Last month, a good friend of mine slipped on the ice and broke a hip. Thanks to modern medicine, he has a nice new one, but even with insurance he also has a stack of new bills, too. Since a retirement income just does not have much slack, he started looking for a way to earn some extra money even before leaving the hospital using his laptop computer.

He had no idea where to start once he used "make money" in a search and heard plenty of talk about making money online. Once reading articles about what to look out for, he knew a lot about the ways that were less than reputable for people looking after potential suckers.

He got lots of hits for schemes to stuff envelopes at home which he had been told was not the way to go. They promise that you can make money easily and lots even promise an amount for each envelope, at least until you read the fine print. That amount is based on whether people buy anything from the advertising you are sending out, and the real numbers aren't so good. Worse yet, most of them want you to put up money for the envelopes and mailers!

There were other pretty questionable offers. A lot were to pay money to take surveys to make money and he knew that this was a real way to earn a small but nice amount of money because he already belonged to one survey site that paid a few dollars for each completed on and sometimes sent out nice free samples. He knew that legitimate sites don't charge you, and that you don't need to pay anyone to find survey opportunities. Instead, he found online bulletin boards, discussion forums and chat rooms with good tips.

The next thing he did was to look at sites that pay you to write. He found some possibilities, but it would take too much time. Then, he decided that since he was already writing for his own blog, it's about his fall and the resulting issues, he should make money from it. He looked into accepting ads on his blog and decided that was what he wanted to do to make money.

Because ads only pay off if they are noticed by people and clicked upon, he aimed to get more traffic. As he was a member of different forums, he started to post link to his blog wherever this was allowed. This enabled him to invite potentially interested people to visit his blog and thus see the ads. Learning about key words, he began to add these words to his posts as this also enhanced his options to attract more traffic. Slowly but steadily, his ads are starting to generate revenues for him.