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.

How to accomplish this goal?

As I have talked about before there are a couple of ways to make money blogging. The first is to operate a single or handful of dominant, traffic pulling flagship blogs. The second way is to own many, many smaller blogs that target only a keyword or two. I think that in the long term, the first option is vastly more desirable, however it also a lot more time intensive. So, for now, I think that the main goal will be churning out a lot of smaller blogs.

The first step is to start throwing out blogs. I am using the method of targeting keywords that get between 300 to 3000 exact searches a month in the google keyword tool. If I find a good keyword then I check the competition in google. I want to see some pretty weak sites in the first five spots, I am particularly excited if I see some articles in those spots. Then I buy the domain and start about researching content.

On content

There are a lot of diverse opinions on creating content. My take is that I am building sites for long term potential. I would rather get a lower CTR (click through rate) by writing quality content that will stand the test of time. The fact of the matter is that I think creating sniper blogs is somewhat dicey anyway as they could be frowned upon by the big G. But, if the content is excellent, then I think they can stand the test of time. Plus I think they might be able to attract natural links which makes their placement on the top of the listings somewhat self-sustaining.

This strategy is not entirely mine. I have borrowed it from some successful internet marketers who use it. The best proponent of this method is Ben K who has written a succinct guide to this method on his blog, How to Make Money Online Quickly. You can look into his blog if you want to see how he explains things.

Where I am Today

Thus far in 2010 I have created about ten niche blogs. I have not, of yet, put any adsense on them. I will eventually throw some adsense up there but I’d like to start getting some traffic first. Some of these blogs, which I started rolling out in late 2009, are already on the first page or two for their keywords. But many are not. In fact, though all the blogs have been indexed, most appear to be sandboxed. There may be a trick to get blogs ranking immediately but I am simply not aware of it. I have studied the couple of my blogs which shot right to the top of the SERPs and I can not really ascertain why that has happened. It could be niche specific and my other adsense blogs might have some sort of penalty that will disappear with age or content or links or some combination of the three. We shall see.

But, I am not lingering on one site too long. I get the site up, put a couple of thousand words over several posts on it, send a couple of article links to it, and then move on to the next site. Eventually, I intend to circle back around and give these blogs a little more link love. For now I just want to create them.

For the people who are thinking about making money with adsense on your own sites, I do have a little bit of a warning. Be prepared to work. If I am going to get to my goal of $4500 a month this year, then it is going to take a great deal of effort. I have several blogs that have 5-10 posts on them and bring in about $1 a day. In order to make $150 a day, I will need more than 100 of such sites which is hundreds of pages of content. And, remember that if you are going to be doing article marketing of any sort, you will need even more content in which to locate your links. So, it is a lot of work. But, the good thing, is that once you get your blogs up and ranking pretty well, they don’t require a whole lot of maintenance. I have sites that have been bringing in $1 a day since the summer time and I have not worked one minute on them. This leads me to believe that 150 (or more) niche sites will be entirely manageable for me.

The other thing that I am thinking, is that if I get 150 (or more) blogs and they are all drawing traffic, that I might be able to sell some advertising direct across the network. Though, we have to see about that as time goes on. I just think it would be entirely possible.

Traffic

All of my sites depend on the search engines to draw visitors. And I find that my niche sites should be able to draw 25 page views a day on average. To accomplish they will probably have to rank in top three for their keyword. This is why I focus on keywords that have lesser competition and less searches. It is my best guess that if I keyword gets more than 3,000 exact searches a month, that the keyword will eventually some competition. I hope that, for these keywords with smaller numbers, once I get to the top of page 1 that I will be able to stay there indefinitely. We shall see.

Niches

I am trying to spread my net as wide as possible. I am only purchasing one or two domains in each niche that I am targeting. If I find a niche to be particularly responsive, I believe that I can always go back in the future and look for more keywords to target. However, as I am still in the learning stage, I think targeting as many niches as possible is my best strategy. So, I do have to spend a decent amount of time researching to produce the content, as I am not yet an expert in every niche I intend to enter. But, I believe that with proper research I will able to produce stellar content in all of these niches.

