"The Internet is for the crooks, by the crooks and of the crooks," Anandi declared. "Making money on the Internet is the biggest lie I have ever come across in life."
I said, "One need not be an astrologer or a seer to understand what happened in your life recently. You have a lost a few thousand Rupees by paying to some agent or website to get paid work."
"Yes. I lost Rs.25,000 in the past six months by subscribing to various websites. These websites promised that I could earn Rs.10,000 a day just by doing some data entry job. To meet administrative expenses they asked me to pay Rs.1,000 as registration fees. But I did not get any work," she said.
I told her, "Anyone with common sense should never commit such a blunder again. Never pay to get paid. There are some websites that act as an intermediary for getting freelance work. But they don't make false promises. Making money online requires as much as hard work that you put on making money offline. Never forget this fact. Don't forget the experience of millions: if something sounds too good to be true, then something is wrong with that offer. But that does not mean you cannot make money online. You can earn online in proportion to your knowledge, skills and hard work. The beauty of the Internet is that even if you don't have knowledge or skills about something, you can quickly develop them free of cost through the Internet."
After a few moments of silence, she asked, "I don't know what skills or knowledge can bring money to me. Can you please tell me something on this subject? From this moment I promise to give up my shortcut methods, greediness and stupidity. I will do what I can and want to earn at the market rate."
I replied, "That's wonderful. A website can become prosperous if it gets favorable search engine listings. As most people find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, every website wants to get into the list of these engines. Nowadays all search engines give importance to how many good websites link to a website. Based on the number of good links a website gets from other websites, Search Engines assign rank to it. The process of getting links is not an easy one. It involves a lot of time consuming manual work. So, webmasters hire people to build links and pay either by hourly basis or by per link basis."
"How do I learn to build links?" she asked. "Google is your best friend in such cases. Here is a brief on this service: You need to find out good websites that have something in common, find out the contact details of the websites from which you want links, contact the webmasters by email requesting links and actually get the links. The process is simple. But getting links is very difficult," I said.
"After learning how do I get clients?" Anandi wanted to know. "You must go to forums and blogs for the webmasters, be active for a few days and advertise your service in a subtle manner. If you are a sincere participant in discussion, webmasters will trust you and then may consider giving you link building work."
In a hesitant voice Anandi asked me, "How much people generally earn from link building activities?" I replied, "There are no industry standard rates for such services. It depends on your reputation and the webmaster. The webmasters of some busy websites may even pay $2,500 a month. But that is more of an exception than a rule. Please don't imagine that all of us are going to make Rs.1 lakh through this service. That requires specialized link building knowledge that 99% of us don't have. If you work hard you can expect to earn anything from Rs.5,000 to Rs.15,000 a month. Though it is easy to learn how to do link building, please don't underestimate the amount of work involved. Once you learn the process, you must go to the websites that webmasters frequently visit and develop contact with them. If you don't market your services actively, you will never get any work."
Yesterday I received an email from Anandi. "Last week I was hired to do link building work. That was my first assignment. After a week of hard work, I got 20 links for my faceless, online employer. He paid Rs.2,000 by PayPal. Even after seeing the credit balance in my PayPal account, I could not believe my eyes. I have earned this money without paying any registration fees to anyone!"