I'm a big fan of making money online, and one of the easiest ways to do this is to create free websites using blogger.com, and then put Google AdSense advertising on them. Get enough targeted traffic and it's almost impossible not to make money.
Blogger.com is a great service because it doesn't require paying for domain names or hosting, everything is free, there are some great looking themes available for blogger.com that make their blogs look just as good as wordpress, and since Google added labels blogger.com has become a really useful tool for creating large websites.
Begin by finding your keywords, do yourself a favour and ignore the biggies that everyone goes for like insurance, mortgages, or health related keywords. Chances are you're going to be competing against every other
Make Money Online expert and frankly some of them are really good at what they do so they're going to beat you every time until you have experience and a network of sites.
Instead look for smaller niches that very few people are targeting, but look for the niches where advertisers are willing to pay more than a few cents to get their ad on your website. Remember, Google only gives you between 5-30% of what the advertiser pays, so if you target a niche with a cost per click (CPC) of 5c per click, you'd need a lot of clicks to make a decent income.
I'm going to digress for a moment and cover Made for AdSense sites (MFA), don't do them. Yeah you're creating websites and you want to monetise them using AdSense, and there is nothing wrong with that, heck Google loves it when we do this because they make even more money and give the advertisers more sites to compete for, but don't be spammy.
Create a website with real useful information in it. That's important, you don't want high bounce rates, and pick a niche that isn't too hard to research, ideally you want your readers to actually read one or two articles, then if they see an ad they want to click that's great, but don't force them to. Don't produce content that is so crappy that they need to click the ad.
Google are smart, they have engineers with higher IQ's than us who develop algorithms to find bad clicks, or websites that are so bad readers are forced to leave. They don't like these sorts of websites because readers and advertisers don't like these sorts of sites.
To find the best niche to work in, use
Google's AdWords Keyword Tool, and just brainstorm things you're interested in, or that wouldn't take you very long to research. If you show the CPC column you'll quickly find keywords that pay really well, but seriously, ignore insurance, mortgages, and health. They are so competitive you'd need to have a huge site to stand a chance of competing against other established websites.
One of the niches I really like that pays OK is pets. If you've ever had a cat or dog you can probably write hundreds of articles and never get bored, and the advertiser CPC can be more then $5, it's also a really easy niche to get links to. A good website will naturally attract a lot of inbound links just because so many people have pets.
Another really good niche that is easy to get inbound links is the mommy blog type niche. Write a website about raising children, baby names, things like that. There are millions of people around the world who write about the same thing but only a very small percentage monetize their sites. Simply go out and network with them and if your articles are funny, or make them think, or even if they're slightly controversial and get a good discussion going, you will get lots of inbound links.
The more inbound links you have the higher you'll rank in the search engines, and of course this naturally means you'll earn more income. It isn't easy to start making money online, but once you make your first dollar a day it really gets easier after that.
After you've picked your niche, or the keywords you're going to chase, go and setup a free blogger account, choose a website URL that has your main keyword in it, then start writing articles. Believe me you could start right now. One hour from now you could have your first website online waiting to get indexed.
I can't tell you how long it's going to take until you start making money online, but I can tell you if you don't start you'll never get there. Once your first site is up you've taken the most important step, starting. Do you know how many people read endless articles like this, or buy endless
AdSense ebooks, or join forums and ask all the big name marketers for their secrets, but they never ever build their own website.
The truth is that the majority of people in forums like Digital Point, Sitepoint, or Netbuilders don't make very much money online at all. The majority are there for two or three months, they start endless projects but never stick with anything. Most of the regulars probably don't either. The people who make serious money might only comment now and again but they're the people who have been members for a long time.
You could also read people like Problogger or Shoemoney, but honestly if you don't start to create websites yourself you're never going to get enywhere. It doesn't matter how many times people talk about that fat check Shoemoney has on his website from Google, or how many times Darren Rowse is mentioned in other blogs, or if you follow one guru instead of another, it all means nothing if you don't start your own website.
Reading the gurus isn't going to make you money, getting off your proverbial and starting a website is the only way to start making money from AdSense. So, get your keyword research done. Go ahead, brainstorm things you like or could write about easily.
Seriously do that now, if you need a good helping hand, then buy Janet Smith's
Nomad's Guide to Make Money Online right now, it's only $37 and gives a lot more detail than this article I've just written.
Blogger.com is possibly the best platform in the world for creating quick and free websites. It has all of Google's resources behind it, and they're not going to shut it down, it's just too big, and they make so much money from people using Blogger they'd be crazy, so ignore all the BS people harp on about maybe losing your sites.
Notice I said sites. Again if you're serious about making money online you'd also be serious about having a lot of websites, you could have just one really big website but if something goes wrong you'd lose everything and all your income. I never put all my eggs in one basket, right now I control around 150 websites. It's hard to manage them all but I have security. That's what you need as well. Good luck.