What the “gurus” aren’t telling you about making money
So I feel a rant coming on. I only have myself to blame though as for some reason I can’t stop reading 100s of different SEO blogs, it comes with the territory of being interested in something I suppose. Don’t get me wrong there’s lots of “interesting” content out there when it comes to internet marketing but there’s so much fluff too that you gotta wade through html for days before you find that nugget of useful info.
So anyway I was reading this post today at seo-theory.com where Michael essentially says people are way too hyped up about link-building. I don’t necessarily disagree with this to a point especially when it comes to some of the useless link-building techniques I see around the net today. However he then drops the bomb that he only spends around 10% – 15% of his time link building at also that uber googlar Matt Cuts says links are only 1% of the algorithm. I mean seriously, go spend 10-15% of your time building links for “car insurance” with the rest on your “site architecture” and get back to me. I probably won’t see you in the top 1000.
This is by no means the first time I’ve seen a post like this on a SEO blog but it’s still weird every time I read this stuff. The only explanation I can come up with is people are trying to setup pre-made excuses for clients about the more difficult aspects of SEO.
“Link building is very 2005”
Still as I’ve said before there can only be one guy at No1 making money on every search and for the rest there’s a million excuses. When it comes down to it there’s really only one thing that matters and that’s if you’re making money from your site or not, everything else is just technical nonsense. Part of the problem of course is the inherent nature of internet marketing when it comes to making a living as few people really get the concept of earning money online and how much work it actually takes to get off the ground. Indeed the delay search engines impose on new sites is probably one of the most off putting things for new people that most don’t make it past the first month.
People often ask me what the keys to a successful website are and it’s really one of those impossible questions to answer just because every site and more importantly every market is different. For instance if you are an online store selling physical goods your margins are very different than someone setting up a blog and selling advertising to make money. The problem is that even though people are developing wildly different sites “Gurus” are handing out this universal advice as a one size fits all solution. I’m hoping not to get into any of that rubbish here on the blog and will try to be as specific as possible (even when I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about sometimes!).
This brings me on to another point with the Internet marketing Gurus, all the terrible products and books they sell. Don’t get me wrong not all the money making ideas they “sell” are scams but I’d say about 95% are. They are quite easy to spot though, if they promise the world within 24hours of purchase then you know what to expect and only have yourself to blame. With that being said though I have bought 2 very good IM products this year which have saved/made me quite a bit of money, however I did have to waste a lot of cash on other useless stuff before I found them. Now I’m not actually going to say what they are here, first because I don’t promote other peoples products here (yet) and second because unless you understand the basic principles website promotion they really aren’t going to work for you anyway. It’s probably one of the biggest problems with the make money on the web industry, they are selling these advanced programs to newbie’s because all the advanced people have already bought it (there’s not that many advanced people). I will say though its v exciting when you finally find a program/system that allows you to save days or even weeks of work. Notice how I define the value as saved time and not direct money because at the heart of this thing is work and the time to do it. The work will always be required but the processes can be streamlined, improved and sometimes even outsourced.
So the question remains, how do you know if the latest money making scheme you are reading about actually works? Well you don’t but for a start it should never be a scheme and it should always be founded on principles that you do understand. For instance if you do understand how article marketing works in relation to your website promotion then a tool that helps you speed that up a few hundred percent is obviously going to in-directly increase your income. However if the “system” is another mysterious promise and only talks about the money you can make how likely is it to be legit?
So anyway this post started out as a rant about one guys “seo theory” and ended up in the more general area of internet gurus, are they the same people? The thing is being able to sort the good information from the bad is the fundamental principle of learning in general and not just this internet business stuff. If I had to give advice to someone just starting out in the online world I would say start small with different techniques and see what works. Also you need to understand the general principles of what’s happening in any marketing situation in order to suss out whether a new opportunity is the real deal or not. Blind faith is only going to get you so far my friends.
