There are plenty of ways that you could earn extra money from home. The internet has opened up many opportunities for anyone to make some extra money. And you don't have to be a total internet coding geek to do it, either.

There are many tools out there that make it easy for anyone to build webpages. For instance, starting a free blog is not difficult at all. It's something my mother-in-law could probably figure out.

The problem is, how do you make money with a blog?

There are so many different ways I don't think I could list them all. Here's a few ideas though:

• Put ads up - Putting ads on a blog is a pretty simple process, especially if you are using blogger or something similar. If your blog gets enough traffic, people will probably click on your ads and you can earn a little money. Just don't tell people to click your ads, that can get you banned.
• Recommend affiliate products - This is what's known as affiliate marketing. You can link to products on Amazon, Clickbank, Comission Junction, and numerous other websites and earn a commission everytime someone makes a purchase after clicking your link. You need to sign up for affiliate accounts with these sites and they will be able to tell you how to set up your links properly.
• Offer a service - If you have some kind of skill, why not use your blog to market yourself? Tell people you'd be willing to do some work for them. A tip - lots of people need writers to put content on their own sites or for article marketing, more on that later. You don't have to be a great writer, either.

Those are some simple ideas that almost anyone could put to use to make extra money from home.

Now, I want to talk about how you actually get people to visit your blog.

First, you need to consider the theme of your blog. And no, I'm not talking about your design theme, such as what background image you use or what colors are on your blog. I'm talking about the topic your blog will be focused on.

Millions of people use the internet everyday to find solutions to their problems. Maybe they are just looking for something to entertain them. Maybe they want to know what to do after a divorce. Maybe they want to know how to cook their mom's old fashioned chicken.

Whatever they are looking for, they are using search engines to find it.

So, if you create a blog that is all about awesome chicken recipes and nothing else, the search engines will see your blog as relevant to someone looking for information on how to cook yummy chicken.

This is where keyword research comes in. You can find out approximately how many people are searching for chicken recipes on the internet. Keyword research will also tell you the exact words people are using to find chicken recipes.

If you build your websites around these keywords, it is much more likely that you will be listed high on the search results.

There's more to it than that, though. You also need links pointing to your blog that use these keywords as the anchor text. The anchor text is the words that you click on to use the link. For instance, "keyword research" is anchor text for the link in this sentence.

These links, known as backlinks, are like votes for your blog. The more links the search engines find for your blog, and the more links that have variations of "chicken recipes" in the anchor text, the higher your blog will rank for search terms relating to chicken recipes.

This takes me back to article marketing. Remember above when I was talking about offering a writing service on your blog? Website owners need backlinks. One of the best ways to get quality backlinks is to write articles relating to your topic, and posting them in various places on the web. In these articles, you would include links to your blog.

You could offer to write articles for other website owners. This is often called "ghostwriting".

These ideas are only some of the online income opportunities. The internet is full of many other methods that can be used to earn extra money from home. I have a blog that talks all about these opportunities. I try to offer lots of advice on how to make a living on the internet.

Also, if you thought this article was useful, why don't you leave me a comment below? I'd love to hear from you.