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It's the holy grail of all housewives and others who want to work from home: find out a way of earning money online. The first thing to understand about making money online is that there are no barriers to entry, which means you are literally competing with people from all over the planet who have access to a computer and who share this dream. The second thing to understand is that making money online is no different to making money any other way - you need to put in the hours and work. There is no such thing as "easy money". Still interested? Here are some ideas of how to go about it.

1. The best way to make money online is to set up a blog about something you are passionate about. Don't bother with a general personal blog about your life, or money blogs; everyone is doing that and there arn't enough readers to make it work. The best business blogs are about niche products, say jewellery, or gardening, or dressmaking or gadgets or some other interest. Once you have started your blog, you can then put links to affiliate ads in your blog sidebar. For instance, say you are a British blogger and have started a blog about gardening. Join TradeDoubler, an affiliate marketer for sites with UK traffic, and apply to have affiliate ads from the big DIY stores which sell a lot of gardening products, such as Homebase and B&Q, on your site. You can also join Amazon affiliates, and put some ads on the blog about gardening books. And you can join Google Adsense, who will provide ads related to the content of your blog.

Once you've got your blog set up, you will need to get traffic to it. Try posting on forums related to your product, which will let you put your blog URL in your signature. Write quality articles on your subject, and submit them to the social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Reddit. Network with other bloggers in your niche by reading their blogs and leaving comments on their posts and exchanging links.

If you put a lot of work into building a quality site with a good amount of traffic, you will start to make money.

2. If you have a small personal blog and are looking to make some money from it, consider doing sponsored posts with the likes of PayPerPost and Smorty. Be warned though that Google doesn't like sponsored posting and will probably downgrade your blog to a pagerank zero after a few months, at which point the sponsored post work will dry up. Sponsored posting pays from $5 - $25 per post depending on how good your blog is.

3. You can earn money writing articles on sites like Helium, Associated Content and Constant Content. Be aware that to earn money on these sites, you will need to produce quality articles and market them.

4. You can earn money with one of the online freelance sites such as GetAFreelancer and Guru. Typically, these sites have lists of jobs from employers, which range from writing articles, to doing IT work, and you bid for each job, saying how much you want to be paid and how long it will take. Once you get a job, you need to make sure you do a good job as your work will be rated, which will affect your chances of succeeding in future bids. Be aware however that you are competing with people from all around the world for these jobs - hence you may be outbid by someone from the developing world who is prepared to work for not very much.

5. You can make money writing reviews for sites such as Ciao, Dooyoo and Epinions. Epinions pays based on how many readers have read your review, whereas Ciao and Dooyoo pay only if Ciao and Dooyoo members have rated your review - therefore to make money with the latter, you need to network on these sites.

6. You can make money doing surveys for various companies such as Lightspeed Panel and Globaltestmarket. Make sure that the survey companies are free to join - never pay to join a site. Making money this way is intermittent - sometimes you will get a lot of surveys, other times they will be sparse. However this is a good way to earn a bit of pin money to spend at christmas (especially if the site in question pays in vouchers).

7. Get-paid-to-read-email sites. There are literally thousands of get-pay-to-read sites out there, most of which are a waste of time as they pay miniscule amounts to read emails so that it takes you literally hundreds of hours to earn a few dollars. There are a few that pay decent amounts per email - Hits4Pay is one, but the real secret to earning with these sites is to get referrals. If you feel you won't be able to get referrals, then give this idea a miss.

I hope the above ideas have inspired you and I wish you luck in your quest to making extra income online!

Learn more about this author, Lily S.
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