Before I go on, let me tell you a little bit of the backstory about how I found Fortitude. I am a member of an article directory called Qondio, and from the moment I joined it, I loved the layout, presentation, and structure of the website. It quickly became my favorite article directory, and on top of that, it was PR6, so the links from it have a lot of strength. Recently I got an email from the entrepreneurs behind Qondio, saying they had a new project, Fortitude. It is an online magazine that aims to get the best amateur writers, and pay them a lot for their creative work. As the CEO Nick Oba puts it, “By allowing our writers to choose their topics and paying them to write about whatever they choose, we are harnessing the power of passion.”

Immediately, my one objection to the project was, “How can they afford to pay so much?” There are two reasons. One, they do not pay for every submission they get; you have to make the front page to get paid. However, a sizable portion of articles make the cut, and as long as you put effort and creativity into your work, some will make it through for you too. Next, they have an algorithm that determines how many articles make the front page, and how much gets paid out, based on a number of factors, including their own budget. This means they never pay out more than they can afford, which is a mistake many other businesses of this type have made.

In addition, there is a fee of $23.88 per year to be a part of Fortitude. Personally, I am glad there is a cost to get in. If it was free, there would be a lot more competition to get to the front page, and you would also have a lot of inferior authors crowding up the system. A moderate fee of this size ensures a quality supply of authors, and gives the site a little extra revenue to work with. Plus, most people who join will be able to make that back many times over.

I’ve already written a few articles for Fortitude, and it has been a total blast. On other directories, I sometimes have to write about topics I am not particularly interested in, but there, I can do anything and get paid for it. That’s a great feeling. I haven’t felt this confident about an opportunity in a long time, and that is why I am so adamant about sharing it with you. At the very least, please check it out!

First, it is important to define what a structured settlement is. Thankfully, the concept is not hard to understand. A structured settlement is simply a financial agreement that is made to settle a personal injury claim, and it involves the plaintiff receiving periodic payments for a fixed amount of time. Before structured settlements came about, people were paid all the money up front, in what is known as a lump sum. With a structured settlement, the payments are spread out, instead of being given to you all at once. This usually makes things easier on the person who is paying out the money.

Since the dawn of structured settlements, financial firms have figured out ways to profit from them. Since people rarely get paid lump sums anymore, businesses like JG Wentworth have offered to convert your structured settlement into a lump sum. That is, you transfer the settlement to them, and they pay you a lot of money at once. Sounds pretty good, right?

It is important to remember that you never get something for nothing, and it is clear that if you just took the structured settlement as is, you would make more money in the end. You will ultimately lose a lot of money by taking a lump sum, so it is advised that you do not sell off your structured settlement. However, that is not to say you should not even consider it, as there are special circumstances when it would be in your interest to get a lump sum.

In this economy, many people are burdened by bills and debt. If you are at risk of losing your possessions, including your car or home, then you may need the lump sum to cover those payments. In this case, it is perfectly okay to take this route.

When making links yourself, you can choose what anchor text you want in your links.  The anchor text is the title of the link, and it is very important to choose your anchor texts wisely, as it determines what you will rank for in the search engines.  Your website should be devoted to ranking for one keyword, at least initially, as if you try to split your efforts, the work will be much harder.  For example, if you want to rank for “lose weight fast”, you would build links with the anchor text “lose weight fast.”  However, since you need to make the linking look as natural to Google as possible, you can’t make all your anchor texts say, “Lose weight fast.”  About a fourth of your links should have your keyphrase, and the other seventy-five percent should be variations of that keyphrase or your site title.

When you first launch a new site, you can’t build links too quickly, or that will look suspicious to Google.  There are ways to build links incredibly fast, such as with certain link building tools, but you should hold off on using such tools until your site is between thirty and sixty days old.  Once your site gets past a certain age, it really doesn’t matter how fast you build links, as long as it is not totally excessive.

Link building should be the primary thing you do when promoting a site.  Content is important, but the time it takes to create content is little compared to link building.  For a site, about 80% of the work, including developing the site, is just link building.  That is how important this is to the success of your website, so it is important to do it right and well.

The drawback of affiliate marketing is that it requires the most action from the user.  They have to not only click through to the website, but part with their money, which is a significant step for most people.  Programs like Google AdSense pay you just for clicks, but when it comes to affiliate programs, you must refer actual sales. It may not be shortcuts to internet millions, but it’s close.

This is not as difficult as it seems, especially if you execute correct affiliate marketing strategies.  First and foremost, you need a website that has information and articles about the product you are selling.  With proper search engine optimization, people will find your website through the search engines when looking for the product, and many of them will be in the market for said item.  Statistically, if you have enough visitors, a good portion of them will want to buy what you are selling.

When deciding what affiliate product to market, you need to take in to consideration many factors and ask yourself some questions.  What is the product?  Is it quality, respected, and affordable?  As for the terms of the partnership, what is the commission, and are there any special conditions or restrictions?  You want to promote a product that has a chance of selling well and can make you money, or else all your effort will be for nothing.

