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Yes, you really can make money online - and lots of it! The trick, as in so many other aspects of life, is in knowing how to go about it in the correct fashion. In this article, I will show you how to get your foot on the first rung of the ladder and also how to avoid the biggest pitfalls that I personally fell victim to when I started out.

The first and by far the most important step is to pick a subject which we know a lot about to promote. We want it to be something very specific. For example, if we like to cook, that is great, but think about precisely what we like to cook. If we start off on our general subject of "cooking" we are going to have a lot of competition out there! However, if we decide to work upon, "How to make delicious roast chicken," we are much more focused and stand a far better chance of getting our presence noticed and ultimately our products sold.

The next step is to build a Squidoo "lens," or site. Squidoo is a fantastic site for getting a message across, for selling items online and also for attracting search engine traffic. The site is packed with tips on how to successfully optimise your lens but the first step is to make sure you get your URL and lens title right - the URL is the one thing which cannot be changed later. In the example above, I would make the selectable part of the URL "deliciousroastchicken," or "delicious-roast-chicken." Make sure it is very relevant to your topic. The title should be something like, "How to Make Delicious Roast Chicken." On Squidoo, we can sell Amazon products relating to roasting chicken, eBay products and lots more, generating us revenue.

Hub Pages is our next stop. You will find Hub Pages very similar in principle to Squidoo but whereas on Squidoo we get a share of the revenue from AdSense if we are successful enough, on Hub Pages we use our own Google AdSense ID for pay per click revenue. You will also need to sign up for your own Amazon and eBay affiliate ID's to fully optimise your page. Remember, there is a lot more than one way to roast a chicken so build this page in similar fashion but with fresh content. Never duplicate content on the Web - the search engines will shoot you down for it. Create a link on this page to your lens and then go back to Squidoo and do likewise to your Hub Page.

Helium is the site you are currently viewing and there are a lot of article titles where we can write about chicken. On your "About Me" page, make sure you include a link to your Squidoo and Hub Pages in the space provided, then write fresh articles about roasting chicken, or indeed cooking chicken in any way. You will earn from Helium - hopefully! - and some readers will check out your "About Me" page and click through to your sites, generating you traffic and potential revenue. Go back to your Hub and lens and link to your Helium articles.

We are now at the stage where we have established our presence online and we have to begin marketing it. Add your pages to bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us. Start a blog if you don't already have one about chickens and link to your sites and pages from it. Join the big social networking sites and share details of your pages with friends. Always be on the lookout for fresh ways to market and promote your websites. There are almost infinite number of ways in which we can do so.

What we must avoid - and I wish I had known when I started out - are the "get rich quick" schemes we see promoted so avidly on the Internet. They are all scams. Do not join survey sites, or paid to read e-mail sites or anything similar. If they do pay you at all, it will be a very small amount only, not at all worthy of the time you have spent earning it.

As I stated at the beginning of this article, these are procedures for getting your foot on the first rung of the ladder. It takes time to create and effectively market your presence but be patient and tenacious. You can do it - and the beauty is, you can now go back to the beginning and start all over again with a different subject!

Learn more about this author, Gordon Hamilton.
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