There are many ways of making money online today. For example, it's been reported that prison guards at a Chinese prison camp are forcing inmates to play World of Warcraft at night to obtain virtual gold by completing in-game tasks. The prison bosses then turn around and sell the virtual gold in the real world, making as much as $930 a day. Called "gold farming", this practice is not uncommon and it's believed there are as many as 100,000 full-time gold farmers in China alone.

Another unique way of making money online is called Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin is a popular P2P, open source virtual currency that experts ay is very secure and untraceable. Until the year 2040, you can earn Bitcoins by dedicating your spare CPU cycles to running a Bitcoin desktop client.

Blogging for money is just one kind of potentially profitable internet businesses. The richest internet business people demonstrate the extent of possibilities. The owners of IT and internet companies on the Rich List 2011 featured prominently throughout the list, with brothers David and Simon Reuben, who own a large data center company, securing a spot above Sir Richard Branson on the list. However, the entrepreneurs behind some of the biggest UK software companies didn't perform as well, especially when compared to their US counterparts.

The first UK software company owner to appear on the UK Rich List is Mike Lynch, who secured the No. 162 spot with a total worth of 396 million pounds. He was closely followed by Niklas Zennstrom, who founded a well-known internet telephony company. He is also a big investor in the Finnish developer of the popular smartphone game Angry Birds. Other software notables on the list include Graham Wylie, Jan Hruska and Peter Lammer.

Online advertising is booming, with businesses spending approximately $12 billion on online advertising in the first six months of 2010, representing a 12% increase from 2009. These figures offer lots of opportunity for small business websites to make cash online by monetizing their traffic. Even though you may not garner millions of page views a day, you can still make money with the traffic you are getting.

The first thing you should do is check how much traffic your website is generating by installing Google Analytics on your site. You should next check the IAB guidelines on different ad sizes to find out what can work on your site and tweak your site if necessary to accommodate ads. After that, you can sign up for Google Adsense, which will serve ads on your site. You will get paid every time someone clicks on an ad they see on your site, which is known as pay-per-click advertising.