Introduction

Hello there and welcome to the inaugural post of my blog! As the title implies, it will be a blog that summarizes anything having to do with my online ventures in an effort to make a residual income over the internet. Hopefully I’ll be able to cover what works, what doesn’t work, and if I come to have success I’ll gladly share any advice that I can come up with that might help you get started making some extra cash on the internet.

So what exactly have I done so far? Well, my first attempt to make some cash was at eHow.com, a site that allows users to post their own writings on “How to” do whatever they can come up with. Once published, the author and eHow split ad revenue from the Google AdSense that is placed on the page automatically. What exactly is the split? I’m not sure, but as far as my own personal experience I’ve gotten anywhere from $.07 to $.41 per click that I’ve seen so far. Keep in mind that I’m writing about cheaper keywords though, (a lot of video game related stuff) articles with keywords that involve lending, mortgages, or anything else that is quite expensive will yield a much higher CPC (cost per click) than a lot of the stuff that I’ve done. It’s free to sign up and quite easy to use; you can check out my profile here if you’d like.

Earnings so far: $8.25

I started in July and wrote a few articles, but then ran out of ideas and stopped for a while. I got it going again in November and got up to 20 total articles, backlinking almost all of them using Delicious, Digg, and a couple other social bookmarking sites. This time around I’m definitely starting to get more views, but I still haven’t gotten that one article that takes off into the thousands of views. Although many people make significant monthly income on eHow, I don’t see myself as being capable of pumping out enough ideas for How To articles to keep my income on the rise, so my plans are to just use it leisurely and maybe write a few articles here and there. If you can think of lots of potential article topics however, it is a great site to start out with and has great potential if you’re a diligent writer. You have to hit $10 to reach payout, so I haven’t even gotten anything yet, but I will soon hopefully.

Another site that I’ve used to make a couple of bucks (literally) is YouData. What YouData does is essentially take some information about you (nothing personal; I didn’t even have to give them my name) in terms of what type of products you like to buy. It uses this information to generate ads for products that you would be inclined to like, in theory, and pays you to look at them. The first time I signed up I made about $1.30 right off the bat, and in the month and a half that I’ve been signed up I’ve made just under $3.00 with them. It’s not much, but for the amount of effort it takes, why not siphon a couple of bucks into your PayPal account? They also have a referral program where you get something insignificant like 1% of any money your referees earn. It hasn’t given me any opportunities in the past couple weeks, so I’m not sure if I’ve essentially used up my usefulness to them or if the site is going down, but I was glad to take the $3 for minimal effort.

I’ve dabbled in other sites like Squidoo and Xomba as well, but I have made a whopping zero cents. I made 29 cents from another blog I have posting random video game thoughts.

My plans for the future revolve around web design. I have had a very basic understanding of how to design a web page using HTML for a while now, but I’m starting to study further, learning some CSS and hopefully some PHP in the future. Right now my first project is a fan site for Final Fantasy XIII: FinalFantasyXIII.info. I registered the domain name for $1.07 from GoDaddy and am currently using hosting provided by my University to all students… (It’ll run out when I graduate, but until then it’s free.) This site isn’t intended to be a cash cow or anything, it’s more about training myself to design professional looking websites and seeing if I can get some traffic up and going. If I can get some ad revenue that supports hosting in the future, that’s great; I’m just sitting with my feet in the pool at the moment. For a dollar, it’s not a bad investment to give a shot. Hopefully I can get the art of designing down a little bit better and expand into more websites that can get enough traffic to where I’ll be able to make some money from affiliate marketing. That’s a long ways off though, so we’ll see how it goes. In the mean time it's just a site that I enjoyed making about something that I'm interested in.

So that’s essentially all that I am doing at this point in time; I’ll gladly share any success or failure I encounter in detail in the future. Win, lose, or draw, it’s a fun experience and exciting to make some cash online, even if it’s pennies on the dollar.