3 quick and easy ways to make money online

Making money online is probably the most exciting way to make money; and the Internet offers a variety of ways to make money faster than traditional businesses might. Plus, it never sleeps and will continue to work to earn you money even when you don't.

But the allure of making easy money online, overnight, and from home tempts millions of people to try their hand at getting rich online. This creates a huge amount of clutter, which becomes one of the main obstacles to earning a decent living from the Internet.

This article will show you three of the fastest and easiest ways to cut through the clutter, reach out, and grab a share of the incredible amounts of money that flow through the Internet every day.

1. Viral content & advertising

Viral content is any content (blog post, YouTube video, drawing, photo, etc) that gets into social media and spreads rapidly. Viral content can generate hundreds of thousands to millions of page views in a matter of days, week, and months.

Often the financial rewards for viral content far outweigh the costs associated with creating it. Even content that doesn't go "viral" can still generate a decent income if it generates sufficient interest.

How to make viral content

Unfortunately, there is no "secret" formula for making content go viral. There are a number of contributing factors, and no small amount of blind luck.

In general, however, viral content has one or more of the following attributes:

• amazing
• astounding
• hilarious
• unbelievable
• incredible
• unique
• innovative

Think about what content you have shared with your friends and colleagues. What was it about that content that made you share it?

How to make money from Viral content

What makes viral content so appealing is that it can easily be converted into revenue by including Google ads (or ads from any network) in, on or around it.

As the viral content is shared through FaceBook, Google+, Twitter, Digg, and other social networks, people clicking through to the content are exposed to the ads. A certain percentage will click on the ads, and revenue begins to flow, day and night.

In addition, viral content that becomes popular enough may attract the attention of large marketing or advertising companies who may pay for the use of it in their own campaigns

What you need to make and serve viral content

The whole point of viral content is that it is accessed by millions of people around the world. The resulting traffic volumes generated by a piece of viral content can be tremendous. To cater for this you need to:

• Have excellent web hosting
• Sign up for advertising or affiliate accounts (to monetize the viral content)

It is possible to serve content through 3rd party sites like YouTube. This handles the technical requirements for serving high volumes of traffic, and you can still earn a bit from advertising.

Other than that, the only other requirements you need are imagination and creativity. If you can conceive of and promote viral content on a regular basis, you will make millions.

Example of earnings from viral content

To get you excited about the possibilities of making thousands of dollars from viral content, I thought I would include a real-life example of how some people made money by posting a video of their kids that went viral:

• "Charlie bit me!" family has made half a million dollars since 2007

As an exercise, try work out how much it cost them to make the video, then compare that to the returns they made to work out the ROI (Return on Investment).