It can be hard to predict how well you will do with a single affiliate program, so it is advised that you start multiple websites and test out several affiliate programs.  When you find one that works particularly well, you can focus more energy in to it.  It may sound like a lot of work having to manage multiple websites, but it is even more difficult and frustrating to put all your eggs in one basket and fail.  The more websites you have, the more of a chance there is that one or a few will become successful, and you can always scrap ones that do not work out.  Once you have a network of established sites, you will make plenty of easy money online.

There are two things that you need to start a site.  The first is a domain name, which is the URL of your site.  Google.com is a domain name, as is Wikipedia.com.  A domain comprises both the website’s title and the top-level domain (TLD) extension, such as .com, .org, .net, .info, .us, etc.  Unfortunately for budding webmasters, all of the simple domain names were registered more than a decade ago, so domains nowadays must be very unique.  Once someone registers a domain, it is theirs until they transfer it, cancel it, or forget to renew it.  Don’t count on someone ever forgetting to renew a domain name you are eyeing; if there is an already taken domain that you want, consider contacting the owner and offering to purchase it.  Be aware that high quality domains can cost thousands, even tens of thousands, of dollars, so it may be cheaper to spend $10 and get your own original domain.

The second piece of the puzzle is hosting.  With just a domain, you have no server to store content on, and that is where a hosting firm comes in.  For a small fee per month, they lease you servers for space and bandwidth, and they also provide you with website building and analysis tools.  Some hosters feature what is known as cPanel, which is an all-in-one control panel for managing and updating your website, and it is much easier to use than an FTP client.

Building a website is much easier than getting people to come to it.  With billions of web pages online, no one is going to stumble across yours by accident.  In order to coerce visitors in to coming and staying on your site, you need to have a consistent stream of high quality content.  You also need to create links to your website, which serve a dual purpose of advertising and strengthening your website for search engines.  With an established website, you can make tons of easy money online through advertising or affiliate programs.

Something that everyone inevitably comes across is paid surveys.  There are some sites that claim to pay between thirty and sixty dollars an hour for certain surveys, but unfortunately most of these are scams.  Most survey sites have offers that pay between fifty cents and ten dollars per survey, and if you join enough websites and complete enough surveys, you can make easy money online.  Of course, there is a time commitment, and it may not pay off as well as a skilled endeavor.

There are many skilled positions circulating around the Internet at all times.  People are always looking for workers to create content, make posts, design graphics, or complete some other web service.  If you can develop skills in any of these areas, there is money waiting for you online.  For the average person, the areas of article writing and paid posting would work out best.  All you need is a fair grasp of the English language and dedication to prevail in the content field.  For example, a webmaster who owns a site about birds would want bird-related articles, and if he doesn’t have time to write them himself, he would pay others to do so.  Standard rates for article writing run between half a cent and five cents a word, depending on the reputation of the writer.

There are literally hundreds of special websites known as “GPT” (Get Paid To), where people can make money very easily.  For those hoping to make a lot of money on the Internet, these are usually not very effective.  GPTs that pay you to read emails or click links don’t offer the potential of more than a few dollars a month, unless you get a massive amount of referrals.  Certain programs pay you to complete sponsored offers, such as a trial period for a web service.  These programs offer much more potential, with some people making thousands of dollars just doing trials and trying products.

Finally, you can make a lot of money online if you develop a series of optimized, monetized websites.  This is the most difficult way to make money online, but by far it offers the most rewards.

Within search engine optimization, the field can be broken down in to two parts.  The first is on-page SEO, which is all of the content on the website itself.  The next, equally important part is off-page SEO, and that comprises mainly of link building and promotion.

On-page optimization is the easiest thing to do since you have complete control over your website.  The first thing any webmaster needs to do is identify keywords they want to rank on search engines for, and then put those keywords in the domain, title, and body content of the website.  A keyword density of around five percent is ideal, but small fluctuations do not make much of a difference.

One of the biggest mistakes webmasters make is targeting the wrong keywords.  You need to find a keyword or keyphrase that is not very competitive but has a fair amount of search volume.  Determining what keyphrases you want to target is the ultimate goal of keyword research, which is a whole topic in itself.

Other than the keyword research and continuous content updates, there is not much to on-page SEO.  The real work begins with off-page SEO, when you start to build links to your website.  The amount and strength of links pointing to a website is a significant factor in how Google ranks web pages.

There are many ways to build links.  This includes writing and distributing articles, purchasing static text links, participating in link exchanges, and commenting on other people’s blogs.  If the content on your site is good, you can also gain links naturally, as webmasters are naturally prone to link to quality content they find online.

Many people feel they do not have the time or expertise to effectively rank a website themselves, or the keywords they are attempting to rank for are very difficult.  If all else fails, there are hundreds of SEO firms online that will do the work for you, as well as consult you on how to best continue work yourself.

Over time, once your website ranks well, you will have a solid stream of traffic that will continuously make you money online.  The fruits of SEO labor are long-lasting, so by putting in a lot of work now, you will have rewards that last for years.