Okay, the number isn’t big, of course. But if your are a newbie, it’s enough motivation to get you going in your ventures of making money online.

I mentioned before that blogging for sponsored posts was what I first did to make money online. So now to be exact, I got my first $10 online from Bloggerwave, one of blog ad networks around, and also one which seems to be aiming to be Europe’s biggest advertising media on blogs. If you got a blog (these days everyone seems to have one), you can straight away make money and get $10 like I had after signing up with them and take one of the many jobs available there.

I think you can. I said on one of my previous posts that the first 100 dollar that I got online was through blogging. But even so, I think I am just a bad article writer and I don’t blog that well. I’ll be honest, I am a noob at blogging even though this isn’t my first blog.

The First Blog

My first blog was a health blog (like I mentioned, the one which I got my first 100 dollar online from). It got a PR3 and average traffic. The blog didn’t go as planned, and many times I found that I didn’t really write what I intended to write. I ended up taking quite a lot of articles from free articles directories. And I didn’t like that. And through time I got tired of the blog and sold it off.

The Second Blog

The second blog, which actually was the “other” blog that I run almost simultaneously with the first blog, was an anime blog. This one went a lot better than the first blog. The grammar and tenses were all over the place, believe me, but it went a lot better than I expected. But I was still a bad writer, that sometimes I was amazed that there were people that could understand what I was blabbering about wrote. But what I learnt from anime niche was that target audience in this niche preferred to watch anime series online, download the episodes, or engaged in community activity, rather than reading a blog about anime. Period.

And through time, I found people were more interested in new features that I put on the blog like download section, and also, through time the blog was slowly converting to more of a download site than a blog. I was happier that way, I guess, because I didn’t need to write. So my “blogging” job on that blog stopped right then.

I loved that blog/site. I have a bit of affection for it. But since it was my first year trying to make some bucks online, I wanted to see the cold hard cash glittering in my hands. Yes, I was downright greedy, and I sold the blog/site off, for which the money I used to buy a new laptop.

Just for a note, selling this blog/site has its advantage as well as disadvantage. The advantage, for me, was that the money that I saw motivated me and reminded me that you can really make some money online. But the disadvantage was that should I keep the blog/site and not selling it away, it might be making me more money now than the money I got from selling it.

The Third Blog

The third blog, after gotten tired of running an-anime-blog-turned-a-download-site for a while, I started a new blog which focused on Asian entertainment, which other than Japanese anime, includes Japanese drama to Taiwanese drama, to Asian musics. With this blog, since it’s my third, I had becoming kind of used to the blogging environment. More so because my second blog was focusing on quite similar topics as this one’s.

I wrote pretty much what I intended to say and I liked it. And so I thought I had been pretty comfortable with blogging, until…

Until there was this time when I got pretty busy, and the blog was left without new posts for quite some time. And when I got back to the blog, I found out I didn’t know how to write. That was the time when my short-minded mind suggested me to get rid of the blog.

No More Blogs Until This One

Since the third blog, I don’t keep a blog anymore (this is an exception of personal blog, that is different). I just thought I was no suit for a blog. I built a few sites, but all of them weren’t blogs. Until this one.

OK, maybe the blogs I’ve run weren’t considered as very “successful”. But they were my start. And I earned quite a good money out of them. I think even if you suck at writing, you could at least try if you really have the heart for it in the first place. Probably from that blog you could build something else that you could see fit at the time.

I am still struggling with writing on blogs in the meantime, I know. But I heard and remember this quote that says; “You are what you think you are”. So I setup this blog, also with the intention of sharing with people my online journey, and how I benefit from that journey.

So, please, forgive me if my writings weren’t so good. And keep doing what your planning to do! Cheers.

This is part of the series in Venturing Into Ways Of Making Money Online.

Read Part 1, Part 2.

The first domain that I bought for my own use was strictly for personal stuff, and was never used for commercial purpose. I had never thought of putting any ad on it and when it was due to expire almost a year later, I had no intention of renewing the domain nor the web host on which I hosted the website. But I didn’t want it to just expire either.

That was when I first thought of selling the domain. Since I was inexperienced in selling domains nor websites, I first tried on local webmaster forum where there was a little “marketplace” section on the forum. The “marketplace” forum was not very active, but I tried anyway.

I knew that my personal website probably worth close to nothing, since it had almost no content (I had deleted most contents much earlier because they were a little too personal), so I was planning to only sell the domain, without the website. And I just let the website sit like that with no content while I was running an auction for the domain on that little “marketplace” section on the forum.

As gullible and naive as I was at the time, I let my auction run and hoping for myself to get a little lucky for someone to be interested enough with the domain. And I was lucky that someone took the domain off for mid $xx, considerring the factors that; I was inexperienced, the website had no content, the website/domain had little to no visitors, and no revenue had been made when it was in my possession.

There was nothing to be bragged about, but what I got from that first website sale was experience.

The key to getting a slacking domain/website sold? I believed it was to get your potential buyers believe that the domain/website you are selling “really” is worth something, no matter how worthless you think your domain/website actually is. Write a “good” auction details, but remember, don’t lie. It will just come back at you if you lie. Not a good business practice.

