Following straight on from the last post Hacked Again, which looked at the problems faced by bloggers who are the victims of hackers, here I want to take another look at the whole idea of community spirit and how it can only be beneficial to what wedo online in order to make money to fund our pleasurable pastime of writing in our blogs.

Well there are plenty of social sites out there for bloggers to get together and share their stuff and I’m quite sure that most bloggers who have an inkling of what they do and why they do it know all the major social community sites that are available to make the best use of.

So what do these social sites actually give bloggers? Especially those that for one reason or another are trying to make money from their pastime. Well, the answer to that is two-fold.

Firstly, most bloggers don’t make any money blogging. They might want to, they might even need to but as long as they keep believing what they’re told by certain A-list bloggers they will remain in cyber-poverty probably until they give up in disgust. That would be after they had probably spent a small fortune buying every eBook and bought into multi-level marketing scam there is and are probably worse than broke. Their credit cards have probably taken a hammering too, so now they’re in debt.

Secondly, the rest of the bloggers who are not doing it for money are the ones that have got the right idea. They blog because they simply enjoy writing for the people that come to their blogs and read what they’ve written. For them, the social blogging sites are perfect to meet new friends, swap ideas, photos and music and generally enjot the great online social system that blogging has brought about.

So as for the larger and better known social sites that we all know and love, there need be no introduction here. However, there are plenty of newer, not so well known social sites that are cropping up that all offer many benefits to bloggers who are keen to take full advantage of the social reach and facilities that are available. One such social site, 3gb.biz is well worth having a look at if you are in the market and want to join 3gb community 3gb.biz, is perfect for joining groups, swapping information and photos as well as getting to know a lot more people online.

So where does that leave the bloggers who are struggling to make a few dollars here and there from their adsense ads that no one seems to want to click? Or all those flashy banners littering their sidebars or footers? Why aren’t all these visitors that they’re attracting from stumble or digg clicking their ads and making them a fortune just like all those nice, friendly, well written, honest, benevolent A-listers want them to believe?

Well, if you are one of those A-listers, then you are probably sitting pretty with a nice income from selling affiliate eBooks and services to all your readers, so where’s the problem? Its a numbers game after all, so if your getting a thousand noobs show up on your blogs every day, then it stands to reason that if you slingenough mud, some of it will stick.

If, however, you are not one of the chosen few, then you’re not getting anything like that amount of convertable visitors to your blog. You might be getting a few hundred visits a day, but those visitors will have already spent their money on the A-lister’s sites and will not be interested in pruchasing an eBook from your sidebar - they probably already have it and realized it was another worthless piece of junk. Just like all the rehashed regurgitated garbage that teh A-listers sell, that hundreds of their blind followers also try to sell in the mistaken belief that they’ll make a fortune just like their heroes do.

Its sad really, when you think about it. People are so easily taken in.

They want to believe that there is a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow and no matter how many rainbows they follow that end up with nothing but a rock or a clump of trees, they still keep right on chasing more rainbows.

Why?

Because they see one person who writes a blog make a lot of money from it and they think they can too. No matter how many visitors they get to their blogs that don’t buy anything, they still sit there waiting for those sales to come flooding in. Because if Mr Chow, or any of his contemporaries says there’s money to be made from promoting this or that, then it must be true. After all, they’re doing it, aren’t they?

Well, aren’t they?

Terry Didcott
Make Money

Let’s get moving on with some more ways to make money online. After my last post Audio, Video and TV on Your Blog, which went into the pros and cons of using certain media on your blogs to gain readers and boost your credibility, we’ll turn our radar onto other ways of turning the Internet into a make money machine. This post looks at something that Internet Marketers tend not to promote so much and that’s franchises.

First, lets look at why franchises are not so widely promoted on the Internet as a way to make money for newcomers.

This is plainly obvious in that to get into a franchise, you need startup capital and the vast majority of newcomers to the field of make money online don’t have any. From a seasoned Internet Marketer’s perspective, promoting franchises to people with no money is a waste of their efforts, especially when they can relieve many a newcomer to the world of make money online of a couple hundred dollars without too much work. In other words, most Internet Marketers go for the easy cash by working the big majority for small returns rather than having to work hard at convincing a few people with the money to spend it on this or that franchise.

