Basing on my almost five years of experience as an online entrepreneur, I’ll show you 10 ways to make money online – 9 established and very useful and one very “hot” and new – Google Affiliate Ads for bloggers.

Each of these points may be implemented successfully by you – it’s not black magic or something for “selected”.  Of course there is a lot of work with all of them, and at these days your online activities needs a lot of time and consistency (for example my first website about financial products needed almost 2 years to become profitable).

So, read carefully

10 points, how to make money online:

1. Showing Ads On Your Site

The easiest way for monetizing your blog or site is by advertising. There are a lot of possibilities of it, in almost every possible category and topic.

There is a lot of types of online advertisement. Some of them are mixture or different types.

Below you can find most common types of advertisement:

1. PPC (Pay Per Click) advertisement

This method is very simple – you earn money, when someone click on ads on your site. Firstly of course you must sign in into one or more of ads networks. Most popular service provider for this type of ads is Google AdSense. It’s accessible for everyone, it’s easy to set up and start earning a lot of money. But in some business areas, there is to less of advertisers, and your earnings may be very little. In this case, you may choose, for example, Chitika instead.

2. CPM, CPT (Cost Per Mille, Cost Per Thousand) advertisement

This type of advertisement is paid per impression. That means that the advert is paid pro thousand of impressions. Simplifying it – when CPM for ads on your site is 2$, and this ad will be shown on your website 50 000 times, you will earn 100$ (because 2$*50=100$)

3. Banners (graphical) ads, text (or intext) links, video ads

Some ads networks are specialized in one type of medium. For example Google Adsense is contextual network, with almost all types of ads (at this time without intext ads). If you want to use intext ads on your side, Kontera is for you.

4. Selling ad space directly to advertisers

When your site or blog has a big traffic, is in specific niche, or has great content, you may try to sell ad space by your own. Of course looking for someone, who want to advert directly on your site isn’t easy and quick job. It’s more engaging and time consuming. But on the other hand – it’s more profitable than participating in ads networks. See my advertising page here.

 2. Participating In Affiliate Marketing

This type of making money is accounted in CPA (Cost per Action) model. And action, in most cases, is defined as a sell.

That means you will earn money, when someone will buy product or order a service via your referral link or recommendation

Commissions may be very various, but most common is a percentage of the sale price. Standard is 5-10%, but for some products, commission is as high as 20-50%

Most profitable online niches are:

1. Financial products (mortgages, loans, bank accounts, bank deposits, Forex accounts)
2. Products related with making money online. It’s very wide niche. We can find here hosting providers (for example Hostgator or  Bluehost), tools for keyword research, like Market Samurai or Traffic Travis, or other plugins and tools related with this topic
3. Products and services for health and beauty (tutorials, diets, exercises, pills etc.)
4. Products and services in tourism branch (hotel and fly reservations, trips, car rental services)
5. XXX branch

Below you can find 4 services, with a lot of affiliates programs for you:

ShareASale

Clickbank

Commision Junction

Amazon Associates

3. Selling Online Your Own Product

Instead of marketing someone else’s products, services or websites, you can earn money selling your own product. In most cases it’s more profitable for you, than showing advertises or even selling someone’s products. But of course there is also the other side of the coin – you must spend time not only on promoting, but also on preparing, updating and supporting your product or service.

If you have no ideas, what could be your product, below you can find some most popular “self-made” product ideas:

1. Books and ebooks
2. Photos, graphics and videos (you can sell them for example on Fotolia or on Istockphoto)
3. Tutorials and guides about specific topics
4. Applications for PCs, iPhones, tablets, etc.
5. Tools, plugins and themes for WordPress

4. Mini Sites (also called Niche Sites)

For some money makers this is the most important stream of their incomes. They set up tens or hundreds of mini sites, advertise them, and are earning a lot of money from them. Earnings from single site are very small – it may be for example one dollar a day. But if you have for example 200 of minisites, you earn about 200 $ a day. Monthly it’s 6 000$ – it’s not to be sneezed at!

And some of niche sites may grow big and earn alone hundreds of dollars. If you are interested in this topic, please visit this site (owned by Pat Flynn) about Niche Site Duel

 5. Making Paid Reviews Of Other Products Or Websites

If you are a good writer and like preparing reviews of products or other things, you may try to make it for money!

