So You Want To Learn How To Earn Extra Money Online?

So You Want To Learn How To Earn Extra Money Online? With the current economic conditions, many people are being laid off work or their salaries are being cut. Bills, on the other hand, are always rising and more and more people are finding it difficult to make ends meet. And that includes people in full-time employment.
As a result, more people each day are turning to the internet as a means to boost their income or, for those lucky enough, to replace their day job entirely.

What's Involved In Earning Online?

Working on the internet requires its own set of skills and there are many such skills to master - learning how to market effectively, copy-writing, building websites, understanding how web hosting works, learning the ins and out of affiliate marketing, link building and so on.
Understandably, that can be daunting for someone who's only exposure to the internet is searching on Google, reading Facebook and generally surfing sites.
So if you're one of those who wants to know how to earn extra money online, you're almost certainly going to have to create at least one website.
And now some bad news: it's impossible to earn online without investment. You're either going to have to buy tools or courses to skill up.

The Power Of Owning A Website

At the core of any affiliate marketer's business (and it should be a business rather than a hobby) is a website. Most marketers have more than one site. How many they have is dictated by the approach they take to building their business. Some build a few authority websites while others go down the road of building lots of niche websites. Then there are others who mix it up.
So once you realize that you need to create one or more websites, you're faced with the decision as to what tool to use to build those sites.
The one most people think of is WordPress and it's one of the best website builders around. This is a blogging platform and it's free, which is always good. But it needs to be installed in a web hosting account, and that's something you will have to pay for.
While WordPress itself is free, it has a pretty steep learning curve, especially for someone who's never built a website before. In all likelihood, you'll need to get training on how to use WordPress to use it effectively.

One of WordPress' strengths is that it is extensible through the addition of what are called "plugins". These are essentially bolt-on extra bits of software that allow WordPress to do more than it can "out-of-the-box". There are thousands of plugins available and many of these are free.
However, the plugins that allow your blog to be turned into an online store or to add products from eBay or Amazon to your posts, for example, are for the most part not free. In fact, you can easily spend a few hundred dollars buying quality plugins that just allow you to monetize your sites. You can use some free plugins to add adverting to your site as well.

Blogs aren't the only type of website you can build. One problem with blogs is that you constantly have to add content to them to keep them alive. Traditional websites consist of static pages and are built in a fundamentally different way than blogs. They also have longer staying power if they are not constantly updated.
You can build a simple website using either methodology and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

I mentioned above that it's not possible to earn online without investment. That's not strictly true. You could start out by building sites on free platforms like Blogger, WordPress.com (not the same as installing your own copy of WordPress), Squidoo, Tumblr, LiveJournal etc.
With these systems, the websites are hosted for you and don't cost you a penny. But you're restricted by the limitations imposed by the folks who run those systems. If you want full control over a website, there's no alternative but to host it yourself using a web hosting company.
Many of the free platforms will allow you to add advertising to your sites. A good starting point is Google AdSense. All the advertising networks are free to join, though some may employ a filtering process before they'll let you in.

Also, if you want to use a particular domain name for your site, you have to buy it and you can also only use it with a site you host yourself. So that's another consideration.

Scaling an Online Business

If you're on a tight budget, then start off by building sites on the free platforms and add advertising to them. You'll need to provide the content for those sites, so keep that in mind. Any money you do make should be reinvested in your online business and put towards domain names and web hosting packages so you can start to build up your business.
Despite what you may have heard, there are no quick riches online. As with any business, you have to work at it to build it. The up-side is that the online world is ever-growing and there are far more opportunities there than in the offline world. And building a business online doesn't require a huge initial investment, but it will require ongoing investment as you expand your business and buy the latest tools.

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