Online Money Dot.com

The question I most often get asked by email is “how can I make money on the internet?”.

To tell you the truth that is one of the reasons why I started this blog in the first place, so my answer will usually be that you start by reading this and other blogs. But the fact that I get asked this question so often reveals that people think this is something that can be explained in one, two, or even three emails. But the reality is it can not.

Although there really aren´t any specific “classes”, to make money on the internet you do need to “study” and “learn”. But this is usually, with very few exceptions, a long process. We have to start off slowly, commit the usual mistakes, and learn from them. It doesn´t matter if you´re chosen path is a blog, mini-sites, forums, or even buying domains. One of the advantages of an internet business is that you can usually start without having to make much of a monetary investment.

When I first started this blog five months ago, my investement was about $7, and today I am already making a decent amount of money from it. Granted it is not a big percentage of the $10000 to $12000 I make every month from home on the internet, it is a start. With the exception of this wonderful world we call the internet, where else can you start a business for only $7? Most of us spend that much money on a beer at a bar. Most of us will spend $20 or $30 on a night out with friends without much thought, but then will spend months thinking if it is worth having a self hosted blog with our own domain.

Another thing to consider (and I am going to repeat myself) is that all this takes time. My blog has recently started receiving an interesting number of daily visitors, and my RSS count is up to at least 50, but during those first few months I had only a handful of daily visitors and RSS readers. We have to be ready for this, and at times it will feel like we are talking and no one is listening. If one of your chosen businesses is mini-sites, than you have to understand that it will take a few month for the first visitors to come. We have to slowly start adding pages to these mini-sites, start getting indexed by search engines, and our visitors will eventually start coming. I think this is the second most common mistake people make: they think that they will quickly start earning lots of easy money, and when they realize that this is not the case they give-up before results start to show-up.

Another reason most people don´t become successful at their internet ventures is because they don´t take things seriously. Sometimes it would be enough to just spend less time on FaceBook, MySpace, or Hi5, and more time on your blog or whatever your chosen internet business.

But you know what is the biggest secret to making money on the internet?

Above all you just need to “start“, or as the Nike commercial use to say: “just do it”!