Plans

The thing now is for me to budget my time as effectively as possible. Initially, I was planning to post to Paycheck Blogging quite frequently. I have decided to take a longer term view of this project instead. I’d like to post to this blog once or twice a month and not a whole lot more. I also, initially, wanted to do a lot of article marketing for this blog. Those plans are on hold as well until I can get these niche sites up and running. I will maybe do an article or so a week for this blog.

If you are curious, I am having fun being a part time blogger. I am enjoying the process quite a bit and I am really looking forward to the day that I meet my income goals and can myself full time. I am going to do whatever I can to make sure that that happens this year. 2009 was great for learning. 2010 is going to be great for earning.

When I write an article for a random niche site, I do it for the links primarily. An article at Ezine for instance might get a handful of visitors in the first couple of days after I post it and sometimes this results in some adsense clicks and a few bucks. But honestly I don’t write clever articles or resource boxes that beg the person to click through. I figure that the people reading articles about some niche topic, say above ground pool filters, are internet marketers for the most part and not really people on Ezine looking for information about the topic. So I write articles that are just barely good enough to be published, 250-300 word snippets that are anything but gripping.

Like I said, I am writing the article for the links not traffic. But this site is in perhaps the most social of niches as it is about how to make money online. There are lots of people on EzineArticles actually looking for information on how to make money online and there are people who have crap sites about this topic actually looking for content to put on their sites. It occurred to me that if I write articles that are a bit better than the crap that I write for niche sites that some of those articles might be picked up and I could get a lot more links.

This has already happened to a degree and it has me thinking. To date, I have published eight articles on Ezines and another handful on the other article directories. I am getting a trickle of traffic from other domains which have republished those articles on their own sites. Now, I must imagine that these are not very good links at all. But, they are still links and I find myself in a new position.

You see, rarely was anyone picking up my articles about above ground pool filters. But people do seem to be picking up these articles on making money online and I can write a decent 500-800 word article on the topic. It strikes me that I will be far better served by writing the best content that I can for the article directories. Usually, I will write no more than 10 articles for a given niche site because everything that I read suggests diminishing returns for links from the same domain. However, if I am able to get more websites to publish my stuff then I may just writewritewrite as it will continue to do me some good. I think.

Currently, Yahoo shows 15 links for this domain. I think I will try to write a good article for EZA a day and see how many links those articles generate for me over the course of a couple of months. Again, I don’t know that they will really do me all that much good as they will be duplicate content links, but I’d like to see what happens.

Out.

I spent about six months trying various make money programs and ideas and never really had any success. I became disenfranchised in the summer and gave up for a while. In the fall I realized that I had quit too soon and that I needed to give it another chance. Unfortunately, due to other commitments, I did not have a lot of time to focus on the project. But, I had found a strategy.

Following in the footsteps of some bloggers who I trusted, I decided that I could make money by creating niche sites using keywords without a lot of competition. I decided that I would launch 100 niche sites and monetize them with google adsense. The problem was that I still did not have a lot of time. I could only get a few sites out a week. In November I had to scale back my online activities for a variety of reasons. For the last couple of months I have not been devote any time to blogging. However, at this point I am now able to allocate a lot more time to the project.

Currently, I have 10 niche sites up. And I have another 10 sites that I intend to develop more fully. My niche sites are currently earning between $3 and $12 a day in adsense. I think that with another 90 or so sites that I may be able to reach $2000 – $3000 a month which is the target.

I’d like to do 10 niche sites a week for the next month which would give me 50 sites by the end of January. Once I get the content up I’ll do a round of article marketing on Ezine, and Dashboard. I also might throw in some buzzles as well. Then, I’ll see how I am ranking.

