Reality Of Making Money Online

Is it even possible to make money online? The question that many have asked since the dawn of the Internet. After many, many months of trying to make money online, I’ve came to the conclusion, it is possible, but it is really hard.

I’ve dabbled in it all, well almost all. From legal white-hat Google Adsense, to Blackhat Codebreaker, to CPA Leads by Content Gateway, I’ve done it all.

Adsense

If Adsense was really such a cash farm, and caused many people to just quit their day jobs and sit at home designing sites to earn money via Adsense, then tell me, why does my adsense statement look like this yesterday?

401 people viewed my sites, and not a single one clicked on the ads. Don’t tell me it is not optimized, I’ve combed all threads on white hat and black hat forums, and I am already using the size of ads that churns out the most click, and the hyperlink is changed to match my site’s colours.

So don’t you tell me, it is because I did not optimize it. It is also above the fold, in fact, before every article. You can view an example of it on my Football Manager Blog.

One of the major reasons I think Adsense does not generate as much money, is because people are becoming ad-blind. Honestly, how many of you readers, have actually clicked on a Google Adsense before simply because you were interested in the comments? I bet less than 10% of you did.

Sure I’ve made a couple of dollars from Google Adsense, but is it really sufficient to cause people to quit their day job? Only if you are the #1 site for a high paying keyword. Now to get to #1 spot of Google’s Search Engine Result Page (SERP) of let say Forex, you probably have to put in so much time and effort, building links and doing SEOs, that if you worked that hard at your day job, you would have made tons of money already.

I do believe though there is a small handful of people out there who really knows the secret of Google Adsense, and they would never share that knowledge with people on the web.

Why would people sell eBooks on how to be rich via Adsense, if they could simply get rich by using their own methods? Which brings me to my next point.

Sales of Blackhat Techniques

Search on Google and you can easily find tons of people selling their eBooks, telling you how to quit their day job and be rich at home by doing nothing and setting up autoblogs, etc and the list goes on. I would like to pose a question to all these people.

If, your method guaranteed you could stay at home and make $300 a day from Adsense, CPA leads, Email Submits and what not, then what on earth are you doing disclosing your method for $10 each person who buy it from you on the web. At the rate you are spending the effort writing the eBook, won’t earning $300 a day from Adsense worth more of your time?

Blackhat Is Unstable

Yes, I’ve dabbled in Blackhat Techniques before. More specifically I set up content gateways that requires you to fill up one of my offers to proceed reading my site, or getting a video to load or something. Yes, on the first day I earned $5, guessed what happened the next day?

I was banned from a CPA Affiliate Network, Peerfly. All my money earned in the first day was gone. Why? Because Email submits done via Contente Gateways is not what CPA Networks really want. Eventually they are going to find out when people submits an email reporting your site.

Even your mighty cloaking of referrer scripts will be useless when the admin visits your site to find out it’s a dubious site.

Greed Causes People To Be Disillusioned

I will admit, I am one of those people who dreamed of making it big online. I combed Blackhat forums everyday, tried all Whitehat Techniques, bought domain, bought programs to automate processes.

And so far in real life, I’ve only seen one guy make it big online, and that’s my mentor in website building, and he dedicates an immense amount of time to building sites, almost as much as a day job, albeit flexible hours.

Autoblogs, CPA leads, Blackhat techniques are not going to work in the long run. Real hard work will only pay well online, search engines will get smarter each day and will not be gamed by your phony links.

But I can see why many people try so hard at making money online. The dream of doing nothing everyday, knowing every second, your pocket grows with money having done nothing at all.

It’s not as though I am financially in adequate, I am more than financially sufficient, heck I even have enough to buy such an expensive speakers! But the allure of easy money is simply too great.

What Really Works

I guess what really works to earn you the amount of money you dream of having is sheer hardwork. And it does not matter what form of hardwork it is. Be it working immensely hard at your day job to get a promotion, working really hard to raise your skills of programming, designing and coding, or be it building links and doing Whitehat SEO for all your websites.

Hard work is the only thing that pays off in the long run. I guess it is time for me to wake up, and simply focus on building quality content, instead of chasing after pipe dreams of striking it rich online from autoblogs and other kinds of nonsense.

To everyone out there, who’s stuck in that cycle of, “I want to make tons of cash from the Internet the easy way”, snap out of it. There is really no free lunch in this world.