In most cases, amount of money you will get in exchange for your review, depends on 4 factors:

-areas of interest of your blog

-reviewed product or service

-traffic on your blog (more the better)

-your possibility to write interesting and reliable reviews

There is a lot of websites, where you can find as well advertisers as bloggers, some of them you can find below:

SeedingUp

SponsoredReviews

LinkVehicle

PayPerPost.com

 6. Be Online Consultant

If you have an established opinion as an Expert in your field, you can stay Online Consultant. Of course you must have very good reputation in your area, and have some teaching skills. You will be paid for consultation, which means people will pay you for your extraordinary knowledge and creative ideas. Most often online consultants are paid per hours (between 10$ and 100$), but most recognized experts will charge you even 1 000$ pro one hour!

I don’t recommend this method, if you are a beginner blogger, specialist or entrepreneur. But if you want to try it, you must start building your credibility and reputation as soon as possible!

7. Preparing Paid Membership Site

It’s very similar way of earning money online to being online consultant – it’s basing on your (or someone else, who prepaid excellent material for your site) reputation and knowledge.

But as opposed to be online consultant, you share your knowledge and experience with more than one man at one time. What’s more, you produce almost all material for your members before starting this type of website.

Of course there are a lot of other differences – most important of them is price! Fees for accessing membership site are almost always fewer, than fees for hiring online consultant. And for this reason, membership sites must have many more customers, than online consultants

8. Selling Websites Or Domains

Some online entrepreneurs make a lot of money only by buying and selling websites or domains. They are looking for expired domains or underestimated websites, they are buying them, looking for someone who needs it, and they are selling it with profit. Most popular marketplace for doing it for existing websites is Flippa. For expired domains you can visit for example GoDaddy.com or Domains.com

9. Monetizing Your Email List

If you have thousands (or well-targeted hundreds) of subscribers on your email list, you can try to monetize it. Lot of companies, small businesses and even bloggers live basing on their email list.

How you can make money with it? You can for example:

1. send sponsored email or newsletter
2. send paid review of some products or websites to your subscribers
3. prepare your own article with affiliate links and send it to your readers
4. send info about your new, hot product

There is a lot of other ways of monetizing your email list, but there is also one, and only one thing, you should never send to your subscribers – SPAM!

 10. Google Affiliate Ads for bloggers

Some days ago appeared new way of earning money for bloggers – it’s Google Affiliate ads for bloggers. This possibility at this time is only for US bloggers, which are blogging on Blogger.com

To get started earning money with this program, you need only active AdSense account, and active blog on Blogger. If your blog category is adequate for advertisers, a new widget “Advertiser Products” will appear on your Earning Tab, where you can choose proper affiliate ad.

It can be text link, banner or even product image. More about it you can read here.

Unfortunatelly I’m not US blogger, so I couldn’t tell you, if it’s profitable or not.

There is only one more thing, which you must know before putting some points from the list into live – there is no passive income at all, and earning money without a lot of work is, in most cases, impossible. So, don’t be lazy and go blogging!

And what are your favorite ways to make money online? Please share them with us!

Disclosure – please note, that some of the links above are affiliate links and I earn a commission, when you buy something via them.

Each blogger use a lot of sources and tools. A lot of them  are available online.

Below  is a list of Top 100 websites, which every blogger should know and use. I spent a lot of hours preparing this list, but some websites may be out of date. If you find such links, please leave a comment about it below this article.

For better navigation, I order them in such groups of links

Search engines

WP themes

Plugins for WordPress

Free blog platforms

Statistics

Hosting for blogs and websites

Advertising and affiliate systems

Photos and pictures for bloggers

Tools for keyword analysis

SEO tools and analysis

Mailing lists and autoresponders

SEO blogs

Blogs with tips & tricks about blogging

Motivation and self-help websites for bloggers

Lists of most important blogs

Reviews for bloggers

Boost visits on your blog

Outsource your work (or find a job as a freelancer)

“Knowledge” websites

Social & networking sites

Websites with other multimedia

Free time for bloggers

Top 100 websites for bloggers

Search engines:

1.       Google.com – most famous search engine in the world

2.       Bing.com – 2^nd search engine for English language market

3.       Search.com – aggregate in one place search results from best engines

4.       Baidu.com – 1^st search engine for China language

5.       Yandex.ru – the largest search engine in Russia

Wp themes

Some free WordPress Themes:

6.       WPdaddy themes – a lot of free WP themes (but be careful – some of them are not free!)

7.       Free WordPress  Themes 4 U (if you need to remove sponsored ads, you need to pay 19.95$ to get the key)

8.       TopWPThemes  – another website with some themes for WP

And some paid WP themes:

