Unsolicited Blog Posts About Making Money

So I was chatting online the other day with a guy who billed himself as someone who knows how to make money online. And after some back and forth, I told him to send me an article about making money online and that I would post it (with my comments of course). So, here it is:

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HOW I DIDN’T MAKE MONEY ONLINE…

Not making money online is the ultimate in self-fulfilment. I know it
to be so because I’ve lived it. And I continue to live it. Every
blessed damn day.

Here’s how I did it.

1) I copied other websites, word-for-word, template-for-template;
particularly John Chow, Problogger and ShoeMoney. If they made it, so
could I.

2) Once my site was up, I dabbed on my best perfume and waited for the
traffic to come. “You’ll see”, I told my imaginary friend.

I didn’t lift a finger. Not even a pinkie. I left no comments on other
people’s sites, didn’t link to them and I sure as hell didn’t submit my
site to search engines.

Nope. I just sat there. And meditated. Meditation is the key, you see. It’s the future.

3) My therapist told me, “Believe you’ll have overnight success and
it’ll happen. There’s an over-worked under-paid genie in a bottle, just
waiting to make your dreams come true.”

4) I updated my site as infrequently as possible. “That should get my visitors talking”, I chuckled. “All 5 million of them.”

5) I’ve spent the past 6 centuries reading about how other people make
money online. Reading how other people make money online is more
important than maintaining my site. But I’m not worried though. My site
is self-sufficient. It’s read a lot of self-help books and knows how to
take care of itself.

And that’s it. Easy. Follow the above, and I guarantee you’ll find
yourself in the same wonderfully exquisite position in the money-making
world.

Good luck, be brave and may the Google be with you.

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Ok, what do you think? Kind of vague? Useful? Redundant?

Psst! I’m Invisible

Today’s post on how to lose money deals with getting your website in front of users (aka advertising). Taking the old “if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” riddle and applying it to your website or blog, you get “if you make a post to your blog and no one knows your blog exists, does your post generate buzz?”.

Users have to know that your blog exists to get traffic. Otherwise, you got it, you lose money today! Even if you are naturally an introvert, there are ways to publicize, advertise, or otherwise tell people about your blog that won’t stress you too much. I’m going to cover 5 Ways to publicize your blog without raising the introvert alert.

1. Ping! Ping! Ping!

If we are talking about a blog, then you surely know about pinging the ping services. Heck, the default install of WordPress auto pings pingomatic on new posts. I’ve seen rumblings that pingomatic pings were sometimes dog slow in the past, so you may want to add additional ping servers to your blog. Others I’d recommend include (but are surely not limited to):

1. http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
2. http://ping.feedburner.com/
3. http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
4. http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
5. http://www.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

You can add as many as you want, but these in addition to pingomatic will likely boost your traffic significantly if you are putting out quality content. Beware – the more ping services you ping, the slower your posts will be processed when you create them. It is a trade-off, and each person decides for themselves what this is worth.

2. It’s Delightful, It’s Delicious, It’s Social (networking)

If you are reading this, and you do not know about Digg, Delicious, or Stumbleupon, then you likely need to spend about an hour searching and reading about them. These services (among the tons of social networks that you discover with a little searching) have the potential to drive huge traffic to your sites (again the quality content caveat applies).

Specific ways to drive traffic to your site is to include their little widget buttons so that users can vote for your articles. In it’s most innocent form, you would create great content, have users come to your site, and have them provide the first vote for your content. This really is not the greatest solution (not even a decent solution). Why? Users submitting your content to a social network will create their idea of what the title and description should be — quite possibly not a very optimized combination (for either traffic or buzz generation). If your content is great, do the submission yourself. Make it buzzy, keep it non-spammy. It will pay off in the long run.

There are lots of schemes out there to boost the performance from social networks. All I’ll say here is, read up before you buy in to any scheme. And the ultimate caveat — if it sounds too good to be true, it likely is too good to be true.

3. What Do You Think (commenting on similar blogs)?

I’d be willing to bet that you are not blogging on a completely unique topic. More likely, you are blogging on a topic that is covered by many other bloggers. I’ll even go so far as to guess that you visit some of these other blogs regularly. Have you ever thought about actually participating in these blogs by commenting? If not, you are missing out on a great way to start getting your blog’s name in front of potential users. Potential users who probably have the same interests that you are using on your blog.