So that rant lasted a bit longer than I expected but still it’s nice to let of some steam in html form. Until next time…
Eternal question: How to make money fast
Ok so I was thinking about this today. If I was starting from no-where and I had to learn how to make money fast with the internet what would I do? It’s one of those weird hypothetical questions because what exactly are the rules of the game? If you’re saying that I have none of the knowledge or resources that I have now to help me then it changes the situation quite a lot. But anyway technicalities aside I wanted to look into the question as I think it’s one every new person to the internet business world is asking. One thing I do want to clarify is how much money we are talking about and what kind of timeframes are involved. There’s so many get rich quick scams on the net these days that promise millions overnight with no work that I want to be realistic with people over what can be achieved. So what I’m going to look at is how easy would it be for a completely new person to the industry to make £500 extra a month part-time (I’m going to assume most of you still have day jobs).
- Writing content. I have actually talked about this one on the blog before and I really do see it as a legit source of income that you can just get started straight away with. The thing about writing content though is that you don’t really get paid all that much in the beginning. This is because there’s a big price range when it comes to quality of content as people are using content for all types of purposes. Most of the prices are in US cents and I’ve seen quotes from 1c per word all the way up to 3c. There was a post by a guy over at smartpassiveincome.com where he talks about how he started his online business just by writing guest posts for other bloggers. Seems like he was actually getting quite good money but I think the key to his success was getting developing a regular deal direct with bloggers who were looking for quality content. So there were no middle men and he was writing quality content for around 3c a word. He says he was only doing about 2-3 hours a day yet was making over £600 a month which is very impressive. So it does seem worth looking into but you’re going to have to wait for a while till the bigger pay cheques start to come in.
- Building websites. So as you can all guess this is my favourite method for making money because it’s the one I’ve spent most of my internet career on. It’s a method with solid foundations because as long as there’s an internet there are going to be people surfing around trying to buy things and if you can attract those people (even if it’s a small number) there is money to be made. There’s no doubt that this technique is much more technical than the last of just writing content for money however the great thing is that a website can be making you money while you sleep were a labour intensive things like content creation can feel more like a 9-5 job. One major problem with the website thing though is the time it can take to get results. Since Google and other search engines will be one of your main sources of customers you need to realise it can take a few months before you get any traction there. Still the webmasters who have mastered the overall skill are often able to generate money quickly.
- So this method is very unusual and it’s something I only recently learned about myself. The good thing though is it seems like a very fast way to make some extra cash, indeed some of the figures I’ve seen says it’s possible to make around £500 in a week or two with it. I first read about the idea at theregister which is an IT news site. They don’t usually have stories about making money through the internet but this “gambling for free” idea caught my eye. Now don’t get me wrong I’m not advocating gambling as a way to earn money as I hardly ever do it myself. I don’t even play the lottery because I think it’s a system to keep people lazy and stupid. Anyway you may or may not know that many of the online betting sites give away cash bonuses for new players or so called “free bets”. They can do this because of the huge potential value of a new customer on these betting sites. The “free bet” can be anywhere from £10 to £100 and it’s added to your account as soon as you sign up. However the thing is you usually can’t use it until you deposit and equal amount of your own money via credit card and then you have to bet the whole amount (and hopefully win) in order to claim it. Ok so no secrets so far however there are also lots of sites that let you bet on a team to lose like Betfair etc and this means you could bet against yourself ie the free bet on the other site. So normally when you bet against yourself both bets cancel themselves out however when some of the money is free (ie 50% of one bet) then you are guaranteed a return. Now the return probably isn’t going to be huge as you can expect anywhere between 60% and 70% profit. So on a £200 bet 50% of which is free you could maybe make between £10 and £30 profit depending on fees and other conditions. That amount of profit may not seem like a lot however when you consider the sheer number of betting sites that are doing introductory offers its clear you can make some good money very quickly. The original article here probably explains this better than I have done but hopefully I’ve got across the basics.
I actually have a few more ideas for making some quick cash but I don’t want to confuse people with more ideas than they need as the internet is often confusing enough. It’s also worth noting that if something’s too good to be true it probably so all the methods detailed above require a reasonable amount of work in order to earn a return. Even with the last “gambling” idea you have to keep detailed track of what you’re doing and spend time signing up to all these sites and adding your details, nothings easy lol. Still hopefully it will give you guys some inspiration on how to make money fast with the internet.
