Now I want to make sure we are clear here.  I said this is how to make money online for free, I did NOT say it would be fast.  If you think that a free way of making money meant a fast way of making money then you are incorrect.

If you need money fast then get a second job, go around offering to rake leaves, pull weeds, shovel snow, carry groceries, sell your services of data entry, writing, fixing or teaching computers, etc.

Making money online the way I am talking about is neither fast, nor is it the best way, it is just one way you can do it without spending money.

Will it work for you?  I don’t know.  I’m not you, I’m not looking over your shoulder to make sure you are doing it correctly nor am I cracking the whip to make sure you are working on it consistently.

The best training in the world is not going to help you if you don’t do it, do it poorly, or only do it when you “feel like it” (which is what it is no matter what flimsy excuse you come up with).

Making money online requires discipline, period.  Yes there’s some things you can set up and leave them alone from then on, but YOU STILL have to work to get them set up correctly in the first place.  It doesn’t just magically happen.

Okay, enough ranting, back to business.

We continue where we left off:

Some Things To Keep In Mind

As I talk about this, I’m sure some of you will go, “Wait, what about…?” and list off some resource.

First of all, I am not going to list every single resource possible.  Second of all, the resources I’m using meet two very important criteria.

Those two criteria are: Is it free?  Is it internet based?

Remember in our grim circumstances that we don’t have money to do it right, much less buy some research tool or whatever no matter how great it is and no matter how low cost it is.

And we are using the library’s computer, so there’s no downloading any free software.  There are good free software programs, but I’m going with a worst-case scenario.

The last thing that you are going to notice is that I haven’t gone into too many specifics.  There’s a couple of reasons for that.  One, is that this isn’t aimed at people who don’t know how to use a computer.

If you are computer illiterate, then this isn’t going to help a lot. You can probably figure it out, especially if you simply read what it being asked when you fill out forms, but there’s more things against you.  For example,  sure you set up a blog, but did you do it correctly?  Did you get all the settings right?

The other specifics I don’t go into is numbers.  How many websites are too many to compete with?  Is that number of advertisers good, bad, or what?  And so on, a lot of those answers depends on the market and how many long tail keywords you find.

Different markets are different sizes.  Making money online is a huge, fiercely competitive market.  Quilting, not so much, but there’s still a market there, but the numbers are way different.

Sign Up For Free Email

The first thing I’d do is get a free email account.  We are going to be using an email address when we sign up for pretty much everything and we will be getting email and we need someplace to get it for cheap…real cheap…as in free.

Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, Juno, and others all have free email.  Some places don’t like free email addresses but we can’t help that, we are beyond broke.

I’d go with either Gmail or Juno but that’s me.

Research My Market

The second thing I would do is research.  Find my market, find my niche and find my keywords.  What I found for my market and/or niche is what I would use to determine whether to promote digital products or physical products.

For the market and niche research I would check Amazon for their best sellers, eBay pulse for what’s popular, Google trends, a big name bookstore, etc.  I would also check out ClickBank for it’s top sellers for whatever niche I was going in.

I’d check for ads on Google or other search engines to make sure there was some indication of money being made.  If there’s no advertisers at all, then it’s probably not a money making market.

I’d write down everything that caught my attention.  Is that a market I want to be in?  Is there a niche within that market that I can narrow my focus on?

For example, online dating is a market, a very broad market.  Online dating for Russian singles is still online dating, but a much smaller and more narrowly defined market.  It’s what would be called a “niche”.

A market could be profitable, but that doesn’t mean that every niche within that market is profitable.  This is why we research.  I’d also focus (at least to start with) on something either I’m already interested in, or is closely related to something I’m interested in.  It’s easier to get going and keep going with something I like than something I couldn’t care less about.

Find My Keywords

For the keywords I would use the free WordTracker Tool and the Google Keyword Tool.  I’d write down the keywords and numbers so I could examine them at home.  If there’s a way to print the information from the library computer then I’d do that, but since I don’t know and it could be different from library to library, I’d just count on having to do it the long, tedious way.

I can check competition and backlinks between Google and Yahoo.  In case you don’t know, Yahoo is more accurate for checking backlinks on your competitors.

Free Hosting Or Free Blog?

At this time I’d need to make a final decision about whether I’m going to set up a free hosting account or a free blog account.  Some of that would depend on what type of marketing I was going to do.

On second thought, I think I’d just use a blog whether I was going to actually blog or just leave it static like a html site would be.  This way I can always change my mind about blogging and whenever I want to I can easily update it without worrying about html code.

For setting up a free blog, there’s WordPress.com and there’s Blogger.  You already know my feelings on WordPress.com so I’d go with Blogger.  I would also try to get my main keyword as part of the URL of my blog, definitely in the title and description.

Secondary keywords also would be in there.  If your market is really competitive, you might put one of your secondary keywords in the URL instead of the main keyword but still use the main keyword in the title and description for the blog.

[UPDATE: I forgot to mention that there are other free places to build like Hubpages and Squidoo for example.  You can't do blogs there, but those single page entries can help promote your blog.  There's also other places to build free blogs, choose what you want, but if you don't have a preference, then stick with Blogger.]

Sign Up For Paypal and Adsense

Paypal allows us to get and spend money.  Everything we get paid needs to go somewhere and Paypal is both easy and free to sign up with. When you get paid, they will take out a small percentage, but so will any merchant account that allows you to get payments by credit card. Fees are a fact of life in the business world.

Sign up for Google Adsense.  That’s Adsense, not Adwords.  Adsense allows us to put some of those Google ads on our website.  Anyone who clicks on them puts a couple of cents into our pockets.

