Can you really make money Online????

Well where to begin. I started this little experiment about 3 weeks ago. I have been an avid web surfer for years and I always knew people made money online but never had the time to figure it out. Well along came unemployment from the company that I had worked for during the last year. I joined the life of the unemployed along with the thousands of others out there all searching for jobs in an industry that was shrinking, as well as the highest unemployment numbers nation wide. So after month of searching in vain for a new job and an email account full of rejections. I figured I would give the internet a try and see if I could be the next millionaire that all those websites calm. I’ve spent countless hours researching and exploring so many ideas online that I have forgotten some of them, but I did learn a few lessons so far. So I’ll try to share a few.

I started with doing research on probably on of the most advertised home businesses out there.. Online surveys, I discovered that most of the actual surveys companies are legit and do really want your opinion and online surveys are a great way for them to get that. The only problem is being that one person they choose to complete the survey. Basically you will be sent an email with a link to a pre-survey. Then if you qualify you will then be able to complete the actual survey from which you will be paid.

The only difference in online survey companies are fee and free, both will pay you to complete surveys for their clients. Fee survey companies will charge you a small fee to join. Now I have to say that I haven’t signed up for any of the fee so I really don’t know if they are truly any better or worse then the free ones. I did however sign up to about 50 free survey companies. The only way to make real money doing straight surveys is to sign up for as many as you can find 100+. Each company will send you one or more surveys a week that will pay anywhere from fifty cents to I’ve heard over twenty dollars, you will have to be a good little survey’r in order to get the higher paid surveys though

After a few weeks of doing surveys I was getting some that were worth 2 to 3 dollars each. The tough part was actually qualifying for those surveys since the sample group was so small, So what’s a going broke person to do????

Referrals… I noticed all the survey sites offered incentives to sell out your friends and family. YAYYYY…Well I opened up my address book and sent sent sent, with very few results. Many of the survey do not allow you to advertise on personal websites such as frendster, myspace or face book so I thought I would build a review website. Referrals will generally pay 1-2 dollars each

Website… the only regret I have about the website is the choice of hosting company. Weebly seems like a good company but it is a little underpowered compared to other business type website design programs. After some research I found out that Site Build It is pretty much one of the best out there, but it’s also over 200 dollars a year. I did end up finding PowWeb which is reasonably price and has a lot of great options. The only problem is that since my domain is new I have to wait 60 days to transfer it over. 

How to build a website…I’m now where near an expert on website building. the only experience I have is an old myspace page and a really old angelfire page from about 10 years ago. The good thing about the angelfire page is it did teach me a bit about html. But now days if you can make a myspace page, you can make any webpage. I started building mine with the free tools available on weebly but couldn’t really do want I wanted so I moved onto designing the page on MS frontpage and just pasting the html into my weebly page. I have discovered that tables are my friend when it comes to putting things where I want them. If you aren’t sure how to write an html code for something you can simply search for it online or find a page that has a similar idea to what you want then right click and view source. Probably the only really difficult part about designing the page is the sitemap, it took me a few days of endless searching to figure out that a sitemap that is readable by a search engine isn’t just a page with some links.

Sitemaps… I found this page that makes them pretty easy to make. http://www.sitemapbuilder.net/default.aspx once it’s built, save it to your computer and upload the actual file to one of your webpages.

I started the website with just one page and I have changed it about a million times while adding to it. While I was building the website I learned about pay per click….

Pay per click…is another great way to make money once you have traffic on your website. Basically you want people to come to your website and then leave by clicking one the ads on your page such as the google ads you see on every ones web pages now days. Everytime someone clicks one of those ads you will get paid. I started using three different pay per click companies, Google adsence, content link and bidvertiser. Google has been the best paying so far generating between 20 cents to 2 dollars per ad clicked. Content link has only paid 1 cent per click so far and I haven’t received anything from bidvertiser. So far I have made about 10 bucks on ppc ads

Advertising… I underestimated how difficult it was to be a little fish in a huge sea. So that’s part of the reason I’m writing this blog and hopefully I can help someone not make some of the mistakes that I have made so far.

I will try to keep everyone up to date on some new idea’s that I’m working one, including the whole google/click bank affiliate program and other product affiliate programs.

Feel free to check my website out anytime at www.freeinternetsurveys.com