Alyssa's Guide to Making Money Online

I've been making money online since 2007 - in the beginning it was a lot of hope and big dreams, and not a lot of success. I fell flat on my face over and over before I finally learnt what worked and what didn't.

I'm writing this blog simply because I wanted to share what actually worked. There is so much utter rubbish written about how to make money online - all appended with the words "easy" or "fast".

The truth is that setting up an online business (which is what making money online is about) is not that different from making money offline. It takes a lot of time and effort. The only difference with the offline world is that it doesn't have to take a lot of money - there are lots of free tools and platforms you can use (which I will be explaining on this blog). In fact I recommend you start with the free platforms first, because you will make mistakes in the beginning no matter how great your guide (me!) is. At least with the free platforms all you lose is a bit of time rather than a lot of money. Once you've cracked what works, then go buy yourself a hosted domain and build an authority site.

There is a downside to not having to spend a lot of money to get started online - it means that all 6 billion people on the planet can have a go if they want. In business parlance this is known as a "low barrier to entry". Simply, the lower the barrier the greater the competition. You will be competing with people who have a lot of time but not much money, as well as people who have a lot of money but not much time, and every variation in between. Lots of competition means this is not easy.

But it can be done as long as you stick to the rules, work hard and are in this for the long haul. Please don't be tempted to make shortcuts - these shortcuts work for a month or so, and then you get caught and deindexed, all your work is wasted and you have to start over. So many people spend hours and hours trying to work out how to get round Google - but in the same way that robbing banks is harder work and less lucrative than getting a legitimate job, going black hat is harder and less lucrative than being white hat.

Therefore this is a white hat blog full of legitimate ways of making money online. It will take you longer, but it's worth it.

One final thing - I've turned off my RSS feed. My bete noire in the two years I've been making money online is the scrapers - black hatters who like to use your feed to steal your content. Really it's not worth having a feed. If you like this blog, do things like they did back in 2004 and simply bookmark it (or put a link to it in the sidebar of your blog so you have easy access to it). Is it possible to make money online in the web 2.0 world (or is it web 3.0, I forget) without a feed? Of course, and I'm going to prove it.