Your quest for legitimate money online could quite easily see you purchase ten to twenty e-books that all promise to 'break the code'. More like 'break the bank'! However, if you harness the power of Web 2.0 in your plans, then you are buying into the future of the internet rather than old rehashed ideas that have had their day.

So what is Web 2.0? Why wasn't there a Web 1.0, or even a Web 0.0? I wouldn't worry about that. Web 2.0, often called 'Social Media' is a 'sea change' in how people - including your potential customers - use the web, and it has become a treasure chest for legitimate online money making.

In the 'old days' of the internet (not that long ago in fact) it was all about highly techie people building websites, something none of us ordinary folk could ever do. Our job was to surf the internet and learn from these very clever people who'd built these sites.

Microsoft's 'Frontpage 2003' was a great gift to us 'layman' as now we could chance our arm at legitimate online money making without having to pay a geek four grand for the privilege. Marketing our business online was a choice between paid or free traffic generation methods, ie Pay-Per-Click, ezine ads and press releases at one end of the scale, with article marketing, traffic exchanges and forum marketing at t'other.

Web 2.0 has made it possible for people to pursue legitimate online money making by using blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Squidoo, Hubpages and many others by making the internet an interactive experience. That's the big shift and the even bigger opportunity for you.

Google, still the heavyweight search engine, loves Web 2.0 sites. Blogs, whether you use Wordpress or Blogger.com, are particularly attractive because the content is always being updated and refreshed, improving the surfer's web experience (Google's major 'driver').

So you can now make legitimate money online without bleeding to death on Adwords pay per click. Discipline yourself to write a blog, post to it regularly (with worthwhile content) with backlinks to your site, and contribute to sites such as Squidoo, Hubpages and Scribd, then you are on the right side of the Web 2.0 wave. Harnessing the power of Web 2.0 is a 'given' for anybody serious about legitimate online money making activities. There is an important 'don't' though. Web 2.0 should never be an excuse for 'up-front pitching' business opportunities to people. That gets short shrift.

You see, Web 2.0/Social Media is all about community. It's about giving value, and only then receiving fruitful connections. In other words, it's not like the stock market. People are drawn to you by the value you give, and if you give enough then the right people will gravitate towards your business.

Legitimate money online, unless you want to throw big bucks at it, takes time and patience. But if you make a habit of using Web 2.0 in your 'branding' efforts, then the wave is going to keep hurtling forwards, with you triumphantly on top.