I know that with the 10 niche sites that I have done thus far my rankings in the SERPs have varied. I am studying the sites of mine which are ranking well to try to learn from them. I find that for keywords that get less than 1000 exact searches a month that I need to rank in the top 3-4 so if I don’t think that I will able to get there with a minimum amount of link building then I don’t buy the domain.

I have high hopes for 2010. I’d like to be able to focus entirely on my blogs this year. I think that my overall goal is to reach a point in the coming year where I can quit my day job and become a full time internet marketer. To reach that goal I am going to have to work my tail off and be able to churn out a lot more than 10 sites a week so I’m not holding my breath. But that is the goal anyway.

Time to get back to work.

So, tonight after submitting a few articles to Ezine Articles I decided to go for a late night drive. I think pretty well in the car and I had a couple of things to think about. I was on the feeder road to the interstate highway near my house when out of nowhere a dog darted in front of me. And I hit the dog. I ran the dog over in my car. Damn. That sucks. Now the night is ruined because I like dogs.

So, that said, I am going to switch gears and talk about why I like blogging because that’s what I want to write about. I just wanted to mention the other thing because this is my lousy blog and I wanted to tell you what a lousy night this is and I know that that is neither here nor there.

But I DO like blogging. There are oh-so-many reasons for this, but the main one is one I already alluded to. I can blog whenever I want (like right now at 5:56 AM) and from wherever I want. And, folks, this is a huge part of the appeal. In addition to working better in the middle of the night when there are no distractions, I also work better out of the house. Where I live in Texas there are several independent coffee shops that are open all the time. I find that if I head over to my favorite Austin coffee shop I can park myself in a comfy stuffed chair and work on my blogs around the clock. I will say that this is one thing I like about living where I live as there are many coffeehouses with free wifi — FU Starbucks — that are open after midnight and a few that never, ever close.

This is why I want to be an internet marketer. Yeah, I’d like to make the kind of money that Griz and other IMers make. But the money is not the real draw. The real draw is that I can work at 4 in the morning in the quiet of the night at a chill coffee house where they play music that I would never buy. I like that.

Another thing about blogging that I like is that there are no bosses. There is nobody that you have to report to. There is no person who holds your financial destiny in his hands. There is no kissing ass to get ahead and there is no ironing your khaki’s so that you look like you “belong” in middle management. There is no laughing at the boss’s jokes when they are not funny. There is no freaking boss! This makes the whole prospect of blogging for a living much more appealing.

Well, I should probably stop to remind you that I really do not blog. Blogging is what people do at the Huffington Post. I write content but I don’t write quirky, witty, ballsy, interesting, fascinating, hilarious, incisive, snarky content. I write boring, informative content on various nonsocial topics. So I am not a blogger in the traditional sense. But I prefer the word “blogger” to “internet marketer” so I tend to use it even if it is really not entirely applicable.

I never wanted (nor do I think that I will ever want) to be a famous blogger. I don’t use my real name on any of my websites. I have made up more fake people than you could imagine. I do not want to be famous and I hope you never learn my name. What I want to do is write informative content on topics that you find off-putting. I want you to find my blogs because they rank well and I want you to ask yourself “Who would start a website about THAT?” Because that’s what I do. I start websites about ridiculous topics. I like to find niches that no internet marketer would want their name attached to and then I start a blog about it because I never wanted you to know my name in the first place.

I love niches that are a little bit sleazy, but not adult, because I know that no “serious” company will ever try to compete with me in the SERPs. If you were a reputable company would you want your company’s website to come up for “lactating man boobs” searches? Of course not. When I stay in the muck I compete against other mucksters but I don’t have to worry (generally) about some media giant plopping a page into my SERPs. Though there are some niches and keywords that I wouldn’t want (or even know how) to monetize. But if the keyword is somewhere in sleaze between pawn shops and abortion pills I will try to hit it.

