Like so many people right now a good friend of mine is out of work, and this weekend we were talking and she asked me if there were any money making online models that weren’t scams and didn’t require a ton of up-front investment.

Now, I want to preface this by saying this is not an instant cash machine scheme that I’m going to lay out here. This will take a little time to ramp up into a revenue stream that pays the bills. If you have zero income right now I wouldn’t suggest trying to build an online income for yourself, but if you have a window of time with unemployment benefits or some other income stream that provides you with a cushion then this could be an option to consider in addition to looking for a new job.

This is a super-easy to understand model, it only requires you take the time to implement it. There’s nothing too technical involved, in fact if you can write an email you can do this. You just have to invest the time.

What I’m going to describe is a simple advertiser sponsored content publishing model. You’re going to use a simple script to create content rich web pages, place a few lines of special text on the pages that will display advertising related to your page topics, and then step in front of existing traffic online to get visitors to your site.

When people visit your site and click on your ads or make purchases you earn commissions.

Believe it or not, it really is this simple to make money online. You don’t need expensive courses, ebooks or software to do this, those only make money for the people who sell them, rarely for the people who buy them.

Step #1 – decide what your site will be about. You need a general “theme” that will encompass the topics for all of your pages. For example, if you’re interested in things like ghosts and Bigfoot then “paranormal” would be your basic theme for the site, and your individual pages will each focus on one topic from that theme, so you might have a page on UFO’s, a page on Bigfoot, a page on ghosts and so on.

Step #2 – you will need a domain name. You can read older posts here for help with picking a keyword based domain, but honestly with this site we’re not focusing on search engines for our traffic, that will come naturally on its own over time, so I would suggest just picking a domain that is short, easy to remember and perhaps even “sounds cool” or fits your site theme in some way.

For example, GhostPics.com would be a great keyword domain for targeting search engines, but since the focus here is going to be on pure human traffic and our site will cover more than just ghosts I’d rather have a domain such as AmazingMysteries.com or TruthSeekers.com because those are memorable and will create curiosity that helps to bring traffic for us.

Don’t spend a lot on a domain name, you can get one for around $10 at GoDaddy.com or NameCheap.com — or even better — you can even get your domain for free if you purchase your hosting through Dot5 for just $3.95 per month. I’ve used Dot5’s hosting and they’re a great service that I don’t think you can beat for the pricing.

Step #2b – if you do buy your domain on your own and don’t want to use Dot5 as your host, then you can always check out Build The Dot Com for information on a bunch of hosting providers that are reliable and affordable.

Step #3 - getting advertisers. This is an easy step, you just need to sign up with advertising networks like Google AdSense, Amazon.com, Yahoo! Publisher’s Network, AdBrite or any other advertising/affiliate network you like.

I would suggest signing up as an Amazon affiliate and then also with either AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher’s or AdBrite. When you sign up for any of these they will explain how to get your “display code” for putting their ads on your site pages.

Step #4 – setting up your website. This is the part that I think scares most people, but trust me I’m going to show you a super easy script for creating content rich pages around your topics that will be quality resources for your visitors and designed to make you money from your traffic.

Visit www.nichemashups.com and you will find a script called NIMS. This isn’t free, but at under $30 it’s well worth the investment; I know, because I’m one of the developers who worked on creating this script.

There is a small but thorough manual with the script that tells you how to create content rich pages in just a minute or two each, so I won’t cover that here. The manual also shows you how and where to paste your advertising display codes from the networks you joined in Step #3, and you will only have to do that once for the whole site, not on every individual page you build.

The main feature of the NIMS script, other than being so easy to use, is that it pulls information and resources from multiple locations to create comprehensive mashup pages that are helpful to your visitors. By giving your visitors value you will get more value back.

If you don’t want to spend the money for NIMS you can always use WordPress and make your site a blog. This can be very effective too, but setting that up and adding your advertising to it is more involved than I want to get in this posting. The rest of the concepts in this post are the same though, so if you decide to go the blog route that’s fine you will just need to use the documentation from WordPress to guide you in getting your pages online.

