The RJ Journal - Making money on the net

2007-05-21

If you believe in luck, you can sign up for the 1 million dollar lottery at pixelotto.com. Even though it seems a bit slow for the moment and I personally doubt that the 2 million dollar goal is reached at the end of the 12 month period, it is absolutely free.
 

If you still believe in luck but don't want to wait a whole year to cash in that million there are a ton of other internet gamble sites out there. You can bet on probably everything from horses and soccer to the weight and sex of the next born English royal child. Or you can just invest that luck in one of the thousands of all the casino sites that exists on the net. They are more than happy to help you.

If you are like me, and don't trust Lady Luck, you can always learn how to play poker. According to all those "become a poker expert in less than (insert number here) hours" books, this will give you a guaranteed 5 figure income in no time at all. Still, I'm a bit skeptical to this method to.

Then we have the stock market and day trading. I guess there can be a good chance to make money on this, if you can keep cool and know what you do but watch out for that next stock market crash. That's one thing for sure - it will come sooner or later. Google can tell you more about day trading, because as you may have guessed, this is not for me either.

Here is another dubious but free site called WealthToolbox. Just sign up with your email address and receive 100$. Well, not until after 24 months and then it also should have grown considerably. You only register an email address which should also be connected to a PayPal account. Sounds like email address fishing to me, but then again, you never know. Spam shields up. Update 2007-04-27: The site has been up for a while now and it seems more like way to A) direct adds to you by mail and B) a way to get you to join a "Forex Power Strategy Course", supposedly to learn you how to trade with currencies. At a later time there has been indications that they might need your computer resources to do calculations for their currency trading program in the background, much like SETI and their screen saver that did computations on gathered radio signals in order to find extraterrestrial life.

The next thing is to make money on your web site. To do this you use Google AdSense for content which basically means that Google will put up ads for products or services on your site, that has some sort of connection to the content of your site. Whenever somebody surfs in to your site, say as a result of a Google search, and then continues to click on an add on your site, you get paid. Wait a minute, you say, it can't be that easy, why would Google pay me for that. Well, it is because Google in turn sells those clicks to the advertisers. They pay you some of their profit for that click. So it is now up to you to make an interesting web site and start making money.

Well, it isn't enough to just make the site interesting, you also have to get people to visit your site and to do that they have to find it in the first place. When you are done with your site, or at least have a substantial amount of pages/info/text on it, submit the site to all major search engines (Google, Yahoo, altavista...). Google also has some excellent advice on how to optimize your site to improve it with regard to search result ranking and indexing. Indexing will take time, though, so don't expect anything to happen over a night. You have to give it at least a couple of months.

Search engines isn't everything. You also need to get links to your pages. Actually, the search engines also uses the number of links to your site to determine how good it is and while the indexing robots crawl the net it will also easier find references to your site through these links. This can be done in many ways. First, put your web site url in your email and msn signature so all your friends will know about it. If your friends also have their own web pages, put links to each others sites there. There are free services on the net that will put links to your pages if you agree to put links to other pages on your site. These are called link exchange services. They are free in the sense that they don't cost anything but they are in turn also getting more traffic with the links they put up on your site. Another type of link exchanging is done with web rings, where similar sites are grouped together with links to each other in a circular manner (hence, the ring). With your url in your email signature, you can also participate in various forums on the net. There are probably as many forums on the net as there are hobbies or interests and these forums are also crawled by the web indexing robots. You can also start a blog, where you have links to your site together with other information, perhaps as a companion to your web site.

There are also a lot of other kinds of affiliate programs you can join besides Googles AdSense for content. They all work in the way that you let up some of your web site real estate for ads in the form of banners, buttons or links and you get paid when internet browsers visit your site and clicks on an add and then goes through with a purchase, becoming a member or opening an account or whatever the affiliate program is intended for. Here is an example of a button that directs you to Bravenet:

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