Hold on to your butts… this post is not for the faint of heart. I won’t waste time on a lengthy introduction, because this is going to be a long article.

As the title suggests, this is a guide for making money online. I believe that for most people, the most benefical way to harness the money-making  powers of the Internet is through residual income.

This involves putting your efforts  into setting up a system (usually a website or blog) that continually brings in money on autopilot. I don’t think I need to explain why this is valuable, or why it’s prudent to set up more than one. (If, for some reason, you do want an explanation, read my article “Internet Business Income and Why You Need It.”)

Bottom Line of This Money Making Guide: Residual Income

This post is all about the theory: targeting three separate streams of Internet-based residual income, my ideas, experiences and advice. Don’t expect to be spoon-fed any step by step instructions — I assume you’ve already got some background in Internet marketing (if not, I do provide links to other articles I’ve written that explain the specifics.) This is by far some of my best material, and while the article may be long (for a change), it’s jam-packed with as much useful information as I could possibly wring from my brain. What I know, you will know (after reading this,) so let’s get to it.

Pay Per Click Ads

Of course. It may seem overdone, but this is just hands down the best method I’ve found for regular people to realistically create residual income. It’s become increasingly easy for them to take advantage of the value PPC offers; many people who are only moderately active online already own a website or blog, many of which generate a steady flow of traffic — that takes care of more than half the work involved right there.

Even if you don’t have a blog yet, it’s become extremely simple to create one, and once you do it acts as the foundation for a whole host of other money making techniques, kind of like a “home base”. More on that later.

A Blog By Any Other Name

To me, the really great thing about using PPC to monetize a blog is how versatile it is. You can literally make as many blogs as you want, on any number of subjects, as often as you want. For the work involved, the return is fantastic — even if you’ve got a small niche that only makes you $50/mo, it’s still residual income. It comes to you whether you continue to work or not. How awesome is that?

If you were to set up 1000 $50 blogs over the course of one year (and I have no doubt that anybody could,) you would have a guranteed salary of $60,000 per year, indefinitely, on autopilot. This doesn’t even factor in all the different ways you can capitalize on a blog — Yoast.com gets upward of $2000 a month from the eight advertisements they display on the sidebar. (I could live on $2000 a month. Comfortably. I’m thrifty.)

A Cost Effective Source for Residual Income

I prefer to own all the website I create with the intention of making money. This requirs the purchase of a domain name (~$10) and a web hosting plan (~$110/yr.) I use GoDaddy and Hostgator respectively, which will get you a domain and your first three months of hosting for under thirty dollars. However, if you’re creating more than three or four websites in a go, without an existing source of residual income or funding things can start looking a bit pricey.

Fortunately, owning a website is not a requirement for making money with PPC ads, thanks to all the free services available:

• Blogs – Blogger and Blogspot are the big names for creating a free web log (blog.)
• WordPress.com doesn’t allow you to put ads on their blogs, however you can still take advantage of the highly functional WP platform with sites like WBLogin and Blogetery.
• Squidoo and HowHub are great for creating single web pages you can monetize.
• If you want to create a full blown website then there’s Webs and 50Webs.

Good things, apparently, come in twos.

And this is by no means the end of the list. These services are easy and quick, and you sure can’t beat the price of free. The only downfall is that you forfeit the resale rights of your page/site/blog once it does start making money; so, you won’t be able to sell it for a chunk down the line, but that doesn’t stop you from enjoying the residual benefits it produces.

Don’t think that just because they’re free, they don’t have any real potential. Court over at the Keyword Academy recently conducted an experiment with Hubpages, in which he created 100 hubs in one month and grossed almost $500 with them during that time. Needless to say, I definitely see hubs in my future.

Strategies for Blogs

As I’m sure we all know, “content is king,” and keyword targeting is critical no matter what approach you use. If you don’t know about keywords, then you need to take a look at my guide for choosing your keywords, or you can forget about making any money online.

There’s a handful of other little techniques that can really make a difference in the levels of success you achieve with your blogging.

