Increasingly more people have been asking me how to use money to make money on the internet. While prevailing wisdom believes that it is necessary to use capital in order to be successful, it isn’t always the case. However, I will concede that making a financial investment to your online business will make success come about more rapidly if done right. Let’s say you are looking to come into the home based income world and you have some discretionary capital to invest, what should you throw it at? Here I will cover the ways you can get the best bang for your buck.

How Can You Use Money to Make Money?

Let’s assume that you already have hosting and a website etc…. I don’t want to cover those here as the fees associate are nominal (anywhere from $10-$40). We are passed the point of setting up a domain or website because you either already have on or you might be looking to use money to make money by joining an affiliate program. Regardless, this article focuses specifically on how you can utilize investment capital to explode your marketing efforts.

1. Pay Per Click or PPC – These ads are where you can bid for placement on a website based on keywords that you want to target. Each time someone clicks on your ad you are debited from your account. When setting up a PPC campaign there are some important things to consider as I have seen many people who have failed to allow this to work for them. Be sure you are targeting focused keywords. For example, if you are promoting a cosmetic product you probably wouldn’t want to have PPC ads on a men’s weight lifting website. Be sure that the keywords are relevant or targeted to your audience. It is always wise to start with different campaigns and test the water so to speak. Find out where you are seeing the highest conversions or click to purchase ration from your campaigns.

2. Social Media, Backlinking, or all in one SEO service.

There are plenty of different software and services that can range from $50/month to $5000 or more. What these services offer are ways to improve the visibility of your website or home business, MLM or product whatever it is you are promoting. More visibility = more sales. If you want to simply throw dollars or euros at your business this a great way to do it. This will provide higher rank in the search engines for selected keywords. Let’s say you want people to come to your landing page for the MLM business you are a part of. You may want to have them rank you higher for “how to get leads for your MLM business”. Can you imagine ranking on the front page of Google so that almost every person that typed that phrase in the search engine came to YOUR webpage? I think you can see how these services are able to charge a significant amount for their help. They can be invaluable if utilized properly.

3. Outsourcing – This is an attractive way to use money to make money online. You are able to employ the services of professionals to perform the tedious tasks of virtually everything. Let’s say you want to do some article and video marketing for your business. You can jump over to Odesk.com or Elance.com and pay to have individuals do those things for you while you specify the topics, keywords and any other criteria. You are able to look at their credentials and history as well as employer satisfaction and reviews. You can higher these people to do search engine optimization work such as building backlinks, social media marketing or social bookmarking. Much like with pay per click advertising be sure to test before diving in completely. Higher multiple people for less of an investment and be sure you can trust them and that they provide quality work.

Using money to make money online is always a lot easier than doing all the work yourself. However, you still need to do your due diligence to insure you utilize the proper strategies and employ the right people or you will just be throwing it all away. Remember, earning income online is all about marketing, exposure and visibility. The more people who see your business or product the more who will become customers. 

It is staggering the number of individuals looking to make money online. This is easily seen by the number of Google searches into the millions and sometimes hundreds of millions seeking to earn income from home. While there are many legitimate ways people can use the web to make a living there are also endless pitfalls and predators looking to take your money. As I have been full time from home now for almost 3 years, I am going to share what I believe to be the most legitimate and simple ways to get started earning online.

How to Work on the Internet

Top 3 Ways to Earn Online

1. Blogging – this requires virtually no upfront investment unless you were to host it yourself in which case the fees are very nominal ($5-$20 month) and then the purchase of your domain which usually is around $8 for an entire year. To be successful blogging you need to attract readers and all this means is you must provide value. Anyone who can write can be do well with this is they devote enough time. If you are interested and have knowledge to share about gardening, have a blog on “how to create your own garden”. The sky is the limit. Anything you are passionate or knowledgeable about is something that you can help others with and add value to their lives. 

Revenue is generated through advertisers that either find you or ads that you willingly place on your blog. The most important thing for you to understand is that as you provide value you will attract readers naturally. The more eyeballs find your website the more earning potential you have. Many have even sold their website after it reaches a large enough audience. I know this might sound like I am jumping ahead but it is important for you to understand that it is very doable for anyone.

