You hear all this talk about all the many different ways to make money online. You’d think that you had an infinite number of options available to you. The truth is, there are only five distinct ways to make money online. Everything else is just a variation of those ways in some form or another. This article is going to briefly cover those five ways and then you can pick out the one that you feel best suits you.

At the top of the list for most people is selling a product or a service. This product can be anything from an ebook to an actual physical product. The service can be anything from providing autoresponder functionality, such as a company like Aweber or Get Response to auto submitting articles for Internet marketers. Sites like Isnare are huge in that market. The advantages of selling a product or service are numerous. Probably the most obvious one is that you only have to create it one time and can then sell it for as long as there is a demand for it.

Another way to make money online is by working an actual job such as a transcriptionist, computer programmer and so on. By working a job, you are guaranteed a pay check every single week whereas with selling a product or service, there is no guarantee that you will ever make any money at all. On the flip side of this equation, finding a job online is not easy. And even if you DO find one, unless you’re given a raise, that’s all you’re going to make no matter how hard you work.

Then of course there is freelancing. This is where you contract out your skills such as if you’re a copywriter, article writer, graphic designer and so on. There big difference between freelancing and working a job is that as a freelancer, you choose how much to charge and you take on the jobs you want and pass on the jobs you don’t want. But in both cases, you are essentially working a job. If you don’t work, you don’t get paid. So freelancing does have its downside.

Number four on my hit parade is the Adsense, CPA model. Essentially, this is where you drive traffic to your site and hope people click on your offers for which you get paid regardless of whether the person buys anything or not. That is the big advantage with this model. You can earn money even if you don’t sell anything. On the downside, this model doesn’t pay a lot per lead. You have to get quite a few of these clicks in order to make anything substantial.

Finally there is what I call the “junk” methods. These involve things like taking online surveys, trying out offers, for which you get paid, and so on. The advantage of these methods is that they are numerous to say the least. You can always find something along these lines to make a few bucks off of. The downside is that they don’t pay much at all and many of these offers aren’t even legit. Finding the good ones is sometimes very hard.

There you have it. Those are essentially the five ways to make money on the Internet. Anything else is just a variation on these themes. Pick out the one that you think is best for you. Or you can do more than one. I do and between the various income models, I make a nice living. It’s just a matter of managing your time well.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

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