So, if you are reading this, you may be curious if I am making any money yet. At this point I can only report that I am not there yet. I am putting up sites all the time, but in my whole making money online journey I am probably only at breakeven. I have wasted a lot of money in the past year buying make money ebooks, worthless domains, blogging products, and muchmuchmuch crap. I have burned through many, many domains for instance and most of the blogs that I started did not even get past $10 in adsense. So they were money losers for me. A lot of the problem was that I would put a blog up, write one article and then move on to the next one. I wasted a very long time without a strategy. In fact, the domains that I bought were so useless that I had an Ebay auction and sold a whole lot of them for pennies on the dollar. I lost a lot of money. The domains were terrible though. I felt bad for the poor guy who bought them even if he did get a 90% discount off of their face value.

Anyway, you may be wondering why I am writing this blog post right here. This blog post about blogging is not going to make me any money. I am writing it because I need a break from “work” for a little while. Because I just ran over a dog, hello!! The point of it is that this post will make me NO MONEY. But there is another reason why I am doing it. Besides writing boring crap blogs in sleazy niches I am also trying to build authority-type sites in a few pretty competitive niches. I am building a network of thematically related support sites which, once they all have some Page Rank, might help me eventually rank among my significant competition. But, realistically, if I want to speed up the process, I am going to have to squeeze out some decent links from other internet marketers. Now, these might be tough to get. I don’t really know how likely it is that the competition will link to me as I am not in a position yet to contact other IMs and negotiate an exchange. But, one thing I did notice while browsing Grizzly’s Get Links listings was that a great many of the marketers maintained sites in the make money online niche. Certainly not all of them but a considerable percentage. It got me thinking that one asset I should equip myself with is a blog in the MMO niche of my own. If I had a blog in the MMO niche myself with PR that might come in pretty handy down the road.

But, I don’t think that I want to be a MMO blogger. I don’t make money online yet so nobody will listen to me anyway. But, in a year or so this could be a nice site to have in the arsenal. So, you will, from time to time, get quirky, hopefully-interesting posts like this one that do not make me any money and are not meant to induce a click.

Seeing as I do not yet make much money online, I do not have to worry about talking strategy. I could probably tell the newbie what not to do, but I certainly can not tell the noob how to make $20,ooo a month in IM. Maybe one day I will be able to. But, I should probably point out, even if I did make $20,000 a month online there is no way I would tell you explicitly how I was doing it. I mean, why would I? If a strategy works the best way to muck it up is to tell everyone about it on a blog. So, when I talk about how I am trying to make money, I am going to always talk in generalities because to do otherwise would probably hurt me.

The last thing that I want to say is that I am looking for link exchange partners for this site. If you have a site in MMO and you would be interested in an inpost link exchange send me an email: karl.jetta((guess))paycheckblogging.com.

Out

Anyway, hubs seemed like the wave of the future so I set up and account. Over the course of a month or two I created around 50 hubs on a variety of topics. I was inspired to do this by Ben from Make Money Online with Seo who was in on the hub phenomenon early. Ben created a lot more hubs than I did. I think he ended up with more than 500 of them. And for a while he was making good money. But the good times seemed not to have lasted very long.

Hubpages production exploded as internet marketers started writing articles. Google eventually took notice. It is believed that some sort of penalty was assessed to the hubpages domain which makes it more difficult for new hubs to rank in the SERPs today.

My experience with hubpages was more mixed than Ben’s. I would say that he was much more successful than I was. The reason that I only created 50 hubs was that they were not making me any money. I tried to create hubs in any as many different niches as I could. Some were drawing a little traffic from the search engines. In the past month my fifty hubs have had a thousand visitors come by but my CTR is terrible. On niche sites that I maintain I usually get anywhere from 3% to 12% of my intrepid visitors to click out via an adsense ad. But on hubpages? It was terrible. I had a CTR of less than 1%.

Now, clearly I was doing something wrong because others have done much, much better with CTR. I think the entire episode made me about $10 over multiple months. So, seeing as I was an especially slow writer back then, I probably made about $0.10 an hour for my trouble. So, for making money I have not had any luck with hubpages.

