One year of my make money online adventure

For a beginner, is it possible to make big money online without spending a cent? My answer is NO. Save in a case like: If you’re kissed by luck and you have some friends that can do the hard work for you, then the things will be different from the other 99,00% of the money maker beginners. Not because the money will opens all the success gates, but because for free there are small and not often practical paths. Ok, open a blog doesn’t cost anything, blogger are free, wordpress can give you a blog for free, there are even web spaces for free, like funpic.org, but the advertising are free? To have a good visibility, to spread your links in the net, ads rotation, to have other web spaces that point to your work... That's the way to be successful.

Advertising methods:

Adwords: not free

Yahoo ads: not free

Adcenter by Microsoft: not free

Buy links on big sites: of course are not free

Sending emails: SPAM, no. There are service that “communicate” with site lists of email address, called safelists, … most of the times those services are not free, and most of the times the people that receive your email, sending by that specific service for you, aren’t willing to read it.

Putting a link in web directories: the cost of the link you’re gonna buy is directly proportional with the popularity of the directory. Free directory = poor visibility

Autosurf: are free – but not so useful, same people that look at the same ads cyclically.

Writing articles: are free, yes – this is a good one. But how many articles you have to write to gain a valuable amount of visitors? A lot. But this isn’t enough. Personally I tried this, and found out that is similary useful to write a different article for every directory or posting the same piece to 10-20 directory. How to find those directory? Simply typing: article+directory+the_subject_of_your_web_space.
Example: article+directory+business

In the middle of 2006 I started my “money making adventure”, and that's all (be in mind that apart from a little experience in HTML I was a total novice; and English isn’t my first language, at that time I understood it a little more than a school level course), I tried different sort of opportunities distributed online, and these are the results, from July 2006 to July 2007 this my report of outgo/income, saved in a Excel file:

These numbers in red are my initial investment (outgo), Advertising stands for adwords and contextual ads on sites that I can’t remember. Programs WAH, or rather work at home programs. Fortunately I bought from an honest ebook vendor, it was Life Empowered System, an alternative of Profit Lance, Rich Jerk and others ebook sponsored in this blog and on the web. It gives me a lot of good information of many things that I didn’t know.

Traffic, a site that claims to give 10.000 visitors for $19,95 - savepartner.com (closed, apparently), a pure SCAM. I’ve send 2 mail because my counter stat doesn’t register any changes after the traffic that they declared to sent to my site. Their response:

Dear GiDi,

We look into the code.
The counter uses JavaScript to update itself.
As you know, we remove all script on the page.
As result, you counter just doesn't work.
We would recommend you to use server-based stats.
Thank you for your decision to advertise your site with us.

Please DO NOT REPLY to this e-mail.
Mail sent to this address cannot be answered.

And promptly, after some time, I wrote this post: Advertising FREE Tips, I was still a newbie but I was learning the lesson number 1, don’t believe to any babble on internet.

The earning was’t amazing, but for what I spent, isn’t bad even if I'm miles away from become rich.

Adbrite stands for adbrite ;) like Google Adsense

Email USD: I wrote a post about it [ Did you ever read email to make money? ], I spent almost 1 year reading email to earn $ 41,06 – lot of time, thousands of mails, and mediocre cash.

Affiliate marketing 1&2 has been the best choice.

Sorry if the post is too long, see ya!