Making money online is not easy. My thoughts of even getting into the niche are dwindling by the day. But then again on second thought, it is possible to make money online even if you don’t sell things. Google is actually moving towards capturing a huge market share in the online advertisements arena, and Google Adsense is the key. There is one thing I did notice while doing research on earning money online: Paid blogging is lucrative.

Imagine owning your own site selling links in the online market. PayPerPost has over 40,000 publishers on their database. Probably 30% are active – imagine how much money you could make by just selling sponsored posts? SponsoredReviews on the other hand charges a 35% commission on each sponsored post – meaning that when you complete a post at $100, $35 goes to them. Google dislikes all these sites selling links – their excuse is that it infringes their Terms of Service when it comes to Page Rank .

When there’s a will, there’s always a way to make money online. What ways do you make money online?

Since I started blogging in September 2007, I’ve seen people pushing Google Adsense saying how much money they have made using this very simplistic way of monetization. However, I notice many A-list bloggers have begun to throw Adsense out the window and start selling their own ads.

For example, John Chow from JohnChow.com now makes about $7,000 on his private ads sale which is 12 times more than what he was earning from Adsense years ago. Darren Rowse from Problogger.net, apparently a “pro” Adsense blogger, had ditched Adsense for his own private ads sale. TechCrunch.com is the champion of them all. Their private ad sales have surpasses many A-list bloggers. Each 125×125 box is selling for $10,000 per month.

What is your preference when it comes to advertising?

Ever wonder why some bloggers just snap at other bloggers for what they write? It’s simple – bad press gets you traffic! The idea is really simple to be honest. Judge by yourself on the good press/bad press ratio. For example the most of the news inside most newspapers are bad.

Several reasons bad press brings traffic includes:

1. Attracts people and their attention.
2. Gets you hot topics to discuss on.
3. Gives you a huge number of comments on your post.
4. Gives you repeating visitors who want to follow up on the latest discussion on the “controversial”
topic that they are involved in.

Get the concept? Too much bad press is BAD, but just enough bad press may get you some attention.

What kind of blogger are you?

Broker’s of domain names such as GoDaddy have tons of money flying around. Naming your business has its pros and cons. Some names have value, some are worthless. Factor the sale price of a business and its name and you have a formally noted asset. Domain names are now being referred to as “virtual real estate”, which seems to be a fair description.

In practice, domain names are a profile as well as an identity. A rep is built by a name, and that matters for advertising and marketing purposes. Being someone nobody’s ever heard of isn’t good market strategy. Domain names generate traffic, particularly from the address bar. Some domain names can sell for $1000 all the way up to millions of dollars. In business registration, there’s a statutory process of checking names for incorporation of companies. You can’t go out and pick a random name without checking it since there is a possibility someone else may own the name.

Checking domain names matter to advertisers because the use of names or expressions owned by other people is legally risky. Made up names in particular are dangerous. Even if you use them unintentionally, with no desire to rip anyone off, and without knowledge of the existence of a name, things can get messy. By rights, you need to check your material. It is possible to unintentionally plagiarize, and under international copyright laws, if you do so, and that material exists “in tangible form” elsewhere, you could be in trouble.

Ad agencies deal with passive approaches. Their clients don’t have to click on this or that to explore. They have one shot to get their message across. there will always be a place for those TV spots and print campaigns but in today’s marketing world it’s simply the jam and not the bread of a complete package.

Web agencies deal with a very interactive audience. Even the simplest web sites require for the viewer to point and click to get there. The world has become much more interactive. The mass majority of consumers has already researched a product before buying. If a company’s web site crashes their computer or takes forever to load they get bored and select the next one from their search list.

Instead of listening across the clothesline about who makes the best product consumers are turning to blogs to see who has what and how well designed that product is. Gone is the day where consumers bought products on blind faith. Today’s consumer is well informed and wants to be treated as such.

While advertising agencies and PR firms are very talented they are not web designers. The web sites that come out of the advertising firms are often poorly formatted. Web agencies deal the problems of formatting and accessibility. Coding. The designers can come up with the next greatest innovation but if the coders can’t find the right web language then the site will fail. Coding has taken on a new dimension for the web. Prior to the rise of web marketing campaigns code languages although complex didn’t have to deal with the types of media that are now being requested of them. Everything in the web coding world is changing at a rapid pace. Within a web agencies the front end and the back end have to work together to produce a reliable product that doesn’t crash a consumers computer. Even if that consumer has a computer from the stone age.