Realistic chances of making money online

If you've ever searched for ways to make money online, you probably came across a myriad of advertisements telling you that you can make thousands with minimum effort.

Needless to say, many of these promises are just empty promises made by marketers who are trying to sell you something, so as person trying to make it online you might be asking yourself, what can I realistically earn and how much work will I need to put in? Hopefully you'll find some answer below.

How much money you can make online depends on method and effort, so let's look at the main methods of making money online and what can be realistically expected of your efforts:

Surveys
This is perhaps the most casual way of earning money online, it doesn't require any skills, you simply make yourself available to answer questions and you're paid for your time and effort.

How much can you make?
Because they're easy and done by many people, surveys also earn the least amount of money compared to other methods, you can expect to make around £1 for every survey you complete.

For more on survey and how you can get started see: make money with surveys

Blogging
A blog is a form of online dairy, albeit more public than a personal diary. It can be used to express views, provide expert knowledge or report news on a specific topic.

How much can you make?
There are blogs out there that receive millions of visitors every month and have made their owners very rich, whilst these are few, it shows that there is no limit to the potential; you can earn £0 or thousands per day depending on how good you're.

What you earn depends on the number of people that visit your blog and your chosen method of making money; you can use display advertising where what you earn depends on the number of visitors or pay-per-click adverts where your earnings depend on the number of visitors who click on the adverts. A combination of both is probably the better method.

Challenges
1. Making it interesting
A blog doesn't have to be about a specific topic, you can write about your daily experiences but to get visitors and make sure they keep coming back you have to make it interesting.

2. Getting found
The main ways for your blog to be found is through search engines and users recommending their friends via social networks. That means this challenge is connected to the one above; no one will recommend your blog unless they find it interesting.

For more on blogs see: Make money with a blog

Website
A website is similar to a blog except that you have full control with regards to the design, layout, and type of content amongst other things that a hosted blog might not allow.

How much can you make?
The potential for a website is unlimited as with blogs. But also because you have more freedom on the design, you can design the site to make your adverts more effective.

Challenges
1. Technical know-how
Unlike a blog where almost everything is set up for you, with a website it helps to have some knowledge of web programming languages such as HTML or PHP; such skills are necessary if you want to make your website unique.

2. Being found
This is the same challenge that you would face with a blog, your site has to be useful for people to link to it or recommend it to their friends. You might also have to do some marketing to get people's attention.

3. Costs
Unlike blogs which can be hosted freely, with a website you will incur certain fees like hosting and domain (web address) purchase fee. There are other costs if you're unable to design, maintain or market the website yourself.