Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

Once upon a time there was a young man, his name was Paul. At around age 6 Paul discovered the wonderful world of computers when his big brother was bought his very first ZX81. He was instantly taken with these fancy new toys that gave him far more interactivity than his He-Man toy figures ever could. But he was a selfish little sod and rather than playing the games that other people “wanted” him to play Paul thought he rather play his own games. So at age 7 he decided to learn how to make-up his own games for his Vic20. By age 9 Paul had written several adventure games in Basic, these were fun but what he really wanted to do was move things around on the screen, like the pros. So at age 11, on the pride and joy that was his commodore Amiga he taught himself Assembler. He then became an anti-social little git as he spent years knocking out program after program. From that point on Paul only dreamt of writing computer programs for a living, that was his destiny.

Jump forward a few years and Paul is now 17 and looking for his first job. He’s got several more languages in his locker and can write pretty much anything he wants. He’s offered the choice of 2 jobs, 1 as a developer in the government, one as a programmer in a small software house. He’s offered both jobs on the basis that he shows them 100 lines of the maths behind his recently finished GPS system. He KNOWS deep down that even though the pay is much less, the benefits are non existent and it will be much harder work he wants to work for the small software house. He LOVES programming, writing applications is his life, be it games, database systems or just the fun little applications that make peoples lives easier. It’s been his thing since he was 6 and he’s bloody good at it. He’s better than good, Paul is only looking for a job because he’s recommended to leave college a year early after one of his lecturers sees the game he writes in pure C to demonstrate how a processor works. To sit in a government office programming exactly what he’s told is not his idea of fun.

At age 27 Paul finds himself in a position where he can work for himself. His programs have become so popular over the internet that just the traffic on his software site creates a good income. He then gets his moment in the spot light when one of his programs appears on PC Pro as one the 100 greatest freeware programs ever. This is great, he now has all his time to write what he wants. BUT this is where his mindset changes. Seeing the potential money that can be made online Paul’s concentration starts to wander. Rather than doing what he loves he starts to spend more and more time doing something that he hates, writing! Before he knows it Paul has that many websites that need fresh “text” content that he’s spending all day every day just writing. He’s being a dickhead, he’s forgotten the one thing that he was truly good at – top notch software. What software he does write now is rushed and jumbled together. Paul has the freedom to do anything he wants at the moment and instead of doing what he loves, instead of writing programs that people download by the tens of thousand, instead of writing software that people link to in their thousands he’s writing this shit and trying to game links using ping backs. Yes he makes a very good living online but is there really any need to tell the world about it? He spends his time reading about affiliate marketers and MMO bloggers who with no actual “real” skills or talent at all, are millionaires. He finds himself defending affiliate marketing as a “legitimate” business when in reality he knows that it’s for scum. Tricking the stupid into parting with money for what is 99% crap. He looks up to these people, Chow, Cow, Shoemoney, Rowse, Johnson, Cruz and wants to be like “them”. From being brought up with fuck all he’s some how gone from the mentality of working your ass off for everything to just wanting the easy way. “Why write software (which requires a brain) when I can just churn out this brainless shit?” If he stopped to think for one minute he’d realise that all these people just had ONE lucky break. They’re not clever and it’s certainly not repeatable. He knows that the real “clever” marketers are people you don’t see or hear from. Paul has become a fucking joke in his own mind and his so far from happy it’s not funny.

To be brutally fucking honest this shit stops here. From now on I’m not an internet marketer, an affiliate marketer, a SEO or anything else that wank. I am somebody who makes his living writing software, not words.

For those that have read along with me for the last year, thanks. It has certainly been a step outside my comfort zone and I appreciate the support you’ve given me. My final bit of advice is simply this – step away from the internet and do something real with your lives. You’ll feel so much better for it, I promise. You could be the one that “gets lucky” with the internet but what are the chances really, you’d be better of trying to win that Euromillions Roll-over.

It can happen. A slight miss calculation here, a change in the exchange rate there and suddenly you find yourself with $20,000 sat in the bank earning interest but burning a hole in your pocket. The question is what would you do with it? Do you invest it in the latest make money online fad, use it to put in some serious time with PPC affiliate marketing or something else?

Perhaps you buy some new gadgets or invest it in some dwindling stock?

Seeing as how the Euromillions draw this Friday is for a guaranteed £100 million jackpot maybe it’s worth blowing the whole lot on lottery tickets? Now there’s an idea!

Any and all suggestions welcomed.

This is another very exciting potential revenue source for bloggers, have you ever heard of Commission Videos? Me either until last Saturday!

Commission Videos is a competitor to Google’s “Adsense in YouTube” style adverts, the difference being that instead of home movie style video that is the norm on YouTube they are offering video from top quality legitimate sources, no legal worries. Video source comes directly from respected partners such as the Associated Press and MTV for example. Commission Videos then marries this video source to some advertising and puts it in a widget of various sizes that you can embed in your blog or website.

