Ways For Teens To Make Money

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Make Money Online - Blog or Website?

This is probably the first thing that comes to your mind after deciding ‘Yes, I want to make money online‘. I went through the same situation a couple of months ago, and the decision making process was not a short one. Having some experience in maintaining both blog and website (started in the late 90’s with good old Geocities and Tripod), I quickly realized that the situation is completely different, now that I want to monetize it instead of making it just as a way of filling up my free time.

There are a number of things that you can start with to get you going…well at least, this is what I did:

1) Ask yourself, which one suits your style?

Your style will determine your lifetime in this money making process. If you choose a platform that doesn’t suit to your style, then it will doom to failure. Imagine someone who is too lazy to write everyday or constantly about anything, setting up a blog, with the intention to make money from it. He’ll just end up going nowhere.

If you’re the sort of person who finds the idea of writing unique and genuine articles constantly a hassle, or you just too busy walking your dogs every morning, then probably setting up a website is a better option. Pick a good theme, set up tens or hundreds of pages, design it carefully, stick in some adsense ads, publish it and watch the money rolling. Probably you need to update your contents as time goes by but generally not every week. If you like that idea, don’t bother looking at WordPress or Blogger. You won’t like it anyway. It’ll just make you puke.

If you talk a lot in real life, or you just love typing and writing about anything especially things you like, and you like to socialize with your online friends, then probably blogging is the way to go.Pick something that you’re passionate about, and just talk about it constantly. And don’t forget, make it interesting and catchy while you’re at it. People will interact with you, you become a happy Joe and life happily ever after. Plus, there’s money coming in as well.

2) Look at the list of successful internet entrepreneurs. Do they maintain websites or blogs?

If you don’t know your style, and need some real life example of money making blogs or websites, try searching for “Google Whores” or go directly to John Chow’s entry on Google Whores. You can also check out Paula’s list of blogger salaries I posted earlier (although some of them are not bloggers). It is always a good thing to learn from someone who has already succeed. They’ve done it. It’s true. It’s not something that they made up. Seatguru.com for example, is a website that talks about airline seats. Think you can do that? What about Steve Pavlina? He gets the best of both worlds. Go through all of these big names websites or blogs and get the feelings of their styles. Then you can compare which suits you most.

WHY WEBSITE?

1) Low maintenance

I did an informal interview a couple of months ago with one of my colleagues who has successfully generated income from his website. According to him, the luxury of not having to update freqeuntly made him choose to maintain a website instead of a blog. There are some exceptions BUT generally if you still have a 9-to-5 job commitment, you would want to build a website that doesn’t require frequent updates; the so-called ‘reference website’. That is, a website used as reference to most surfers around the world. For example, you build a website about The History of My House. Well, it’s not really interesting but for the sake of discussion, let’s just use this example. So you create about 50 pages of information about the history of your house, how it was built and so on. You publish it in your website and that’s it. No further updates required (unless there are some misleading facts you missed out). You can then sit back and enjoy. Just wait for it to make some profit.

2) Passive source of income

What I mean by passive is, you don’t have to do anything to get the money from your website. Okay, you need to do something before it becomes famous and before the money starts coming in, but after that, this is like your online cash machine. Very useful if you somehow did something annoying, got beaten up by a group of nasty yahoos, ended up in hospital bed for months, out of job and technically out of money. No worries, the constant money coming from you website should be sufficient enough to start you over.

WHY BLOG?

1) Online Social Networking

It’s the current trend. Besides socializing in your real world, the internet has become the largest social networking place for every living surfer. People sharing everything in the internet through social networking websites such as hi5, myspace, friendster, flickr and the list goes on. Blogging is one of the way to promote yourself in the Net and build up networks in every part of the world. You voice out your opinions, tell your stories, share your pictures and people come to you everyday for these kinds of stuff. You won’t normally get that through a normal static website (excluding forum which is another good place to build your networks)

2) Interactive

Blog can be as interactive as chatting with your friends at their house. Normally you don’t get that kind of feelings through reading a website. But reading through a personal blog or any blog, can suck you into the author’s mind and life. And that really is a magnet that keeps people coming back, building up the traffic into the blog and making more money to the blog owner.

3) Cover different topics

Diversify your blog by putting in different topics of discussion as time goes by can be a good escape to prolong your online money making lifetime. You can easily run out of issues to talk about, especially if you’re writing something that’s not in your main interest. Although niche blogging is better, I think, than randomly blog about everything, discussing up to 5 to 6 different topics in your blog won’t hurt much. As long as you concentrate your postings on 1 or 2 main topics, it’s gonna be a good enough blog to keep your audience sticking with you all the way till the end. Generally, you don’t get to do this on a website. A website on airline ticketing service, suddenly talks about how to milk your cow would be a disaster.

So there you go. The list can go on forever if you want, but I think you get the point. Y’all smart enough aren’t you? Think what’s best for you and how much money benefits you want to reap from your blog or website. I personally think, both options are equally profitable, depending on your style (again) and the effort you put in to make it a success. So choose wisely and have fun!

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