A Primer on Making Real Money Online.

With the advent of the internet the world has seen the birth of a new platform for entrepreneurial escapades. All the web pages that exist, or at least any that matter, exist for the sole purpose of generating income. Think about it, if a page isn't directly selling something to the visitor, it is still making hard cash via offering advertising space. In fact, those sites which look to be non-commercial in nature actually are some of the most profitable enterprises out there. The inevitable question, no matter the specific details, is: how do I make actual, hard cash, online? Everyone dreams of becoming a bathrobe-billionaire, but how does it happen on today's internet? The only way to make any money online is to have as many "qualified" visitors as possible. Qualified? Huh? All I mean by qualified is that they are searching or looking for what you can offer. This is different in every case, for example if you ran a website that sold hand-crafted jewelry you would want people visiting your site who wanted jewelry. If you ran an information based site which sold advertising space and your site was centered around heart health, you would want visitors seeking information regarding heart health. Common sense, no? Now that we know what we want (qualified visitors), all we need to do is figure out how to get it. There are two ways to drive traffic to your site: 1. have people place a link to your site on their site, and 2 (which is made easier by doing #1), have the larger search engines display a link to your site when the search engine is queried (searched). The math makes the priority list simple to assemble; with Google alone receiving over 200,000,000 searches per day, the need to have search engines include your sites is enormous. But more than include your site, you want the major search engines to have preference for your site over your major competitors. Alas, the art of search engine optimization, or SEO, was born. Any site which wishes to make money on the web, irrespective of how, must be fine tuned and managed in a way that caters to the expectations and wishes of the major search engines. The idea is to make the search engines rank your site as highly relevant in as many beneficial categories as possible, therefore it is imperative that one understands how a site gains a high relevance ranking. The first and arguably the most significant way to improve your standing with the major search engines is to have as many link-backs to your site as possible. A link-back is where someone places a link to your site on their site. Every time a search engine sees another site linking to yours it counts it as a vote. The more votes your page acquires, the more relevant your site is, according to the major search engines. The second, and arguably equally effective form of SEO art is to get the search engines to love your content. Information is power in the online realm, and he who has most, wins. The more relevant your content, and bluntly, the more of it, the greater the odds of the mega-search engines liking your site. Also, the more frequently updated your site, how it 'grows' contributes to the search engines giving you preference. But isn't content like that hard to produce in the volume needed for the profit driven venture I'm interested in? Easy answer: it can be. There is really no such thing as free money. Yes, people all over the world are making in upwards of $20,000+ per month online, but trust me, they earned it. Don't despair, there are tips and tools to make this hard work a little easier. First, pick a topic that you actually care about. If you construct website centered around issues that are of importance to you then the work will go smoother. Work isn't as hard when it concerns something that interests you. Also, your personal knowledge base is likely to be greater on topics that matter to you, and your drive to discover more may be equally as significant. Also, when choosing a topic; the more specific the topic the better. For instance, a site on "Waldenstrom's macroglobulinemia" has a far better chance of receiving a high relevance rating than a site on "cancer." The reason being is an obvious one: less competition. The more focused your content, the more relevant your site (according to Google, et al). Next, choose a domain name that is relevant to your desired subject matter. For instance if you have a site devoted to Matchbox cars and your domain name is happysurfing.com, then your site is on an irrelevant domain. Also, in your domain name you should try to make use of a relevant keyword, if at all possible. The last major tip to get search engines to like your site is to use keywords consistently throughout your content. Keywords are words that people frequently use when querying search engines. Your keywords will vary from site to site as the focus of the site changes. For example, a site that focused on exotic flowers would use different keywords than a site dedicated to Chocolate Labs, but there should be keywords in each. How does one find keywords on any topic? Go to Yahoo's http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ and type your site's premise/theme in (i.e., cancer, diabetes, etc), you will receive the 100 top keywords associated with that term. It is advisable that you make a separate page for at least the top 10-15 keywords associated with your chosen term. Another place to find keywords is via Google's https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox. Also, it is advisable to not wait to install Google Adsense to your pages, or whatever other revenue stream you want. The sooner you have something on your sites that has the potential to make you money, the sooner you are going to make money. Once you use all of those tips and have a site up and running, the last step is to start all over. The more sites with excellent content you manage, the more money you make. The most anyone can even dream of making on a single domain is $2000/month, but $500 is a realistic goal. Now, all the tips are free, but the tools usually aren't. I mean of course you can find free tools out there to make a website template, graphics, etc, but when it comes to filling those templates with real content, the free-tool section is limited. I personally am involved with, and am 100% bias to, a website platform called Dynamic Content Router (http://www.dcrouter.com)***. This is a content management system that takes care of inserting keywords, delivering relevant articles, and it can manage not one, but all of your sites from one easy console. DCR can generate as many pages as you wish, using any template you can conceive of, and it delivers as much unique content as you desire. The Dynamic Content Router is like a profit-driven website's operating system; it is like Windows but exclusively for making money online. These tools are worth the investment, because they allow you to increase your overall efficiency and enable you to generate more profit-geared websites. After all above is accomplished, the only thing left is to not be discouraged. Allow your web-based business to start off as a hobby and grow naturally. Don't worry if you don't see money coming in the first day you start your business, allow yourself a minimum of 60 days to see a profit, but in as little as 30 days you should see some returns on your investment of time. Once your sites start rolling, start receiving the visitors you need, then it becomes far more of a passive enterprise, wherein you do updates to keep your site "fresh," but for the most part your enterprise runs autonomous and unassisted. ***NOTE: DCR may not be available by the time you read this article as we have limited the number of licenses for sale and we are selling out quickly.