1. One of the biggest skills you’d do well to master early on is the ability to view your site through the eyes of your visitors. The best way to do this is by visiting other sites in your niche, and taking note of your impressions.What do you notice first? Colors — boring, engaging, spammy? How about the overall layout? Cluttered and confused or professional and sleek? Are you blind to their ads or do you catch the mouse hovering over them once or twice? Is your first impulse to skim their article, or does it easily draw you in?

   Taking the time to analyze what works and what doesn’t, and why, is one of the most efficient ways to optimize such crucial little details on your own sites.

2. Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but since the subject of ad placement came up naturally in the dialouge anyway… The fact that a topic’s been overworked doesn’t make it any less important — ad placement is an art form. Study it, experiment with colors and location, and pay attention to what others are doing.

   Call me crazy, but this site here really impressed me in terms of integration into the design. Taking advantage of tracking features to measure performance in various locations is another absolute must.

3. In my experience browsing, I’ve noticed that I tend to be sucked in by short articles with catchy titles (talk about hypocrisy, right?) The catchy title draws me in, and the length of the article doesn’t scare me away. The entire body of the article is visible, and I can easily see that it requires no more than a minute or two of commitment on my part.Articles like these always have related articles listed close by — all of them short and having compelling titles.

   Madconomist is a good example of this; the end of the article segues seamlessly into the related links, and as soon as you stop looking at those then you’re looking at the “Best of Madconomist” in the sidebar. It’s a vicious cycle.

   Understanding what makes a title catchy and taking full advantage of this X factor is another skill I recommend taking the time to learn. I look through the titles on article directories like ezine and Goarticles and see which ones catch my eye, then I compare them to the others to figure out why. You can also apply this strategy to sales pitches and other writing. If you’re reading a general article, or about a product, and you start to get drawn in, go back and take stock of the writing — the tone, the tactics, the hype, everything. Analyze, analyze, analyze. This is how we learn.

4. One last piece of advice before I move on to the next section of this money making guide — consider setting up a “personal blog” if you don’t have one already. This is an actual blog with a nice design that you personally write on regularly. It doesn’t have to be anything extravagent or time-consuming, updating once every week or two is probably enough.Depending on your angle, you can focus around a particular subject or just go for a general “about me” deal.

   I personally prefer the latter — this gives you license to write about anything for any reason, and can have great marketing potential as I explain later on. There’s just something about real opinions you know are coming from a real person that draws us in, the so-called human touch that no “made for adsense blog” can quite duplicate.

Affiliate Marketing

We all know this is where the real money lies. Even if most people aren’t destined to make the huge six, seven, eight, however many figures a year as an affiliate, if you play your cards right you can still eliminate the need to get up early in the morning and possibly battle traffic in order to make your living.

So what are the keys to greater success here?

Aim High

One article I read proposed that if you don’t set your sights high, you can’t help but fall short. This is part success mentality and part common sense. For one thing, if you were to focus on making money with something like Cash Crate or Project Payday, some free-trial-offer-paid-survey-small-time bullshit, then you could forget about ever making serious money online. If you want to build a house, you look for blueprints for a house. If you want to build a mansion, you look for blueprints for a mansion. You’re not going to figure out how to build a mansion by looking for information on how to build a house. See what I’m saying?

When you set a concrete goal for yourself, you challenge yourself to the fulfillment of that goal. It makes you think. This comes back to what I mentioned at the beginning of this article, about things like innovation and dedication, and how they play such a fundamental role in success.

All that aside, there are definitely proven, need-to-know techniques that every marketer should understand, things like linkbait, hypnotic writing, developing relationships and the importance of opt-in lists. I’m not going to reiterate any of that in this particular post; I’m more concerned with the potential your niche blogs present to affiliate marketing, and how to combine them to produce a secondary stream of residual income.

Recommendations && The Human Touch

Perhaps the most obvious tactic is to “recommend” things on that personal blog. This runs in the same vein as creating a website with a phony review of whatever affiliate product you’re promoting and ranking it well for the name of the product + “review.” Many people don’t bat and eye at the thought of an innoncent consumer being mislead into purchasing a crap product, but I personally don’t enjoy scamming people. I encourage you to promote products you’ve actually bought and find useful, that you’ve heard are useful, or that you at least suspect to be useful.

Also, consider yourself as a potential customer.

