How Much Money Can You Make Online In A Month?

41.7 Million. That is the number of blog posts published monthly on Wordpress. It's a huge number, and it doesn't even account for the posts published on Blogspot or other self-hosted blogs. If you consider those, the number might approach 90-100 million.

What are they writing about? Some might be trying to educate, some to entertain, but the goal of at least half of those would be to make some money. Maybe they're looking for something extra to supplement their job, or maybe it actually is their job. Either way, the competition to make money online is immense.

Do you want to make 1 million dollars your first month, after only investing 100 dollars? Well, wouldn't we all... However if that was possible for every single person on the planet, then the value of the dollar would decrease exponentially. Money is basically a way to measure value, and every single person on the internet can't create 1 million dollars of value for everyone else.

However, people still believe in the numerous pay to earn "success" schemes, and throw away hundreds of dollars in the hopes of becoming rich, even though the only person that becomes rich is the scammer.

Don't get me wrong, there are numerous great "coaches" on the internet that will show you how to really make money, and who make a nice amount of money on the internet themselves, but they all have to inflate their earnings so you pick them over the next money-making strategist. However, let's start from the beginning.

If you are completely new to making money on the internet or you've just started a couple days ago, then here's the hard truth. You probably won't make much money the first couple of months. I understand that that's not what people want to hear, but that is the truth for 90% of the people who start out in the business.

Sure, some people get lucky and end up doing the right things all by themselves, or some have a great mentor they can turn to, but for most people who are just starting out, the first few weeks (or even months) will be full of learning, informational overload, and the question of "why am I not making any money yet?"

To make this easy, I will keep my examples in this Hub to someone creating his first website.

So let's say it's your first day. You just registered a domain, and now you're using your favorite website builder to turn this absolutely great idea that you had into reality. Good job! However, like all beginners, you probably made a big mistake already (don't worry, even seasoned professionals make them sometimes) and here's some questions you should ask yourself:

• Did I research the niche that I'm going in? (Do I understand the level of competition, the difficulty of ranking in the top 10 for certain keywords, and the amount of work it will take to get there?)
• Am I going into a niche where I can make money? (Ads on a popular financial website would pay much more than ads on a website about sports in your area. However, the first one would have much higher competition than the second one)
• How much work am I willing to put into this? (If you're planning on running a website by dedicating only a couple hours of work a week to it, it'll take you at least a year to get some traffic and start making real money.)

If you have the answer to all of those questions. Great! You're on the right track! However, if you've already built your website in a highly competitive niche, or your niche won't make you much money, it's up to you to decide whether the time you put into it is worth it.

I always write about the 5 steps to making money anywhere. You don't need to understand this perfectly, so here's a simple outline of them, but if you want to read more I suggest you check out my blog post on my website.

Here's the 5 steps:

1. Decide what your time is worth and what you want to do with it
2. Learn to create value. Value=Money
3. Learn how to get/keep customers
4. Always educate yourself and apply it to your work
5. Put time into it

So if you're expecting to make a lot of money your first month as a complete newcomer, you're defying at least 2, if not more of the steps:

1. You won't be very educated on money-making online, and you will make lots of mistakes in the beginning
2. You won't have put much time into it.
3. You might not know how to create value, or what your time is worth
4. You might not know how to get visitors to your website/customers

As someone who works online, you will need to find something called the middle ground between researching and working on something.

When I just started out, I was extremely excited to work on my website, and I didn't do any competition or SEO research, and I just jumped in to buying a domain and creating my website. When I was done, and no one came, I realized I needed to do some research on SEO and acquiring visitors. (Too much work)

Thus I dived into researching SEO, ranking your website, and all that good stuff. However, even though I spend 5-8 hours a day reading countless articles on them, I didn't apply them to my website to see if they actually worked. Some of the articles were from 2008 or 2010, and the tips they offered wouldn't have worked in 2014. (Too much research)

You have to work on finding your middle ground right away, so you don't fall into the endless loop of too much work-> too much research-> too much work...

We've all heard of the crazy success stories: people who are making hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars working online. However, not all of those stories are true, and those that are true are outliers. These people are the Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs of the online world. We always hear about the success of the outliers in the offline business, but most people don't consider pursuing the same "opportunity" the outliers pursued. However, when they hear about making money online, they dive in without thinking.

Why is that?

Firstly, the competition looks smaller online. You might not realize how many people actually had the same ideas and you and failed, or how much work it actually takes to rank your website #1 on Google for a certain keyword.

Secondly, the idea of making money from your home in your pajamas appeals to nearly everyone. " I can make thousands of dollars while sipping coffee and sitting in front of my computer in my underwear?" Count me in!

Thirdly, when we're online, we're constantly bombarded with ads and offers on making money. While offline... Well, when's the last time you had someone tell you that you could earn thousands of dollars a day with their system?

However, even after knowing all these reasons, why do people come back over and over again, and refer to these huge success stories when they're just starting on their money-making journey? It's simple.

The success stories are the easiest ones to find. If you do a Google Search for "how much money I make online", one of the top results is a list of the highest earning blogs online, found here. It's a list of 30 blogs each making over $5,000/month. That's pretty good, right? Let's assume that there is at least 1,000 blogs making over $2,000/month.

Keep in mind that these are just estimates, but let's say that out of these 1,000 blogs, each has 10-15 blog posts a month. (This is actually a very high number for most). That equates to 10,000-15,000 blog posts a month total. That might seem like an enormous number until you compare it to the 100 million posts a month mark. This means that less than 0.0001% of all blog posts online make a respectable amount of money.

Let's increase our assumptions even more. Let's say that there are 10,000 blogs out there instead of 1,000. This gives us 100,000-150,000 posts a month, which still only amounts to .001% of blog posts that make serious money.

Why do we never hear, or pretend not to hear of the 99.999% of posts that make a tiny amount of money, even if they make money at all?

Almost everyone who starts a business believes they have the best idea, the highest chance of success, or something else that will trump the competition. Humans like to think that we're special, and what we do is special and better than what everyone else is doing. Thus we might realize that there are people who failed, or websites that don't make money, but since we're so much better than them we won't fail.

Another reason might be the fact that we're simply scared. Whether it's being scared of failure, or being scared of success. Some people will be scared and in denial of the enormous possibility of not making much money online.

This might sound very depressing to you if you were planning on becoming rich within a month of starting your online business. However, don't quit your day job yet! Even though many people don't make much in their first month. Most are capable enough to start making money within 100-500 hours of putting in the work into your website.

If you follow the 5 steps to making money, find your middle ground, and don't set your expectations too high, you could start making enough money online to increase your standard of living or maybe even quit your day job!

When I started writing about this topic, I planned on making it around 1,000 words if not less. However, as I wrote, I realized I would need to write about many more topics to answer the question in the title. Thus this monstrosity of a Hub was born.

If you read this all the way to the end, thank you! I hope you enjoyed my post!

If you still want to learn how to make money online after reading it, go to my website, to make sure you don't make the same beginner mistakes that I did.