Can I Really Make Money Online?

One of the major reasons people surf the net is to find money making opportunities as a residual income. People who look for such opportunities vary from moms to youngsters working in corporate offices. The million dollar question is – are there real online income schemes? Let us discuss in detail to make it transparent how things really works and whether you can earn some online money.

What People Do to Make Money Online?

It will be interesting to see the trends of make money online programs. We classify them under three simple categories:

• PTC Multi-level marketing programs.
• Affiliate programs.
• PPC Advertising programs for website publishers.

The below Google trends show multi-level marketing and affiliate programs are searched more than the PPC advertising programs in recent years.

Multi-level Marketing Programs

These programs offer different types of opportunities basically under PTC mode. PTC stands for Paid To Click and you will be paid a penny when you or someone clicks on the advertiser’s URL.

Whenever you click on an ad you will be paid in pennies like $0.0008. The maximum amount as far as we checked is $0.02. All these PTC programs work on multi-level commission in such a way that the referrer will get 10 – 30 % of commission for the referral clicks in a tier manner (multi-level). Below is an example of the earning for own and referral clicks from the popular PTC site:

Since you can earn more when you have more referrals, people used to spread their referral links on all possible ways.

Why Should You Be Away from PTC Sites?

In our opinion, you should completely be away from any paid to click programs for the following reasons:

• More than 90% of the PTC sites are scam. They collect money from users for membership and cheat anytime.
• You are not going to achieve anything by clicking ads like a mad and getting 10 cents per day.
• Buying referral or spamming with your referral links is merely waste of time which you can’t continue for life long.
• You need to spend lot of time without any plan for the future. This will affect your personal, social and official life for the cost of cents and pennies.

Basically these PTC programs will take lot of time and offer pennies to users without any clue of what will be the learning at the end of day. We highly recommend users not to fall in prey to these funny programs whether they are legitimate or scam.

Affiliate Programs

This is the second category we can rate better than PTC programs. The reason we say better is that there are many big players like Amazon are offering affiliate programs. Since the product owner push the sales by offering affiliate programs there are good chances you get paid with your affiliate links.

The open source platforms like WordPress offers huge potential for earning affiliate money by selling other’s themes, plugins and services. This is the good reason most of the people write about WordPress and mention their affiliate links in the article. The affiliate links once clicked will set a cookie in the browser. The cookie will allow earning commission when someone purchase a product from that computer for 30 / 60 / 90 or even more days as per the agreement.

This may look more attractive, but the problem remains same unless you don’t have your a platform to promote the affiliate links. The platform you needed here is your own website, otherwise the only way for you is to spam on blog comments, forums and emails. So basically if you have an established website undoubtedly you can make decent money with affiliate marketing. For those who don’t have websites, affiliate marketing may not really help.

Advertising Programs for Publishers

PPC or Pay Per Click is nothing but PTC concept and was filled with spammers for long time until the big companies like Google took the task and streamlined it. This changed the whole Internet and everyone started building their own blog to make online money from programs like Google AdSense. This is the most decent and gentle way for publishers to earn money. You also have the potential to earn more by combining multiple things on a single site like online sale and affiliate marketing.

 

The problem is that running a blog or an ecommerce site is not an easy task for all of us. First of all this needs lot of initial investment and patience to build the site to a get decent traffic. With changing world of search engines you may loose or get traffic without your influence thus making the PPC earnings unstable.

Additional Option – Buy Sell Business

If you have investment and little knowledge about how the Internet is functioning, there are lot of brokerage opportunities available to make money. This is not about making money but a real online business without owning the asset. You can buy and sell domains, whole sites, apps and other reseller services to make a good profit. As mentioned, this is a business subject to high risk of loosing your initial investment so not suitable for those looking for PPC and PTC range.