A great strategy for offering reviews is to supply video and/or pictorial documentation (for things you actually purchase.) If it’s online, do a Camtasia of going through the order process; take a little footage of the product itself, then take the time to experiment with it and write an honest review. I’m telling you, there’s nothing quite like that humananity factor.

Even if you’re not blatanting promoting an affiliate product with a review or recommendation, it’s still important keep your eyes open and take advantage of opportunities that present themselves. With the freedom and versatility of a general personal blog, there’s no telling what form this could come in.

Mr. Fire

For example, I like Joe Vitale — he’s an author. I’ve listened to him, I respect what he teaches and I think he has a lot of good  information to share. So, I might write a blog post recommending Vitale and his work. If he has an affiliate program, I might include that. I could also add an ebay or amazon widget to the post that show some of his products, or I could use the Nightingale.com affiliate system.

Additionally, Joe Vitale’s website is known to be generous with their link exchanges, as long as they think the site they’re linking to has value. MrFire.com is a PR6, which represents a huge boost PR-wise.

Any of these ideas alone might be reason enough to write the blog post, or I might write it because I really like his books and what he teaches, but there’s very little extra work involved in taking advantage of all these different angles and the respective benefits they provide — blog content, potential monetization & traffic boosts.

My point: there’s a lot of oppotunity out there, more than you think, so do your research, experiment and keep your eyes open. You know what they say — Carpe diem, and all that.

If It Works, You Should Probably Be Doing It Too

Another example of this is my first experience with Project Payday. Once you sign up, they offer you all kinds of promotional crap, and one of these was a “Free $500 Wal-Mart Gift Card.” Now knowing that Project Payday is legit, I decided to take a look into this — I even read the fine print. You had to apply for six free trial offers from sites they affiliate with, and once they received verification from the six websites they’d ship your card (and of course, they share your email address with all their marketing buddies… I’m still unsubscribing from all the spam mail. blehh.)

Okay, I thought, no problem — for the first four signups, there was about twenty programs to choose from, so I picked a few that really were free or that shipped for a buck or two. The last two free trials were the catch… they’re not “trials” at all! There was about six to choose from, and they were things like “Sign up for a year of web hosting” or “Sign a year contract with Direct TV and lock in your low price.” I don’t even friggen watch tv, and anyways that would esentially cancel out the value of my “Free Wal-Mart Card.”

To a “T”

All right, so to get around to the moral of all this… One of the trials I filled out was from the company Gevalia.com (a coffee/tea company.) I got three boxes of really good quality tea and a nice travel mug for just $3. (That alone is worth it — one box of the crappy stuff at Wally World is like $3.75)

In addition, a free trial for tea can be incorporated into blogs on a variety of subjects — cooking, nutrition, and fitness, just off the top of my head. You can bet your butt that the Wal-Mart card website was getting a commission for every person they referred to the trial offers, and many of those websites will prominately advertise their affiliate program. That’s an easy and honest way of making a little extra money right there, for referring your readers to a legitimate and high-quality product that you used yourself.

If, as is the case with Gevalia.com, the website doesn’t advertise their affiliate program, you can still recommend a really nice freebie to your readers and build up a little bit of trust and author/reader love. Consumers are more likely to buy on recommendations from people they love!

I really do talk too much, so hopefully you’re significantly inspired to come up with your own brilliant ways to make money with affiliate marketing, and we can move right along to the last of our three residual income systems.

Downloadable Media, My Own Custom Method

In my article  the Top 11 Ways to Get Fast Cash Online I talked about couple different websites that pay you a commission for various forms of intellectual property, things like:

• Associated Content
• Shutterstock
• ShareCash

These programs all pay you a set amount for downloads or views of your files. Associated Content will pay you for every so many page views your article, video, slideshow, or similar receives. Shutterstock lets you submit photography and graphic art as microstock and pays you every time one gets downloaded. ShareCash simply allows you to upload any kind of file, and pays you every time someone downloads one.

