You don't choose short generic keyword phrase to optimise
a post like "make money" or "make money online" because competition will be very high and
it will take a lot of time (building thousands of keyword optimised back links) to get
to the first page of SERPs.
But rather choose more specific terms like
"make money online promoting affiliate products" or
"make money online starting a blog" etc.
You must also remember that long tail keywords are searched less
in compared to short generic keywords. But if you can have say 25 or 50 posts optimised
for long tail keywords with average traffic volume then
the combined effect will be much more powerful.
Moreover the home page is to be optimised with the high traffic short generic keywords.