If you play around in the space where I play, aka MMO or blogging, you may have noticed a bit of silence of late from an influential corner of our world. I want to begin by stating that I am not a blogging guru who makes a lot of money online. But I have an understanding of how websites attract traffic and the ways that a website can make money. But I pay attention to the writings of people who do make a good income online, I’ve learned a lot from them over the past year and a half, and I want to write about what I’ve been hearing or not hearing of late from these individuals.

First thing is first: In case you are wondering, it is possible to make a very good living blogging or working as an internet marketer. (I use these terms synonymously, however they have distinct meanings. But the meanings are close enough for me to just throw them around interchangeably, and my preferred term is blogger.)

As I have discussed in the past, there are several ways to make money with a blog but they all come down to one basic equation: Finding a method to monetize (make money) from the traffic (visitors) that come to your blog. There are a whole bunch of strategies that one can employ here for the money making part. Here are a few possibilities: You can create a membership site, The Wall Street Journal is the largest membership site that I can think of. Or you could serve as an affiliate marketer like Ben’s Bargains whereby you earn a commission when a person buys a product from a retailer, like amazon.com or any of a million others, that you have sent your visitors to. There are also ways to make money by showing ads, such as through an ad network like Adify. Or you could make money by using a contextual ad service such as adbrite or Gmon’s adsense whereby you make money each time one of your visitors clicks away from your site and is delivered to the advertisers site to view their offer. Lastly, like Michael Webb, you could create digital products, or any product really, yourself and sell your creation to your visitors.

There are a couple of other ways that people can make money on the web with a blog or site, but that is a good overview of the basics, assuming I am not forgetting something major — which is always possible considering the state of my mind.

Anyway, as I mentioned above the equation is traffic + monetization = money for you (the blogger).

In reality there are two basic ways to get visitors to your blog or site. The first is free, usually by getting placement in a SE’s results but sometimes through social networks or other methods. The second method is to pay for your visitors (advertising). Everyone I know prefers getting traffic to their site or blog for free, though all will pay for traffic if they can make a profit from the purchase.

So, for a while, there were a number of bloggers talking about how to use SEO to draw free traffic from the SEs. These same bloggers would use their techniques to draw traffic to their own sites and they would then monetize that traffic using one (or many) of the methods discussed above.

But, the problem is that the SEs don’t like this. In the beginning, the GMon had dreams of the cream rising to the top “organically” with the best resource for “oil filters” coming up in the number one spot anytime someone searched for oil filters. They created a system that, theoretically, *should* have resulted in this. However, their system, though quite complex, isn’t rocket science. Since there was money (sometimes a LOT of money) to be made by getting all of those visitors looking for oil filters to YOUR site, people started to try various methods to improve the placement of their site in the search engine’s results. In other words, they tried to game (trick) the SEs. While this was surely anticipated, this nevertheless, probably infuriated the holier-than-thou folks at the search engines. They surely just wished that everyone would just play “fair” and not be so damn greedy — but the searchers should still click on the SE’s PPC sidebar as often as possible.

So, as I understand it, the SE started to make clear their policies of what they considered especially egregious manipulation of their system and the consequences for site owners. Gmon started punishing sites that tried to manipulate the results. However, there are many gray areas in this regard. They couldn’t remove EVERY site that wasn’t pure as snow (very few are) or searchers would use a competing SE.

And, sometimes, Gmon faced a conflict of interest.

What if a site was manipulating their knowledge of how the SE ranked sites to get their site ranked at the top? What if their site had crappy content, like ehow.com, ezinearticles.com or (especially) wisegeek.com? BUT what if these sites were Gmon’s advertising partners? By being at the top of the SE results, GMon made more money. In the early days, this probably would have been insufficient enticement for GMon to allow a crap site like wisegeek to play the system the way that they do. But, times have changes, and GMon is just like every other corporation, except for the fact that they know what you ate for dinner last night, where you ate it, what you are thinking right now, and the date you will die. But, I digress.

The point is that all the animals are not equal. Some sites get different treatment than others and the quality of the site’s content is not the sole determining factor. These things are at the whim of the dictator (and the algo).

Anyway, back to the point, there were several bloggers who talked openly about the methods they used to draw free SE traffic. In some cases, they made money by sharing this information, in other cases they didn’t make enough to offset the risk that by sharing their methods those methods would become less effective or, more frightening, that the GMon would take notice of them and put them on the shitlist. If you are a blogger who makes money online, you probably don’t want to be on any SE’s shitlist.

At a certain point, not too long ago, everyone wizened up. It had become very risky to try to make money by talking about your methods of making money. What’s shocking is that the system worked as long as it did for these guys. Usually, when you yourself rely on certain methods for your livelihood, you probably would be unlikely to share them, especially if this could potentially hurt you financially. But, lucky for me, a few brave folks took on GMon and told it like it is and put tens of Gs into their own pockets as well! Hats off to you, boys!

In any event, those days are pretty much over. Griz’s Blog was one of the first to go silent. But it was followed by others. And then still others. Others switched to email newsletter or private forums.

The bad news, if you are starting out, is that all of the legit free sources for information on how to make a living online have mostly dried up. There are still good sites, but they can’t say IT plainly. You have to learn how to read between the lines. And sometimes, they won’t say IT at all. Of course, there are still lotsa sites that will sell you information about how to make a million dollars in 90 days or whatever but… buyer beware.

This makes the learning process a little more challenging if you are just starting out, but do not despair. You won’t make any money your first year anyway, so just keep trying and learning and eventually you might start to figure a few things out.

If I ever started to make $25k a month online, you can count on the fact that I will be keeping my method to myself.

In any event, this is my take on radio silence of late and a little insight into how I perceive the game to be played. But, again, who am I?

Out.