9.       Theme Junkie – premium WordPress themes with one-time fee starting at 29.95$ (but for 39.95$ you will get allWP Junkie themes and life time support). This blog is based on one of WP Junkie themes – Smart Blog theme

10.   Thesis WP Themes – pricing starts at 87$ for one website

Plugins for WordPress:

11.   WordPress Plugins – official WordPress.org site with thousands plugins

12.   WordPress Plugins from yoast.com – some useful plugins made by Joost de Valk, most of them are free

13.   WPMU DEV – WordPress plugins by WPMUdev team

Free blog platforms:

14.   Blogger.com – Google’s platform for bloggers, integrated with Google Accounts

15.   WordPress.com – it’s free and open source platform for bloggers.

16.   Xanga.com – network of blogging and social networking communities

17.   Tumblr. – you can share here everything you want – text, photos, videos, links, etc.

18.   Moveble Type – another social publishing platform

Statistics:

19.   Google Analytics – free statistics with huge amount of reports and tracking tools.

20.   Piwik – open source web analytics tool. It is really good tool, but needs installation on own web server

21.   AWStats – free tool for advanced web statistics analysis

22.   StatCounter –Statistics tool for your website with real-time analysis of the visitors.  It’s free for 250k monthly pageload. Above it, it’s paid monthly

23.   Site meter – this counter and statistics tracker has, similarly to StatCounter, 2 options. SiteMeter Basic is for free, and Sitemeter Premium is starting at 6.95$

Hosting for blogs and websites:

24.   Hostgator – this blog is hosted by Hostgator – it’s not free hosting (prices started at about 4$ a month) but it’s stable and easy to use

25.   BlueHost– another hosting recommended by some bloggers

26.   OVH – hosting for sites in Europe

27.   IQ.pl – hosting not only for Polish sites

28.   GoDaddy.com – another hosting for your website

Advertising and affiliate systems:

29.   Google AdSense is most famous advertise program(based on contextual advertisements), both for small and for very big portals. Google equivalent for ads publishers is Google AdWords

30.   Zanox.com – this network offers publishers and advertisers a lot of affiliates program. It’s European market leader in this area.

31.   Clickbank – it’s online program for buying and selling digital or information products. It’s one of the biggest affiliate’s network system

32.   Tradedoubler – this is also European program for affiliate marketing, with a lot of websites and ads publishers

33.   Chitika –  it’s non-contextual  online-ads service, which may be used simultaneously with Google AdSense ads

Photos and pictures for bloggers:

34.   Fotolia.com – one of the best stock with royalty free photos, images, videos and vectors

35.   Istockphoto.com – another website with a lot of royalty free images and photos. You can also get discounts on istockphoto with a promo code.

36.   Photoxpress.com – some photos and images on this website are free of charge

37.   Flickr.com – photo sharing and image hosting website

38.   Shutterstock.com – another stock with royalty-free photos, illustrations and vectors

Tools for keyword analysis

39.   Google keyword tool – It’s very popular keyword tool, feeded with data by Google. It’s not perfect, but it’s free of charge!

40.   Market Samurai – this keyword analysis tool has a lot of useful  functions  – keyword research, seo competition, finding domains, etc. This tool is used by more than 200 000 users (including me). It’s paid tool (price is not low – it’s one time fee of 149$), but there is 12 day trial – you can download it for free here! If you buy it in 5 days since downloading, you will paid only 97$ for it

41.   Keyword Research Suite from WordStream – it’s free only in very limited area, paid plans starts at 329$ a year

42.   Traffic Travis – another tool for keyword research. It has both free (limited for 5 projects) and paid (only 97$) versions

43.   Keyword Elite – it’s keyword Research tool by Brad Callen. It also cost 97$

SEO tools and analysis:

44.   Majesticseo.com – site explorer for your backlinks, neighbourhood checker and more. It’s better than Yahoo Site Explorer was!

