Over the years I’ve come across many different techniques and strategies for making money online. I thought it might be useful to put many of them in one place for our readers. I’ve included some of my favorite resource for each, that should serve as a great jumping off point to learn more. Please feel free to add your favorites to this list.

1. Affiliate Marketing

What: Many people in Internet Marketing today began their journey with AM (affiliate marketing). AM is basically selling other companies products or services and getting paid a commission to do so. Affiliate Marketing is growing Very quickly,  affiliate payouts top more than 6.5 Billion annually.

Tips: Pick an unsaturated niche. Try to find products within that niche that are not being sold heavily by others. Better yet, try to work out an exclusive relationship with a new company to be their only/first affiliate.

Resources: Find things to promote:  CJ.com, Clickbank.com, Linkshare.com

Experts: JohnChow.com, Shoemoney.com, Affiliatetip.com

2. PPC Arbitrage

What: Pay Per Click Arbitrage was a technique used successfully by many internet marketers 3-5 years ago to make literally millions of dollars. The concept is to exploit the price difference between Adwords and Adsense, or other PPC services. Basically finding keywords that cost very little to deliver large amounts of traffic to landing pages or sites built to encourage visitors to click on Adsense ads. When the profits from visitors clicking on Adsense ads exceeded the price paid to Google’s Adwords program, you’ve built a successful arbitrage campaign. Google and other PPC companies have cracked down hard on this sort of thing, but PPC arbitrage still exists in some forms online.

Tips: Learn ALL the rules. Most PPC networks have done their best to completely eliminate arbitrage, this technique has real potential still, but requires TONS of research to figure out ways to make it still work. As always, niche is everything, pick obscure topics. The biggest tip here is really just to understand that arbitrage can be done with nearly anything, so look for new opportunities. For example, Twitter Arbitrage is a potentially huge new market. Read this.

Resources: The Basics

3. Website Flipping

What: You’ve heard of house flipping, the process of buying a “diamond in the rough” house, fixing it up, and reselling for a profit. A similar concept can be applied very successfully to web properties. In a down economy, there are TONS of websites being sold for pennies on the dollar. The trick to being successful with it is being able to pick up on the ones that have the most potential.

Tips: Find sites that are aged (at least a few years), have decent link profiles (thousands of links), and that have poor site-side SEO and design. This applies doubly for e-commerce properties, by remedying duplicate content issue, indexing problems, link structure problems, conversion roadblocks etc, you can double, triple, even quadruple profitability. Once you’ve increased profitability, either keep it, or resell at a large profit.

Resources: Flippa site marketplace,Websitebroker.com, Guide

4. E-Commerce and Dropshipping

What: E-commerce websites are among the most profitable online, and can be a great long-term investment. Having an E-commerce site that sells dropshipped products (products shipped from a third party distributor) gives you the ability to offer products without having to purchase them upfront, or store them. Using this strategy, overhead is almost completely eliminated, and the focus can be put on site optimization and marketing.

Tips: Niche is everything in E-commerce. Don’t bother with clothing, shoes, electronics, these niches are saturated. Focus on under-served niches. semi-taboo/strange products can be especially lucrative.

Resources:GetElastic.com , Forum

5. Domaining

What: One of the oldest and most lucrative ways to make money online. Domaining is the process of buying and selling domain names. Early domainers made millions of dollars in very short periods of time by being the first to buy domains that later were in very high demand. The domaining landscape is different today, but still can be very profitable for those that know what they are doing.

Tips: Be creative, forecasting trends, memes, rising celebs, can all be great ways to snap up domains that will be worth money in the short term. Also look for opportunities to buy undervalued domain names in a down economy. There are some great deals to be had these days. Domain names are a shrinking commodity, there is still money to be made here.

Resources: Namepros Forum, DN Forum, Pickydomains.com

6. Create and Sell Info Products

What: One of the best ways to make a sustainable income online is to sell your own products. If you aren’t interested in e-commerce or dropshipping, and writing and research are your forte, then creating and selling informational products like e-books might be your ticket to Internet Cash. E-books and other info products can be created for almost any conceivable problem, from “How to regrow hair”, to “How to get an ex back”, to “How to put on 10lbs of muscle in 30 days.” Info products can then be sold directly by you, or by utilizing affiliates through services like Clickbank.com.

Tips: Niche info products are key, look for under-served communities looking for resources that aren’t being provided for them. Be comprehensive with your info products and offer real value, mediocre e-books will fail.

Resources: More Info

7. Offline and Local Affiliate Marketing

What:Affiliate products and services don’t have to be promoted only through online channels, many affiliate marketers have found success driving traffic and getting sales by marketing online products through offline means. This can include fliers, business cards, or other grassroots efforts. Think for instance placing flyers for online weight loss affiliate programs on cars at local gyms.

Another offline/online affiliate marketing method is to approach local businesses with creating a custom affiliate program. Car dealerships, limo services, lawyers, clubs, restaurants, contractors, mechanics.. TONS of local businesses would be willing to pay for customers you send to them. Depending on how competitive local terms are, it might be quite simple to rank for such terms with little online marketing efforts.

