Making money online previously required you to pretty much have your own Web site, products to sell and ideally some marketing savvy. But a new generation of dot-coms have arrived that will pay you for what you know and who you know. The best part: you do not need to be a web designer or a marketing genius!
But it's hard to tell hype from the real deal. I did a search on "make money online" and "making money online", and much of the information out there is just promoting various info-products, mostly about Internet marketing. I can see now why people sometimes ask, "Is anyone making money online besides Internet marketing experts?"
So I put together a list of business opportunities with legitimate companies that:
* Pay cash, not just points towards rewards or a chance to win money
* Don't require you to have your own Web domain or your own products
* Don't involve any hard-selling
* Aren't just promoting more Internet marketing
* Give a good return on your time investment
In the interest of objectivity, none of the links below are affiliate links, and none of them have paid or provided any other consideration for their presence here. These are legitimate companies with business models that allow you to get paid for a wide range of activities.
Write your own blog.
You don't have to have your own Web site, or install blogging software, or even figure out how to set up the advertising. At Blogger you can set up a blog for free in less than five minutes without knowing a thing about web design, and Blogger even automatically sets up Google Ad Sense so your blog, by displaying ads and getting people to click on them, will be another source of revenue. To make even more money from it (what is "it"? "Ad Sense" or "Blogging," this distinction needs to be made), set up an affiliate program (see below) for books, music, etc., and insert your affiliate links whenever you refer to those items. You'll have to get a lot of traffic to become a six-figure Blogger, but pick an interesting topic, write well, tell all your friends, and you're off to a good start.
Share Knowledge for money
Myndnet works on the fundamental concept that businesses live and breathe by the information they can access, accumulate, analyze and act upon. They don't actually want to do the research themselves, but prefer to simply pay someone (read: YOU) who has already done it. And the faster they get it—the more valuable it is. It's a very unique concept that works on the principal of buyers and sellers of information. The best part is that the whole transaction is anonymous (i.e. the buyer doesn't know the seller and vice versa.) Myndnet does this to protect the privacy of the seller and buyer.
Connect suppliers with buyers.
Referral fees are a common practice in business, but they haven't been used much in online networking sites because there was no clear cut way to track them all. InnerSell provides that. Vendors set the referral fees they're willing to pay, and when a deal happens, you get 70% of the referral fee.
A word of caution…
You might come across several programs that claim you can make money online in an instant and without any hard work. Some of these schemes include, promoting spywares malwares to be distributed and installed, Medicare Rx Drug Coverage, Nigerian Money Offers, Online Auctions, Phishing, Prizes and Sweepstakes, Pyramids and Multilevel Marketing, Scholarship Scams, Travel Fraud, Work-at-Home Scams and many more. Just stay away! (Clicking on these links or opening attachments will open your system up to a host of viruses and/or spy-/mal- ware programs.)
The truth is that an online business is just like any other business, it needs time, effort and dedication.
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