Can You Really Money Online? Not Really!

Theoretically, you can make money online, but it will cost you. Realistically, yes, but very little.

This blog does not make any money for me, so I have no reason to sell the idea. The truth is, if you want to make money, you would have to invest money (alot) in advertising to drive traffic to what you are selling. And even though you do get a lot of traffic, the odds are very low anyone is willing to whip out their credit card and buy anything. I had an affiliate link out there, and I got over 500 click-throughs in one month, but not a single purchase. Same thing with any affiliate program, including the famous "Click Bank." Overall, in three months I made about $20, and spent $400 in advertising. Statiscally, only 5% of the affiliates make 100% of the money.

In the "Get Paid to Try" programs, I made a few hundred, but you really need to keep on top of your "free trials" and cancel before your free trial is over so you will not be billed. I made more money with these programs than any other.

Adsense is a good one, but you need to have many, many website pages to generate any real income, and that is a lot of work. I did that too.

Purchasing a ready-made website that will make you $1,000 plus a day is pure B.S. Don't do it. I did, and I lost my money.

All in all, you can make some extra spending money for fun, but not as a full-time income. But if you are anything like me and you want to "give it a try" or see for yourself, I say do it. It was a lot of fun actually, and I learned a lot of things about a lot of different things!

Google AdWords

Google Adwords is a very simple, user friendly advertsing medium. It can be used for several different things, including driving traffic to your own website or blog, or if you are an affiliate, driving traffic to your merchants' website. You are charged per click on your ad and the ad will stop running once it has reached the maximum dollar amount you specify per day.

You can have your ad key word targeted or site targeted. You can set up specific URL's you would like your ad to appear on, and Google has a huge list of available websites for advertising your ads. These available websites are grouped by what type of websites they are, e.g., social networking, hobbies, employment, etc. If you use key words to target your ad, Google pretty much does all the work. All you have to do is enter one key word, and Google will come up with 100 more for you, using their key word tool. A word of caution, however, if you are advertising one of your merchants' links and it happens to be a paid survey site, the keywords survey or paid surveys or any variation thereof, is very expensive. These keywords go for $10.00 per click. When I use the keyword survey for my own website however, those keywords are about 15 cents per click. What I do when advertising for one of my merchants' paid survey websites is to site-target rather than key word target. It is a whole lot cheaper that way, and for five bucks a day I get about 100 clicks on my ad per day.