45.   Alexa.com – it provides a lot of information about websites, their audience, traffic and keywords. Completely free and without registration

46.   Whois.Net – tool which help you reveal who is behind each domain

47.   WayBack Machine – it’s “time machine” for websites. If you want to see, how did web page look like in the past, you must use this time machine

48.   CleverStat – on this site you can find a lot of useful SEO tools for bloggers and website owners. Some of them are free (for example PaRaMeter, which allows you to check Google PageRank), some aren’t…

Mailing lists and autoresponders:

49.   AWEBER – email marketing software (used also by me) with prices started at 19$ a month (you can try it for 1$ for first month)

50.   Constant Contact – email, event and social marketing solution for you with 60 days trial

51.   Get Response – email marketing platform with powerful autoresponder with few pricing plans

52.   iContact – another autoresponder with additional features

53.   MailChimp – free email marketing service. It’s totally free for 12k emails per month (or for 2000 subscribers)

SEO blogs:

54.   Matt Cuts blog – blog of Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Web spam team

55.   SEOmoz blog– most famous blog (and not only blog) about SEO

56.   Search Engine Land – news, tips & tricks about Google, Bing, search engine marketing and search engine optimization

57.   Search Engine Watch – very helpful site about SEM, SEO, PPC and Paid Search advertising

58.   SEO Book Blog – another valuable blog about SEO

Blogs with tips & tricks about blogging:

59.   Smartpassiveincome.com – very smart blog about blogging and with very detailed income  reports, owned by Pat Flynn

60.   Johnchow.com – very interesting blog with one of the best free ebook: The Ultimate Blog Profit Model

61.   ProBlogger.Net – most famous blog about making money online directed by (maybe even more famous ) Darren Rowse

62.   Dailyblogtips.com – blog about tips & tricks for bloggers. By Daniel Scocco.

63.   Entrepreneurs-Journey.com – Yaro Starak gives here a lot of advises and tips for internet entrepreneurs

Motivation and self-help websites for bloggers:

It’s very hard to describe all the staff, which is on each of the site. But I strongly recommend to visit them at least one time, to see what’s inside

64.   PsychologyToday.com – a lot of articles, not only about motivation, but also about creativity, setting and achieving goals and lot more

65.   Brian Tracy blog – official blog of Brian Tracy, motivational and self-help specialist

66.   StephenCovey.com – website of Stephen Covey, author of bestseller: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Unfortunately his blog isn’t updated since some time, but despite this, there is a lot of motivational stuff  on this website

67.   FourHourWorkWeek.com – blog and site of famous author Tim Ferriss

68.   StevePavlina.com – website of Steve Pavlina, blogger about personal development. Another great website!

Lists of most important blogs:

69.   Technorati.com – list of top 100 blogs

70.   Bloggers.com – this website is dedicated for bloggers, categorizes blogs and bloggers

71.   List of top blogs by Wikipedia – no comments

72.   Top ten lists of blogs – top ten list of blogs by blogs.com

73.   Top blogging news with Alltop– news from most popular blogs and more…

Reviews for bloggers:

Unfortunately I didn’t use any of them, so there are only links to most popular reviews sites. If you have some experience with this type of sites, please share your knowledge and leave a comment

74.   Reviewme.com

75.   PayPerPost.com

76.   PostGenius.com

77.   SponsoredReviews.com

78.   SharedReviews.com

Boost visits on your blog:

79.   Digg.com – a social news site. Some time ago it was more popular than Facebook

80.   StumbleUpon.com – recommend your website to more than 20 millions of StumbleUpon users

81.   Reddit.com – social website, where you can submit your content and vote for another

82.   Delicious.com –(in the past – del.icio.us) – you can find here a lot of cool sites and shares your own links with others

83.   4chan – this site mostly concerns on sharing images

Outsource your work (or find a job as a freelancer):

84.   Elance.com – marketplace for freelancers and people (or company) which want outsource their work

85.   Guru.com – you can outsource your projects here or find freelancers for hire

86.   oDesk.com – another website, where you can find job as freelancer or hire somebody to your projects

“Knowledge” websites:

87.   Wikipedia – free online encyclopedia with more than 20 million articles

88.   Ask.com –most popular question-answering service

Social & networking sites:

89.   Facebook – most famous social site in the world. You must be in

90.   Twitter – share short messages with others. Follow friends, experts and celebrities

91.   LinkedIn – it’s world’s most popular professional  and business-related network.

92.   Google+ – another network, some people like it, some not

Websites with other multimedia:

93.   YouTube – free video sharing platform owned by Google

94.   Vimeo – another site, where you can find, view, download and upload  videos

95.   Live365.com – radio online with a lot of stations

Free time for bloggers:

96.   Dilbert – you don’t know, who Dilbert is?

97.   Demotivational Posters – you must see it!

98.   Break.com – website with funny videos and pictures

99.   Jokes.com – jokes for almost everyone

100.   Garfield – and everything is clear…

Disclosure – please note, that some of the links above are affiliate links and I earn a commission, when you buy something via them.