Overview
If you’ve seen the movie “The Matrix”, you may recall the part where Neo, the main character, was asked by Morpheus to take the red or the blue pill. Taking the red pill meant he’ll wake up and see reality; blue meant he’ll remain oblivious to reality–continuing his life in the virtual world of the Matrix.
What I’m about to tell you is the reverse. Most people are oblivious to what is happening within what I call the “real matrix” in the Internet. I will give you the blue pill so that you may see the virtual world or community that most people don’t realize exists! The “real matrix” is the thriving Internet economy that only a few have seen and can comprehend.
If you are like most people, When you take the blue pill, you will be enlightened. Your view of the Internet will never be the same. You will realize that there are a few people out there living solely on the Internet. I’m not referring to people selling things on eBay or Craig’s list; I’m referring to those people who earn income through the pure bits and bytes that flow through the Internet. Their product is not physical, but intelectual; thus it is created out of thin air and converted into the bit and bytes of information people need or seek through the Internet.
This income generating power has been around since the beginning of the Internet, but was never easily available to anyone until the emergence of the Internet giant Google.com. They have single handedly revolutionized online advertising and have created opportunities not previously available to anyone. This article will enumerate the various ways people are making money online.
Opportunities Abound!
Perhaps you’ve heard of rumors about how some people were able to leave their day job because they pursued and took advantage of this underlying economy. The interesting thing is that most people are oblivious to this–only seeing what is on the surface of their Internet browsing experience!
So go ahead, take the blue pill.
Be advised that this will show you a video of an opportunity that might inspire you. You don’t necessarily have to sign up because the main objective is to watch the video and see what point they are making. Note that this is in not my link nor am I endorsing the product. Only pay attention to the video message.
Have you finished? Are you excited? OK. The main point I’m trying to make is that anyone can actually improve their financial situation by taking control of life, and that age and education doesn’t matter–only the strong desire to change your destiny really counts. And all this can be done from the comfort of your home and computer.
After I saw the video, it inspired me to dig deeper into how people made income while working from home. What I discovered inspired me even more. Check out these articles:
Before making the above discoveries, I really thought that blogging was an activity that people did to document their activities and thoughts online. In reading the above articles, I quickly realized that it was more than that; it was really the strong desire to share useful information with others, and in the process earn income from web traffic–enough income in some cases to leave their day job!
At this point I thought that I needed to build myself a blog. But before I delved into my own blog, I tried my hand at various sites that allowed me to post information and earn from those postings. Here are some that I tried:
For some reason, my efforts gravitated only towards the following sites; it is probably because it seems to be easier to setup and create articles.
eHow.com is probably the easiest place to post useful information and get micro-streams of income from the “get go”. Note that the income may start flowing as soon as you post your article. There is no limit to what you can write, and this site gives you a taste of how it would feel like to generate residual income from your postings. Imagine if you took time to write hundreds of short “how to” articles. You might think that you don’t know anything, but everyone knows how to do many things. Your unique perspective can give your posting a special touch of personality. If you wrote on topics you know, there is most likely many other people interested in those topics. When they search the Internet for that topic, yours will show up. And through the ads within eHow, you will earn some income. It may not be much from the start, but if you build up a good set of “how to” articles, the residual income stream can start becoming significant. Why? Because you earn income even when you stop writing! This is the power of residual income generation.
Next is
Helium.com. This site is a little tougher to get into, because they require longer articles. However, because your articles are rated and compared with others, you get that extra motivation to improve your writing. Your own motivation will help you push for the top 5 position. At Helium.com you earn badges and various writing recognition. You are also encouraged to review other people’s articles and rank them. Hence the name helium–quality rises to the top. Another way you can earn income is by writing an article through their market place section. There you get paid a certain amount based on what the topic requester is willing to pay. This site too has residual income generation potential because you can earn income even if you stop writing.
The third site–
bukisa.com–is also relatively easy to write to. You don’t have to write about “how tos”; you can write about almost anything. Some people on eHow have started to replicate their articles to Bukisa. One unique thing about Bukisa is how you can earn from others’ work if you were able to recruit them into your network–like an MLM scheme.
