I promised I would share with you my own successes and failures in pursuing each of the 5 strategies. Of course it's important to understand how success is achieved, but most of the gurus in time have confirmed that they learnt more from making mistakes. It was in correcting the mistakes that they found success, so it follows that getting out there and taking action, any action, may not lead to immediate success but will almost certainly lead to a mistake or learning experience that will propel you forward to success if you persevere.

It is also worth pointing out that these are just my personal experiences based on what has worked for me.

Before we dive in, it's worth considering that the five methods we have been talking about in this article series can either be applied individually, or maybe a couple adhoc or even all of them collectively as part of a higher level meta strategy. In other words your approach will depend on the time, money and resources available to you, and your grand vision in your quest to make money working online. You can either find one that works for you and just stick at that. Or you can pick the strategies off one by one or even work on several together.

In fact if you stop to analyse the methods you will perhaps notice that the order we have covered them is almost a stairway or building block that will allow you to make real money online. Advertising is low cost, quick, and easy to get you started. Yet to make money through Participation methods at the top end you generally need to invest a lot more time, effort and resources and really need to have built up a following or customer base, some of whom will be prepared to pay for your high end participation products. This system is what you may generally have heard called the sales or marketing funnel where you start with free or low cost items through blogging or affiliate marketing, and then build up to ecommerce and participation products and services that tend to be higher ticket items. Strategy 1 - Advertising

As we have previously established, this generally refers to making money online by selling your advertising space on your site(s) or blogs. Personally I had 2 issues with this strategy. Firstly I felt that the small rewards achieved from the effort in setting up services like adsense that places content relevant adverts and links was not worth it.

The other issue for me was that my overall goal was to sell my own products and services and so I did not agree with the principle of sending traffic that had landed on my site to another site via the advertising. This is why many internet marketers set up dedicated blogs or traffic sites which are purely there for the purpose of driving traffic to their links. So if you are going to pursue this strategy as your best way make money online, that would be my advice - set up specific traffic sites or blogs. Blogs are free so are a great cost effective way of doing it.

For me, having quit my job and with 2 young children, I needed to make money online fast so I had a couple of websites that were there to promote my own products and services as part of my overall strategy. So it did not make sense to divert potential customers away from my sites by using them to advertise just anything.

My approach to advertising therefore was not so much to make quick money online from it, but to trade advertising space with reciprocal links to other established service providers to my target market who also had existing traffic. This worked tremendously well as it meant I kept my costs low, got very targeted traffic for free, and built my brand and reputation quickly by association.

This reciprocal approach has served me very well. Although I did not understand it in the early days, it has also helped with search engine optimisation and placed my sites higher in the search rankings - generating extra traffic for free.

In future articles I will share my experiences of affiliate marketing, ecommerce, participation, and subscription.