Can i really make money online?

Is it really possible to make money online easily? - Dos and Dont's to guide you on the road to success with online earnings

What Not to waste your time on, and what you can really use as a source of making money online
If you are seriously seeking ways to make either a decent or even just some extra income from home though online means, then this post should give you a detailed and honest guide as to what you should avoid spending time on, and what methods will bring you definite funds without disappointment of feleing duped or scammed, or having to spend more time on the attempt than the rewards justify;

Some of the most popular Internet scams which most people fall for and end up either wasting a lot of time on for nothing, as well as sometimes even parting with money for info which promises definite results but actually never deliver, are;

1. Signing up for writing testimonials
2. Writing Online reviews
3. Filling in Questionnaires or reading E-Mails, or marketing surveys
4. Joining tiered affiliate programs which require you to pay a fee for access and then offer you income and rewards for signing others up

The Millionare Mogul John Paul Getty once said "I prefer to make one percent of 100 people's efforts than to make one hundred percent of my own"
This is mathematically obvious, and is the base concept behind tiered afilliate schemes and even the chain letter thing.
Recently, i came across a job forum which had a section for freelance jobs and self employed internet opportunities for making money from home. In this forum i noticed several members were posting multitudes of posts with different titles offering different ways of making money

One of them was a property sales agent who offered that you will make a definite 2 to 5 thousand singapore dollars in the forst month or they will pay you cash.
here is part of the sales pitch to get you to sign up;

"Justin Ng Properties.com is the largest property search engine in Singapore with more than 200,000 HDB resale flats, apartments & condominiums, landed properties, commercial & industrial properties for sale & rent in his database posted by 27,893 active agents & referrals."

Before i go into further detail, just look at the mathematics of the offer; 27 thousand agents trying to sell 200 thousand homes. This leaves each person with about 8 homes to try to sell - and that is only counting the 27 thousand official property agents and not the hundreds or perhaps thousands or hundreds of thousands of fools who sign up for this company's training course, and attempt to enter the selling market and compete for those maximum 8 properties.
This is a complete scam and not worth taking time over i guarantee you. The only thing that happens here is that you pay them for a course and access to three silly tools ie a postcode finder (you can do that with many free online tools without paying) a statistics tool (which tells you which properties were sold lately, where, and for how much) , and a market analysis report tool.

Then you are left on your own with this to try to find your potential buyers and make your sales. I ask you; How on Earth are you going to get people to be interested in trusting you as a non registered non qualified property agent, (which is illegal in Singapore anyway) instead of walking into a real estate agents office or even a registered company website?
No chance. You will be peeled of your money and have no success at all.

Next scam;
Writing reviews.. There are many websites which offer moneymaking writing reviews, be they travel review res, restaurant writeups, or whatever. I already fell for this one with one of the top 3 review writing websites on the www. (reviewme.com) ;
They pay out after you have reached a 50$ minimum threshold - you are paid 5 to ten dollars for a review. What happens here is that they take hundreds of bucks from the companies which hire them to get an Online review written, then send you the job. When they have sent you perhaps 40 dollars worth of reviews, they stop sending you, and send to the next person who signed up. Hundreds of thosands of chumps sign up every month which means if they send less than the minimum payment level worth of reviews to each new member and then stop sending you jobs, they never have to pay you because you remain below the minimum payment threshold! And yes they really do this.

Reading emails is the same - they send you less than the amount needed to reach the minimum payment threshold.

As to answering questionnaires or "paid Surveys"; This is even more sneaky - once you sign up, they send you a mail saying "survey offer - this one pays 50 bucks" (for example) - then when you click on the link it will say "please answer the following questions to determine if you are eligible to participate in this survey" - you then proceed to click on the series of questionnaire forms and answer them (e.g. "do you live in the united states? are you under 40? do you have children? have you ever bought beauty products?" etc etc. At the end of about 30 questions you are then fed to a page which says "sorry you are not eligible to participate in this survey - residents of your country are not included - please try again next time!"
And if you are stupid enough they will send you lots more promises of possible survey eligibility offers which will see you answering the questionnaires (these ARE the surveys really - which they get you to answer for free!)
The only ones getting paid for the surveys are them! no survey pays fifty bucks per person! They might get say 50 bucks for 100 surveys filled in which means that you are needed as the chump. Think about how much money a company would lose to find out enough marketing data if they paid 50 bucks per person for surveys?
Im sure you can follow my point.

Many searches on the web will bring you to articles and blogs or forum posts which will tell you how to make money online writing reviews or signing up for this and that and the person posting will say how much he made last month. Dont believe them or click on their stupid links my friends, because the only one who shall benefit from it is them by getting you (the chump) to sign up using their afilliate link)

Some forums will pay per post - albeit a miniscule amount like a tenth of a cent, meaning 100 posts will get you one dollar with a minimum payout of 100 dollars. This will not make enough to cover your coffees which you drink whilst writing them.. but at least it is a real offer and you do get paid when you finally make anough posts to reach the minimum payment threshold.

I suppose now you are thinking "So if all these methods are scams, then how do you make some money online?"
Well one way is to use afilliate programs such as google adsense on your own website or blogs.
If you notice, this blog has google ads in it - i recommend using google adsense* because they pay not only if yu make a sale, rather for a click and even sometimes when you have enough page impressions. This is because they take money from advertizers for using your adspace, not for making a definite sale. Te control panel you have with google adsense is great and lets you see with a decent overview what your earnings are. I have used many other afilliate programs such as clickbank and cj clicks, LinkShare Referral Program etc.. but in 7 years of doing it have never been paid a penny from them, whereas i do get cheques regularly from google. The Linkshare affiliate program is however given good reviews by some of my friends who swear that they make good takings from it. I believe that if you have anough traffic on your website and know how to market well then perhaps this is an option for making money, but you have to know how to market the products in your blog posts.
I therefore recommend you to use google ads and whatever you write let it be on your own blog instead of writing for other people and helping them to make money from your efforts.
You will need a lot of visitors to your blog to make enough money from the google ads. So i do stress that you make original well written content that is useful to people - this is the best way to get real traffic to your blog.

Some of the other methods to make money online which i have criticised, may work for some people, but i can only say that in my experience it has proved to be a total waste of time and effort. Whereas what i write on my blogs (over 60 of them) does pay.
I shall be posting more ways to make some legitimate money online in upcoming posts here on the make money online blog which i decided to revive today after a long long absence.
So dont forget to keep coming back to check for new posts or sign up to the rss newsfeed here.

Paid Review Writing Becomes illegal - read this link about how you could be fined 11 thousand dollars if you write a review online and recieve money
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ftc_to_bloggers_disclose_freebies_or_face_11000_fi.php

timewaster links for you to see what these scams look like;
http://www.43things.com/things/view/350454/get-paid-to-write-stories-all-day (read this one its a gas!)
http://www.testimonials.ws/income-opportunity.html
http://www.writerincome.com/index.htm (this one makes you pay for a book which is crap)

*Google Adsense - I shall be posting a detailed explanation of how to use google adsense to make some extra money, as well as how to optimise your ads on your website using Adsense in a later post.