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More and more people nowadays are turning to the internet to supplement their income or even try and make it a full time income. The fact is, you can make money online and a lot of people are doing it. Few people however, make a full time income or get rich, despite what you will see on countless websites that promise riches for doing next to nothing. Your online income will be in direct proportion to the time and effort you devote to it. The internet being what it is, you can make anywhere from a few extra bucks a month for doing very little, to thousands per month from devoting full time effort creating multiple income streams.

So let's take a look at some of the more common methods people are using to achieve a level of success online. We'll start with some of the easiest and free methods and progress to some of the more comprehensive methods that will take more time and effort.

GTP or Get Paid To

These include paid email and paid surveys. They have been around a long time and most people looking for an online income will give them a try. You can make a few dollars per month with minimal time and effort and you won't have to invest a penny to participate, only your time.

Paid email programs, once you sign up, will send you emails containing links to websites that their advertisers have paid them to send out the ads for. The paid email program then pays you a small amount (usually a penny or less) to click on the ad and visit the website. You can see that you would have to join several programs and click a lot of links to make very much with this method.

Paid surveys, once you join the program, pay you to fill out surveys on their site about various subjects. You can make more than the paid email programs but again, you are not going to get rich. It will also take more of your time than the email programs. Realistically, you can make several hundred dollars per year taking surveys.

Affiliate Programs

There are so many affiliate programs out their and so many claims at how much money you can make with them, I will give you one piece of advice that I have found to be absolutely true in every case, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." Beware of the programs that promise riches for simply joining their program. A large number of them charge a fee to join and that's a clue that they make most of their money from the membership fee than actually selling a valid product or service.

The only program I recommend, especially for people new to affiliate marketing is SFI, which is free to join and they have a huge resource center that you can use to learn everything you need to know about marketing online. It's worth joining this program just for the access to this information which you can apply to all of your online marketing efforts.

Blogging

This is a relatively new method of making money online but it's becoming more popular all the time. It's another thing you can do with absolutely no investment. Sights like Blogger and others will let you set up one or more blogs about almost any subject you choose.

Blogging is simply writing about topics that interest you or you're passionate enough about to be able to write on the subject on a regular basis. Blogs usually consist of short posts of a few paragraphs daily or several times a week. You make money with them by monetizing them with programs such as Google Adsense. Google will place ads on your blog and when people click on the ad, Google will pay you a share of the fee they charge the advertiser to place the ad. You can also place ads on your blog from programs like Commission Junction or ClickBank.

To achieve success however, your blog will have to be interesting enough to attract readers and not everyone that goes to your blog will click on an ad. The percentage is usually around 5% or less of visitors that will click a link so you will need large numbers of visitors to reap much income.

You can also use your blog to drive visitors to your website if you have one or any of the other programs you are involved in by including links to them on your blog.

Writing Articles

Different from blogging, article writing will require more of an in depth writing style on any subject and you'll need a little ability to write about a variety of topics. Sites like Helium, Squidoo, Associated Content, Constant Content, Elance and others will let you make money through writing. Helium and Squidoo are probably the best for amateur writers. Some of the other sites are looking for a more polished writing style but will usually pay more for your writing so give them a try. The worst that can happen is they won't accept your article.

Photography

You can get paid for sharing your digital photos online at sites like shareapic.net, shutterstock.com and others for people viewing or downloading your photos. If you have a stock of your own photos or you would like to make some money with your digital camera, these sites are for you. If you've ever thought about being a professional photographer, but your photography has only been a hobby, now your hobby can make you some money.

Social Networking

The most popular social networking sites on the internet are MySpace and Facebook but for all the money they take in, they don't share a penny with the users that help them make that money. Fortunately, there are now a few social networking sites that do. Right now I believe the most popular and fastest growing is Yuwie, based in the United States
but there is also MyPage5 which is based in the U.K.
Both sites will pay you a small amount for each page view of your profile. That means that every time someone views one of your pictures or reads your blog or simply goes to any page one your profile, you will get a small amount credited to your account. The ideas is that all those small amounts will add up so the more friends you get viewing your stuff, the more you will get paid. They also have referral programs so when you get all your friends to sign up, you make more.

Auctions

Anybody that has been on the internet at all has heard of ebay. There are many auction sites but by far ebay is the most popular. If you have products to sell, using an auction site to sell them is an inexpensive way to do it. You can set up a virtual online store without the expense of having your own website store and merchant account. You will have to pay fees to the auction site but it's a lot cheaper.

Some people use online auctions as their sole source of income but it takes a lot of work to build it up to that point and if you are selling your own products, you will be busy packing, shipping and fulfilling orders. One way to ease this burden would be to offer products from companies that "drop ship", that is, you sell products from companies that will ship directly from their warehouse whenever you make a sale and pass along the buyer's information to them. You never actually have to handle the product yourself.

Your own website

Now that I just got through telling you it's cheaper to not have your own website, I'll tell you that there are certain things that you can do that you can only do with your own website. For one thing it's the only way to totally control your content. If you have your own domain, you can do anything you want with it. You control what's on it, the layout, the colors, what it's about and what ads you want or don't want to appear on it. You can change it anytime you want, add or remove content and you can even change the theme or subject it's about if you so choose. It's the ultimate freedom online to express yourself. With your own domain, you build name recognition over time. You can put links on your site to all your other online content. You can advertise your referral links to all your programs all in one place. You can set up your own online store, your own blog, your own discussion board, just about anything you want to do with it.

It's really not all that expensive to have your own website. You can buy a domain name and get good quality hosting for under $100 per year for a basic site. Of course, that's assuming you can design the site yourself with basic HTML or using one of the many WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) programs like Microsoft FrontPage or Adobe DreamWeaver. If you need professional design services that will add to the cost and later on when you need increased bandwidth because of the hoards of traffic to your site, that will cost you a little more, but by that time, hopefully, your website will be making you a good amount of cash.

Well, there are a few of the more popular ways to make money online. I'm sure there are a lot more out there but these will give you a good start or give you some ideas for you to choose a direction. Give it a try, you'll be making money in no time.

Learn more about this author, MJ Miller.
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