No matter how worthless your domain/website you think is, just give it a shot. It might have some qualities that you were not quite aware of.

This post can be titled either as the original title above, or also, as “When You Let Money Conquer You”, or “When You Let Money Be The Judge”, or “When You Let People Judge You By The Amount Of Money Your Making”, or anything else that goes in between those.

It has been some time I know the existence of this one local blogger (when I said “local”, I mean Malaysian blogger). I believe she had been around much longer than that, probably since I was still in high school. Never mind that. But because of how long had she been blogging on the net and how much money she is now making from those blogs of hers, I think either she had felt the money she’s making could put her on top of others, or she was just naturally big-mouth, egoistic, eccentric, and downright annoying.

Her attitude makes me think deeper about how human generally easily gets snobbish and so proud because of money and wealth. When we are an average Joe or Jane, we see Paris Hilton and diss her because of her big attitude being “rich and famous”. And diss how her family used their status to get her out of jail and law.

But aren’t we the same if when we started making five to six figure income online we started talking like we owned the Internet, like the Internet couldn’t go on and live without us? It won’t hurt if you stay down to earth, and stay being a big player on the Internet at the same time, like Darren Rowse from ProBlogger, or Yaro Starak from Entrepreneur’s Journey, or Hong Kiat from HongKiat.com.

And I’m not even talking about “real” big players that move the Internet like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or MySpace. This is just some individual blogger who makes five to six figure income per month and started thinking everyone would respect her if she says she’s making that amount of money a month. Well, I don’t. And I don’t like the idea of counterfeiting someone with the statement of how much money your making a month. What is that really?-

Money really is something, it is. Money is also what I’m trying to make here too. But money isn’t everything in that matter, and it shouldn’t be something you put your ego on. If you still insist, then don’t complain about Paris Hilton, or Bill Gates’ daughter, or the late Datuk Zakaria, or any wealthy people abusing their status and power. You’ll do the same too. I bet on that.

Don’t let money conquer you, if you still value dignity.

As I have stated on my previous post before, I have started my journey of making some bucks on the Internet by blogging and doing sponsored posts. And that was also how I made my first $100 online.

I was raw and still in experimental state when I started the journey. Alongside blogging and doing paid posts, I built up a few other websites, community forum, tried on domain reselling, and also, I experimented on domain parking.

I did them all at once (in which I would go into deeper on future posts), and though I earned my first hundred bucks online from blogging and sponsored posts, the one that I enjoyed the most and earned me more than the others was building and selling websites for instant profit.

When I said “instant profit”, it actually isn’t as “instant” as you first think. As much as you read people bragging about how they made millions bucks “overnight”, the truth and reality of online business, as it is with brick-and-mortar businesses, is, everything takes a little bit of time and efforts.

Of course, I haven’t made my first “million” dollar online (or offline, in that matter) yet, but I believe unless you were born rich like Paris Hilton, all these things are going to take a little bit (if not a lot) of efforts. And even with Paris Hilton, I still believe that “someone is sitting in the shade today because someone else planted a tree a long time ago”.

Read the posts in this series: Part 1, Part 2.

There was this discussion on a forum which I sometimes go to the other day.

The topic was; “how did you get your first $100 online?”.

The topic attracted quite a lot of replies. Some people said through Adsense check. Some others said through affiliates commission of online sales, selling self-written e-books, e-bay, and many other answers, of course.

And I remembered about mine. How did I get my first hundred dollar online? I figured at the time I couldn’t really remember. My close call was between my “first” Adsense check, or through selling my first website (it was second actually, because the first website I sold was sold for less than $100).

But much later afterwards, I remembered that my first $100 was actually not coming from either of those two, but from blogging. Blogging and writing paid posts, to be exact.

Making some bucks on the Internet was never something that had ever crossed my mind two years back. In fact, I didn’t know you could “really” make money on the Internet. I jumped into the biz because of mere interests, situations, and curiosity. That would probably be a whole different topic completely just on that alone.

Anyway, back to the topic, in late 2006, I set up a blog, much like this one. A Wordpress blog. I didn’t set it up for commercial purpose. It was a health blog, and the main reason I set it up was for me to have my say on the health condition that I was coping at the time (I shouldn’t say much about this). But regardless, I built some inbound links, submit the blog to a few blog directories, and the traffics came.

Then when I had been running the blog for a while, I became more interested in exploring the blogosphere world, and to try that “one thing” which almost every blogger talked about all the while; paid blog posting.

I signed up my blog to some blog ad networks, like the most popular and most talked about, PayPerPost, and a few other, and started writing some paid blog posts. You write a few (or one) paragraphs of what’s to be advertised, and once done, there, you get paid (depends on respective blog ad networks’ payment rules though). And I got my first $100 online this way.

It was pretty easy, anyone can do it I believe. But through time I got bored. The more I did it the more I became bored of it. And so that blog became the third site I sold on the Internet not long after.

Doing paid posts is pretty easy, all you need is a blog, and not that much of writing skill. But getting your blog to comply to every other rule set up by every other blog ad networks you signed up with could be really boring. Could sometimes turn tedious. And I think I am done with that.

