One of the first decisions one should make before trying to earn extra income online is what kind of a site to build. Different sites require different marketing strategies, different search engine optimization, different investment, and so on.

The easiest distinction is between “product site” and “content site”. The obvious difference between the two types is that product pages are usually used to sell a product. While content sites are sites that focus on a specific content. The content draws people (and search engine spiders) who are interested in the site specific niche and can be used to promote related products. The major sources of income from a content site are affiliate sales and PPC advertising.

Adsense is the major source of income for content sites. A site that is targeted on a specific subject can easily earn substantial income just by adding adsense ads. I t is important to remember that content sites require continues supply of fresh content; therefore it is much easier to create a content site on a subject that really interest you. Usually, content site require heavy traffic in order to be profitable therefore it is important to promote your site constantly.

The most suitable promotions for a content site are article publishing and posting on related sites and forums. It is also important to remember that traffic is not enough. You will want your visitors to click on an ad or purchase something from the merchant that you are promoting.

A product site is in fact a store front for actual products that is set with an explicit purpose of selling. The product can be your own product or someone-else product . In addition, the products can be tangible products, information products, knowledge, or services.

A product site will usually require shopping cart and a merchant account that will allow you to receive payments. The easiest solution is an eBay store or a PayPal account. These services are easy to set up and require no special technical skills. Most of these services offer free basic service and you only pay a small transaction fee per sale and/or a percentage of the sale. Since the amount of content on a product site is usually small, search engines promotion is completely different. Search engines love a lot of fresh textual content and a product site will have hard time providing it. Therefore, a more suitable promotion will be Adwords, affiliates, and link purchasing.

A slightly different type of a product site is a site that promotes offline sales. In many cases, established offline stores want a simple web presence with the sole purpose of promoting the sales on their “real” store. This kind of site is suitable mostly for local established business that don’t want to sell online, sell product that are impractical to ship, or offer local services. Most of these sites are used as an expanded yellow pages ad or a public image enhancement.

In a perfect world, a search engine would have returned the best answer to the question on the users mind.    This is of course a problematic claim.

First of all, can the user really express in his query all his desires?     For example, looking for  information about printers one may want to find “an ink jet printer from one of the major brands, with an ink cartridge which cost less than 30 dollars and will last for over a 1000 pages”.
In addition one may want to buy this printer from a site that promises free shipping and delivery in 2 days.     While some of these functionality may be achieved using the advance search option in google, the common user probably is not aware of this option or lack the skills to use it.

The fact is that in a search for a product 85% to 95% of the people will open “google” (ok, some will use “bing” ) and type in a one or two words, about 30% of them will type a 3 words search term.     Not only that, if they don’t find what they are looking in the first or second result pages, most of the users will not continue to the next pages. Instead they will try to rephrase the query.

As a result of the above, a better place in google means a lot of money for a company.
For this reason, many companies invest in SEO – search engine optimization.     while  no one really knows how the google algorithm really works, there are a few basic conventions about the things you can do to promote your site to a better place in google results pages.

There are several levels to search engine optimization.   This article is about the most basic aspect of it, the on-page tags you can use to communicate to google information about your site. When this article was written (many years ago) these tags had substantial effect but a a lot has changed since than. Many developers abused these options and now they hardly have any effect. still it is important to be aware of this in order to avoid making mistakes that can harm your ranking.

First of all, The < Title >:
The Title is without a doubt the most important tag.    You should try and insert your keywords in the beginning of it but remember! The content of the Title tag will appear on the upper blue part of the browser window. Therefore, it must be readable for the human reader and to the spiders as well.     The title tag length should be maximum 60 characters.
Don’t use words in the title that are not in the body of the page, search engines don’t like that.
Another thing to avoid is using the same title to all your pages; this will make the search engine mistake it for the same page.

The < H1 > and < H2 > tags should be treated the same way. Their content should be very close or even identical to the title. Use your keywords wisely and if the < H1 > or the < H2 > damages the design of your page; change it using css.
Try to avoid the FONT tags that will make your page heavier and will confuse the search engine.    For the same reason you should avoid using java script and css in the < head > and use external files instead.

Use your keywords in the middle of the page and in its end. This tactic will help the search engine “understand” that your page is about your keywords.    One way to do so is the little menu in the bottom of the page and another way is the anchor title.     This way you will earn the points for using your keyword as links as well.

Another important use of keywords should be in your URL and filenames.
Of course, the www.most_important_keyword.com is probably taken; but you can always use www.yourdomain.com/important_keyword.html , apparently it has its effect.

Another way to use filenames is the images on your page.     Your logo file name should contain your keywords and you can use it in the Alt tag and in the Title tag     of the image.