So you’re probably thinking what is so revolutionary about this? Besides the whole “legal” thing (that matters to me) there is also the eCPM. They pay a huge $7 eCPM! So that’s $7 for every 1000 manual (your visitor presses play) video play backs. If you set the video to play automatically that rate drops to $0.50. That’s still not too shabby in my books.

Where Would I Use It?
I’ve got one class of visitor in particular in mind for this. Social bookmarking. In my experience people who arrive via Stumble, Digg etc ignore adverts. However, they’re a sucker for a bit of video in a post. A nice related news video in your controversial stumble worthy post and it’s going to be some quick dollars.

You’d be crazy not to be thinking about having at least a little bit of Adsense on your MMO blog at the moment. With average clicks bringing in around $1.50 it is a very easy way of making money. The problem is finding a layout that will get clicks from search engine traffic but not annoy your regular readers. People searching click, regular readers don’t. Anybody who reads this blog regularly will know that there has been some in-post Adsense. It’s annoying to those people who are only interested in reading the content, I’m not stupid, I know that! But on the other hand positioning it elsewhere just doesn’t get the clicks. Over 80% of the traffic for this blog now comes from the search engines, that means in general terms nice click happy customers. I’d be a fool to ignore the income potential for those visitors. So long story short, I need a way of showing ads to those visitors that arrive via a search engine and not to those regular readers.

I’ve found the solution. It’s a WordPress plugin called Who Sees Ads. It does what it says on the tin. You define a number of rules which decide whether or not a section of code/text is displayed or not. Please see the image below but in my case I’ve set it to show the ads to search engine visitors but not to regular readers.

If you’re a regular reader and still seeing Adsense in the post body itself then keep coming back, it might take a few hits to recognise you as a regular reader but from that point on no more in post Adsense. It’s really tough trying to keep everybody happy but hopefully this should go some way towards it?

Back in July of 2007 when I started themakemoneyonline.net I was very new to all things WordPress. I’d only ever used it once before, adding a blog to an existing website. That site was hosted on an IIS server so I was never really fussed about the SEO factors of using WordPress, I just needed a quick and simple content system. So in terms of getting a WordPress driven website to perform in the search engines this was my very first.

I do like WordPress. So much so that I’ve gone on to create probably another dozen websites using it as well as moving several old websites over. Yesterday though I discovered a problem that has been holding me back and it is something so simple that I’m positive there are plenty of people who have done the same.

Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is a simple 2 word phrase that can strike the fear of god into SEOs. WordPress’s biggest weakness (out of the box) is the high possibility of picking up a duplicate content penalty. Or at the very least having the wrong content indexed. This is where the robots.txt file helps. At the moment mine looks like this:-

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /author/
Disallow: */page/*
Disallow: /wp-images/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /backup/
Disallow: /banners/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: /*?*

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /

User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /

There is one vital thing missing…I don’t exclude tag pages! It’s because when I first started using WP there were no tags. Since then they’ve been added and I’ve started tagging posts across the majority of my WordPress websites. Depending on your template but for the vast majority, a tag page is given much more authority than the actual post itself (it’s all to do with the tag cloud in your template). This results in lots of non keyword targeted tag pages that although indexed don’t rank anywhere whilst your targeted posts end up ignored. It’s a lose-lose situation.

I recently started a new blog where this became apparent. Within the first week I had 20 pages indexed in Google. The home page, 2 posts and 17 tag pages. The home page brings a tiny amount of organic traffic (it’s still very new). The 2 posts that are keyword targeted and indexed are already in the top 3 results of Google for their keywords and bringing targeted traffic. However the tag pages that have been indexed are nowhere in the first 3 pages of search results, even when you search for their title. The posts that contain the content similar to what is on the tag pages aren’t indexed at all.

The really simple solution here is a 5 second fix. All I need to do is add “Disallow: /tag/” to my robots.txt file.

I only had 1 job to do yesterday. Just one simple job. Update one web page. I knew that if I did that 10 minutes work in time to get crawled by Google it would be worth anywhere from $40 to $150. Why then did it take me SIX hours to get around to doing it?

I just wasn’t in the mood yesterday, I slept in until 8 o’clock and even then I was still tired. When I finally made it into the office I could and did find any excuse to do anything other than that little bit or real work that I had to do. It was a check and re-check stats sort of day. I had a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach, for somebody who never feels the cold I was shaking. I was convinced in my own head that this was it, I’d finally had enough of making my living this way. My motivation and body was giving up on me. Maybe it was time to give up and go and get a normal job again?