Comment, regardless of whether they have no follows in place. Yes, you always want links to your site (in particular followable links). But in this case, you can use well thought out, non-spammy, comments to create a buzz for your site. Search engines give you rankings, but users who actually come to your site can be more beneficial for actually generating links. Give users every reasonable chance to come to your site.

4. Directories

There are as many diverse opinions about the value of pursuing directory links as there are people spouting opinions. (Yes I know that mine is just adding to the disarray). So my position is simple. The big guys (BOTW, Yahoo) are likely worth getting a listing it. Yahoo is a recurring cost, BOTW has a one time option or a recurring option. For the remaining directories I have a general rule that I use — if a directory is highly ranked for a search phrase like “KEYWORD directory” (where you obviously replace KEYWORD with the keywords most related to your site), then it is likely worth a few minutes effort to submit to if the cost is marginal. “Highly rated” is subjective, but my own preference is top 10.

5. You Got To Have Friends

Ok, so even the most introverted person I know has friends. Tell them about your site. If they are familiar with the topic at all, tell them to stop by your site to give you some feedback if nothing else. If your site has the magic content, they will likely subscribe to your RSS feed. Users who read your RSS feed are likely to come back in the future as a topic of interest comes across their reader. Traffic = potential money. No Traffic = no money.

If you are the type who just prefers to work on your merry way, not really talking about your blog with friends, how about this simple solution. Include your blog URL in your email signature (also your forum signatures if allowed). No, this is not going to cause a sudden rush of traffic to your site. It will actually surprise you though how the clicks from these links will be consistent if not spectacular.

Tiny Traffic = Big Traffic?

I’m not saying all of these suggestions are going to send you so much traffic that your server crashes. I am saying that if you are reading this post, looking for tips, you likely have very little traffic. When you have very little traffic, every little bump up is a step. My general believe on blog traffic is that it takes small bumps until it reaches some critical mass. At that point you are going to start experiencing something closer to exponential traffic growth than linear traffic growth.

Don’t leave money on the table. Get the traffic, and monetize it!

The Simplest Way to Lose Money – Do Not Show Ads

Don’t show ads? You must be thinking that is about as stupid a way to lose money online as anyone has ever come up with. Of course everyone shows ads on their sites.

Actually, that is not true. There are tons of sites that do not show ads on their sites. Or, if they are showing ads, they are not showing ads where visitors will actually visit.

I have a nice chunk of websites. Some that I picked up in land grabs when I’m in a site buying frenzy. Others that I have just not touched in a long time. I can say with absolute certainty, that there may be a site or two (maybe three), that I am not showing ads on. Or maybe I have ads so tightly embedded in content that they are nearly invisible to users. There might even be a site or two that I felt were not traffic’d enough to deserve ads.

In my original way of thinking coming up on 10 years ago, I felt (as did some of the prognosticators of the day), that you should build out content and a critical mass of readers before dropping ads on the site. The thought was that users who saw ads would immediately hit the back button and poof, your traffic was gone. Now there may have been some validity to that point. But I believe looking back now, that the true meaning behind that thought was that you did not want to overwhelm your user with so much advertising that they we unable to appreciate your content. Remember, the primary ad media back then were graphical banners. Some were quite unappealing.

At this point on the Internet though, I feel that users have come to expect a reasonable level of advertising on a site when they visit. And reasonable is somewhat dependant on the niche you are in. Users expecting a classy, almost educational like resource don’t want to be bombarded with ads I’d guess. But users visiting sites more akin to sins of the flesh site might be willing to put up with a more robust advertising experience.

The real key though for the webmaster is to set the tone such that the level of advertising is acceptable while out in front of the user enough to acquire clicks. I struggled with the right word for that. I think entice is too aggressive. What we really want is to sustain advertising as a viable business model is for users to click knowingly and to convert. Tricky clicks, while a nice revenue model in the short run, do not encourage advertisers to keep paying big bucks.

Lastly, while I am sure you probably have seen it if you are reading this, you should at least give a peek at the AdSense heatmap for improving performance. The thing to keep in mind though is that although this is provided for AdSense, you can expect similar tracking patterns for other advertising media.

You might notice that I am not running ads on this site right now. That will change shortly. I’m kind of in the get the content rolling mode right now, and have really slacked on the revenue generation plan for Lose Money Today! I guess that is kind of the gist of this post anyway. Touche.