

I believe this is often the first and foremost question that is on anyone's mind who has read and heard numerous legendary tales of people who make money online without too much effort and most importantly of all, not having to spend a single cent doing so. While I am about to show you what are some of the methods you can use to do this, I do not agree at all that you can actually make money anywhere, online or in the bricks and mortar business world, without having to spend any money because one thing you would definitely need in any situation is that of time, and in business, as is so often the case, time IS money. So if anyone actually tells you that you can produce endless number of checks with any figure of income and you do not have to dish out even a single cent from your pocket nor waste any second of your life doing so, run for the hills away from the person and lift your scam alert radar because that is what he or she really is.

To make some income online without having to come out with any monetary capital of your own at the beginning is entirely possible and feasible. However, the one thing you would need in huge amounts and probably endless supplies of it would be time. Nothing comes free in this world, and to making a living online at the start without so much as a penny to your name would require your total dedication, discipline and a good part of your waking hours because while the methods may be easy, they are incredibly tedious and time consuming. In certain cases, you will also be competing with mass production lines who offer rates which will effectively knock you out of a reasonable return and you either bite the bullet and grin and bear it, or choose an alternative revenue generating method which might offer better returns.

Before we go on to explore Internet Marketing which can offer attractive returns in comparison to the overall effort, it is also not something that anyone can do, and do well. In many cases, there is also a requirement for some startup capital if you would like to see results earlier, but this money can easily spiral out of control for many beginners who are not adept at monitoring different ad campaigns and their funds and budgets. Therefore, my advise is always to stick to some basic online money making methods, get acquainted with them, learn the fundamentals of SEO and marketing, and then go on from there. Do not just jump straight in to anything that promises lots of money like so many beginners do, and then quickly get disenchanted and discouraged when you only see earnings of a couple of dollars after 6 months or worse still for some, losses amounting to a few hundred dollars.

I will start with some simple methods of making money online, something which just about anybody can do as long as they spend any amount of time on the keyboard, in front of their computers, sending emails or messages and chatting with another party over the Internet. If you can type and often engage in these things, you certainly have something to say and definitely can write about something. Whether it is about your everyday life, your favorite sports, a current affairs or general news item, it is not difficult to churn out a few paragraphs about any topic. If you can do so, then you can, and you should, try your hands at freelance writing. While the initial returns certainly do not offer much, such as a dollar for a few hundred words article, if you are persistent enough, the payoffs will progress and can certainly come up to even tens or hundreds of dollars per article when you have built a portfolio of completed freelance assignments. Of course, you definitely need to provide quality writing as well, but this will certainly improve as you do more of it. It is a simple way to start earning an online income while working from home and the only drawback is that you are limited to what money you can make to the number of articles you can produce in a given day. It is by no means an easy task from the start, but it gets simpler and more efficient with each passing article.

There are many online sites to get freelance writing assignments, such as from GetAFreeLancer.com. Note however that you are often in competition with mass production lines that offer ridiculously low prices of $1 per 500 word article or even less, and buyers take advantage of this to push prices low. Try to stand your ground even if you are starting out, and build a relationship and portfolio with a few buyers. If the offers start coming in with regularity and they have shown satisfaction with your work, do not shy from requesting for higher fees. In many cases, the buyers will often themselves do so if they feel that you offer good quality work and are determined to keep you amongst their regular writers.

There are also other article sites like Associated Content which rely on user generated content to act as a news site. They offer anything from $3 to $15 for a minimum 400 word article, depending on their individual reviews and whether the articles submitted by you are in demand in terms of online content. If you submit articles related to current popular news, and they are well written, you can expect at least $6 per article and that amount can easily accumulate. Unfortunately, such offers are limited to United States citizens. However, foreign writers are eligible for Performance Payments which basically pay you per CPM per article at $1.50. This basically means that you will receive $1.50 for every 1,000 views of any article, and this number is an accumulated amount, which means that if you get 400 views for article A, and 600 views for article B, you receive $1.50 for a total of 1,000 views across your total content. This is an easy passive income and it can potentially grow if you provide popular content.

Further to this, you can also generate some money online through the use of article marketing. There are actually many differing opinions on what article marketing is, and I will not go into the rights and wrongs, but to use the term as a broad umbrella of making online sales, income, traffic or for SEO benefits by employing the submission of articles to article directories. In many cases, many blogs are in effect article marketing platforms as their authors attempt to peddle their wares and products to readers through blog posts. The basic idea is to write articles that try to promote a particular product that you aim to make a sale for once the reader actually answers your call to action at the end of the article which will bring him or her to the sales page. These articles are then submitted to various article directories such as EzineArticles.com from which sales leads can be potentially generated. The way to make money from this method is to submit the articles to as many directories as possible and they must be well written in order to entice readers to click through the links provided within to the sales pages. This is essentially the traditional method of article marketing which can still achieve some results today, but is quickly on a decline. In future posts, I will discuss more on the modern benefits of article marketing.

I will continue with more methods of making money online without having to spend a tangible cent of your own money in my next post, before this one gets too long and most of you start losing focus. In the meantime, you may wish to try the above methods rather than some of the other scam filled methods which so often require that you build huge downlines. While there are definitely legitimate programs of these sort, you will spend too much time trying to filter out the good from the bad and in the end, fail to use your time productively. Freelance writing and article marketing can be a self starting method for starters and they definitely do not require anything other than your time in producing content, and is a low risk and moderate return strategy for anyone looking to make some extra money online without money.

Till then, it's

Pete North

How to Make Money

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