Five ways of Making Money Offline

There are hundreds of ways of making quick money in the 'real' world that anyone can do. The reason that not everyone makes money in this way is that they either can't be bothered to try or have other priorities.

Here are just five examples of ways of making money offline.

1) Wash cars - Washing cars is one the of the most simple, cash in hand, businesses out there. Anyone can do it as long as they have a sponge and a bucket. If you charge between £5 and £10 per car (depending on how you rate your cleaning ability) then say you wash 20 cars that's £100-£200 turnover. Minus the maximum cost of £5 for a bucket and sponge and your profit is between £95 and £195... Easy Money.

2) Clean Windows - Very similar idea to cleaning cars obviously. The start up costs for this are slightly more however if you wish to use real window cleaning equipment. This does however mean you can charge more anywhere between £10-20 for the downstairs windows of a house, add another £20 for upstairs windows and you've doubled your money. Lets say you manage to do 10 houses in the few hours you have spare means you could be earning up to £400 (10 houses, upstairs and downstairs at £20 each).

3) Mow lawns - Once again a very simple idea, if you have a lawn mower charge £5 per lawn, 10 lawns in the few hours you have spare, £50 in your pocket.

4) Offer a Courier service to local business' - Most professional courier service's charge a high premium on same day delivery of goods, offer to do the same task for less... undercut the competition. This business model will work particularly well if you live in a large city and go to small businesses that are less likely to have contracts already with other firms.

5) Offer your services as a personal trainer - If you are fit, active and have a basic knowledge of how to get fit this method of money making can be very cheap and profitable. Design yourself some business cards and have them printed from somewhere like Vista Print, go round and post them through a few doors suggesting that you charge £20-30 per hour training. Ask your client what they want to achieve and make a basic exercise plan for them. When you meet be confident and help them to complete the exercise plan. Easy.

Hope that this methods help you to make some money offline, I will be suggesting more ideas in the future so keep checking back for updates.

Making Money from Blogs

So how exactly does one make money from blogs? Whilst the answer to this question may at first seem obvious, making money from blogs is no easy task. Despite this, nearly everyone I talk to seems to know or know of someone who has managed to make a decent income from blogs, even people who know nothing about blogging whatsoever have heard of the likes of celebrity bloggers like Perez Hilton; whose website is now valued roughly, by website outlook, at $5.25 million.

Surely if someone like Perez Hilton can make money from a blog most other people can!

There are five factors that I see as key in creating a successful money making blog. It is important to look at these individually in order to best understand how each point helps.

1) If you want to make money from blogs obviously you need adverts. Google adsense is perfect in this respect as, once Google has crawled your blog, it will bring up relevant adverts alongside your content. Where adverts are not added using adsense, it is vital that they are relevant to the content you are talking about. No one will click on adverts for a new brand of shampoo if the content of your blog is about computer games.

2) The phrase 'content is king' was coined, i think, by Bill Gates. This term is more relevant to making money through blogs than any other form of website. If the content that you choose to fill your blog with is low quality, poorly written articles from ezine websites, then visitors are not likely to see your blog as a credible source of information and thus won't return. For this reason make sure that your content is well written, original and interesting.

3) Once you have your original, well written content it is vital to optimise it for the search engines. This means choosing particular primary and secondary key words and sticking with them. For example your primary key word could be 'make money online' and your secondary keywords could be 'forex trading' and 'paid surveys'. I will be writing a more in depth post on search engine optimisation but the basic jist of it is to use primary key words in the title of your apost, and secondary key words consistently in the article content. More on search engine optimisation will be revealed however in my later posts.

4) Backlinks: Once you have your blog up and running with adverts and content now you need visitors. A blog with no visitors won't make any money. One of the best ways to get visitors is through natural search traffic, that is, the results that Google brings up after a search term has been entered. Backlinking is considered by many to be fundamental in achieving high search engine rankings, the more relevant links back to your blog from high ranking websites, the more natural traffic you will see. To achieve this submit your blogs url and RSS feed to as many free locations as you can including dmoz.org, Del.Icio.Us and Digg, all of which have high page ranks and will see your site ranking higher as a result.

5) Keep at it! Blog success does not come overnight and requires time and dedication if you follow the above four steps I guarantee that you will start to see results within a month of blogging. Don't be disheartened by the slow start, you too could be the next blogger turning over thousands of pounds in advertisements but only if you keep at it.

Getting Blog Visitors

You've got a blog now..... so how do you get traffic? Of course, it will take some time to build an audience, but here are some suggestions to help you get more visitors and thus help you make money online.

1. Visit other blogs in your niche and comment. You can then leave a link back to your blog. If it's a very popular blog with lots of traffic you may get more than just the blog owner visiting back.

2. Register with Technorati and follow the steps to claim your blog. Every time you add a new post "ping" with Technorati. Doing this consistently will bring you good traffic over time.

3. Ping your blog with other free services using Google and blog ping as keywords. Just be sure you aren't posting multiple times to the same sites as this would be considered spamming.

4. Autosubmit to social bookmarking sites with Only Wire. This takes some time to set up, but once done, is a huge time saver in the long run.

5. List your blog URL in your profile in Facebook, twitter or other social networking sites.

6. Join internet discussion forums and post there using your blog in your signature line. Posting helpful information in forums and on social networking sites, and just being friendly with others will make others curious about you and more likely they will check out your links.

7. Create Squidoo lenses and link them back to your blog. Google really likes squidoo, so this is a great source of free traffic.

8. Article writing is another good source of free traffic. Again you can link back to your blog in the resource area.

9. Join a Blog Carnival.

10. Join a blog directory such as Blog catalog.

What's it all about?

So what's this blog all about? Well I am a student and over the past two years I have been looking far to much at the many ways people can make money online. The reason I created this blog was so that I could share what I have found to be the most effective ways of making money and help fellow students (and others) who may also be looking to earn something on the side.

I am planning on posting a new article every day that will look at a particular aspect of earning money online. Indeed blogging itself can earn money online and as a result I am planning to focus firstly on how people can make money through blogs.

It only seems fair however to tell you a little bit more about myself first. As stated above I am a student who has studied, what I consider to be fairly extensively, the various ways in which people can earn money online. I am a student at University in the UK and as such many of the useful websites that I link to will be British based. That is not to say that others cannot benefit from them, one of the greatest benefits of the internet is its universalism. I have had various successes and failures as an online entrepreneur over the past two years, thankfully less of the latter. I consider myself to be an expert at flipping online blogs and consider this to be one of the best ways to earn online. That is not to say that other methods have not be proven to work, it is just that I find this particular method of making money easiest. Needless to say I will try to highlight this particular method as well as addressing many others.

I hope that you enjoy reading the various ways to make money online and I assure you that you will be earning extra cash, or possibly an income, in no time at all.