Is there an honest way to earn money on line?

There is some information here:
http://able2know.org/topic/129325-1

"Making money online" generally means two things:

Low level work like clicking ads, Mturk, and other outright scams and then just actual work that's done on the web.

There's no real secret to the former. There are armies of clickers willing to do it for much less than you are, and there's no real money to be made that way. The "make money online" schemes from sign ups generally mean that they get an affiliate fee for the signups and then pass a portion on to you. They need more unique users, not a stream of actions so you sign up for a bunch of things that make them a bit of money but that never really adds up to money for you (especially with payout thresholds).

So avoid the notion that you can just make gobs of money easily just by regular web activity. Focus on the real work that there is to be had on the web.

For example, you can apply a marketable skill on various sites for freelancers such as elance.com, rentacoder.com. You could, for example, sell writing on either site. There are lots of people who are looking for low-quality writing at cheap prices that almost anyone can produce (many times the people doing it don't speak the language requested for the article well) and they are looking to get a couple paragraphs for $5 a pop, another common task to find on the web is transcription.

It's not much, but it's much better than the cents per hour that the other types of online work tends to entail, and if you get efficient at it you can actually make a decent hourly wage.