Guide to making your first money online.

Courtesy Of JamesH

Alright, I’ve read a ton of threads about some people begging to spoon feed them information about how to make money online, so here is my step by step guide to making some capital that you can use for your big projects. This is easy, and I know it works because I’ve used it before. I’m going to do it step by step, so there is no reason for you guys not to earn. Let the games begin.

Look around the room you are in, and try and decide on a niche. I have a ton of car stuff in my room, so I’m going to choose the auto industry as my niche.

Log on to your favorite registrar (I prefer Namecheap because the administration panel is extremely user friendly, and I don’t have to use my credit card.) Start searching for a domain, doesn’t matter what it is really. However if you think you found a really good one, go ahead and register the dot com.

Next, get some cheap hosting. I use ResellerZoom because they are only $5 for a basic reseller package and you can host a ton of MFA sites on them. Go ahead and set up the DNS zones and what not. Wait a couple minutes (in the case of Namecheap) and everything should be set up.

Time to install some sort of CMS. I prefer Wordpress because it kicks ass at what it does. I don’t really have experience with other systems because Wordpress just gets the job done. If you need help with installing Wordpress, Aequitas from Wickedfire.com just made an awesome post that outlines everything you need to do - Complete Guide To Wordpress & Blogging. Find a decent looking theme too; it can be free, but try and customize the header with an image of something in your niche. Try and make it stand out a bit.

Next, you’ll need some plugins to help with the SERPs etc. These are the basic plugins that I recommend you get:

AdSense-Deluxe WordPress Plugin » Acme Technologies Zeitgeist
Stop Comment Spam and Trackback Spam « Akismet
Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress v2 Final
Sociable - Push cx
Il Filosofo » WordPress Database Backup

Those are the absolute minimum. There are probably a lot more that can help you out with the ranks and what not, but those are good for now.

Everything set up? Great, time to start doing the real work. Note that this is not fun stuff, but it’s really easy and should help you get started online with some capital. You’ll also learn a bunch by doing stuff like this.

I recommend you try and get 30-40 posts per 30 days for this ‘technique’. They don’t have to be very big articles, maybe around 200 or so words each. You can outsource this work to people such as GeekCognito; he writes for $.0225 per word. However at the end of this article I’ll explain why outsourcing is good and bad. These articles must be unique. This is one of your sell pitches. The fact that you have a ton of unique content will be one of the main reasons you sell the site. Do not use a RSS auto poster; just provide good, unique content. Need some ideas for content? Look at other blogs around you and see what they write about. Dig deep into the serps looking for information in forums that hasn’t been posted about by the big boys. Log in to Yahoo answers and look at questions people are asking. Maybe ask some friends about stuff they’d like to read about. You can even regurgitate a lot of the information you read online, just rephrase it in your own words. Just make sure it is unique, original, or written in your own words. Once you accumulate all of this content, do not post it all at once. Just post around 2 articles per day. You can set up the timestamp feature in Wordpress that will automatically post the content for you. However if you haven’t written the content yet, you can write it on a day to day bases. It takes me around 10-15 minutes to write 1 or 2 decent 200 word articles. Just keep practicing, and you’ll soon become better at it.

Time to work on link building. Directory submissions are a good place to start, and I highly recommend you out source this work. The cheapest I’ve seen this stuff go for is around 100 link submissions for $7. I wouldn’t purchase text links from individual sites unless you really know what you’re doing, or if you think you’ll be sticking with this site longer than a month or two. Try and write a ‘special’ Digg article that you think will attract the attention of Digg users; if you reach front page other people will blog about your content and you’ll receive a ton of traffic and more backlinks.

That’s about it. I’ve made several blogs using the exact steps shown above and sold them for around $150-$200. How was I able to do this? Easy, I did all of the work. I established a blog on the internet; I got it indexed, got a decent PR, had traffic coming to it, and had unique content. All the new owner has to do is keep adding unique content and monetize the site, which brings me to another list of tips.

If you think you can monetize a site well, give it a shot. Throw in some Adsense and targeted affiliate offers. Try a little bit of CPM stuff if you’re getting decent traffic. Just try whatever you can to try and make a buck. If your site starts to convert well, hold on to it! You may have found a winner, and you may wish to develop it. However if you can’t get it to convert, just sell it. I personally suck at monetization, so I usually sell my blogs to someone that knows how to make them convert.

Now let’s talk about outsourcing. You can outsource every single step of this process, less purchasing the domains. So sure, you really don’t have to do much, however if you choose to outsource everything you may make little to no profit at all. Sites like this can sell for $100 to $200. So let’s do a breakdown of what it would cost to outsource all of this:

1. $10/year - domain
2. $5/month – hosting
3. $180 - 40, 200 word articles
4. $20 – 300 directory submission

So that totals to around $215. Good luck trying to make a profit. You’ll need some awesome stats or revenue to get your money back. I personally think that you should do a little bit of link building yourself, and write the bulk of the content. You should aim to not spend over $80 to $100 on this site, because there is no guarantee of it selling - I don’t care how good you think it its. It’s only worth what someone is willing to pay. So let’s say you decide to invest $90 into this site, and do a lot of the work yourself.

1. $10/year – domain
2. $5/month – hosting
3. $55 – ~12, 200 word articles
4. $20 – 300 directory submission

So now you only have to write 70% of your content instead of all of it. And you’ll still make a good deal of money back on your investment. Okay maybe not, unless you sell for $200, but at least you get the point of what I’m trying to say.

And one more tip that I just thought of, I just bought a domain yesterday that is already indexed in Google, already has backlinks (pagerank of 2) so it basically gives me a head start. The best part of it all? I spent $5 on it. So I’m saving money and also getting a head start. Look for those great deals out there.

Alright well now that I read over this, this plan is really great. But it’s what I do and I make some okay money with it. Since I’ve already written this huge post, I thought I might as well publish it so your guys can laugh at me. Who knows, it could be used as food for thought to come up with some bigger and better schemes. Of course there are better ways to make money, however as obvious of a plan that this is, its one of the millions of ways to make money online. I didn’t intend this article to be of any substance to the big players out there, but for the new guys here at Wicked Fire to maybe help them start thinking of ways to make money.

Let me know what you think, and flame away.