At this point the enthusiasm over hubpages has died down. They are probably still good for links, though even on this count I am suspicious. Let me talk about that for a minute. I think it is possible that links to a site from a hubpage that runs the same adsense ID will not be counted or discounted in some ways. I have no proof for this. I just have a suspicion due to the strange behavior of my sites in the SERPs when linking to and from sites with the same adsense on them. So, you may want to consider setting up a sole proprietorship and signing up for another adsense account under your business name. Just something to think about.

In the final analysis, I would say that hubpages have not been especially useful for me. I have had much better success putting my original content on sites that I own. One tip I would give you if you decide to use hubpages: Don’t put all your hubs under the same username, create multiple identities to better cover your tracks.

I’m out.

I started Paycheck Blogging because I thought it was a cool name for a site. I didn’t really do much with it for a long time. In fact, up until today this blog had been around for more than a year and only contained four posts. The funny thing about those first four posts is how useless they really were. I didn’t know how to make money online and my strategy for monetizing this blog were laughable. Those early couple of posts are, today, embarrassing. But, I do not want to take them down, because frankly I need the content. So, they will remain as reminders of how little the newbie knows about internet marketing.

You may have realized that I have updated this blog a couple of times today. I am doing so because my strategy has changed. I do not monetize this blog. Not that it would matter as it gets dick for traffic. But, it is still useful to me. The fact is that for most search engine marketers links are very valuable. By maintaining a blog in the make money online niche I equip myself with something very useful. As this blog gains age, content and links it becomes valuable to me as a property with which I can link to my friends.

You see, lots of the top internet marketers have sites pertaining to internet marketing and making money online. There might be a time in the future when it will come in handy to me to be able to shoot them a nice juicy link when they write some really compelling content.

For that reason, I am turning some attention to this little blog. It costs me about $9 a year. It makes me nothing. Yet, I think it can be valuable. Remember that.

For instance, I remember in the late 1990s I signed up with a MLM called Streamline. The pitch was basically that if you bought $60 of vitamins a month, you could turn around and recruit others to buy $60 of vitamins each month. And those people who recruit still others and pretty soon, with all these $60 a month flying around, someone would start to make money. It sounded like a great idea at the time, though I was only a teenager and none too experienced in running a business. But I looked at the diagrams which showed how a tremendous downline could be achieved whereby I would be getting a piece of thousands even hundreds of thousands of people’s $60. I signed up and immediately began receiving vitamins. Of course, I never convinced another person that they should buy overpriced vitamins to get rich and over a few months I lost a few hundred dollars before I gave it up.

When I first started looking into making money online I was determined not to repeat this mistake. This was a mixed blessing. The fact of the matter is that there was not anyone that I trusted who could tell me how to make money online for free. I tried the some forums where they proclaimed that they could teach you how to make money online, but I never really learned anything. And the fact of the matter was that nearly everyone there had a product that they wanted me to buy. So, I had no idea what to do.

But, I was determined to make money with the internet. Finally I bought some ebooks on affiliate marketing and blogging and sat down and read. The lesson I learned was that I had been ripped off yet again. My experience with buying products designed to make you money is that they are terrible. Most of them are, in fact, just funnels to get you to buy more of the author’s products or products he is an affiliate for. So, if you are looking to buy a make money ebook, I would just advise you to save your money.

There are multiple ways to make money and, the fact of the matter is that nearly all of them require some start up capital. There are a couple of exceptions to this rule, but they will not make you money quickly. And they probably will not make you very much money.

The first exception to this rule is Project Payday. With Project Payday you can make money by earning other people affiliate commissions for trying products. These people will then pay you. But, even this is not free. For instance, if you sign up for $50 worth of trials with your credit card you might make $100. So, you need to be willing to spend that $50. As most people would be willing to spend $50 to make $100 you may not have a problem with this. But the problem is that those trials that you signed up for then cost you more money in monthly subscriptions unless you call each vendor and cancel your subscription. Trust me when I say that this then becomes a huge hassle.