Which ads run will depend on our keywords and SEO.  The better you optimized your blog and posts, the more accurate the ads will be, giving you better chances of getting clicks.

Choose A Product

If I hadn’t yet, I’d sign up with ClickBank or whatever merchant sold a product that matched the niche I was in.  I could just run an Adsense site and not have a product, or have a product and not run Adsense, but in this case I’d probably do both.  If one does significantly better than the other, then that’s what I’d keep.

If it’s a particular ad on Adsense that’s doing really well, then I’d sign up with that merchant and put an affiliate link directly to that product in place of Adsense.

Something else you can do either with, or in place of, finding a product this way is to go to Yahoo Answers and forums based on your niche, and see what the most common questions/problems there are.  Then find a product that addresses them.

Sign Up With StatCounter

I’d have also signed up with StatCounter to help me keep track of my traffic.  I can add the code they give me directly to the blog.

You can use Google Analytics if you’d prefer…or both.

Every week I’d check my stats from StatCounter or Google Analytics.  I’d use that information to guide me in what direction I’d go.  If there’s one type of article that’s getting far more traffic than the others, then I’d look into doing more around that topic.

Get Your Content

Ah yes, here’s the second hardest part (the hardest part is driving targeted traffic).  Many of you who’ve been around the block a bit might say “Use PLR” and that’d be good except for one little detail.  You usually have to pay for good PLR and we have no money to spend.

You can search for free PLR, and if you find some it may be okay, you’d have to copy and paste it directly from where you found it into your blog post and not publish it until after you’ve rewritten it.  Break it up into several, smaller posts if you can and if it makes sense.

If you can’t do that (either because of time or maybe the browser doesn’t allow you to copy/paste) then you will have to do it the old fashioned way.  Research.

Where are you?  In the library.  What’s in the library?  Books.  Check out some books on your niche (or do it in the library if you must) and write down main points and subpoints about the various topics in your niche.

Then you simply make a series of posts where each post contains a single topic where you’ve listed the points and subpoints and then written a paragraph or two about each one.  Little, short, choppy paragraphs like in this post you are reading.

DO NOT copy the paragraphs out of the books and put them in your post.  Books are not PLR and doing a straight copy is plagiarism and is illegal.   Write down the POINTS and write your OWN paragraphs.  Just like you did (or were supposed to do) when you were writing reports back in High School.

Drive Traffic

The bane of every marketer.  Some are really good at it and many suck at it.  The whole point of doing SEO in our blog and posts is for free search engine traffic, but there’s more we can do.

There’s writing articles and submitting them to article directories, posting relevant posts in forums related to your niche (you would put your link in all your signature files), posting useful comments on related blogs, writing guest blog posts, and use social bookmarking sites.  That should get you started.

Now there’s some debate about how useful those techniques really are.  It is said that article marketing is not as effective as it once was, that many blogs use the ‘no follow’ tag and so on.

My personal opinion is that it doesn’t hurt.  They may or may not help you build backlinks, but they may help get people to click on your link and come see your website.

Think about it.  If you are posting useful things on other people’s blogs or in forums, you may catch the attention of someone who wants to see what else you have to say.  I’ve done it.

The key is that it needs to be useful and relevant, not something like “good job”.  That doesn’t cut it and some forum moderators are starting to treat such comments as spam, meaning you are only posting a comment to get a backlink and not being a valuable, contributing forum member.

Autoresponders

We can’t afford an autoresponder but there’s a couple of things we can do.

Sign up for Feedburner at Google, it has an option to incorporate itself with your Blogger blog.  It collects some information and though you cannot email your list you can write a post talking to them and notify them of things you would normally send through email.

Don’t do it too often though.  Your blog posts should be related to your niche, not letters to your readers.

I’ve heard that Aweber has a free trial, but unless I’ve missed something, what it is, is that you sign up for Aweber and you don’t pay for the first 30 days giving you a chance to test it.  After that you have to either pay or cancel.

GetResponse however has a real free service.  Highly limited, but free.  It allows you to store up to five followup messages.  You cannot send emails, but you can send the followup messages.

What this allows is for us to collect the names and emails of people so we can start building our lists.  Then when we can afford to, we can upgrade to a paid account and send emails out to our (hopefully) growing list.

Better than nothing.

Conclusion

As many of you know, I do a very poor job in optimizing my blog posts for SEO.  It’s not because I don’t know how, it’s because I simply don’t.  However, I’m in a position where my financial life or death isn’t on the line.

The person in this scenario, and me too if I am ever there, does not have that luxury.  Every keyword must count, and it’s good practice.  I’ve been trying to do better myself.

How long, if ever, until you make a profit, no matter how small?  I don’t know.  If you really only have 15 minutes a day at a library (and I don’t know) then it will take you a long, long time, but you will get it done.

Once you’ve started making a profit, I’d do the process again in another niche.  Eventually we can start using that money to invest in internet based services that will help us get faster at what we do.  If we’ve earned enough money we can go back and start doing it right with buying a domain and autoresponder.

I wouldn’t get rid of what we’ve already set up, I’d use it to start something new.

I haven’t decided whether I am going to continue this series by going through it step by step.  In any case, I hope it helps get your thinking cap on.

Related posts:

1. How To Make Money Online For Free Part One
2. Make Money Online ~ Micro Niche Your Focus
3. Make Money Online ~ Narrow Your Focus
4. How To Set Up Your Own Blog
5. 4 Ways To Explode Blog Traffic For Free!