Is it possible to make money online?

When I first saw this question in a forum, it was actually phrased more like ‘Can I make lots of money online?’, and I guess the important question for a lot of people is ‘Can I make a living’, or more often: ‘Can I make a decent second income?’. My first reaction to the question of whether there was money simply waiting to be made online was ‘Surely not!’ I went on to say that if you wanted to make decent amounts online, you would have to really work hard at it. In the main, I think that this answer still stands up, but I am coming to the conclusion (I am one of those who has to see it work, before I will advocate it..) that actually there IS money to be made, and PAID TO BLOG is one of those opportunities. If you live in a place where the USD is very strong currency, and incomes are relatively low, then you probably can make a relatively decent income online, and if you live in the West, you may be able to make a small second income without devoting ALL your spare time…I retain the view that if you want to make a legitimate living online, you will probably need to put at least as much effort into it as you would in a regular job, and I suspect that in reality, you would have to work harder. The upside is that if you do the groundwork, you may be able to establish a base that provides an income from less effort as you get better at it. The reality is though, if you have that sort of energy, you will be spurred on to achieve more and if spending more time with the kids was the plan, you might be better off with a 9 to 5.
To read the rest of the article follow this link to my other blog

SEO - spidering

A lot of web sites nowadays use some fancy script-based navigation with menus that drop-down on ‘hover’ and the like, but apparently these links are often not read or followed by the search engine bots that index the site.What does this mean? It means that there is a danger that only your homepage will be fully indexed. How do you fix it? Very simply, you add standard HTML hyperlinks to back up your other navigation. Many sites do this and place the extra navigation at the bottom of the page. You may think you can cleverly fool the bots by adding ‘invisible’ text ie. text which is a similar colour to the background or in a very small font. Be warned – the bots are wise to this, and will not take kindly to ‘hidden’ text.
Search engine 'bots' like to see good interconectivity between pages ie. the 'web' nature of pages that all connect together - make sure that you don't create dead ends in the 'spidering' of your site. The best way to achieve this is to create a sitemap and check that everything links together. As well as sitemap pages, there are sitemap files that you can leave in the root of your website which will be recognised by search engines. You may need additional facilities on your web host to do this. Google recognise sitemaps created via XML and RSS, check out what Google has to say about this and check whether your host has the appropriate software on your server. If not you can opt for a simple text file list - this will inform the bots of the pages that they SHOULD be seeing, and if they see a problem in navigation, it can be reported back to you in Google Webmaster tools.

SEO - blogging

Techniques for SEO apply as much to blogs as they do to websites, but depending on your front-end editor, some techniques such as tagging are a bit tricky as you generally have to be able to edit the HTML if you use a service such as blogger.com.
The other side of SEO in relation to blogging, is that you can use a blog to promote your own website and get some reciprocal linking going. The theory is that regularly updated blogs are 'attractive' to the google search engine and may be in a better position to gain page ranking points than a website.
There is a vast blogging community and it is much much easier to get people to link to your blog than it is to get them to link to a commercial website. I am using two blogs - check the link to my 'other blog', and I am going to post another couple of links that you may find useful:
Ourblogreview.com - exchange links and submit your blog to be reviewed
Make Money with Ja Kel Daily - read the posts, exchange reviews, build your site traffic...

Web 2.0

Here is a hot topic, a new buzzword which requires some of the mystery taken out of it... Web 2.0 is all about the web going 'up' to another level, but there is no specific outline that defines Web 2.0 precisely. It is more of a concept which takes on board a lot of diverse ideas which might lift a website out of the boring flat HTML-only sites of yesterday. We are talking incorporating Flash, Java and good design to enhance the browsing experience and ecourage interactivity, forum-style posting and the like. How can I incorporate this into my humble little website then? Well, this is not an easy one to answer, but I can tell you what I plan to do with my site to start getting some interaction going: I have had various emails from people asking for advice on the DIY sections of my website. I plan to post the questions and answers on the relevant pages so that there is an element of interaction. You can incorporate forums into your site with a little java programming, but I have steered clear of a forum format as I prefer to have control of the posts on my site! To my way of thinking, Web 2.0 is about getting away from a static HTML site that doesn't encourage interaction and sits on the web from month to month without change. If you can find a way to get your website out of that particular rut, then you are on your way to Web 2.0....