Making Money Online... not

Is there a shortcut to making money on the Internet?

Only hard work will make money on the Internet

The more time I spend on the Internet, the more I become convinced that there are no golden secrets to making large amounts of money on line. There is no quick shortcut.

It is true that every so often somebody will hit upon a sneaky way of artificially boosting their online money making activities. However, the key is in the word "Artificially". The Internet doesn't like this sort of thing. Many ideas will work extremely well for a period of time, and then die. You can only work these sort of systems by repeating them over and over again, or constantly coming up with new tricks.

In the real world, nobody tries to start a business based solely on some transient fashion - they need a long term prospect that is going to produce revenue for years to come. Everybody wants to make money fast on the Internet, but we also want the money stream to keep following for a long time.

The holy grail of all online money making schemes is a system that literally makes money whilst you sleep. Then you really can take that 6 month holiday and come home to find you have made a profit.

The only reliable way of producing a regular and reliable stream of income from the Internet (assuming you are not selling physical goods or services) is to build useful content rich websites that attract large numbers of visitors. Only then can you sell the advertising space on those webpages and make money.

To a certain extent, you will make money whilst you sleep. However, it is a regular task to create new interesting content and up updating your websites with it. On the other hand, if you do go away on holiday for a month, earnings will continue to arrive.

But, as I have said before, making a content rich website that generates serious amounts of revenue is a long, hard and tough job. There is no shortcut. Any shortcut you find is garenteed to fail sooner or later. There are countless sites out there that just consist of content scraped out of wiki or other such places, but this duplicate content does no good in the long run.

There isn't really any shortcut to writing content. Buying or scraping articles usually is not going to work due to the issues of duplicate content and how much Google dislikes it. Google searches are always going to be your number one source of traffic, so you must always make sure you make everything Google-Compatible.

Other effort and time can be expended on growing links and promoting your content rich website. As I have said before it is getting increasingly difficult to get decent links from other webmasters. Half of them tell you to get rid of the advertising if you want a link, and the other half tell you that they will add a link, but never get around to it.

To be honest I put very little effort into building links. I used to be quite fussy about it, but these days I am less bothered. I know inbound links are supposed to be important, but I'd rather generate them by people finding, enjoying and linking to my content rather that me trying to falsely impress my link upon them: Again - a similar message - growing inbound links organically is a much better long term prospect.

So if you want an Internet based income that continues to grow and provides reliable revenue, then you have to work for it. And don't believe any of those websites that try to sell you an Ebook that claims it will teach you how to make $5000 a month overnight.... there is no such system, and there never will be such a system. Reliable, dependable Internet income only comes from hard work.