The other exception is to write for a site that pays you for drawing visitors to their site. For instance there are sites like Associated Content and even hubpages.com that will pay you for providing them with the content. The way that this works is that you submit articles and then when visitors find your articles and view advertising then you get paid. Actually, in some cases the visitors need to take action such as clicking on an adsense ad. You can make money through a site like this, but very, very few make enough money to live on by doing so. If you want to read up on why it is even harder than it used to be to make money with hubpages you can read through Ben’s archives.

The fact remains that you will almost surely not make money quickly by writing content for other sites. Some people, like Ben, who I mentioned above, were making decent money with such sites. But this was in the heyday of these sites and they were only did so after they had written hundreds of articles. And the people who were making a couple of grand a month knew what they were doing. They knew how to write and promote content that would rank on the search engines. They knew about search engine optimization.

The fact of the matter is that you are going to need to spend some money if you want to make a living online. You do not need to spend tons. In fact you can start by just buying a single domain and hosting. But, trust me here, you are probably going to need to spend considerably before you start seeing any returns. The fact is that making money online requires money. If you want to be a success without spending money you are going to have to invest a lot of time in order to make up for you cheapness.

One of the things that I want to do on this blog is talk about ways to make a good return on your money and time. Because, if you want to be an internet marketer (which is just a fancy name for people who make money online) you are going to learn that time is your most precious commodity.

Still, my advice about ebooks stands. Don’t buy any ebooks (the one exception to this the Griz Ebook compiled by one of his students.) Yeah, actually if you are just starting out and are willing to put in the work to make money online you should just buy this ebook. I recommend it because I know that the strategies work and you will be making decent coin in six months. Grizzly is an asset to the make money online community and I do not make any money by promoting this compilation of his methods.

Ok, so maybe I have given you something to think about and you are thinking about ways to make money online free. I would simply echo my statement that you have to spend money and invest time to make money on the internet. Remember that.

I’m out.

Let’s say you’ve got a really popular political blog. You write from the left or from the right (it doesn’t really matter) and you’ve got a loyal readership. Why aren’t you making any money? Because readers don’t make you money. It’s that simple. What does a reader do when they come to your site? They read. They freaking read. That’s all they do. Do you think that makes anybody any money? I know when I go a blog that I like, I consume the information that they present and then I leave. I do not buy anything. I don’t click on adsense ads. I read their piece of information and then I go about my day.

The fact of the matter is that blogging for most people is not a lucrative endeavor. I bet that the majority of blogs that I read for their content make less than $500 a month from their blog. Certainly there are exceptions like a few of the top internet marketers that know how to monetize traffic. But, for the most part, blogging is not a money maker.

I started this blog, for instance, about a year ago, and I haven’t made one red cent from it. In part this is because I choose not to monetize it but in part this is because blogging doesn’t lend itself to making any money. I’ll get back to this in a moment.

The blogs that do make money do so in two ways. They either sell a product, and usually this is through a recommendation of something that they get an affiliate referral for, or they make money by redirecting their traffic to someone who is willing to pay for it. There are lots of examples of bloggers who make money by recommending products. Johnchow.com is the prime example here. On JohnChow the author recommends certain products claiming that they will help people make money online in some form. For every person that buys one of said products, Mr. Chow earns a commission. His only responsibility is to keep the traffic flowing in and interested in the notion of making money online. He then recommends some service through an affiliate link and is paid a percentage on every sale. Mr Chow claims to make more than $40,000 a month through his blog and he accomplishes this by mainly by pitching products/services for which he is an affiliate.