In the past, Meta tags were the way for the webmaster to communicate with the search engines and explain what their page is about.     Over use, misuse and abuse of them lead the search engines to give a very low weight to their content.    Some of the search engines ignore them totally but that doesn’t mean you should ignore them as well.
Use the Description Meta tag to explain what your page is about.    Use your keyword in it but be careful not to pass 200 characters and not to use keywords that are not in the page itself.
The keywords Meta tag should contain your keywords of course, don’t repeat over and over.     However, “survey” and “surveys” are not the same word so you can use each separately.
All other Meta tags probably have no effect.

The T-shirts business is an extremely lucrative business. T-shirts were one of the first products to be sold on the net and people are willing to pay for them. apparently, it is easier for people to pay on clothing than on many other products. This is a specially true when it comes for T-shirts,  probably because they are conceived as a very low price – low risk kind of product. 

Starting a t-shirts business requires a little creativity but really not much more than that. You can create t-shirts, mugs or other product with a small joke, your kid drawings, or a good picture you just took.

If you don’t have any creativity in you, you can always promote someone else’s store and earn the referral fee as an affiliate without using an ounce of creativity.

The starting cost is zero (ZERO COST). So why not try it? cafepress offers an extremly simple way to start an online business as a shopkeeper or as an affiliate. You will be surprise that people will buy without any effort from your side.

Making BIG money require some additional effort but it is an easy business. Once your store is set (couple of minutes) and you uploaded some designs, you will sell online without any effort from your side.

 cafepress will take care of the shipping, billing, returns, and everything else. All you have to do is sit and wait for the check. Of course promoting and marketing of your store will help to turn this store from a simple way of making money online to a real business.

The advantage of the cafepress affiliate program is the high conversion rates. Once a client is referred from an affiliate site to cafepress, the chances are that he will buy something. even if they bought someone else’s product,  you can still earn the refferal fee. The simple fact is that people are willing to pay for T-shirts. In most cases, T-shirt purchase is an impulsive, fast and fun purchase that can easily create a nice profit for the shop keeper or the affiliate.

So, you saw all the “make $1000 a day”, “make money online” and “earn extra income from home” ads and you decided that you want to join the revolution. Why work when you can become a millionaire without effort, right?

Well, the good news is that there is money to be made online and many people are making it. In fact, some of them are not more talented than you. The bad news is that although it is possible to make money online, it is impossible to earn extra income without an effort.

following is the list of common (and less common) ways to earn some money online:

1. start a blog – earn money from google adsense or/and other ads networks
2. write your own e-book and sell it on amazon’s kindle , Google play, or ibooks
3. write your own e-book and sell it your site
4. write your own e-book and sell it thru an affiliate program
5. become an affiliate and sell other people’s products
6. sell your art on etsy
7. sell your photographs on http://www.istockphoto.com/sell-stock-photos.php
8. make money online by answering surveys from home
9. write a smartphone app
10. design t-shirts and sell them on Threadless, Zazzle and CafePress.
11. dropshipping
12. sell stuff on ebay
13. sell a service on fivver. something you can do really fast
14. start a youtube channel and make some money when people watch your videos.
15. Sell advertisement on your site directly.
16. Promote your off line activities (lectures, E-courses, etc)

One of the first decisions one should make before trying to earn extra income online is what kind of a site to build. Different sites require different marketing strategies, different search engine optimization, different investment, and so on.

The easiest distinction is between “product site” and “content site”. The obvious difference between the two types is that product pages are usually used to sell a product. While content sites are sites that focus on a specific content. The content draws people (and search engine spiders) who are interested in the site specific niche and can be used to promote related products. The major sources of income from a content site are affiliate sales and PPC advertising.

Adsense is the major source of income for content sites. A site that is targeted on a specific subject can easily earn substantial income just by adding adsense ads. I t is important to remember that content sites require continues supply of fresh content; therefore it is much easier to create a content site on a subject that really interest you. Usually, content site require heavy traffic in order to be profitable therefore it is important to promote your site constantly.

The most suitable promotions for a content site are article publishing and posting on related sites and forums. It is also important to remember that traffic is not enough. You will want your visitors to click on an ad or purchase something from the merchant that you are promoting.

A product site is in fact a store front for actual products that is set with an explicit purpose of selling. The product can be your own product or someone-else product . In addition, the products can be tangible products, information products, knowledge, or services.

A product site will usually require shopping cart and a merchant account that will allow you to receive payments. The easiest solution is an eBay store or a PayPal account. These services are easy to set up and require no special technical skills. Most of these services offer free basic service and you only pay a small transaction fee per sale and/or a percentage of the sale. Since the amount of content on a product site is usually small, search engines promotion is completely different. Search engines love a lot of fresh textual content and a product site will have hard time providing it. Therefore, a more suitable promotion will be Adwords, affiliates, and link purchasing.

A slightly different type of a product site is a site that promotes offline sales. In many cases, established offline stores want a simple web presence with the sole purpose of promoting the sales on their “real” store. This kind of site is suitable mostly for local established business that don’t want to sell online, sell product that are impractical to ship, or offer local services. Most of these sites are used as an expanded yellow pages ad or a public image enhancement.