Making Money on the Internet

I was doing some keyword research, something we should all do on a regular basis, checking what comes up in the search results.

I came across a nice post which referenced this site ShoeMoney as the best source for making money online information. Unfortunately for me I spent way too long reading. Jeremy, great site but I really need to be doing my own stuff OK? I'll be back but not tonight.

The site that directed me to Jeremy's site was this one link and there are some excellent ideas here.

A word of caution, you will never make any money online or off if you are not focussed. Here is another internet marketing secret, pick one market and work it until it makes money. If you keep chopping and changing chasing the fast easy money you will almost always fail.

If you manage to make any money with this it will be purely because you fluked it and you'll be almost certainly unable to repeat it, certainly not deliberately.

As far as I am able to identify most of the so called gurus are in this position, they fluked something that worked but they still don't know how or why.

I remember one guru that I actually paid to teach me how to make money online who didn't even complete the course of instruction and disappeared with my money. He called himself Mr. X, should have been enough warning for me but he came with a recommendation from The Internet Marketing Summit.

He fell into a system that made money for him but he was just lucky and was unable to repeat the same success with his next attempts so he tried to teach others but was unable to do that because he had no idea what he was doing.

Disclaimer: I am not a guru, I write about what I am learning, not all of it works consistently even for me. I think I'm getting closer though.

OK, here's a couple of other links for you. How to find extra money in your current finances. How to Generate Emergency Cash from the internet.

Keep at it folks, more coming.

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Internet Marketing and Making Money are not the same thing.

I don't know how many people are actively involved in internet marketing but I suspect that there are 100,000s who are active with possibly millions who have dabbled or not even got started yet but who would like to have the steady passive income that seems to be available.

I don't usually read other peoples blogs because they interfere with my online activities. If you spend all your time online reading emails and blogs you won't ever get anything done.

My advice to you would be to do the activities that will make you money first, then read the emails and blogs.

So what makes up the activities which make you money? Really only a few things, keyword research, get content, get links. If you do that you will make money. One other thing that will help. If you have one site which makes $5 per week you might think that you have failed. Not true, you have a successful site - now make another 1,000 sites like that and you'll be making $5,000 per week

I found this excellent blog post that you should read. 102 ways to get backlinks will open in a new window. Why read this, simple really if you don't get links to your site you won't get any traffic and I can prove that see this post and understand that the single most important thing you can do for your online marketing efforts is to generate backlinks to your site and to the pages within your site.

After years of following the "avoid the Google slap" and "how to trick Google" idiots I realised that Google actually loves you and wants you to make money. Not only that but they provide, free of charge, all the tools and information you need to find profitable markets and how to target them. They also provide you with the content that they like that you can use.

You don't need to buy tools, you don't need to buy traffic, you don't need to pay for hosting, you don't need to know how to build a website or any of that stuff. You probably will want to learn some of that later and you will want to have your own hosted websites later so you can sell them but you don't need any of that to get started.

Learn to find good markets, find out what keywords will bring the right type of traffic, write content similar to the pages listed high in Google for your keywords and get links.

Too hard? Then go do something else because this is the easiest and cheapest business model you'll find anywhere on the internet or off.





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Another interesting email from Google

I had an email from Blogger telling me that their auto anti spam software had identified my latest blog as a spam blog.

They didn't tell me what they found to determine that but they did say that I should log in and fill in their capture stuff to prove I'm human. I would like to know what triggered the email so I don't do it again.

Now don't get me wrong here, I'm not complaining. I am quite happy that they are actively working on stopping the spam blogs and the auto blogging idiots.

I am confident that after they review my blog they'll accept that it isn't spam, it's just formatted differently to most. You can have a look at it here on my blog about beef jerky recipes, you'll have to click the link called continue because of the current block but you can get through and see the blog.

The difference is that, since I am aware that most visitors to any website don't scroll down the page at all, on this blog I am experimenting with putting the ad block above the fold. Does this make it a spam blog? I don't know but according to the rules of blogger I don't think so. The way I read it indicates that the main characteristic of a spam blog is lots of links and very little content. Because of the ad block there are lots of links at the top of the blog but there are full articles (200+ words) below the fold which are on topic and not keyword stuffed.

According to the Amazon ad block there are 18 links back to Amazon in that ad block so that is probably what triggered the problem. It'll be interesting to find out what the ruling is.