Remember, we’re approaching these with residual income in mind. We want something we can set up once, market, and receive money for indefinitely. The payouts for things like this may seem to be piddly, but our game is to target people en masse. We’re looking for the high traffic keywords that no one cares about, and exposing our media to as many people as possible. With only one thousand downloads, at thirty cents a pop, you’re doing pretty awful damn good. Like Eric Giguere of The Unofficial Adsense Blog said on the subject of making $5000/mo. with Adsense:

“…$1 a month is pretty easy to recover with AdSense earnings. In fact, I’d say it should be possible to get $1/day in earnings within two or three months if you’ve got good content that’s attracting traffic…So one site makes us $29/month.So to make $5000/month you just divide 5000 by 29 to get (approximately) 172.

So you need 172 sites, each earning $1/day, to make $5000 in AdSense profit.”

Here goes on to describe how the practice of focusing on creating more sites with smaller earnings is a trending way to make more money overall. That’s exactly what we’re doing here.

No Writing, No Excuse

Now, I know not everyone likes to write or takes good pictures, but with ShareCash no one has any excuses. There is so much potential here — since you can upload anything (barring things like pornography and other violations of the ToS) you can tailor your downloads to fit any market. Free software, free wallpapers, free articles, free icons, free document templates… If you can make keyword-targeting websites for affiliate products (and you can, if you read my article about making easy online money), you can make them for this.

Take just one possible scenario: document templates. These are so friggen easy to create, and if you’re not really good with Word, you can always Google them and download something to base yours off. So, do some keyword research for the various kinds of templates — resume, memo, fax, application, order form, whatever — and throw together a quick SEO-ed website.

Mmm… Doughtnuts… *gurgling noises*

Dollars to doughnuts you’re not going to have any real competition for crap like this, so a light article marketing campaign and some do-follow diving for backlinks should get you ranking in no time flat. It’s probably a good idea to flesh out the website some and make everything clean-cut and professional looking, and get some prominent button graphics for your download links (those are the moneymakers, after all! Although, a little unobtrusive PPC wouldn’t hurt either.) In general, make sure everything looks legit so your visitors won’t hesitate to download from you.

Just please, don’t be an absolute asshole about it, make sure you deliver on whatever your download link promises. If your site performs well for you, you might even get some related articles from ezine to beef up the content. You can really do whatever you want with this, there’s limitless room for expansion.

Peer to Peer

Where’re all the bitTorrent junkies in the audience? This is another fantastic way to circulate your links.

I don’t know if anyone makes a keyword targeting tool for P2P, but some running some keywords + the words “download” or “torrent” through Google’s Keyword Tool External might be useful. Brainstorming file sharing keywords is much the same as brainstorming search engine keywords; think of things that you would download yourself, variations of them, misspellings, anything that comes to mind.

Do a couple searchs yourself in Shareaza, Limewire, or whatever your personal preference is, and see what kind of results you get. Also, consider the kind of legitmate downloads you can easily create and promote. bitTorrent engines like isoHunt won’t allow you to upload crap torrents, but it only takes like five minutes to slipstream a copy of Windows to include IE8; all you have to do is include a hyperlink or a text document in the archive.

You’ll want to adjust the download you provide depending on your target audience. For pirated software, think geeky young people. I’d do girly pictures or wallpapers, or hacking ebooks. For some obscure freeware tool that calculates Fahrenheit to Celcius, think people who like downloading useless shit. I’d do a “Master Compilation of Useless Shit Downloads” or just one really retarded thing I know they couldn’t resist.

You could also write your own short ebook and embed your links in much the same way you would with affiliate links. Shareaza is great for distributing books and other documents, although it does tend to run on the slow side.

So What Are You Waiting For?

I know there’s huge potential in this one — I brainstorm new ways to approach it every time I think about it. This is definitely going to be the next major project I work on, but that’s a little ways off yet. However, in the meantime I’d like to hear from anyone else who attempts this campaign, and how well it produces for you.

Which brings us to the conclusion of this particular money making guide, and what a wild ride it’s been. With any luck, you’ve come away from it all with a greater understanding of residual income and all its mighty power, as well as some deeper insights into marketing theory and strategy.

As always, comments are open, and I wish you all the best!

Related posts:

1. How To Build Residual Income
2. 7 Most Popular Money-Making Models Online
3. The Myths Behind Any Residual Income Affiliate Program
4. Residual Income -The Easiest Way To Make Money Online.
5. How to Get Money Fast With Blogging – A Four Part Guide