Make money online?

Making money online... How many ads, get rich quick schemes, websites, and blogs are out there trying to make money online or advertising how to do so? Is it still actually possible to make money online?

To answer this question, I turned to John Chow's free E-book for answers. According to John Chow, he cite's the statistic that 99% of blogs will not actually make money online. In spite of these odds against, there's no shortage of people hoping to cash in on the internet with yet another blog.

Why do 99% of people fail?

I've put some thought into this and the answer is pretty simple. Making money blogging is really not very easy. To make a successful money making blog, you really need to carve out an original niche--there's not many left, blog every day, and work to develop page rank, alexa traffic, and subscribed readers. This means that it requires time, effort, persistence, and probably a little luck which are all contrary to getting rich quick and easy...

Let's look at creating a new niche. Many bloggers decide to write about a topic that's already saturated (like how to blog) or a topic for which they have little passion or expertise. If you're going to write a blog about how to make money online, you're out of luck unless you can show your readers that you're actually successful in doing this. Strangely, this puts you in a chicken and egg situation, since you can't actually be making money blogging when your first start out, right?

The truth is that many of us bloggers, myself included, simply lack the creativity to create a new blogging niche in today's saturated blog environment. It already feels like everything's already been done... Hm wait, I have a great idea, why don't I take funny pictures of cats or dogs and put some nonsensical, grammatically incorrect blurbs underneath which I will call lol-speak? Isn't this a great idea? Well, yes it actually WAS. The blog was created two years ago called icanhascheezburger and it sells ad space for more money than any of us can ever dream of.


Here's my next blogging idea. I think I will call it, "one red paper clip." What I am going to do is create a blog about my flipping items. I will start with one red paper clip and trade it for something. Then I will keep trading items until I have a scene in a movie and a house. This should be really good... Oops, welcome to last year. This has already been done too, so what now?

More to come...