2. Affiliate Marketing – affiliate marketing simply means you get paid by the promotion of someone else’s product. The benefits of AM is that you don’t have to worry about creating a product, website or anything. All you need to worry about is promoting, sharing or marketing. This can be done on or offline but is typically done online. If you decide to go this route, just be sure you join an opportunity that encourages mentoring or has an incentive to make sure you learn the basics. In other words, look to learn while you begin earning and that way you can make more money in your next phase of how to work on the internet.

Usually, affiliate marketing that provides education comes with a price and this can be anywhere from $30-$3,000. If you were to only be an affiliate say for a ClickBank product, you can do that for free. You simply get paid as you sell but you must learn everything on your own which is quite feasible.

3. Freelancer – there are different places online that act as meeting grounds for people to find jobs or hire contractors. Many times I have hired people from all over the world to do social bookmarking, article writing, backlinking you name it. You can set your own price and decide what jobs you take. I suggest you take a look at a couple different sites, personally I have used Odesk and Elance, and while both are great service Odesk I found to be a little more effective.

work on the internet

A Couple Things to Avoid

1. Paid Surveys - While many of thees are not scams, some are and regardless of whether you find a legitimate one or not the time investment will never be worthwhile. In other words, you will be spending countless hours filling out surveys only to make a fraction of what you would had you spent your time learning how to grow  a real business. More importantly, that time spent filling out questionnaires doesn’t provide a residual income later on.

2. Anything that is a “Job” that requires up front payment - Have you ever been to an interview for a job where they asked you to write them a check before you were hired? How about paying a “processing fee” in order for you to proceed to the next step of the interview process. Avoid any business opportunity that employs this tactic. It is a sign of deceptive and manipulative marketing practices, not only do they hold themselves out as a legitimate job when in fact they are a business opportunity, but they often times offer  no reasonable way for one to recoup their initial investment.

If you are able to assist anyone and willing to do some of the grunt work you can begin earning. As you establish yourself and your reputation online you can begin demanding more per job and there are many contractors that make quite a health living. When many started out I’m sure they did just as you did, namely Googled How to work on the internet.

What is Survey Monkey? Why is there almost 1 million Google searches each month for this phrase?

What is Survey Monkey

In short, SM is a service that helps you to create polls or surveys for your customers, clients or prospects to better understand their needs, wants and concerns thus helping you to provide a better overall consumer experience and increase profits. The system is designed for people that don’t have much savvy when it comes to computers. In other words, it is easy to implement and allows the users to pose a variety of questions such as multiple choice, rating scales, or written comments. You don’t need to select just one form as the system allows you to use any combination of question types.

The cost of is $19.95 per month or $200 for an annual membership. There is a free membership available that limits the number of responses one can receive as well as the number of questions one can ask. Like most free memberships, it functions more as a trial where you can determine if you want to use it as a full paid member as you are quite limited in what you can benefit until you upgrade.

Here is a helpful and overview of Survey Monkey

Mobile Money Machines was founded by Frank Lucas and Matt Marcus and is software designed to target cell phone users. It is basically a lead capture system that acquires cell phone numbers from its leads, turns around and offers affiliate products through Clickbank in order to monetize those leads. The advantages with MMM is that the potential customer pool is much greater than if one was to use only the internet to make sales and the cell phone user pool is largely untapped. Well, at least this is one of the selling points made by their sales videos.

mobile money machines

Let’s take a little closer look at what this system actually means for the average individual looking to make a buck online. First, it could be argued that the cell phone community does not expand your customer base because those you would market to would just as readily join your business or purchase your affiliate product using their computer. Secondly, they claim that this market is untapped and thus more people will be receptive to receiving annoying marketing messages on their phone. I can tell you that when I receive messages on my cell phone I simply feel obligated to reply “STOP” so I don’t have to get any more messages. Mobile Money Machines says that they create such enticing squeeze pages that people willingly and readily offer their cell phone numbers.

Let’s take a look at some of the Pros and Cons of this business.

Pros

- It is easy to use

- They offer a helpful software that can collect leads

- It is reasonably priced

Cons

- There are a lot of misleading marketing tactics used.

- The leads one captures are not targeted.

- You cannot succeed unless you know how to drive traffic online.

