How I Made My First Dollar Online

How I Made My First Online Money

Many people ask me how I first got started making money online. I made my first buck online using Google Adsense.

It was probably about eight years ago. I was fresh out of college and had landed a job with a online ad agency. What we did is run banner ads on newspaper sites. If you've ever been on ChicagoTribune.Com or pretty much any other newspaper site, we ran and managed the online banner ads on those sites.

I worked both in analytics as well as campaign management. The campaign managment side involved ad agencies sending me banner ads, I would check the html code, make sure the ad worked, make sure a tracking link was embedded in there and then pass along to the newspapers.

On the analytics side, my job was to make sure ads ran evenly dispersed throughout the campaign. For example if the movie studio who made Kung-Fu Panda wanted to buy 10,000,000 ad impressions and wanted a campaign to run 30 days, my job was to make sure the impressions trickled out evenly everday as opposed to the impressions being delivered all in one day or over the course of a couple days.

This was my first introduction into online advertising. Granted I'd seen banner ads before, I knew they existed, but it never really occured to me that someone like myself could essentially start a free blogger blog, become a publisher myself, and sell ad space or monetize my website in other ways.

I was beginning to learn a bit about HTML code, what banner ads were, etc. I decided to start a blog which was RulesForRebels.Com, the very blog your reading right now. Now over the years I've gone through and cleaned up some posts as I've gained more of a focus on what my blog is about and who my audience is, however if you go back to some of my earlier blog posts you'll see things like product reviews, an article on the fourth amendment and Americans Freedoms, and a lot of other topics that aren't geared towards making money online. I think at first I was going for kind of a young professionals lifestyle type blog. I've since kind of changed the focus to a how to make money online blog.

Anyhow, this was my introduction to starting a blog and shortly after I monetized the blog with Google Adsense. I don't recall exactly how long it took me to start seeing money roll in but I do recall getting excited at seeing a few clicks which I was maybe paid $0.50 cents for. Now my blog didn't have a ton of traffic so I wasn't making much. Google Adsense has a minimum payout thresh-hold of $100 so it took me a few months go receive my first payment for all those months of add revenues to finally add up to $100 but eventually they did and eventually I was paid out, the money hit my bank account, and I was hooked.

I ran this blog for a while and had it making enough to consistantly be paid out every month. It occused to me, the idea of scaling up. If I have one blog making say $100. What if I started another blog and built it up. If that blog makes $100, I'm now making $200 a month off this. My second blog was on the topic of storage auctions back during the height of their popularity. That site took off and was quickly making about $300 itself.

I began getting really excited and launched a campaign of creating blogs. Unfortunately I seemed to hit a wall and my income just never seem to increase. I think I learned an important lesson about the internet. Almost nothing is set it and forget it. The internet is constantly changing and if you don't change and adapt you'll be left behind.

Here's what I mean by this. Google's algorithms like new content, they like fresh content, they like social sharing. As soon as I would launch a new blog I would lose focus on my old blogs and start neglecting them. Sure the new blog would do well but the old ones would suffer in terms of traffic, and in turn, monetization as well.

Overall I feel I got a pretty good start and did a pretty good job of getting my feet wet with making money online, publishing and monetizing my publishing, etc. I wasn't happy with my earnings though so I put more of a focus on CPA or cost per action models. With Google Adsense you only get paid if someone clicks and ad and typically payouts are very low. We hear about $50 keywords, I can't say whether that is or isn't possible, but I will say I sure never got those payouts. I believe at first I had a fairly high CPM but for whatever reason it got to the point where I was making pennies a click and it wasn't really adding up to anything.

At this point I started looking into CPA or cost per action models. Cost per action for example would be an Ali Express, eBay, Amazon, etc affiliate program. Rather than just getting someone to click you have to get someone to make a purchase or at the very least sign up for something in order to get paid. This is more difficult but it also pays better.

I signed up for Commission Junction, also known as CJ. Commission Junction has a whole index of various affiliate programs you can sign up for in practically any niche from health and fitness to travel to gaming to pretty much any other category you'd like to find an offer for. I struggled with CJ and never really made much money. I think my problem is my blog didn't have a focus, and because of that I didn't really know what type of monetization to focus on. This experience kind of turned me off to CPA type offers.

Years later after still struggling and not making the kind of money I wanted I heard about Clickbank. Clickbank is a marketplace for digital products, some weight loss or health but overwhelmingly how to make money online type stuff. I had heard great things, the commissions are high. Again though, I struggled for years and never made a single sale.

It honestly wasn't until just recently when I have kind of really defined what my blog is about and really learned more about my audience that I began knowing what kind of ads to run and what kind of offers to promote and since then things have really taken off.

The point of this blog post is to encourage you to try new things. If you're trying to make money online there's a feeling that you need to educate youreself on how to do so. Quite honestly the best way to learn is just to get started, make mistakes and learn along the way. So many people spend so much time trying to educate themself on every aspect of making money online they never take the actually step of getting started.

I watched a great Alex Becker video the other day where he basically says there is a time for educating yourself, there is a time for being smart and scaling up in a very planned out way. What he says which I absolutely agree with is that time is not when your just starting out. When your just starting out your best bet is just throwing crap at the wall and seeing what sticks. If you have an idea for a blog you want to start or some other way of making money online you want to give a try, quit planning and start doing. Give it a month. If your not making any money, and if your not at the very least growing in terms of building more traffic to the site, learning more, etc then ditch that idea and move on to something else. Eventually something you do will make you money. Once you find that thing scale it up and make it bigger so it can make more money.

The number one easiest way to make money online is by taking action. You can do 99% of everything wrong and if you take action you will make money. The people who are online complaining about how they can't make money online are those that have spent the last couple months reading about making money online and never taking any concrete steps to do it. I'm not saying your going to get rich but if you take action you will make money, there's no way around it.