Basic Facts to Know Before Start Making Money Online

People need money, especially easy and quick money by working from home. Internet is one of the best media for making money online, but not so easy. Most people think that making money online from blogs or other online activities are very easy and quick, but that is not true most of the time. Yes, it could be easy after you reached a certain level, but you have to work hard and spend more time to reach that level.

I can understand a few common doubts for most of the newcomers on blogging. They have not understood the basic facts of blogging and how to make money online. In this post, I share my experience and knowledge about most of the common questions asked by email to me.

Before going further, let me tell you one thing clearly, I can reply your emails hundred times and you can read the whole web about how to make money online or start a blog, BUT nothing will help you UNTIL you really start a blog and get to know how things are working. There is no certain formula to become successful in blogging, no one has that. You have to form your formula.

Two Ways to Start Making Money Online

I know you would feel insecure to invest money on hosting package and start a new website, but you have to take that risk.

If you fail with your first blog, take that as a lesson and start the second blog. You can easily recover the loss made from the first blog with your 2nd blog.

1. Start a Blog with a topic

In this case, you have to write and update your blog very frequently (maybe daily or once in two/three days). You can have several sub-categories under the main topic and write about them.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will be very important in this method. Once you started getting decent traffic (visitors), you can make money with Google AdSense or other PPC programs.

2. Create a niche website

This is not like a blog. You have to find out a product (or niche) which is having decent search queries on Google but less competition. Then start a website with 5 to 6 pages, so it will be a static website most of the time.

Get traffic from search engines or other methods such as social networking sites, advertising, and email marketing. Then you have to make your readers to buy the product or click ads on your site.

You can’t make more money from a single niche website by this method, so you need to have multiple websites with a similar setup.

This is called ‘niche blogging’ and I do not recommend for new bloggers, because it is really difficult to find a niche and get traffic to these types of static websites nowadays. So, if you are a beginner I recommend the first method, start a blog and write daily.

How to Find a Topic to Start a New Blog?

This is another critical question. The topic you are going to write completely depends on your interest and ability. If you like to write about Android phones, I can’t suggest you start a blog on Photography. You know what I’m trying to say!

Its all about your knowledge, experience, interest, and consistency. Also, you must check the competition for a particular topic. If you search your interested topic on Google, by seeing the results you must understand the competition by a number of search results and top ten sites’ strength.

For example, if you are a lover of iPhone 4, it is pointless to start a new blog about the iPhone 4 now. Because it's already an old topic and well covered on most of the top blogs. Instead, you could try some different topics on iPhone 4S.

You have to spend more time than anything else to find out a topic while starting a new blog because it is very important and almost you have to stick with it all the time!.

WordPress.com or Blogger.com or Separate own custom Domain?

First thing, if you are serious about blogging and making money online, better buy hosting package with a custom domain name. It may cost you around 5 to 6 dollars per month, but that can be earned very quickly after some time, let's say within six months.

Getting an own custom domain is more useful and advantage than free sites. Later transferring your blog from free site to custom domain is a headache and painful by losing the traffic and Page Rank. Instead of facing these all issues, better start with separate custom domain from beginning itself.

You can USE THIS LINK to get $50 discount from Dreamhost for your new custom domain package.

If you are still not comfortable or having some financial issues on getting a custom domain, you can go with free sites like wordpress.com or blogger.com. Both have few limitations and you can’t customize them as you like, but still, it is very much possible to run a successful blog and make money with free sites.

So, try to start your new blog with custom own domain, if not, try WordPress.com (because I know this) or blogger.com.

How Long Should I wait to Get traffic and Making Money Online?

It is completely unpredictable. If you are starting a new website, it will take some time by Google to trust your site. Once Google trusts and makes sure that your site is not a spam site, then your blog pages will appear on Google search result pages (based on the competition). Its called ‘Google Sandbox effect’.

In my experience, it may take around three months to get reasonable traffic if you publish quality and unique articles with proper SEO in regular interval. During this time you must continuously build quality backlinks to your new blog from famous sites in your topic. This will increase the popularity of your new blog. Also, social networking is very important nowadays. Content is still king on the internet, so write good articles by keeping real human readers and SEO on your mind.

In my personal opinion, once you started to get decent traffic may be after 4 months, I think this time you will start making money online too with a good amount. At least, you should be able to recover the hosting charges with extra bucks for your pocket money.

These all are from my experience and what I have seen in my blogging life. As I said earlier, there is no particular rule or formula for blogging. So, it could be different for you. But, few things remain the same for all, such as ‘traffic is money’ and ‘hard work pays back definitely on blogging’.

I hope this post will give some ideas if you are new to blogging. Share your experience and questions. I like to hear more valuable doubts and questions here, so it will give some ideas to write my next post.