Conclusion

I see new opportunities everyday and all of them promise the same thing. They claim it’s as easy as buying their system and setting it up while you watch the dollars pour in. Mobile Money Machines is no different than all the other over hyped business ventures I come across. While I wouldn’t consider MMM to be an outright scam, I would caution any newcomer to the internet based business world. There should be a disclaimer on their website that if you don’t understand how to drive traffic or leads to your lead capture system you will not make a dime. It is here that this system fails. 95% of the people that purchase this software will have no idea how to produce traffic and the other 5% will do exactly what we see right now when you Google “mobile money machines” , namely, pose as a third party reviewer while trying to con you into purchasing it from their affiliate link.

Can you believe that the phrase legit online money is actually searched almost 7,000 times in Google each month. That is 7,000 searches specifically for that phrase! I’m not even going to get into variations of more commonly used phrases meaning the same thing as the number of searches get up into the millions with results topping hundreds of millions.

What does all this mean? Well, for starters it means millions of people are looking for real ways to earn income on the internet. It means that people recognize the real potential to create wealth on the web and they want to capitalize. Furthermore, it means that people are hungry for tapping into what is seemingly a limitless stream of potential but they don’t know what is legitimate. While the interest increases so do the predators. This just means that it is harder for serious minded business people to find the right opportunity for them without having to sift through all the garbage and possibly even get tripped up a few times.

Legit Online Money – 3 Things You Must Look For

1. If it sounds too good to be true it probably is. I’ve seen far too many people jump into a home based business because they got persuaded emotionally I should say enticed by the potential of wealth creation. It is a natural sales tactic to get the potential customer to think emotionally rather than rationally and this is never seen more frequently than in the home based business arena. Selling an idea rather than a product. Selling a dream rather than a business. My advice is to look at the facts and ignore what the sales pages are telling.

2. Be certain of a real product that can stand alone. I see it all the time, a business opportunity on the internet that wouldn’t have a product at all if it wasn’t simply slapped there just to make it “legal”. A legit online money business will have a product that can stand alone apart from the income producing opportunity attached to it. If it is a product that you would never consider purchasing unless you knew there was a chance to earn associated with it than the business itself cannot be considered credible. Remember, these home based scams slap a product such as “access to our educational course” as a way to pass legal issues and not be considered a pyramid or ponzi scheme.

Push a button Make Money - Wait we need a product?

3. Verifiable Testimonial - Many websites will offer testimonials and some of these are real and some are fabricated. This is why I say “verifiable” or where you would be able to contact and confirm that the person who claims to have had success actually did. I know it seems tedious or over the top, but especially for businesses where you may invest $1k-$5k I think you would agree that a simple phone call is worthwhile. Now, if you are going to throw $25 at the next get rich quick go right ahead and take your chances. However, if you actually believe that a $25 initial investment is a legit way to make money online then I think you may have problems that far exceed the scope of this article. I mean that in the nicest way possible.

Is Income at Home a scam or a legitimate business opportunity? I’m sure you have come across this post because of an advertisement you may have heard on the radio. This business was actually the first review I ever did back in 2009 when I started online. In short, it is important to understand this is an opportunity in which your earning potential is determined by your skill level and work ethic. Like most all internet based business models there are no guarantees and the majority of people fail to ever earn their initial investment back.

The way this works is you pay just under $50 for the starter kit and are assigned a success coach. Instead of explaining to you all the specifics I am going to give you an overview. Income at Home functions as a sales funnel for Herbalife. Herbalife has been around for a long time and is a billion dollar company that provides health and wellness products worldwide. It is a network marketing company that many of you have certainly been approached to attend hotel meetings. Look at IAH as a tool to help you better promote Herbalife.

People can make money with this business but it will take extreme dedication and a learning curve. The advertisements make it sound quite easy but for the average person working a full time job among other obligations, finding the time to learn how to market online effectively is quite difficult. I don’t mean to say that it can’t be done, just have realistic expectations. When I began to work full time on the internet I was fortunate enough to have a few months to learn aggressively and it took about that long to start seeing success. If I was a Herbalife distributor I would join Income at Home otherwise I would pass.

