Being a publisher and making money online has brought in a lot of attention when telling people that you make your money online. They begin asking you many questions on ‘How to do it?’, ‘Can I do it?’ and etc. It then turns to a long discussion about how I make money online so I’ve decided to post some frequent questions and answers.

Is it possible for anyone to begin making money online?

As long as you have the ability to work on the computer and know how to work a computer then I believe it’s possible. It’s not as easy as you may think it is since you’ve got a lot to learn and a lot to go through because it does take time but once you grasp the simple aspects of it, then your good to go.

How can you do it?

Before you even consider working with websites, I highly suggest you to learn the basic codings of a website. You simply cannot begin making money online if you do not know how to code at all. Although you can hire someone to do it for you, there are times when you can complete a really easy task without any help which takes only a couple of seconds. To learn the basic HTML, search websites on the internet or use W3Schools.

How much does it cost to make a website?

How much a website cost to start it up all depends on the webmaster. You can take the easy way out by spending tons of money or you can take the time and practice some designing skills, learning how to code in HTML and getting in the cheapest way out. Getting it the cheapest way out does require a lot of time so the choice is up to you. It can take weeks, month or even years before you can actually learn how to design and code highly professional designs.

For example, Ashley Qualls started her website, whateverlife.com, with only $8 and look at what it has become. She hasn’t spend a dime yet on advertising and have designed majority of the graphics on her own! She even bought herself a really nice house cash with the money she made from her website. It’s definitely possible for anything to happen over the internet!

How can I get started?

It’s all up to you now! You can first start off by finding out what type of website you are looking into creating. Don’t worry about your first website since you are just learning everything. I found out that my first website actually turned out big and that’s simply through trial and error. I wasn’t panicking about receiving the most traffic possible as the traffic built on while I was learning. Once you’ve got the type of website you want, then go ahead and think of a decent name to name it and purchase your domain name from any domain registrar. I started off at Godaddy and I still use them to this day. You can find some coupon codes to Godaddy if you happen to purchase one. So now you got your domain name and now for the hosting. You can either purchase hosting plans or you can find free hosting from companies that actually provides it. I started with free hosting and grew out of it quickly but if you don’t want to go through that stage, then skip over on to paid hosting.

Now that you got your domain name and host, now begin working on your website! Possibilities are endless and you will learn it all through trial and error. This is obviously not the indefinite guide to begin working on websites but it does provide the basic tips on starting off. Look forward to a very detailed article or even an eBook later on.

The one thing that almost every webmaster do is purchase domain names but the difference between each purchase is the registrar. I personally like the GoDaddy service for domain names but for others, GoDaddy is not what they are looking for. If you haven’t already, try them out on your next purchase. Something that I’ve encountered from GoDaddy is that you can get quite a bargain on domain name purchases and renewals. They love sending you those extra coupons through email for a discount on their already cheap domain names. They don’t give you all the good ones so I’ve bundled up a few to post here.

• OYH3 - All .COMs for $6.95 per domain name.
• CJCDEAL35 - $5 off your next purchase of $30 or more.
• CJCDEAL36 - $10 off your next purchase of $50 or more.
• CJCDEAL37 - $20 off your next purchase of $100 or more.
• CJCDEAL38 - 15% off your next purchase of $50 or more.
• HASH3 - All .COMs for $6.95 per domain name.

These coupons come quite in handy when I purchase domain names. It doesn’t take a huge percentage off of the domain names but it does take a few dollars. Let’s take .COMs for example, I can grab any .COM domain name for $7.15 a year and still have a great service from my registrar! That’s pretty cheap compared to many other registrars but every company has their benefits and a few extra dollars can also be used for another purchase of a domain name or be kept saved.

Selling direct ads to your visitors is a great way to increase your revenue by simply removing the middle man. The only disadvantage between the middle man is that the middle man usually supplies you with your advertisers. You wouldn’t have to go around searching for them. Therefore, I would only suggest you to begin selling direct ads to your visitors when you have a decent audience that would be willing to purchase your ad spots. Listed below are a few ways that you can increase revenue coming from direct ads.

