Is it possible to make money online?

When I first saw this question in a forum, it was actually phrased more like ‘Can I make lots of money online?’, and I guess the important question for a lot of people is ‘Can I make a living’, or more often: ‘Can I make a decent second income?’. My first reaction to the question of whether there was money simply waiting to be made online was ‘Surely not!’ I went on to say that if you wanted to make decent amounts online, you would have to really work hard at it. In the main, I think that this answer still stands up, but I am coming to the conclusion (I am one of those who has to see it work, before I will advocate it..) that actually there IS money to be made, and PAID TO BLOG is one of those opportunities. If you live in a place where the USD is very strong currency, and incomes are relatively low, then you probably can make a relatively decent income online, and if you live in the West, you may be able to make a small second income without devoting ALL your spare time…
I retain the view that if you want to make a legitimate living online, you will probably need to put at least as much effort into it as you would in a regular job, and I suspect that in reality, you would have to work harder. The upside is that if you do the groundwork, you may be able to establish a base that provides an income from less effort as you get better at it. The reality is though, if you have that sort of energy, you will be spurred on to achieve more and if spending more time with the kids was the plan, you might be better off with a 9 to 5.
How is the money made then? Simply by making a website that is very attractive to a lot of internet users and cashing in on it’s popularity… It IS that simple, but getting to the pinnacle of popularity is very hard work and you really need to know how the internet really works. In the recent past a site (at least in the UK) offering mobile phone (cell-phone) ring-tones would be the type of thing that would attract a lot of attention for example. At the moment, a blog well-placed in the blogging community can achieve phenomenal traffic – and can be put together for free!
How do you make money from your traffic? Tip: It’s all about advertising – there are several schemes on the internet that will offer you cash for hosting their adverts (Google Adsense, Ad-brite etc…), and there are schemes who will pay you fixed amounts for you to write an entry in your blog which promotes or at least mentions their product or service - this is PAID TO BLOG (payperpost, blogsvertise, creamaid etc...). One other legitimate way to raise revenue that may be worth considering once your site is up and running, is the selling of ‘e-books’. There are loads of e-books out on the web, these are basically home-produced documents in electronic format. If you have some good ideas that you think might be useful to someone, you can write it up on your PC in MS WORD, convert it into an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) document and offer it for sale again and again and again…The easiest way to do this would be through a pay-pal account accessed directly from your website, you can charge whatever you think the market will allow or you could offer them for sale or auction on e-bay.
Getting your site to be popular is the Holy Grail of internet activity, proving to be a moving target as Google and other search engines develop their search-bots to constantly prevent you from developing a formula which guarantees popularity. The best way remains developing networks and gathering ‘votes’ in the form of visitors and links to your site – all very time-consuming, but once you have it, the opportunities for your ‘non-active’ money-spinners (ie. stuff that doesn’t actually take you any time or effort to speak of) such as advertising revenue and e-book sales takes off…
In conclusion then – Can you make big bucks online? Yes if you are prepared to put the effort in – the majority of us will make do with the ‘pocket money’ earnings that are far easier to achieve.