If you are working in the MLM or network marketing industry it is important to develop an online presence. That can be done quite simply by setting up your own blog through WordPress or Blogger and getting a lead capture or email marketing service. I use WordPress for this blog and AWeber for emailing my subscribers. Once those things are in place it is just an issue of driving traffic to your blog or website. You need to make sure that you are targeting the right audience as well.

is income at home this easy?

Is Income at Home a scam? I would say that it is not a scam but the advertisements are somewhat deceptive. Understand that it is a company that is trying to sell you on the dream that you can make it big from home, while playing on your naivete that it is SO EASY.

Mass Income Multiplier Third Party Scam Review

First of all let me state that I am a third party objective source which I hope is music to your ears. As I was researching Mass Income Multiplier for this scam review. It is frustrating these days that one has to fish around to find a review that is honest and not simply PRETENDING to be objective as they are attempting to sell you the very product they claim to objectively being reviewing.

So let’s dive into this bad boy since I am not affiliated with MIM in any way. The main website claims it is the “most advanced web-based affiliate marketing application that works.” The system basically allows users to expedite traffic generation by being able to create web page and send them to your affiliate links within 30 seconds. One of the touted features of this system is its network sharing, an attempt to merge social media with affiliate marketing. In other words, all members of this system will be able to recruit other members and share links within the group. Unfortunately this is quite circular as everyone is trying to get each other to buy you have a network of all sellers without any actually buyers.

To be fair, I believe that Mass Income Multiplier can be a helpful tool in traffic generation and website creation. They handle all the hosting and email list building etc….. I can see this as a tool to help people that are already affiliate marketing other products rather than a system unto itself. Basically, understand that you will not be able to earn income online strictly through this business opportunity. It is too similar to other affiliate programs out there and doesn’t have enough meat in terms of its products. You would be better of utilizing AWeber and Hostgator for your email marketing hosting needs. They are both very inexpensive and would allow you much more flexibility to market and promote a variety of products.

Facebook, Twitter etc…are the social media networks that will help you with whatever business you are promoting. You don’t need to pay to play for anything related to social media nor should you.

Mass Income Multiplier

I have a confession to make. I hate social media with a passion. It stresses me out and I believe it takes away from a lot of the quality content that is out there. However, for anyone to succeed in blogging or making money online it must be incorporated. There is no two ways around it. Social media must be utilized at least in some degree to have success on the internet.

social media madness

Before I move onto 3 things you can do in less than 10 minutes per day to radically increase traffic let me just clarify  why SM bothers me. I believe there are many out there that portray a false image of who they are and set themselves up as a guru while self promoting their garbage products incessantly. Like a bunch of sheeple, internet novices flock to the next big craze. This next big thing, usually comes in the form of some instant turnkey automated profit machine created by some fake guru promising success. The fake guru then auto tweets it to death with some automated software that promotes it as a solid product.

Do you see what I’m talking about? Basically Twitter, Facebook and the like have made exploitation not only accessible but commonplace. Now unfortunately it has become a necessary evil that everyone must utilize to avoid failure online. You can have authentic products effectively promoted through word of mouth by other using SM while you have the fakes using the same tactics and throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Ok…now that I have my venting done with how do we utilize Social Media to improve our marketing efforts online?

1. Quality content without question. There is no way around it and in a pure world this is where SM shines. Referring to others information you find online that is beneficial. Providing value to your readers will inevitably create SM to work in your favor. If you want to avoid bookmarking, promoting and all the other tedious aspect of internet marketing or making money online then focus on quality content.

Regardless of all the other distractions, tools etc…. Providing value and knowledge to your readers will always win. Many multi-million  dollar websites never did any self promoting but their quality of content was so substantial that they grew.

2. Utilize a hands off back link and SEO service. Personally I have found LinkAloha to be a good fit for me and it has helped a lot. This way you don’t have to spend hours doing the legwork yourself. There are many out there that are great. Find one that allows you to set up a campaign and will let you set specific dates and amounts of links. You want to be able to have a variety of different postings, YOU DO NOT WANT ALL FORUM POSTS. Posting to forums or low quality sites with a bunch of links back to your blog can damage your pagerank significantly.

