Making money online — years ago when people told me about it, I’d say “how is that possible?” But I shouldn’t have. Even though I’ve never really pushed hard on this, I do get a small monthly return for what I do online. How does this happen? Which methods do you use? If those are your questions, keep reading.

First off, I’m writing this for people starting from zero. By zero I mean people who don’t have a physical item to sell or the means to launch an e-commerce site — I’ll outline a few methods for them. The first is making money by setting up a website. As old as this method is, it still works. When you set up a site, you have to take on ads — those ads must first cover the site’s costs, and after that you’ll start seeing returns for your effort. In the first months, even the first year, forget profit — your costs might exceed your income, sometimes you’ll have no income at all. You won’t even cover the costs, basically. Alright, you’ve sorted everything, your site is established, and you want to make money. You have a few options here: sales on webmaster sites, Google AdSense, Adhood-like sites, and banner ads from people in your network.

When I say webmaster sites, I mean r10, wmaraci, fuub and the like. But the most important one — where you can actually get ads — is r10. The ad types you can get from this site are banners, backlinks and intro articles. How do things work on r10, you ask? Advertisers open a topic, and we make them offers for that ad. Of course, remember that those offers depend on your site’s PageRank, whether you have a Dmoz listing, whether you get indexed fast, and your visitor count — those are the important criteria for banners. Backlinks and intro articles can go to any site because those are done as suck-ups to Google.

For Google AdSense, it goes like this: you set up the site, push it live, and if you apply to AdSense before the site reaches a certain level you’ll get rejected — or if you’re sharing inappropriate content. If the site has reached a certain shape and the content is good, you’ll get approval. After approval you can get ad codes from AdSense for your site. When you accumulate 10 TL, mail comes to your address for verification; at 20 TL, a PIN for your bank account; and finally at 200 TL, you receive payment. Adhood has a similar system so I won’t explain it twice.

You can also reach out to business owners in your network and get ads from them. For this, basic networking skills and a smooth tongue will suffice. The first part of the How to Make Money Online series ends here. Continue to Part 2: How to Make Money Online with YouTube here.