Making Money Online

Making money online is quite easy really. You can post articles on HubPages, Squidoo or your blog and generate advertising revenue. You can become an affiliate marketer  for companies like Amazon, Go Daddy, Host Gator or Zazzle.com. You can design products and sell them to customers through zazzle.com and Cafepress. Or you can sell your items through Amazon , eBay and Bonanza or Etsy.

All these places allow you to sell words or goods. Making money online is pretty easy if you can turn a few ideas into cash. Sell old unwanted clothes and write a line or two of good coherent text. Money will come wandering to your door.

Wandering to your door? Well yes for a while cash does just seem to wander to your door. It comes a penny or a dollar at a time. For weeks, for months and often for years.

I have been online now for several years. I began on mailing lists back in the late 1990's. I began to create work as a hobby. This continued for several years, I only began to make real efforts in 2009 to make any real money. It wasn't until late in 2012 that my income at least matched that of my day job.

That online income has been up and down this year. The early months were tough. My online income fell drastically, the pennies wandered up to my door but the dollars walked right on by. As Zazzle income fell, Amazon and Yahoo! voices stepped up. Now Zazzle income is rising again and it looks like June 2013 could see online income could come to levels to match my day job income again.

Online income at this stage is far too fragile to risk giving up a day job, but so I double my monthly income some months. That;s a nice bonus.

Making some money online is so easy. I'd defy you not to be able to begin generating cash today if you use the right services. Generating consistant cash income is the hard part. I have not quite mastered that just yet. But I will. I will and I will share my findings with you.

California State and Cities Mug by Bretsuki
Create a unique personalize coffee mug from zazzle.com.

Should You Consider a Blog?

In the Questions and Answers section on HubPages and also on several forums, the questions of creating your own blog is an evergreen topic.

For my two pennies worth there are a few good reasons to have a blog as opposed to writing for HubPages.

1. You have full Editorial Control: If you are writing on your own blog you are not tied to the limitations of HubPages. You can post what you want, within reasonable boundaries, most hosting services have rules on what canbe posted on sites but they are very unlikely to pull your content because you have been idle for a few weeks.

2. Hosted Blogs are very inexpensive these days. A blog on Go Daddy or Host Gator can be had for about $6 per month.

3. You can monetize your own blog and NOT share your income with HubPages. When you publish on HubPages all ad revenue and revenue created by people viewing your work is shared with HubPages. Also items sold on your Amazon and eBay links are shared with HubPages. Fine you are happy sharing your revenue for free hosting, but revenue sharing is not really free, and if you are not a member of Google AdSense scheme you are giving your revenue to HubPages for free.

Having your own blog may not give you access to Google AdSense, but there are other cash per click options out there who might be more suitable fir your content.

4. You are responsible for your own reputation. As HubPages becomes seen as a place for poor content and marketers and spam your reputation becomes tarnished. With your own blog, you are the controller of your own public persona. You can keep your own reputation squeeky clean, and wholesome.

Ask yourself if you may reach a wider audience and make more money, being your own independent blogger.

It does take some time, two or three years to start to build a strong blog, so its not for everyone, with perseverance though blogging can be much more satisfying, publishing for yourself rather than for another organization like HubPages.

Broaden Your Horizons

The world of internet publishing is a fickle friend. What with search engine tweaks and constantly rising and falling viewing figures.

The world of community pages such as HubPages is always a dangerous one. At any moment the owners of the community site can throw a spanner into the works and blow all your hard work away.

One tweak of their algorhytm and you are history in search engine parlance.

So for this reason I would say keep as many irons in the fire as you possibly can.  Don't throw away HubPages but spread out to other sites. Blog for yourself, maybe move into online retailing opening up affilate links to sites such as zazzle.com, cafepress.com and godaddy.com.

Affilliate sites pay some good referal bonuses and with sites like zazzle and cafepress you don't even need to produce designs yourself these days you link to a certain keyword product list and bang you can start earning cash without having to make anything.

If you need to write, try squidoo.com too or List my 5.com they are both different from HubPages but they offer you an outlet and a chance of marketing your work if any one of the sites you use botches their search engine standing.