3. Follow and Post. If you want more Twitter followers then follow more people. If you want people to comment on your blog orFacebook Fan Page then start commenting yourself. For example, follow me here and I will return the favor!
SIMPLE!
Follow @legitprofits

Do these things without keeping tabs. Simply spend 10 minutes per day commenting and posting for others and you will begin to see that it comes back to you. It will even come back to you in many cases if your quality on your blog is crap unfortunately.

Each day I hear from people who want to make money blogging. This usually stems from someone they know or somebody they saw on television who earns a full time income online. It is important for you to understand that this is a very real way to earn an income but it requires a brief learning curve as well as some persistence. In other words, it isn’t just setting up a blog and blathering about your deepest and innermost thoughts while earning loads of cash.

If you are serious about pursuing this here are a few steps you need to take.

Subject Matter

Have an understanding or knowledge about what it is you will blog about. I personally wouldn’t ever start a website that talks about flowers. I know nothing about flowers, I’m not interested in flowers and my girlfriend only likes daisies anyway. I do, however, know about internet marketing, how to make money online etc….. This is why you are reading this page right now. It happens to be something in which I can provide value to readers and help them. If this was about flowers and written by me, I promise you would’ve left the page already.

For you this might be cooking, health and fitness, fashion, art, politics or anything that you might be passionate about or have a knowledge about. Without sounding too Kumbaya-ish think about how you can HELP people. What do you have to give that could be helpful for someone else? I hope that when you are done reading this post you will be further along in your quest for making money blogging. If you are not interested in your topic you will hate doing this and if you can’t provide value to your readers you will fail at it.

Quality over Quantity – Tortoise vs. Hare

Many people who begin a website think that pumping out endless streams of content will increase page views, traffic and search engine ranking. While a lot of content can be a good thing oftentimes quality takes a back seat. If you were to post a lot of crappy content on your site you would actually be hurting the quality of your blog and diminishing your traffic. Your bounce rate would sky rocket and you would have no repeat visitors.

While enthusiasm is important let’s take an example from an old story. Do you remember the tortoise and the hare? The hare although much faster ended up surging out and taking a break subsequently losing to the much slower tortoise. To make money blogging it is important to understand that principle. Focus on creating 2-3 quality pieces of content each week rather than killing yourself for 2 weeks straight to get as much as possible on your site. It does not help traffic to post 100 articles on your blog in 4 days. Slow and steady wins the race.

Be a tortoise if you want to make money blogging

Keywords

This is the last topic I will cover in this post. Keywords power the internet and search engines. In other words, its how people find you! For example, the keywords for this post would be “make money blogging” as that is the related terms and people that want to learn about this will hopefully stumble across this page. But it isn’t always that easy. For example “Make money blogging” as I write this article currently has 40,500 monthly global searches on average. If you Google that phrase you will see there are over 100 million search results. This is a pretty difficult keyword to rank high for.

It is for this reason that I recommend to my students to focus on long tail keywords. Long tail keywords narrow the competition and make it easier to gain exposure. For example, instead of using “earn income online” you might say “earn income online tulsa” in this way you would be narrowing the search and targeting a more specific audience with less competition. Instead of “income online” you might try “making real income income”. Again, this is more specific and will yield less overall search results but make it much easier to rank. Wouldn’t you rather rank number 5 out of 25,000 results than 45,000 out of 100 million? I hope you get my point.

Longtail Keyword Graph

There are countless link building and SEO systems available today. Many are legitimate in their own right and offer benefits to the user. Some are more difficult to use than others while some are more automated. While some of the simple to use ones will blast thousands of links to poor ranking web pages and forums others will provide only pertinent page links. This is what I believe to be the strongest or most powerful tool online today to increase traffic.

linkaloha signup

LinkAloha is a solid platform for anyone looking to increase traffic to their website. Since they released LinkAloha 2.0 the system has capitalized on Google’s slap in 2011. Essentially what the slap meant to online business owners is quality matters and those that try to cut corners will be penalized. More is not necessarily better and quantity is certainly not king. In fact, many people are shooting themselves in the foot by linking to destructive or unrelated websites.

LA 2.0 gives a helpful video tutorial to make sure those who utilize this product are able to take full advantage of all it offers. There is not a more simplistic yet effective single product you can find today that will increase traffic the way LinkAloha does. Be sure to check this product out if you are looking to give your websites more juice without spending countless hours.