The other way to make money from a blog is to sell your traffic to others for them to try to convert. The easiest way to do this is to display Adsense on your blog which will show text ads relevant to the content of your content. In other words, if you have an article about consolidating student loans then Google will display ads about student loan consolidation for your visitors to click. Each click takes your visitor away from your site and onto your advertiser’s site. In exchange for diverting your traffic to a third party site you will receive a fee (minus Google’s take) and if you generate enough traffic you can earn a substantial amount of money re-routing traffic.

So the fact remains that most blogs make nothing (or very nearly nothing) a month. But the big problem is that people do not want to do the things that it takes to make money. You can make money from a blog if you are willing to write C+ content. If you write A+ content you might eventually make some money from your blog if you can generate a book deal but, for a very long time, you will simply be writing just to be writing. And, if you are okay with blogging for pleasure than go for it.

On the other hand, if you write content that, while being informative, still leaves the reader with a thirst for more information they might take an action. That could be following through a link on your site in search of a product or information and in some cases you will be able to make money from that action. The thing about it that you have to realize is that reading is not a money making activity. The only way you will make money from your blog is if your readers do something. No money exchanges hands when someone reads your beautiful words and leaves.

What this really boils down to is making choices. Do you want to be a famous blogger or do you want to make money? In many cases they are mutually exclusive and you will have to make a choice. I choose to make money. That’s the reason I write. I don’t think that it either correct or incorrect. I am not among the people that think that you are somehow evil if you are trying to make money from your activities online. The only thing that I am saying is that you need to make decisions in advance. Decide if you want to make money or not. If you do then you need to act like it and if you do not then why are you reading my blog about… making money online.

So, jump I did. Within a few weeks I owned 30 domains in various niches that I thought would be easy to make money in. I put an article up on each, like on my hair transplant resources site. I still had no idea how I would make any money I just figured that I needed to get started.

I’d work on my online business everyday. And by work, I mean I’d read a few messages on the warrior forum and think about all the people there who claimed to be making big money online and think about how soon it would be that I’d be joining them. I also read blogs. I read them constantly. I had heard of a few of the big ones, like Johnchow and I figured that they could teach me how to make money. I read lots of promos for various products, and I read and read and read. There seemed like so many good ways to make money online, so many in fact that I couldn’t decide which way was right for me.

At one point I became interested in flipping sites. Some idiot in the warrior forum demonstrated that you could make about $80 if you bought a domain, populated it with content and then put it up for sale. So, I thought this was genius. I bought a few more domains. Spent a week or so writing articles — And at the time I thought writing 10 articles in a week was working hard — then I listed the site on the marketplace for sale. At the time, the sitepoint marketplace was the place to sell a crappy little site, so I went there. It cost me $10 to list my site. I listed it for $100. There were no bids. So I listed another site of mine, again for $100. There were no bids, but an individual emailed and offered to buy the site for $70. Having no other options, I jumped at it. So, I had spent $10 on the domain, $20 for two auction listings and a week writing content. I profited $40 for my trouble. I has hardly impressed.

It had now been three months since I first started. I had spent about $500 by this point for domains and hosting and had still not made any money. But I was determined to stick it out so I went back to what I do best: I read more blogs. Back to johnchow, who is always ready to offer you his affiliate link for the latest-greatest, and back to warrior forum. For the next three months, I floundered about with my 30+ sites, each with maybe 400 words of content on them and wondered why I wasn’t getting any traffic.

Around this time, it came to my attention that the domains I had been purchasing, while clever, were unlikely to be of much commercial use to me since they often did not contain any pertinent keywords within them. I had gathered that a keyword rich domain might bring in more traffic so I started to buy more domains based on some keyword research I did on wordtracker. I didn’t have any experience with keyword research so I was surprised at some of the results I found. I learned for instance, that “another love calculator” was searched for more than 600 times a day on search engines. Imagine my surprise when I went to GoDaddy and learned that anotherlovecalculator.com was available. Sweet I thought! Perfect keyword domain for a keyword searched for hundreds of times a day!