1. Build Up Traffic!
   I’ve seen many web publishers do this already and it won’t work. You must have the traffic in order to pick up the advertisers. You can’t get the advertisers and then get the visitors later on. It doesn’t work like that way.
2. Set Up Ad Spot Locations.
   Do not fill up your site with millions of ad spots for private advertisers. There’s disadvantages to doing this which would include, having a lot of ad spots not filled. Advertisers do not want to see many unfilled ad locations as it would leave them to believing that there aren’t many interest in your ad spots. You do not want potential advertisers thinking that. Start out with just a couple of locations and as you fill them up, add one or two at a time until you have a decent amount on your site.
3. Set Up Advertising Page.
   Set up a page where you list all the ad spots you currently provide, quite a bit of information regarding your websites statistics and the pricing structure. If you’re dealing with Paypal as a payment method, add the Paypal button up so that they can instantly pay you for that location.
4. Use an Ad Manager.
   There are plenty of ad managers out there for use and I believe Google has recently released one but it’s still in Beta. Try using the one many people are quite familiar with which is OpenX. It can do everything for you automatically without the hassle of having to manage which ads go where and etc.
5. Advertise Your Ad Spots on Forums!
   Last but not least, advertise your advertising page on webmaster forums. High populated webmaster forums can bring you many advertisers and in return also returning advertisers. Make sure you give them what they want and you will definitely notice the impact of webmaster forums.

After all, your bringing in more revenue by doing these few tips. Include discounts for long term purchases and allow more than one payment client. Not everyone use the same payment source so it would be beneficial to do so. Feature your advertisers from time to time so that they feel that they’ve got a good return for their money spent. It’s all about business!

The concept is quite simple for many new webmasters; make a website and start making money with it. It sounds pretty easy but in reality, to make a decent amount of money with it, comes a lot of work and patience. I’ve been doing this for about three to four years already so this shows how long you have to be persistent on it to begin to see a nice amount of revenue coming in. Still to this day, it’s pretty hard for me to come around new projects but within time, it all will come to you.

Depending on how hard and much you’ve worked on it will definitely determine the amount of time it takes to get to start seeing some nice income. Use these few tips that will help you on your first easy steps to making money online through websites.

1. Focus On Content:
   Before you jump into any other situations, focus on your content. The better your content, the higher of a percentage a visitor will begin to keep coming back to your website or blog for more. You can’t really have a website without content.
2. Focus On Appearance:
   Appearance isn’t everything in life and it has been proven that it isn’t everything on the web either. However, you can still take the approach to having a decent template design on your website that can attract visitors as well. It doesn’t have to be extravagant and it doesn’t have to be too simple. You can start off with a decent one and then once your website start rolling in some nice cash, you can think about getting something extravagant for it.
3. Build Up Back links:
   Begin to build up back links after you’ve accomplished the first two tasks. Post your URL on forums, on directories, submit your site maps to search engines and exchange links with other sites in your niche. You will receive a lot of rejections at first for link exchanging and that’s simply due to not having any visitors on your site but forget about them and just continue on.
4. Campaign For Visitors:
   Start to purchase campaigns to promote your website. If you truly believe that your website has a great point and will stand out, then go ahead and spend a nice sum of cash to get the visitors. In the end, it will all pay off. I’ve done that quite a bit on new projects. I don’t go too far with purchasing ad spots but I do get somewhere with what I purchase. Use Google Analytics to verify the quality of your traffic and to see if you should purchase more from them again.
5. Provide Some Interaction:
   Not many people enjoy a dull site. Provide some interaction and get your visitors involved. It is very important to do so if you are running a blog. You can’t really succeed if you don’t do this since your forming a community. Allow blog comments for your readers to discuss your topics and provide frequent incentives such as blog contest. It will not only help them but it will also help you at the same time.

These are just the very first basics to establishing a website. As you go along with this, try interacting with fellow webmasters in your niche and chat about it for a while. Doing this can help you out in the long run and may help that other webmaster at the same time. Simply by conversing in business, you can definitely make a lot of things happen.

In all niches, there has to be a market strategy that you can approach in order to ‘beat’ the competition. In this case, our niche is the ‘online webmaster’ niche which can be a pretty hard niche to master if you don’t concentrate it on the right way. It’s about the same for every other niche but this one in particular has it’s slight differentiation which is that it’s a bit saturated.

Having a niche with millions of companies/websites in it already can definitely to make a difference in your success. For example, let’s take the ‘make money online’ blogs for a second. There are only a few bloggers who actually makes a decent amount of money online and this is what most likely got their readers attention. But having their success by now owning a popular blog that’s classified as a ‘make money online’ blog on top of making a lot more money online elsewhere brings many interested people/webmasters that would like to do the same. They would like to take a piece of the market by starting their own ‘make money online’ blog. The only differences between the two is that one actually does make money while the other one is really assuming how to make money as they never been through the experiences.

This is where your internet marketing strategy would definitely need to come in handy. Everyone has their own opinion and views on certain things and that’s what really has to make your internet marketing strategy unique. Brainstorm great ideas that you are satisfied with and that’s personally your thing. The other bloggers who are actually making money online had it the easy way as they been through it already and can quickly grab the attention by backing it all up. You, however, can’t fit into this position yet. Tie in your favorite hobbies that you know many others would enjoy as well along with your blog and you can grab some attention from there.

After all, a blog is what you make it. Make it all you and take it in the swift lane!