That’s for me. I guess it really depends on what you “love to do”. Now how about you? How did you get your first $100 online?

You have probably heard that one of the ways of making money online is to write articles. Good articles would bring you readers, which mean traffic. If you place affiliate links in your articles, and if you manage to raise the interest of your readers, they would eventually go and buy those products you’ve written about, and you’d earn commissions from the manufacturer.

How much money you could make from these articles depends on many factors, such as how popular your site is, how good are the affiliate programs in your niche, and how much effort and time you are willing to invest in building your site to be an authority in its niche.

Content is not everything, you’ll need to think of making your site known, and this can be done without too much spending by doing a good SEO optimization. This means that you have to make sure you use the keywords
you like people to find you for in your article titles, headlines, in the text and in anchors of internal links.

Some people say that they make a lot of money by writing articles online, and judging from my own experience, they are probably right: if you are serious and treat it like a real business, a website can bring you as much as $5000 per month, or even more.

Your income can come from many sources, both active and passive. The passive or recurring ones can come, for example, from promoting affiliate programs for web hosting, or membership sites, which require monthly payments from subscribers. Each moth you’ll get new commissions from the old members, without doing anything more. This is passive income. Another source of passive income is selling ads on your site. You can sell ads either directly, or join an ads network and place their ads on your pages. Active income can come from writing paid articles, either on your sites, or ghostwriting for other people’s sites. Depending on your writing talent and skills, you can earn between $5 - $100 per article, or even more, if you become an authority in your field.

After you have built one successful site, you can choose to go on building a second one, then a third one, adding every month some sources of income to your portfolio. The more sites you build, the better your income will be. Plus, you’ll be on the safe side if one of the sites crashes or loses Google rankings.

Most of all, remember that building the first site is the biggest challenge of all. The next ones will seem much easier, because you’ll already have experience of things which work well and things which don’t, so you won’t be guessing in the dark anymore.

(Credit goes to Simonne Matthew).

When you got a decent amount of visitors to your website, you must have come acrossed many kinds of visitors, especially the whining, annoying ones. A blog like this one isn’t so much a trouble, because a blog don’t always require constant maintenance of past content. A blog like this one usually makes reference to or adds up new contents to previous contents. Edition of past content could be said is occasional.

Not saying that blogs won’t get whining and annoying visitors, they do, of course, because the annoyings are everywhere on the planet. They will, of course, eventually when the blog gets bigger, more of the “annoying” ones rather than the “whining” ones I would say.

But when you run a site that requires regular maintenance and addition of contents, like a fan site or portal, you get a lot, yes, a lot, of whining visitors. And as much as you wanted to please every visitor you got, it could get very annoying sometimes. More so if you built the site out of true interest, and revenues/Return Of Investment are very little (because you keep the ads as less as possible), while the whining visitors are more than you can handle.

My interest is anime, and I’ve built a few anime fan sites, which most I have sold off to someone else each, and a few I had just started with. I love running these sites, it’s part of the satisfaction you got when you go on the net. I enjoy spending time on them. But what I can’t stand is the whinings of those annoying visitors.

“These” visitors usually demand for many things while they give nothing back to benefit the site. They demand new episodes to be put up fast. Demand for this episode to be mirrorred, that episode to be put on their “favorite” free file host, demand this episode or that episode to be uploaded on their “favorite” streaming site, while they never help uploading the stuff themselves for the convenience of other visitors. Demand a new section of their choice to be put on the site, demand this, demand that.

And the worst of all, after all these demandings, there came another bunch of them who, this time curse and swear because the demands are not met, because the webmaster put up the new content a little late. Yes, they swear at you, like you owe them something.

Oh, and it hasn’t ended there yet. Worst of the worst, there are a bunch who “kindly” distribute links to other similar sites to fellow visitors, with the intention of trying to be “helpful” to others; killing your site all at once.

The third there, was always to me the last straw. Sending off my visitors which I’ve worked hard to get to another site ‘just like that’ is really the last straw.

So how do you handle these annoying visitors?

There are always a few available options. Banning them could be helpful. But if you are running a site which don’t require membership, then you are back to the start of options.

I always first give them warning, but as it always does, it continues. Banning them by IP wouldn’t be much of a use, if the visitor is using a dial-up or dynamic IP address.

My second step is to take away the feedback functionality or chatbox, shoutbox, closing comments, or whatever it is to make me not being able to hear their whinings. But of course, this, has its drawbacks. If you can’t hear what your visitors think, you don’t know what you are doing wrong with the site. Because amongst the swarm of annoying visitors, there are the truly decent ones who give it back to the site and give their critical but positive feedbacks to improve the site.

Now I understand why Dattebayo, a popular fansubbing group for Naruto and several other anime, are always mean (sometimes “really” mean) to their visitors. And this is why. Because these guys are doing it for free, and people always sounded like these guys owe them something.

So far, if the work is more than what I can handle, the ROI is not so much worthwhile and I got fed up, I would sell the site and move on.

How do “you” handle your annoying visitors?