What's your opinion about the single best (most effective or highest success rate) way to make money online?

I suppose you ultimately make more from selling something than from screening ads, I have not made more than $100/month from ads, and that's on sites with 30k visitors per month.

If you've got a lot of unique and well-written content, and submit your site to directories and search engines, should it result in success? Or are there other factors involved? What's your experience and best strategy? -- or best strategy that you'd be willing to share ; )

I would say website.ws is the best, it has a referral system really nice, for every person you referr, you get 1 dll, but not only do you get 1 dll for the ppl that you refer, but if the ppl you refered refered someone, it will also count as your refer, and so on till 5 levels, so for example:
you refer 5 ppl, and each refers..3 ppl, that would be 20 dlls :O
check it out, here is the link with a nice video:

freedom.ws/cananito

Well, there is no best way to make money..
you need to do a reseach, a smart one. Not just jumping in referral syatem or affiliate just because people told you so. Need to know your own niche.

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so it sounds that you have a website,right ? if yes, I think if you are tired of google ads, you can try others like google ads . or you can do lead in your website. put the ads for CB or CJ and earn commisons fromt the sales.

You can start selling advertising space..

Good answers guys, but we should think beyond advertising as a link on a page...

Depending on your site, you could get donations from companys in exchange for good reviews, some exposure or whatever. (thats more of a member-building thing though).

Another thing you could do is offer services related to your genre (for example, sell movies which you buy in wholesale, offer webhosting, etc.)

Do your own advertisement scheme, google is underpaid. Charge like.. $10 a month to put them on banner rotation, and have a few advertisements around the place.
For eg/ at the bottom of the page and top of the page ($10 a month for banner rotation at the top, $7 a month for the bottom).

Just general things like that. When you have the member base, there isnt too much you cant do (Just DONT over-do it)

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This is a concern of all webmasters. What do you do to make money online? Banner ads are not good enough. So best making online money should be affiliate programs. But best of all if you are running some trading and selling website you can not go wrong.