So you’ve heard, seen or read this great thing that is the Internet and how people from all walks of life are making money — big or small — from it. Stuff like virtual cash machines, automated money makers and all those whiz bang make-money-while-you sleep jiggilig.

Let me tell you now. If you went online or you put up a blog/website JUST because you want to make money — you will fail and you will not make money.

Here’s for some reality check:

• The big money makers, the big websites, the popular websites are making money because they have sticky content that make people come back to the websites day in and day out. They have content that is useful, entertaining, or informative. “Useful” here is relative to the audience of these websites. What may be crazy to some may be useful to another segment; it’s called niche.
• Most successful and popular websites or blogs began to make money only after they generated massive traffic. You can only generate massive traffic if your website/blog does not turn people away with so much advertising and affiliate links that your visitors feel you’re just there to sell them something or take their money.

Common mistakes to avoid:

• You want to make money overnight. You spend dollars, hundreds, on ebooks and all those internet marketing products and you realize after reading them that nothing has changed. You join this and that, and at the end of day, you have too much information and less money.
• You are impatient. You want to get a lot of visitors days or weeks after launching your website. But you know nobody and nobody knows you yet. So you spam comments on blogs, spam forums, submit to shady directories and join this and that traffic exchange scheme.
• You hard sell because you want to make money and that is your main goal. Your new website/blog is one giant advertising billboard. All your blog posts push affiliate links, and to the readers, you begin to appear spammy.
• You spend too much time in internet marketing circles because you just want to make money. You are prone to buying and spending and falling for the “salesletter.”

The way to go:

• Build a sticky website and stick to it for a period of time. No matter what it is — a blog, forum, or a gallery — spend time on it, submit to directories, exchange links, and build your readership/community. Communicate with your readers in your blog or forum — build a community.
• Pay attention to search engines.
• Don’t overload your site with advertisements. Build content first, then when your traffic comes, you can start monetizing it with a decent amount of advertising.
• Don’t build just one website. Explore other niches. But when you begin to build your own network of sites, make sure you give enough time to launch each one. Use your existing sites to build traffic to your new sites.
• Create a viral website with the intent of making it the next Internet sensation. It may be crazy, it may be weird. But traffic is what you want. Use this viral site to promote your other websites.
• Explore other website formats other than blogs. Other types of websites include forums, galleries, wikis, videosharing, imagehosting, filehosting. You will discover that there is money outside blogging.

The key to making money online is to make sure you enjoy first. If it’s not fun anymore, what’s the use of money? Money can’t buy happiness.

Have a profitable weekend!

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