Making money on the Internet is no longer something reserved for a very small and elusive crowd. You can make money online today, with minimal financial investments, through 100% legitimate ways. Here is a look at the most successful 10 methods of making money online.

1.    Online advertising – On the Internet, a smartly organized small business may get excellent results, often competing side by side with larger corporations. Internet advertising is on an ascending trend, which shows plenty of potential for the near and distant future. As traditional media outlets struggle to keep costs down and become more attractive for potential advertisers, the virtual space offers any business the opportunity to achieve amazing results with a budget that is only a fraction of what an advertiser would pay to get the same ROI through traditional media. Using programs such as Google Adsense, placing affiliate banners on your site and making the most out of pixel advertising are all amazing ways to make some money.

2.    Affiliate programs – You can choose affiliate hubs where different advertisers offer their banners and affiliate offers and you can manage them using a centralized system, or you can get a single affiliate website that will display their banners on your site. The potential profits that come from affiliate programs are strictly connected to how high your visitor counts are and how targeted those visitors are. This takes us a bit away from affiliate systems and highlights the importance of SEO in any online business. The web masters who invest money and energy into ethical SEO techniques often notice a very steady increase in traffic, which, in turn, enables them to make more profit from their online business.

3.    Freelance jobs – Working as a freelancer on the Internet is one of the most popular ways of making money from home. You can try your luck at graphic design, copywriting, programming and several other dozens of ramifications and project types.

4.    Electronic commerce – selling items on eBay is one of the hottest ways of making a lot of cash online. Not everyone is successful at it, of course, but those that are continue to increase their profits constantly. Auctions on eBay have a lot of potential – combine them with dropshipping and you can get a business that’s easy to run and very profitable at the same time.

5.    Paid surfing and survey filling – There are a number of companies that pay you to surf the web. They display a small add on your desktop when you are connected to the Internet and give you a percentage of the advertising revenue they receive. The amount per hour is not very big, but there are ways to multiply it by referring other people. This is really the focus of all this programs. Tell everybody you know that they too, can get paid to surf, and get paid yourself for referring them. Paid surveys are also great, since they are easy to fill in and anyone can do that from the comfort of their own home.

6.    Networking – while this is not actually a direct way of generating profit, you can use social networking and MLMs to generate leads and drive traffic to your online business.

7.    Selling websites and domain names is becoming an extremely popular area, which still has a lot of room for development. If you bought a nice, short and relevant domain name a while ago, you can make a small fortune selling it today. If you don’t believe me, check out these figures, for the top five most expensive domain sales in the last few years:

• Business.com – $7.5 million
• AsSeenOnTv.com – $5.1 million
• Altavista.com – $3.3 million
• Wine.com – $2.9 million
• Autos.com – $2.2 million

8.    Work at home jobs – Depending on how much time you are willing to put into a work at home opportunity, you could either do it in your spare time, or make it your main income source. Work at home jobs are suitable for everyone: from students, to retired people. You do not sign any documents or commit in writing to anything, thus you are not obliged to work if you do not feel like it. In a modern society, with parents spending more time at home raising their children and college students looking for a comfortable part time job, a work at home opportunity is the perfect answer.

9.    Outsourcing – this is not a moneymaking opportunity, but a money saving one. Outsourcing is the best way to create a competitive business in countries like the United States, Canada and most of Europe.

10.    Free stuff online – you will not get rich while taking advantage of all the free stuff you can get online, but it is fun and rewarding. If you are a webmaster and you wish to create a very popular website, do your best to offer lots of things for free – downloads, software, ebooks, wallpapers and so on.