I'm off to make more backlinks to my sites. Seriously, this is probably the absolute best thing you can do to generate traffic. I saw a site today which has a #1 position in Google SERP for a very competitive key phrase which only has 16 links according to Alexa and the keyword phrase isn't even in the domain name.


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How not to get Traffic.

One of the problems of being as unfocussed as I have been in my attempts to create an income online is that I sometimes forget to do certain things that are crucial to gaining the required traffic.

One unforseen benefit of this though is that I have a number of websites and domains around which I continue to pay the fees on and now are aged domains, if that is a benefit.

I was working on a website that I have held since early 2007 and generates small but regular adsense income. The reason I was there is that I am setting up a new project and was looking to generate some backlinks for it. I wanted to write a couple of articles to plug links to the new project.

When I was there I thought I might check the stats on the other subdomains and discovered this.



The url is blocked out to protect the innocent. What this shows, for those of you who don't read their stats, is that the day I set the page up I triggered 8 hits. No-one has seen the site since 11th July 2008. Absolutely no traffic which shows exactly why you MUST HAVE LINKS TO YOUR SITES if you want any traffic.

On this domain I have several other sub-domains which have links and the total traffic to all the sub-domains and the main domain is around 10,000 hits per month.

So folks, traffic tip #2, create at least one link to your page or no-one will ever find it.

Remember traffic tip #1? Adwords links do not create backlinks or search engine rankings on their own.

In the interests of creating a link to my new properties, which actually already have links 'cause they're in the menu, this is the page I was building recipes for Beef Jerky and this is what is called a contextual link.

Apparently the search engine robots like these because they are part of the content of the page. This link would carry more weight if the content was also about beef jerky or recipes but it isn't. The bots will follow the link though and find the new page.

Because there is a menu structure on the site the bots will also find all the other pages but not the sub-domains if there are no links to them, as you can clearly see from the graph above.




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How to make Money on the Internet.

I am still learning this stuff after all these years but I am beginning to have some understanding of what is actually required.

For example, despite the claims of companies like Omni Business Solutions and other thinly disguised scams, you don't need to spend large amounts of money to make money.

You may need to spend some but in general you can begin to make some cash before you have to re-invest some of that back to leverage your income to greater heights.

You will need a website but these are available for free, click on this link car auctions above to see one I made last night for no cost to me at all.

Now I need to do more work here but that is a good start. As you can see I have set this up as an affiliate site which means that I don't have any product creation costs or any customer issues. It is also a slightly modified Blogger blog and you can get the information on how to set these up at this site.

So what do you really need to make money? You need a group of people who want to buy something, you need to be able to supply that something and then you need to be able to let that group know how to find your something.

Seriously, that doesn't look too hard does it? And it isn't. What goes wrong then? How come so few people are making any money online? After a couple of years of only making a dribble of income I think I can give you a few clues.

I fell for the line that it was hard work, I fell for the line that I needed to buy that latest wizz-bang product, I fell for the Vanuity/Omni Biz solutions BS but more importantly I didn't used that neck-top computer and actually look at what was really required. In short, I over analysed all the information I was fed and failed to see the truth.

The unvarnished truth is what I wrote just above, you need potential customers, you need a product and you need targetted traffic.

The Devil, as they say, is in the details. In this case the details are also simple. You really need to get the book from Geoff Shaw, this is the simplest, cheapest and fastest way to profit I know. I have been using these methods for a little over 4 months now and I am totally impressed. I have taken a blog from almost no traffic (around 20 visits per month) to significant traffic (around 20,000 visits per month) and another from 5 per month (on a good month) to 80,000 per month in the same time frame. Geoff explains it simply, with examples, in his book Get Google Smart.

What you'll discover is that getting traffic and backlinks are so simple and easy that you'll have ample time on your hands for surfing the net, chatting in forums and still make money. Geoff shows you what he is doing right now to create a new $200,000 per year income, no sneaky hidden tricks or getting all his 'Guru" buddies to promote stuff for him. Actually I'm not sure he even has any 'Guru' buddies.

Adding a bit more detail, do keyword research to find out what people are looking for - Google can help you here for free, find a product which satisfys those people, try Clickbank, PayDotCom, CPA offers etc., set up a free landing page, use a free Blooger blog, send visitors, Google can help you here as well and I'm not talking Adwords.

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