The fourth site–
hubpages.com–isn’t bad either. I would say that it is almost at the same level as Bukisa, but I’m making more money ther than Bukisa. In bukisa you can have people become fans. The more fans you have, the better as it allows you to spread your knowledge faster through your fans.
At each one of these sites, I generate microstreams of income while I sleep, eat, and go to my day job. Imagine if I had more articles in them; over a period of a couple of years there might be enough income there to earn hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month!
Blog and Earn Money
In parallel to this effort, I was trying to figure out what my blog should be about. After much thought, I settled on a blog that would inform the common computer user about the various technology available out there for free. This gave birth to my main website at
http://www.freetechzone.com. Before settling on this, I tried wordpress.com and blogger.com; however, most information about how to maximize income suggests setting up a blog under my own control.
Now that I have a blog, where’s the flow of money? Well, the real secret to making money on the Internet is “web traffic.” One has to build traffic to a site, as I am doing now. You’ll want to do a Google search on how to build traffic to your website. Of course, the best way to do that is to show up on the first or second page of a Google search. To do that, a site has to be very relevant to the search topic; and based on Google’s own documentation, that can happen if you have high ranking sites linking to your site and that your site has very relevant content. There are many other things that Google take into account in determining your relevance; the ones mentioned are definitely what Google mentions in their recommendations.
OK, so now that I got traffic, where’s the flow of money? Well, money wont flow unless you have some form of advertising on your site and a way for you to receive payment. To do this, you need to do three things.
- Sign up for a paypal.com account. This will allow you to have a place where your money will accumulate as income starts to flow.
- Sign up as a publisher for Google.com through their adsense program. This will allow you to get ads and have them placed on your web site. Later you can sign up with affiliate sites like linkshare.com or Commision Junction (www.cj.com).
- Monetize your website! To monetize, you will need to place Google and/or affiliate ads on your website.
Note that the effort towards generating income from the Internet this way will take time and effort. On almost all articles I’ve read from those people who were successful in doing this, they indicate that this is not a “get rich” scheme. You must be patient and must work hard to help keep your content relevant. The more work you put into it, the higher the chance it has being relevant to the search engines. If your content is useful, you will have thousands of visitors daily, and you can convert those visits into income–income that keeps flowing even when you are not working. How cool is that!
Internet Money Making Explained
If this is all confusing, let’s step back and try to explain how websites make money from the point of view of the user.
OK, almost all sites that you go to now-a-days are free. I would even say that it is probably safe to say that 99.9% of web sites out there are free. How then are web sites able to keep open? As everyone really knows, nothing is really free. All sites, have one or more form of advertising on their site. You see it everywhere and probably don’t even notice it because you’ve just gotten used to them being there.
Anyway, those ads pay for the site and more. Some ads provide revenue to the website publisher on a page impression basis. Some provide revenue to the site when a user clicks through the ad. Some ads pay the website publisher if the ad generates a lead. Last but not least, others’ ads provide commision on actual sales resulting from users clicking and then purchasing through the ad.
Picture this…
Let us say you are a website publisher or blogger and you are using an ad that pays $1 for every lead your site is able to generate. Let us also say that you get 100,000 hits on your web site a month. If you are able to convert 1% of those hits into leads, then you can potentially generate about $1000/month. This is just from one ad. What if you had 4 ads that generated as much revenue per month? This means that you, the publisher, is able to generate $5000 plus per month! This can be pretty conservative, if you have a very highly visited site, and this might just be enough to make you quit your day job.
Closing Remarks
The underlying economy in the Internet is like “the matrix”. If you take the blue pill, you will see. Until then you will be oblivious to the fact that some people out there are actually making a living from the Internet, working from home, and are able to quit their day job. So go ahead, take the blue pill, see the underlying Internet economy, and perhaps participate in it.
If you have any questions about this article or anything related to this topic, don’t hesitate to contact me at
forlanda@gmail.com.
