The Smart Way to Make Money Online

There are opportunities online for making money. There are more scams than opportunities, but if you are wracking your brain for ways to pick up some extra money online, here are a few methods.

Google Adsense is a program run by Google.

Sign up for a Google Adsense account which allows the search engine giant, Google, to put ads on your website, and you earn money each time someone clicks on an ad. (You can't click on the ads yourself. It's part of the agreement.)

The earnings here are incremental, but if you can draw some traffic to your website, you could earn money while you look for jobs elsewhere. The revenues here are completely residual. Get paid for work you have already done, and, potentially, keep getting paid for it...forever.

Think about it.

Once you put the site up, put the ads on the site, and click publish, you don't have to do anything else. Every click on an ad makes you a couple cents. You could be earning money while you play Tower Defense, yet again.

If you are spending three hours a day looking for work, you could take one day to sign up for Adsense and put some ads on your website, do some tweaking to your site, and then just "set it and forget it". Your site will make money for you. That's the theory and the goal anyway.

Don't have a website? Get one. Get ten.

There are free website services like Weebly.com and many others where you can create a website, post content, and place Google ads on your pages without the need of any programming knowledge. You don't need to know programming at all. These are template programs that make websites very, very simple - more simple than Dreamweaver.

There are thousands of types of websites. You can make one every day if you have the time. Or, make one, single website and keep improving it.

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Another way to make some money is writing for online publications and online organizations.

There are multiple places that will pay you for your writing. Essentially, they are doing the same thing outlined above. These sites sign up for Adsense and similar programs and let you, the writer, build their websites for them.

It's really a win-win situation. The writer only needs to write. The group behind the website does all the maintenance and leg-work. Additionally, because these sites have thousands of writers working with them, they draw large amounts of internet traffic. These are big websites. Associated Content, Bukisa, and Triond are some good places to start.

Associated Content will also pay you upfront for some articles.

If you are patient and plug away at creating loads of content for your own website, for your various websites, or for these pay sites, you can generate some revenue. Though they don't pay much at first, if you treat the work of creating content as a job, you will reap the rewards. But you can't expect that to happen overnight.

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How do these pay sites work?

Mostly they pay you for page views. If you write an article and get it published on Triond, say, they will pay you a certain incremental amount per click or "page view" of your article. If one hundred people view your article on horse grooming, you will be paid ten cents - or something like that.

If twenty thousand people view your article on Paris Hilton's weekend with Johnny Depp in the Bahamas, you'll make a few dollars.

The pay is incremental, but it's real money. I mean, it's not a scam. They will pay you.

And the sites mentioned here are all free for the writer. You don't have to pay to become part of any association or pay to get access to assignments.

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Is it better to make your own websites and put Google ads on all of them or is it better to write copious numbers of articles for the pay per view sites?

Really these two methods are not very different in terms of how you will be spending your time. Neither are they different in terms of how quickly you might start making money.

If you don't like to wait and would prefer to be in complete control of how your own creative materials are handled, then you should make your own websites. Post a bunch of ads on them and gear the sites toward the types of people who would like to click on ads, people looking to shop, looking to go (monetarily) deeper into a topic, and people who don't know the difference between an ad and a tab.

If you can produce items that people want, you can make money. If this is a bit shallow, well, then it's a bit shallow. We are not talking about the great American novel. We're talking about making some money, son.