Free Ways to Make Money Online

If you want to earn money online but have little or no money then there are a number of options available to you.

Blogger

Blogger is basically the only blogging platform I have found that is free and you are allowed to make money from it in basically any way you wish. You can use Adsense and also affiliate links. Just as long as what you have created is not spam and you have looked at the TOS generally. The disadvatage to using blogger is that you don’t really own what you have created. You aren’t allowed to sell your blog, an if you do sell it you probably won’t get as much for it as you really deserve. Also, who knows, blogger might go bust and you will lose everything. This is very unlikely to happen however because it’s owned by Google and they have a very healthy bank balance as far as I know.

Some people might say that you have an advantage with blogger because it’s owned by Google but I tend not to find this to be the case. However you can get indexed without even getting any links but in order to get ranked in Google you need anchored links.

Wordpress.com

Google really seems to like wordpress.com and you don’t even need to get much in the way of links. The problem is that it’s very difficult to make money from wordpress directly due to them being very strict about this. You can’t have adsense or click bank affiliate links. They do allow other types of affiliate links from the likes of commision junction. Just be careful about how and what you write about. Basically, wordpress.com is for social bloggers rather than internet marketers so be careful not to sound too promotional.

Squidoo

These are basically pages that you can make on just about any topic you desire. You can fill the page with text, photos, video, ebay auction and all sorts of other things. You can get a squidoo lense ranked fairly well in Google but you still need to get back links via normal sources such as blog comments and article directories. The downside to squidoo is that it’s very cluttered and if a visitor arrives at your squidoo lens, they can easily get distracted by all the other links and banners available. However unlike bigger and wordpress.com, you can sell your squidoo lens if you like. I have not done this personally however. I basically use squidoo for the purposes of getting links and just fill my lenses with a bit of text that contains a anchored link plus I also stuff them full of ebay and amazon modules just to pad it out. I make a little bit of money but it’s nothing great.

Hubpages

This is a great way to start making money with Adsense very quickly. However they do take 40% of ad impressions so it’s not as good as having your own website. Of course the benefit is that you can create as many pages as you like and pretty much any topic. If you get some anchored back links to you hubs then google will often rank you very well so it’s easy to get quick traffic. Yahoo also loves hub pages. You need to be careful about what content you create though. If you are going after a overly saturated market such as payday loans or weight loss then you need to make sure that your content is extra special and isn’t just a rehash of everything else. I make pretty OK money with my Hubs and it’s a lot better for me personally than squidoo. Hubpages has a much more simple and clean layout so is better for ad sense CTR.

Of course, in order to be able to make money from these free methods you still have to understand SEO. However using these free methods of making money online will only cost you time and will allow you to experiment with SEO and understand it better. Once you have a basic grasp on making money online you can then spend some money on things that are important - ie links. There are many systems/services that you can buy into but not all of them are worth the money as you can read in this 3waylinks.net review.

How to Get Backlinks with HubPages

We keep being told that we need to get as many backlinks from as many sources as possible. The problem is that it's very easy to spread ourselves too thin and we miss quite a few important details.

A lot of people use HubPages as a variation on EzineArticles.com the problem is that it's NOT. You can't simply write an article, add a few links and expect that to be OK. HubPages is a social site but unlike Squidoo, if your profile score dips below a certain number, all outgoing links have the "no follow" tag attached to it.

Some people still think no follow can help with MSN and Yahoo but if you want to rank with Google it's advisable to get regular do follow links wherever possible.

So How Do You Get Do Follow Links With Hub Pages?

I'm by no means an expert but I have spent a little bit of time looking into it. Basically if you're profile is set to Average (of possibly worse) the no follow tag is attached. When you first sign up you're account will be given a setting of Prodigy but you'll quickly lose this if you're not careful.

Simple steps to follow are:-

Comment on other pages. Don't leave crappy "nice page" comments. Leave something like"I'm terrible at boiling an egg; they always crack. It's probably because I have the heat up too high like you said. I will try out your tips next time."

• Join other user's fan clubs. Hopefully they will return the favor.
• Get links pointing to your pages in hope that you get some traffic. If you have a strong StumbleUpon profile you should be able to get at least 50 hits with just the one stumble.
• Update your pages with images, links, amazon and ebay modules, change the wording of text etc.

I think that's pretty much it. HubPages have implemented this rule to prevent spammers from setting up dozens of accounts. Remember the site is a social site so you need to take part. By doing this you'll increase your score and ensure that all outgoing links are do followed.

Feel free to leave some decent comments on my own pages and join my fanclub. I'll try to do the same for you. Click here to see my profile.

April

PS I'm also trying to get my Ellen Page blog indexed, please Google, visit this link.