How I Started My Work At Home and Make Money Online Adventure

I am Efren and I’ve been working as an Auditor for more than 10 years. Before I started making money online, I was just a same guy next door who is just surfing the net for fun. While I was surfing the internet few years ago, I was amazed with the websites I was seeing. So, I challenged myself to make my own. Then, I started learning the basics of HTML with htmlgoodies.com.While I was learning HTML, I noticed the wonders of dynamic web pages using PHP and MySQL. So, I couldn’t stop myself learning the basics of PHP and MySQL. After learning the basics of web development using HTML, PHP and MySQL, I built my own website for fun. I put anything that interested me without direction or any goal until I saw an ad on a web page I visited that teaches how to make money online with a website. So, I click that link and that started my adventure of working at home and making money online.

After learning so many things, I found the following as the foundation or the basics of working at home and making money online:

1. Find or discover your niche

   Niche is your area of passion like hobby, your work or dream job. Your niche must be the one enjoyed doing most of the time. Otherwise, you will end up unhappy doing you don’t enjoy. Another factor is that your niche could serve the needs of other people, like solving their problems, making them happy or it makes their work easy.

2. Learn SEO and Be an SEO Expert

   SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an art and science of driving targeted traffic from search engines. It is the act of meeting both the needs of the search engines and its users. Search engines is a business of providing the list of web sites that meet the needs of its users. The users are using the search engines to find the information or the stuff they need.

   The users type the words or phrases in the search engine box and press enter or click Search icon to give the search engines the hint what to look for. Using its crawlers or robots, the search engines match the words or phrases, popularly known as keywords or key phrases, with the web pages in their databases. They match it with the words in the url, title, meta tags, headlines, body copy, images and hyperlinks.

   Hence, the necessity of search engine optimization or SEO comes in. Significant portion of SEO is the keyword optimization which promotes use of the search engine keywords relevant to the web page without sacrificing the quality of content for human readers. Other factors are making your web page easy to be crawled during the data gathering of the search engines. This is the optimization of the incoming links, outgoing links, file size, html tags, scripts, images, frames, file structure and other web design factors.

   There is a SEO and internet marketing training from WEBCEO that is being offered for free with certificate. If you are new to internet, that is good start of learning to make big money online.

3. Building A Content-Rich Web Site or Blog

   Why build content-rich web site? More relevant keywords your site has the more web traffic it can get from search engines. You can make more money with more traffic. The simple strategy to develop a content-rich site is to identify your main site concept or theme. Under the main theme, develop at least 5 relevant sub-topics. It would be better if your sub-topics include keywords mentioned in the main them. Then your sub-topics, should contain at least 5 articles that include the keywords mentioned in the subtopics.

   With the knowledge of SEO, optimized all the web pages.

4. Effective monetization of Web Site

   After building an SEO-optimized content-rich web pages, your site is ready for monetization, that is making money. You can start applying for affiliate programs. Some of the programs that really make money are Google Adsense, Commission Junction, Maxbounty, Bidvertiser, Clicksor, Clickbank, and Sitesell.

   Adsense, Bidvertiser and Clicksor are pay-per-click (ppc) affiliate programs. You will place ad codes to your web pages and you make money when a visitor clicks to those ads on your pages,50-80% of the highest bid for the keyword relevant to the ads. Several advertisers bids for the certain keywords in your site. The ad of the advertiser who bid the highest for the prominent keywords in your site, appears on ppc ads in your site.

   Commission Junction, Maxbounty, Clickbank and Sitesell offer % or fixed amount of commission for leads or products sold through your site or blog. You will place an affiliate link in your site as recommendation to your visitors. When the visitor clicks to it and bought or filled in some lead forms, you will be paid a commission.

   Normally, commissions are accumulated until the end of month or until the minimum amount is reached. Then, it will be sent to you by paypal, wire trasfer, check and any other method available to send your commission.

   A best strategy to make money with affiliate programs is to make a genuine review and recommendation of the products related to the content of your site or blog. Put in mind that your targeted readers will be interested in the topics you discussed. Seldom that they will be attracted to irrelevant stuff.

5. Learning the HTML and CSS basics

   It would be very useful if you know the basics of (Hyper-Text Mark-up Language) HTML and (Cascading Style Sheet) CSS as you may use this to optimize the design or the layout of your site or blog. If you still don’t know, web page is made of HTML tags and new web page style standard is CSS.

   You can make more money online by manipulating the placement of your ads into an optimum location, where the ads can attract the attention of the readers.

   You may also use your knowledge also in placing the social community and/ or bookmarks, blog widgets, feed subscription links and other relevant tools for your site.

6. Web Site Promotion

   Then, it is time for you to tell the world about your web site or blog. Without promoting it, no one will know that your site exists. Search engines may index your blog if it is in free popular blog platform like blogspot, wordpress, and typepad. But, promoting your site or blog, will greatly increase your web traffic. Always remember that you make more money if you have more visitors.

   Top web site promotion strategies are:

   • Submit your URL the top search engines, namely: Google, Yahoo, and MSN Live.
   • Submit your link to the top relevant directories, particularly DMOZ.
   • Submit your feed to the RSS or Feed directories like bloglines, …. Use pingoat.com or ping-o-matic.com.
   • Submit an article to the article directories like EzineArticles.com, GoArticles, ArticleAlley, SiteProNews and WebProNews.
   • Submit your page to the social bookmark sites like technorati, digg, google, reddit, etc. Be careful not to spam these sites. Submit your own page only once a month, together with pages from other sites.
   • Join social communities like mybloglog, myspace, friendster, facebook, mylot and promote your blog or site.
   • Join top forums relevant to your site and promote your link in your signature, which is normally allowed.
   • Post eye-catching comments in other blogs related to your theme.

Hope this helps. Thanks for dropping by. See me at MyBlogLog Community.