financial independence

Can blogging really make me cash, clear my debts and help me achieve financial independence? Will I really make money online just be writing a few thoughts?

A big thanks to Lord Matt. Today is the start of Lord Matts blog promotion/blog carnival Idea called Spike Club.

Lord Matt has given a great review of financial independence and now its my turn to write an article for everyone to comment on.

One of Lords Matts observations about financial independence was this and he's absolutely right.

"It seems Stubsy has started the community as a personal project for getting out of debt (something I too have experienced the hard way, once before)."

I am in debt up to my ears as I think is most of the developed world, debt is like a ball and chain a noose around my neck.

I used to be quite financially secure, I had quite a good job I had made a lot of money from my the sale of my first house.

The most common game plan for bloggers and site owners when they think about making money is they think: "I will write piles of good content and put adverts on it. The get rich."
Sadly this does not work very well for the average blogger.
Why not?
To be honest it is because the return per article is tiny - arround $0.04 per hour or less for the first year or two rising by as little as 10% year on year after that.
Writting good or even great content every day is very, very hard. Even reasonable content daily is a challenge.
What is needed is to have the time and skill to pour into a site where for the first year or two you earn nothing but spend every spare moment (after the day's article writting) making friends with other writters and bloggers.
However, what would also help is to have a better plan on how to get a revenue from you site. Adverts are the last thing you should be thinking about.

So you want to make money from home on-line, the problem is so does everyone else.

Affiliate marketing is a relatively risk free way to make money online, you have very few start up costs you don't need to worry about credit card chargebacks, shipping, customer returns, suppliers, cash flow with affiliate marketing you don't need to worry about anything other than marketing you don't even need a website.

You could start a free blog, Google allow you to post adsense ads on blogger.

So how do you choose a good affiliate program?