by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: January 28, 2009

There are three principal sites which I would deem the best for making money on the Internet but there are a great many others which I use to assist me in doing so. I will first introduce you to those three sites - in no particular order - and then explain what I mean about using other sites to assist me earn money from them.

It seems logical to start with where we are at the moment, Helium. Helium is a site to which writers post articles on any one of literally thousands of different topics. As we build our presence on Helium and our portfolio of articles grow, we will - if we are good enough - accumulate stars, which lead to increasing fixed payment rates on our articles. We will also share in advertising revenue. Regular competitions are held on the site to which we can write and hopefully take one of the three prizes on offer in each instance. Helium articles are rated by site members, our peers, and this practise too is essential if we are to maximise our earnings.

Hub Pages is a Web 2.0 site which allows us to build a page or series of pages on the Internet on any given topic. We should choose a very specific topic for each page to optimise our chances of being found by the search engines. It is very easy to set up a Hub Page but full, step by step instructions are provided as you go along. You will also need a Google AdSense ID, as well as Amazon and eBay affiliateships in order to advertise on a pay per click basis and sell products for commission.

Squidoo is another Web 2.0 site which is similar in principal to Hub Pages. With Squidoo, however, the AdSense revenue is pooled and distributed monthly depending upon performance and pre-built modules facilitate our selling Amazon, eBay, CafePress products and lots more.

Building a presence on these sites, however, is not enough to earn good money through them, especially in the latter two examples. We have to make sure that these pages or mini-sites are found by potential visitors and/or buyers. There are a great many ways in which we can go about this effectively.

The first step is to include relevant links from our own sites to others on the same topic. Readers like this as it provides them with more information on your subject. The search engine "spiders" which will crawl your creations also are impressed by this practice. Don't forget to link your own relevant sites and articles together.

We then have to obtain inbound links. Bookmarking sites such as Reddit, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us are great ways in which we can do this fairly quickly. Search for and find as many of them as you can and submit your details to them - but don't Spam them with an excessive number of links!

Social networking on sites such as MySpace and Facebook is often thought of as simply a teenagers' occupation but we should not under-estimate the power of these sites. The traffic they attract is massive and if we properly position ourselves on them, the visitors we can attract is virtually unlimited. Join them, make friends and post your links.

Blogging is a further practise we should get ourselves in to. I use two different blogging sites. I use Blogger (operated by Google) which allows me to place my GoogleAds on the pages to generate further revenue. I also use Today, which actually pays you to blog at the rate of $1 per 100 word post per day.

I hope that I have convinced you of the merits of both these sites and these activities and that you will now try them for yourself. They are all free, and if used as I suggest, they all work - I promise!

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