Weigh Your Moneymaking Options

In the world of online moneymaking, the Monetizer has learned a very valuable lesson we all should heed: "if it doesn't seem worth the money being made, then forget it". Case in point would be paid survey sites and those paid blogging sites. Both are nice opportunities to get a "bit" of extra money, but let's be realistic, if a site asks you to blog about a dry topic you just can't get a feel for, is it worth $10 or $20? Also, if a survey is taking you over 30 minutes to do and paying under a dollar, is it worth it? Most likely not. In either case you might be better off working a half hour extra at a real job :)

The best sources of online income seem to be the one everyone loves, passive income. The type where you've set up a site, it gets search engine love and visits keep on coming. Affiliate marketing and sales would rank as numero uno for this, where you build sites designed just to promote a product and receive a percent commission of its sale. Other examples of some small passive income would be two sites the Monetizer has mentioned, Squidoo and Associated Ccontent. Both can earn you moeny while you're away from them. Squidoo will give you a share of their Adsense revenue, if your lens page happens to be doing well. Associated Content will give you $1.50 for every 1,000 page views one of your submitted articles gets. It's not a ton of money, but if you did a timeless article on AC, you may benefit from long term income sources there. Submitting a ton of articles and making a ton of Squidoo sites could add up though. These are also both ways to promote your site as well. On each you can place links back, and on Squidoo you can go as far as to include your RSS feeds.

Deciding whether you want to put more effort into aggressive income like blogging versus setting up sites for passive income such as affiliate sales should be a major moneymaking consideration.

You also have to weigh the following when starting a moneymaking blog:

1) Do you start off with a free blog site from the get go, gauge how well it is performing, and then move to a hosted domain?

2) Do you partner up and find people to help make your site even better? Do you pay for site design and how much should you spend?

3) Do you eventually sell your site once it's built up a big following and traffic levels? How much is realistic to even ask for?

Almost every major blogger will tell you with question #1 to make sure you get that self-hosted domain from the start. Trust me it's something I'm learning the hard way about with another blog that has built up a decent following. Sometimes you may want to start from the ground up though, and maybe going with Wordpress from the start before hosting makes most sense. With #2 above, you usually can do well just finding free templates for your blog and waiting until you're making the money to afford a better site design. And with #3 selling your blog, sure who wouldn't want to pull some cash off a blog or site? The problem with #3 though is you usually will become attached to a blog or site you've done. It's your brainchild and your creation, so it will be a tough decision to wrestle with. Blogging Fingers recently was sold for $6000 though and quite honestly most of us would take an extra $6000 for a site we created. However, figuring out what your blog is worth can be a bit complex too.

So when you first start up any blog, you may way to consider the 3 questions above. If you're looking to make money from the project, you'll want to weigh the risks and rewards and consider the best strategy for your particular blog topic.