(MMO: Making Money Online)

I’ve been actively working on ways to make money online for a about a week now, so I’d like to share an update of what I’ve been doing and how things are going.

The first thing I wanted to do was get a couple of basic sites together so I could develop a system which could be rolled out quickly to other sites as and when required. These were going to be primarily adsense-targeted, keyword article sites. I do kinda have an uneasyness about this type of site, but right now I’m just exploring options and systems. You don’t get anywhere if you don’t try. In the future I’d like to use other, what I would see as more ethical means to make money online.

The sites were bought through the Sitepoint Forums. Mostly for their domain names it must be said, though they did come with a healthy amount of articles that I can use if I want. 2 of the 3 were already adsense sites, while the other was a clickbank affiliate site. It’s always good to diversify your income so I decided to keep the clickbank site as-is for now.

The 2 adsense sites were joined by a 3rd which I bought new. Most advice I have seen about setting up adsense sites recommends setting up – or buying – Dreamweaver templates and building sites by hand. Far too much effort for me, so I immediately decided to put WordPress to use instead. By leveraging WordPress’ power as a CMS I hope to streamline the task of maintaining these sites. All I had to do was set up a basic template. When I say basic, I mean it! For most of the week there was nothing more than an empty stylesheet. Right now I’m more concerend with getting the sites indexed than how they look. By including data from some keyword-related news feeds I was able to have content up on the site until I got round to adding the articles.

Sourcing articles was going to be my next challenge. Writing a bunch of articles myself wasn’t an option if I wanted to get things going quickly. There are free article directories out there, but the articles you get from them tend to be focussed on selling the products of the author. You’re also usually not allowed to edit the articles to suit your site. Besides, more people use the free sites making duplicate content penalties a real possibility. Making other people money is not my goal, so I wanted to avoid using these directories as my source.

Following a recommendation on Yaro’s Forums, I took a look at Article Underground, a limited numbers, members-only article and promotion service. Although it’s not free, I could see the benefit from the service: 400 keyword-targeted articles_a month_ for you to cut up, edit and rewrite to your hearts content. On top of that there’s a network of targeted blogs for you to post announcement links to the articles posted on your sites. Add in the excellent community and many free extras (videos, ebooks, site scripts, etc) and the monthly subscription is worth it. If you’re interested in making money this way, sign up to Article Underground before the current membership round closes.

Now I had my sites and my initial content, it was time to put them together. I spent 20 minutes or so going through the 400 articles on my disk, selecting a couple and editing them ever so slightly before posting them. On Site A I used the pages feature of WordPress, while Site B used the traditional blog entry system. Just to experiment which is more efficient, you know? A quick check over the formatting and job’s a good ‘un! Now it was time to get some links.

As mentioned, the Article Underground service provides a network of blogs (15 at last count) for you to announce and link to your article pages. A quick trip to a couple of topic-related blogs and I had some links in place. The important thing about these links is they look completely natural – unlike a random text link in a sidebar or something. They’re also keyword relevant – ideal for building search engine ranking.

With that, I decided my work on these sites was done for now.

Obviously I want to maximise my potential earnings, so all my sites must be a potential source of income, including this one. I’ve run ads on this site from the beginning and there are other things to come, but I felt the site needed a bit more exposure than the blog linking and carnivals I’d been taking part in up to now.

Text Link Ads is a relatively new service (to me). It allows you to buy links on any site in their publisher network. Obviously you want to target the most relevant to your site. The prices are reasonable and I’ve heard good things about them form a few different sources. I’ll find out for myself over the next few days as my links go live. Signup now and you can take part in their introductory offer; simply order over $125 worth of links, enter the code “new client” and get $100 knocked off instantly! With any luck these links will bring in A) some Google juice and B) some new visitors.

With all this, it’s clear my first week was about more money going out than coming in. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” my Grandad used to say. Total cost breakdown looks like this:

• 3 Sites: $65 (hosting is counted as free because I have a Textdrive lifetime hosting account paid for by another venture)
• 1 extra .info domain: $3.30
• Article Underground Membership : $97
• Text Link Ads: $45

Total outgoings are $210.30. It’s not all bad news though – I took in a whopping $0.94 this week in adsense revenue (all from The Get Rich Project). It’s not much, but it’s a start!