NOTE: While this seems like a lot of material, the truth is if you have an idea for what you want your site to be about you could have the domain name, hosting and first few pages setup and online in under an hour. The real work is getting traffic, covered in the next few steps.

Step #5 – “talking traffic to your site”. This is the most involved and time consuming part of the whole model.

Once you have your first few pages online with the NIMS script you need to bring some visitors to them. This is where you make money, building web sites doesn’t earn you money, bringing traffic to them does. Traffic is the currency of the web.

Over time as the search engines find your web site pages and start listing them in their indexes you will begin to get free traffic from them, and that’s great, but right now we want to get instant (and no-cost) traffic to our new site so we’re going to go out and find existing pools of traffic online with people who are already interested in the topics our site covers, and we’re going to attract visitors from them to our site.

You’ve probably heard a lot of people use buzz-words like “social media”, “social networking online” and “social marketing”… if not you will over time as a site owner. I use those terms a lot myself, but what they each are doesn’t really matter, it’s what they collectively imply that’s important.

People are social. Online just like in the real world, people like to socialize and gather together with others who are like minded and have shared interests.

As a site owner that’s great news for us, because it means we will be able to find those places online where people interested in our site topic are already gathering.

Perhaps you already know some of these places since you may be interested in the topics you’ve built your site on? I’m talking about forums, blogs, Facebook or MySpace groups; any place that already exists online for people to learn about or discuss the topics we’ve covered.

By joining these forums and groups, you can add your site link to your user profile so that it is displayed whenever you post something on the forum boards, and then just be social. Engage in conversations that are already taking place. Ask or answer questions, be informative and entertaining.

People will see the things you post (and your link that you added to your profile) and if they find the things you say to be helpful or entertaining they’ll click through your link to your site.

Find other blogs where people are writing about the topics your site covers, and make comments on their postings. You are allowed to add your web site URL when you leave a comment, so again if you post interesting or entertaining comments it will encourage readers who visit the posting later to click your link.

This may seem like a lot of work, but think about it this way, the actual work is just “talking traffic to your site” by chatting about topics that you built your site on, and are hopefully interested in yourself. That’s not really a lot of work at all when you think of it that way.

The trick is to always be interesting, informative and entertaining. Never just flat-out say “visit my site”, people will respond poorly to that. But if they read what you say and are impressed then they’ll seek out more from you by visiting your link.

Another great place for “talking traffic to your site” is at Yahoo! Answers. If you know a lot about the topic you made your site on, then visit Yahoo! Answers and find questions that people have about your topics and post answers for them with your site link.

Be creative, find every place online that you can where people who share an interest in your topic are already gathering and join in the conversations. Spend some time every day posting in discussions and commenting on blogs. Use Google to find additional places, groups and portals online where people are already discussing your site topics and participate on as many of them as you can.

In addition, don’t forget about social networks like Twitter where you can find people talking about the topics your site covers, as well as social bookmarking sites where you can bookmark the pages of your site and let others know about them.

Your goal is to just “talk traffic to your site”, so the more you’re talking the more traffic you’ll be getting, and soon others will begin talking about your site too, and that’s when the snowball really starts rolling.

That’s it! Just keep adding a new page or two every day to your site, and then spend the time required “talking traffic to your site” and you will begin to see traffic and revenue levels rise.

I know folks (and “gurus” selling expensive systems) like to complicate all this stuff and make it seem like rocket science, but it’s not. Traffic is currency online, and people are social which makes talking traffic to your site fairly easy to do if you just find the places online where interested people are already gathering and add value to the conversations that are taking place.

I have to add that nobody, including myself, can guarantee that any web site you build will earn money. There’s just no way to predict what topics everyone who reads this might decide to build their sites on and if those topics will be popular or not. So take this to mean that I make no guarantee or promise that you will earn money by following the steps in this posting (to cover my legal behind).

However, if you follow the steps here and build your site on a topic that has even moderate interest levels and you are interesting and entertaining while “talking traffic to your site” then I am confident that it should be a profitable money making online model.

Email this post

Technorati Tags: money making online