Then last night the feeling in my stomach was getting steadily worse. Maybe it was stress caused by the situation I’ve put myself in? Maybe this making £5 one day but £1000 the next and never knowing where I stand was stressing me too much? Well after almost 2 hours on the toilet with serious issues “at both ends” I can confirm that rather than my body telling me it was time to give up and my lack of work being down to a lack of motivation I’d say it was all down to some fairly major food poisoning! Man, that wasn’t pretty! I had an early night and have taken the day off today to just mess around the house not doing anything much (except drinking lots of water). I’ve got ideas for posts and new sites coming out of my ears! Just goes to show that sometimes you can read too much into these things. Healthy body, healthy mind.

As far as I’m concerned when you filter it down, reduce people to the base components there are in fact only 3 types of blogger. Each absolutely belivies that they are doing things the right way and both the other categories are either stupid or scum.

The Hippy
The hippy blogger writes only from the heart. Each blog is composed in the most beautiful heart felt way including more research than can possibly be healthy. The hippy blogger is 99% politically correct, does their best not to offend anybody and will NEVER EVER give in to accepting payment for anything related to their blog. This means no adverts, no sponsored posts, nothing that makes any money. In fact they wouldn’t even accept a guest post because their blog is their baby and there is no way they are going to let ANYBODY pollute it. The hippy blogger comes from 1 of 2 backgrounds. They are either independently wealthy, the blog is something to fill their day as they are sat at home. Either that or they are in fact just a plain old hippy. Writing their blog is something to do in between hugging trees and saving the world. They don’t need to worry about making any income from “their time” because they are 100% subsidised by the rest of the tax paying population. Hypocritically all other types of blogger are scum in the eyes of the hippy.

The Balanced Blogger
The balanced blogger writes on a subject they enjoy but one that they can also see some value in. Whilst they aren’t blogging only for the money they aren’t happy putting so much time and effort into something that doesn’t give them any return. They really do put time and effort into each post. They certainly aren’t opposed to writing a paid review (as long as they think it’s something their audience would be interested in). In terms of their blog layout it is 70% about making their content accessible and 30% about trying to make a buck. Expect to see “a few” 125×125 ads and maybe one or two other types of advertising (be it in text or ad blocks). You will find affiliate links in the posts. The balanced blogger is just as interested in quality as they are in making money although deep down they’ll probably admit that the quality issue is just as much about building their income. In terms of background most balanced bloggers have a full time job or have just left university. Chances are they don’t like their job/the thought of getting a job and they see blogging as a way of expressing themselves about something they enjoy (as opposed to their crap job) as well as making a bit of extra money. The balanced blogger dreams of becoming an authority on their subject and making it BIG. Hippies are seen as stupid, spammers as scum.

The Spammy Bastard Blogger
The spammers blog is born out a keyword research tool as a way of exploiting a niche that will make money. As they have no interest in the subject expect lots of scraped content and “guest” posts. Expect the content to mostly dry up after the first month. The template will be 90% adverts and 10% content. If you look into the background behind a spammy bastards blog you’ll see almost all the back links are social bookmark based (who is going to link to it naturally?) or link directories. You’ll see product reviews from the most obscure products that have jack all to have the blog. They’ll accept guest reviews from products and websites that they know are crap all in order to make a quick buck. They will boost their own stats in order to generate advertising income by using dodgy bot ridden traffic exchange systems. The chances are that the spammy blogger already has a number of successful other websites. He’s building a portfolio of websites. If you look deep enough you might find that most balanced bloggers also can fall into the spammy bastard category. If you’re looking for a spammy bastard the first place to look is at students, the quick buck low risk spam blog is the perfect “opportunity”. As far as the spammy bastard is concerned everybody blogging for any other reason than making money is being stupid.

So that’s how I see things, I have a fair idea where I fit in, what about you?

When I was told this by one expert I dismissed it. When I was told it by a second expert I assumed he’d found out from the first and still ignored it. However by the time I was being preached to by the third expert about this I thought maybe there was something in it.

I’m talking about gaining extra backlinks for your posts. At the end of the day the SEO battle will come down to links, whoever has the most valued, relevant links will win. Unfortunately link building also happens to be the most tedious part of building a website. It is usually a toss up of getting low value links quickly or spending lots of time getting a few valued links. The method that I’ve heard is about getting relevant links quickly and easily.

Just 2 of the places I’ve seen this featured include Shoemoney’s Marketing Tools and Market Samurai. With those endorsements surely it will work? Every bone in my body is telling me it’s too spammy to be anything good but these guys are endorsing it. Shoemoney does it for Christ’s sake! There are paid tools to make it easier. People pay to be able to use this method So I’m going to give it a go and see what happens. If it does work I’ll be letting you know a free way of making it work for you too. If it doesn’t work then just pretend this post never existed.