Tips: When selling affiliate products offline, be creative and be targeted. Don’t waste your time by passing out 500 fliers to random people, pick a niche and corresponding demographic in places where they congregate. When looking to set up offline affiliate programs, go after high ticket items, the more a conversion is worth to the company, the more they will pay you.

Resources: Example, Forum

8. Produce Viral Videos

What: Viral content, especially videos can generate huge numbers of viewers and a few video networks are willing to pay content producers by the views. There are several sites that will pay you based on the number of views you generate. Youtube does this through their application/invite only partner program, and Revver.com does it for all users.

Tips: If you’re looking to make big bucks with this method, it’s unlikely. Youtube and Revver.com pay a pittance for the traffic, but it can be a great way to monetize your videos at least a little bit for some extra cash.  The big money in viral videos comes from producing them for clients. If you can prove success with your own projects, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get work doing freelance viral video creation.

Resources: Interesting Example, Guide

***Not-Recommended***
Greyhat and Blackhat Money Makers

9. E-Whoring

What: E-whoring is the technique of using social networking sites to lure/trick users into signing up for things like dating sites or porn sites. With the explosion of Myspace, Facebook, and other social networking portals, E-whoring became very popular and very successful. The technique generally involves creating fake profiles that funnel profile viewers to landing pages or other forms of monetization (usually other dating sites or porn sites that pay per signup).

Tips: There has been a lot of saturation in this monetization method, but for creative folks out there, the market is still wide open. It’s best to think of E-whoring as a study in social engineering. Getting eyeballs isn’t a problem, its convincing them you are legit, and walking them through to completing a sale or signup that is the tricky part. Again, niche communities are easier to be profitable in than mainstream ones. Make sure the affiliate programs you use are liberal with what they allow, as some would ban you for this method.

Resources: More Info, Forum

10. Outsourcing Arbitrage

What: In the past 5 years or so many freelance work sites have cropped up with workers from all over the globe. By posting jobs on these sites, workers bid on your work, often times for VERY affordable prices. With so many different freelance sites, workers, and work available, this is a wide open market for a technique called outsourcing arbitrage. This type of arbitrage, similar to PPC arbitrage, takes advantage of price discrepancies. The goal with outsourcing arbitrage is to win contracts for work, and then re-outsource the work for that contract at a lower pay rate than what you are getting. This can be done with almost any type of work from content writing, to programing, to marketing.

Tips:Those making the most money doing outsourcing arbitrage are the ones who have spent the time to build good relationships with those they re-outsource work to. Finding a competent writer, programmer, or graphic artist for a rock bottom rate can be time consuming (Thailand and Singapore are great places to start your search.)

Resources:elance.com, rentacoder.com, scriptlance.com, crowdspring.com, 99designs.com, odesk.com, guru.com, freelancswitch.com, getafreelancer.com

11. Cookie Stuffing (**Will Likely Become Illegal)

What: Affiliate sales are almost always tracked via cookies. Cookie stuffing is the practice of covertly placing an affiliate cookie on a visitors computer without their knowledge with the intention of getting credit for any sales placed by that visitor. An example would be using a highly trafficked page and cookie stuffing all the visitors with your amazon.com affiliate cookie. Each visitor who then went on to later purchase from amazon.com would look like they had been referred by you, giving you a commission on whatever they purchased. While not yet illegal (but certainly not right, and possibly criminal), cookie stuffing is rampant.

Tips:Nearly all affiliate programs explicitly prohibit cookie stuffing in their Terms of Service. If you are caught doing it, it’s likely you will be kicked out of the affiliate program. Small private affiliate companies are worse at detecting fraud than large ones.

Resources:More Info

12. AutoBlog Empires

What: Autoblogging is a technique where you automate blog creation and content generation in an effort to earn money through adsense or similar monotization methods.  Successful autobloggers own “empires” of thousands of blogs that target a wide swath of niches and keywords.

Tips:If you plan on trying this, do so on a completely different server than any whitehat sites you own. Being banned from Google is a risk autobloggers must accept.
Resources:
Autoblogs == $$$
(12 pages of threaded discussion. Some really basic information on the working of autoblogs)

Ultimate Collection of Autoblog Plugins
(Almost every WP plugin has been discussed in concise details in this thread)

How To Replicate Techchuck AutoBlog
(Techchuck.com – one of the decent example of autoblogging. Learn how you can make the same kind of autoblog.

Auto Blogs on CRACKS
(A thourough guide and the first guide you should read, on building autoblogs. Really cool.)

Another Blogs on HomeMade Crack
(A really descriptive guide on a method based on autoblogs. Hats off the OP. Filled with really nice discussions on Autoblogging and Money.)

Step By Step Autoblog Setup
(Building autoblogs can never be easier than this. A totally spoon feeding, spoiling post)
Living the Dream with AutoBlogs
(Success story and guide)
Bluehatseo.com guide
(Success story and guide)

In the field of search marketing, there are a ton of different areas where skill proficiency is a must.  If you are new to the arena, back from a hiatus or just need something to help you focus on one area at a time, I have something for you.  I use a short and simple equation that organizes all of the search marketing tasks into different groups.

