Little Earner

The idea of making money on the internet is far from a unique one. I see people wanting to create a website and suddenly earn piles of cash from doing so. So here are a list of top myths relating to making money on the internet based on my own experience.

1. Making money on the internet is easy - erm, no! It’s not! As an experienced programmer and using experience from running my own business, it still took me a year to make a profit from websites. It has taken me 2 years to make a good profit from running websites, but I still couldn’t survive on the income.
2. If you build it, they will come - this refers to the quote from the film “Field of Dreams“. If you create a website, and put content on it, you will not magically get visitors. You’ll need to spend time working on optimising your website for the search engines (called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO), then you need to gain back links (getting people to link to your site) and you also need to find a way to earn money from your site.
3. You pay a few dollars, and magically get visitors to your site - this is kind of true, but a bad way to get visitors to your site. You are asking someone to send traffic to your site by using dodgy techniques. The visitors tend not to even look at your site, or if they do, they won’t buy anything or stick around. This is a very poor short term solution.
4. I need a completely unique idea to make money - this is a popular misunderstanding of how entrepreneurs earn lots of money. All you need to do is to come up with an idea that no-one else is doing, but this might only be a subtle variation of an existing idea that its more profitable. Or you come up with an idea that you know you can do better than everyone else, and therefore attract the most attention. It’s still not easy to do, but thinking about it in this way is far more likely to lead you to a business idea.
5. I need to start off with a big idea - definitely not true! If you start off with a small idea that only earns you a few dollars a month, then you’re already successful. Simply put, if you get experience with the small ideas first, you’ll eventually get a big idea, and the latter is likely to be more successful as a result of your experience.

In summary, to get started, learn more about running a website based business using freely available information on the internet (never pay for it). I like the Webmaster Forums at Digital Point, a free discussion board with plenty of information to improve your understanding. You’ll learn about how to get traffic to your site the correct way too (buy building backlinks).

Then develop a small idea to start earning some money. Try something and see where it takes you. If you fail, learn from your mistakes and try again! If you start with small ideas, then if it does go wrong, you lose very little investment (if any!).