First of all I wish you a happy and successful new year.

Since I started my blog, I have often received emails of people asking for help, they were trying to make money on the internet, but were unsuccessful.
This is a real problem for many, you can get a lot of information on how to make money, but usually, there is too much overload, and it is difficult to find THE way to achieve it. It always seems like a race to find THE information that will make you rich.
So let me give you the big secret.

To make money on the internet you have two choices :
- either you know THE place or THE people that will give you THE secret,
- or you jump in the swimming pool, and learn to swim.

The first one is not impossible, but it will take you time anyway. Don’t expect people leaking out their big secrets for nothing, unless you happen to be the best friend of one of those people, but even then, you’re in a bad position because when THE big secret will not be “hot” anymore, you will be helpless to make money.
So you can spend the time to “network”, and with time you will “virtually” meet the ones who can give you good tips, but anyway, at this point you will have to be good too, and also be able to give other people nice tips. So, in the end, it is not more different than the second choice : jump in the pool, and learn to swim.
And this is where most people are failing, they read a lot of information, but they never put their mind into one project, so they read, try something for a while, fail, and repeat.
Even worse, many people actually NEVER start to work on one project, they will find a thousand excuses, that’s exactly like when you want to stop smoking all year long but never start it.

The internet is like the gold rush era… Anyone can be successful, it doesn’t depends on your family, your relations, your skin color… But you can’t expect to dig a bit and immediately find big nuggets!

So the first big secret to be successful in making money on the internet is… Start a project! Yes, read it again: Start a project. You can read a zillion blogs with great ideas, but you’ll only get the USEFUL knowledge with EXPERIENCE. So, whatever you might think, even if a project seems totally out-of-date, just start it now because even if you don’t make money, you’ll get experience. And little by little, you’ll get the good knowledge, you’ll start to know the tricks, the people, share ideas, make money and then it’s a virtuous circle: you’ll make more and more money, until you’re one of the $50K+ a month club.
But you must start today.

The second secret to really make it, and this is probably the most important is to be CONSISTENT. Don’t give up too quickly on one project. Usually it takes months before you start to really get results. I know everybody wants everything fast “yeah I’m on a diet to lose 8 pounds a month”, come on, GET REAL, how do you see yourself in exactly one year? Do you want to have some money-making online business, or still be searching for THE great idea?

The third big secret, is: don’t forget that the internet is huge, the sky’s the limit.
Not every project is profitable, but when you make money with one, try to EXPAND it.
I do myself the mistake of working on new projects regularly, instead of taking my successful projects and expanding them. I can do it, because I can afford it, but for most of you, you want to make enough in order to pay your bills first. When you will have several profitable money-making machines, you can allow you to digress like I do and have fun on new projects, but FIRST create ONE good source of income.
The very good advantage with the internet is that it is GLOBAL and it is HUGE, and it with the same amount of effort, your earnings don’t add, they multiply. It might take you 3 months before you make $1 a day, but with the same effort on the same project, it will take you another 3 months to make maybe $10 a day, and 3 months later you could be doing $50-$100 a day. Within next year you could reach the $500-$1000 a day if you’re consistent enough. I am not joking. But most of people will not put the consistency into one project, and many will not even really start it.

Much later, you can start to think about multiple streams of income, but not now, first get ONE good project, and do it to the max.

I found an interesting idea in another blog: instead of choosing good resolutions for this new year, you should choose only ONE WORD which will guide you through the year. I think this is great, and to paraphrase it, I’ll ask you to choose ONE project and do it all year long. You might try other projects IN PARALLEL, but don’t give up on this one project during 2008. Take any you want, maybe one that you wanted to do since ages, or a new one that you find exciting, don’t worry to know if it is “hot stuff” or “so 2005″, just start it and put some effort into it.
And come back in one year to tell me how much you’ve earned.

So, as promised, I have detailed in my last post the project idea I’ve worked on, I tried to be creative, twist some ever-working ideas and update them with some recent strategies, my starting point was to find an idea that a beginner could do, without investing any money.
More seasoned people will already have ideas to improve it, and also there are a few hot tips that would make the system much more efficient, but I can’t reveal them openly, so I’ll create another “private” project, like I did with the adult blogs project. I will limit the subscriptions to 40 people, and IT WILL BE FREE, just like the adult blog project. But don’t worry, even if you are not part of it, you can take the public information, do the project and make money with it. It is just that I have to limit some tips to a limited number of people or they would become useless… Stay tuned!

And let’s get working!

Tags: online marketing, blackhat, make money, grayhat, monetization, SEO