Here she is:

Research + SEO + Link Building = High Search Rankings

Seems like a elementary equation to represent such complex tasks and systems but I assure you, it will help when you need a frame of reference or you get lost in the weeds.  As always, the better you become in each area of the equation the better results you’ll achieve.

Part One: Research

The most overlooked area of search marketing is in my opinion, the planning and research necessary to the success of any website online.  You should be engaging in keyword research, niche analysis and competitive analysis before you construct your plan of attack or develop any target keyword spreadsheets.

• Analyze keyword difficulty
• Analyze the competitors that currently rank for the keywords you want
• Compile a comprehensive keyword list with at least a metric for keyword difficulty
• Develop your SEO plan of action

Part Two: Search Engine Optimization

Of course, before you decide how the website will be optimized, you’ve got to have a firm grasp on which keywords are going to give you the biggest bang for your buck. Obviously, you should scoop up the keywords that are easiest and put in solid consistent effort in improving your rankings for more difficult long term keyword goals.

Before you build your first link, write your first blog post, submit to digg.com or tell a friend about your website, you must:

• Create unique page titles
• Create unique meta data/information
• Create unique urls using mod-rewrite or something similar
• Fix any canonicalization issues
• Check site-wide architecture and make sure the infrastructure is in tact with no server error pages
• Make sure unique content is on every page
• Don’t ever serve two pages with the same content

If you can’t master the aforementioned tasks, don’t tell anybody until you can.

Part Three: Link Building

So, you want to get your website fully indexed by the search engines and you know you’ve got to get some juicy inbound links to it.  Sorry guys, ultimately, if you suck at link building, you’re going to have an impossible time getting the rankings you/your client is looking for. If you’re giving it a shot anyway, here are a few popular ways to accomplish this task!

• Manual Link Building (slow): this usually consists of contacting website owners and convincing them to put a link on their website that links to yours.  This is totally cool for the more popular websites whose link would benefit your rankings greatly but don’t just go contacting any old Joe with a PR1 blogger blog for a link.

• Blog Writing (slow/medium): One of the best ways to build links to your domain is to create an active blog that offers content to an eventual community of users.  The topics can usually be directly or tangentially related to your company/product.  The con here is that creating a successful blog takes time, creativity and patience which a lot of us don’ t have.  If you can weather the storm, the pro of keeping a successful blog severly outweighs the con with thousands of visitors per day becoming the “talkers” for your company often linking your site to others and spreading offline word of mouth as well.

• Social Media Marketing (fast): If you engage in social media marketing correctly, this can turn into a link-building powerhouse for you.  By far, the most difficult part of this process is creating link-worthy content and refining your promotional skills, two activities that even “web 2.0” experts struggle with.

There are many more link-building examples that could work for you, check out some examples over at SEO BOOK.

Remember when optimizing your website and campaigns, you’ll want to make sure you’re using analytics data to make decisions about which tactics work and which ones do not.  The power of the search marketing equation should get stronger and stronger over time.

Note: this is by no means the end to the work done in search marketing, but it does illustrate in a quasi-mathematical way, what areas you must focus on for success with your website.

-Nicholas Santillo

For those of you who are anti-social media, non-believers or unsure- I am here to convince you otherwise.  Here is your wake up call and a real example professed by the CEO of Reddit.com at a recent TED TALKS.

Universal Social Media Lessons

1. The playing field is level: This is true in the fact that the internet is a place where anyone can publish content.   If anyone can publish, anyone can create a successful internet meme or campaign.  Can anyone create the ideas behind the campaigns with a high success rate?  This is less than likely and where the amateurs of social social media get left in the dust.   Social media experts and web 2.0 agencies are in fact, held responsible for creating content that fits the culture of a specific community. The goal is to create content that marries the brand with what the community finds valuable.  This takes constant involvement in those communities and trend research to be able to use those communities to your advantage, time after time.

2. Social Media Submissions Cost $0
The actual cost of submitting content to a social community such as reddit.com, digg.com, stumble-upon, etc.. is indeed $0.  Perhaps the only cost associated with social media marketing is the cost of content development and production.  Its possible that your brand is a PR dream however, in most cases its not, within this gap there are many web 2.0/social media firms around to help you properly utilize social media for your business.

3. Be Genuine/Write Original Content
Writing original content is the backbone of everything on the internet. You should never inflate, lie or copy others work and claim it as your own. There are many negative SEO implications for copying content that comes from somewhere else and not to mention ethical problems associated with it too. The internet is for producing and reading original, interesting (and sometimes not so interesting) content. No posers allowed.

4. Lose Control
For those bigger corporations, losing control is probably the scariest thing one could say to you but for social media, you really have no choice. With the proper planning and campaign strategy, you can lose control positively. There will always be opposition to your brand but as long as the positive comments and sharing outweigh the negative, the word of mouth alone will go a long way.  Word of mouth alone can make or break your brand, product or even business so using social media wisely key for any business.