Making Money on the Internet

My name is Ethan, and I have bought into the American Dream: the dream that where there's a will, there's a way, and that where there is work, there are, or soon will be, workers.

With the onset of the internet, there is no shortage of opportunity to make your place in the world of e-commerce...but with thousands of scam-sites, poor-quality companies, bankruptcies, lies, scandals, and more, almost since the beginning, it's become harder and harder to find the legitimate sites. Scammers have become more clever, putting in more and more effort to get to your money - and not just for a quick buck, or a short ride; no, sometimes they will be after your entire identity.

In the past few months, I have been scouring the internet for high-quality opportunities to make your dent in the booming world of working online. You've probably seen "Work From Home, Make Thousands of Dollars a Week!!"-style advertisements abound. While they are, indeed, a gross exaggeration, they are based in truth.

Myself? I make a few hundred extra bucks a month by working online. There are several sites that I use, and services I use them with that help smooth things out.

Be it selling t-shirts, writing articles for fun and profit, dropshipping, opening emails, there is a world of opportunity for you to find your own niche in.

Some of the best sites I use include associatedcontent.com (but of course; I love you guys.), t-shirtmojo.com, cafepress.com.
I use PayPal and a personal PO Box, and, of course, an internet connection. Pens and notebooks, optional.

Associatedcontent (www.associatedcontent.com), as you know, is quite an awesome deal. You submit content (be it articles, videos, or pictures) and you are paid via PayPal. Almost every imaginable kind of topic is accepted here. I am still active here; after a brief hiatus (family issues, things like that), I am back and will be writing more and better than ever. This may be my favorite site on the entire interweb.

Cafepress (www.cafepress.com) is a nice online-shop-site. You upload pictures, and they are printed on your wares; Cafepress keeps your inventory for you, sending it out when it is ordered from your site. You set the markup upon a base-price per item, so you can decide how much profit you stand to make.
Though, there are a few drawbacks: one of which is that the basic shop, the free shop, the one where you don't have to pay a monthly fee to keep it open, lets you keep only one kind of item each in your online store, unless you upgrade. They pay you via PayPal, and I believe they also give you the option to be paid through a check. I opted for a check.
Other than that, it's a nice site. Though, I don't use it. In my opinion, t-shirtmojo is vastly superior.

T-shirtmojo (www.t-shirtmojo.com) may be one of the finest online-shop establishments I have ever seen. It truly is a very, very professional site with a user-friendly interface. Your shirts are kept in the T-shirtmojo warehouse until they are ordered via the site. You are given much, much more flexibility than with Cafepress, and they have a wider range of products for you to put your designs on; you can even request products, and they may just get them for you. T-shirtmojo is a much smaller company than Cafepress, and is, in my opinion, much more efficient. Some of their shirts are downright awesome, and make a lot of department store shirts look like...something not worth the price you're paying for them. They pay you via a check. I highly recommend them.

PayPal, while often blasted for not being user-friendly, is still one of the most widely used online payment services, and one of the most secure. My recommendation: Don't buy anything with it. Use it only to receive money; send the money you receive to a bank account. Do this, and you should be fine.

A sufficient PO Box should be able to be rented from your local post office for 20 to 40 dollars a year. You can use it to receive whatever you need. I use it just so my home mailbox doesn't get cluttered. It's completely optional, but it helps, in my opinion, for organization.

Good luck, and may the good wind of internet prosperity blow your way!