It didn’t occur to me to question these numbers. I just thought, “Finally!” I knew it was just a matter of time until I was getting hundreds of people a day searching for information on more love calculators.

But nobody came. As it turns out, nobody searches for that term. Maybe one person a day. I was ranked second on google for that keyword and I would maybe get two visits a week. I didn’t understand it at the time and I thought about giving up. But, no I thought, I must keep going. So, I returned to warrior where I read more stories of people making $20,000 a month and wondered how they did it.

It had been nearly six months and I still didn’t know what on earth I was doing. I had spent about $1000 and made only a few dollars back. I was down big. At this point, I found myself on Grizzly’s blog How to Make Money Online for Beginners. Which I found interesting and inspiring. I realized that I needed a plan and Grizzly’s approach of making money through seo seemed to make sense to me.

So, now that I knew how to make money online, I bought some more domains. This time I bought keyword rich domains for moderate-heavy monthly search keywords. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to research a niche and in many cases, the sites already ranking for those keywords were too entrenched for me to have any hope of knocking them out of top spots. My sites were all on page 5 and deeper.

I was bummed but still determined. I went back to Grizzly’s site and read everything on it. I began to understand the importance of ranking in google for your keyword as well as the basics of how linking works.

Now, flash forward three months. It has been a year. I have spent more than a thousand dollars buying mostly worthless domains. But, finally, I am starting to see some returns. Using Grizzly’s methods (as well as Court and Mark’s from The Keyword Academy) I have just had my first $100 month in adsense. This is by far the best month that I have had so far. I finally have a strategy that I am using going forward and I see how I can get these numbers up significantly before the end of the year. But, at the moment, I am happy to be making $2-$5 a day. I know it is not much but it’s much better than I did for the first 9 months that I was at this.

The main thing I have discovered so far is that is takes a lot of work to make money online. Dicking around and reading blogs and forums does not make you any money. Doing work does. I have realized that if I want to make a full time income blogging, I am going to have to put full time hours into it. Nobody pays me for sitting on my ass. This has been a tough lesson to learn… to realize just how much work it is going to take. I have figured that for me to make $100 a day, I am going to need to have hundreds of pages of content online. This can be somewhat daunting to a person who first thought that it was hard work to put 10 articles on a blog in a week.

I was so worried about making my content great that I barely made any content at all. I have realized that just doing the content is half the battle. It doesn’t have to be good. In some ways it is a disadvantage if it is too good. So, now I just create content. Content and links. It’s all I am about.

I am grateful to the people who have helped me learn how the whole MMO game works. Though I have hardly learned everything that I need to know. I am also very suspicious of all the charlatans who are looking to separate the fools from their dollars.

The fact of the matter is that working online is just like any kind of work in the sense that it is work. It is boring and hard and very boring and tedious. But the fact of the matter is that even at its worst making websites and blogs and pointing links at them is infinitely better than working for someone else. I can’t stress that point enough. If I start to make a living at this, it will take me two seconds to put in my notice at work. In fact, I look forward to the moment when I am able to quit my job and focus on working online full time. At the rate I am going, I don’t know when that will happen, but I am more determined than ever. So, if you are thinking about working online, I would describe the work much like Winston Churchill described democracy — “Working online is the worst form of work there is… except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.”

There is nothing so rewarding (and difficult) as working for oneself.

I don’t update Paycheck blogging very often. I don’t have all the answers at the moment. I am just a passenger on this particularly journey. But I do have some faith that my base of knowledge will grow over time. And I will gain more useful information to pass on about these matters.

This is one of the first domains that I bought and I actually like it. It isn’t really super keywordy but it is the kind of thing that I can brand over time. So, I expect to return to this site and talk about my methods and ways to make money online and, particularly, my own money making journey. I can assure you that I don’t have it all figured out just yet, but I will be posting more regularly here in the hope that, some day, this content can be advantageous to me (as an entrepreneur) and you (as an entrepreneur). So, give me a chance here and let me find my voice.

I’m out.