Of course, this scenario is focused on the majority of Internet Marketers that we all know and love (a little). Franchises are not solely in the realm of the generic Internet Marketer, as there are other companies out there that do promote them with a good degree of success.

Franchise Opportunity specialist AmericasBestFranchises.com are one such company that successfully promote many money making Franchise opportunities in many different areas of business. Many people erroneously believe that you need many thousands of dollars to buy into a franchise, but that is not necessarily the case. When you visit their website, you’ll see that some franchises start at less than ten thousand dollars. At the time of writing, there is one franchise going for less than fifteen hundred dollars.

That’s not a great deal of money to get yourself set up in a branded business where you can potentially make a lot of money as long as you get your marketing right. Well what better way to do that than to do what you may well already be doing and that’s marketing online. One leads to the other in that if you are already successfully marketing one or many products online, there is every possibility that you could turn your already honed skills to marketing a brand name via a franchise.

That’s the positive side of the coin and it would be remiss to omit to mention that there is a negative side. In any business, you get out of it what you put into it. If you work hard and put your all into a business, then you will most likely succeed at it. Conversely if you expect to set up a business then sit back and wait for the money truck to roll up outside your door, you will doubtless fail. Same goes for a franchise. You can’t expect to pay your money, however much that is, to buy into a successful branded franchise business and then just sit back with your hands behind your head waiting for the payoff, because it will never come. You have to treat a franchise like any other legitimate business in that you have to work hard to make a success of it.

That may all sound like common sense to most of you, but you’d be surprised at how many people think they are going to make money hand over fist by starting a business and then not working at it. That haunting statistic comes back to remind us that fully 95% of Internet Marketers will fail. That means that fully 95% of everyone who starts a business online fails to make any money from it.

That’s a fact.

So if you’re in the 5% who succeed, pat yourself on the back because you have worked hard to make money online, no doubt about it. If not, then a franchise may not be for you and you should not give up your day job just yet.

Freedom Writer
Make Money

In my last post Work From Home, Make Money!, I went over the keyword thing some more in an attempt to rank this blog for the from home make money keywords. That experiment was not so successful and proved some things as well, which, in this fast make money ways post, I will share.

The first thing to note is that good keyword density alone is no guarantee of getting up there onto page one of Google’s search pages. Sometimes it works, but not always. I’ve just repeated this experiment in a niche that doesn’t have so much competition as this fast make money ways niche (oh such wanton abuse of those keywords!) and surprised myself a little in that a brand new site using a 3 year old bought domain with almost no content went embarrassingly straight onto page one in its niche.

I wasn’t expecting Google to index it so fast, so didn’t prepare it properly.

All I had was the basic Wordpress theme, an “about” page with a few keyword stuffed lines that I intended to pad out later and a first post that pretty much said welcome to my site which is under construction (I won’t do that again!) and signed off with my keywords. Google duly placed that pile of rubbish straight onto page one for all to see - yep, with the description: “welcome to my site which is under construction…” Guess how much fast make money traffic that attracted! Nada!

I hastily slapped 10 posts worth of content on there to try to repair the damage, but so far in the last three days, the googlebot hasn’t returned to update its cache, so my useless description sits there on page one mocking me…

Ok, that’s how not to do things when the opportunity is there to move into a niche for the kill. Back to fast make money ways and a post mortem as to why this site didn’t get up there for its last keyword assault on this woeful fast make money ways niche.

Simple fact of the matter is the post itself lacked keyword authority in the guise of backlinks with the right keywords in the anchor text. If you go to Google right now and type in “fast make money”, with the quotes, you’ll see sitting up in second spot my Fast Make Money alter ego, Money Hints.

It’s been there for a couple of weeks now and looks like staying put as long as I keep feeding it fast make money keyword rich backlinks from various places.

On the other hand, this site has dropped onto page two for the same fast make money (ways) keywords, because I’ve been concentrating more effort on the other fast make money ways site. You’ll notice that PR has nothing to do with placement here. This site is a PR3 and (fast) Make Money Hints is a PR0. It has everything to do with backlinks and some to do with keyword density and keeping the site tight to a few keywords with multiple posts featuring the fast make money keywords.

As I said earlier, this works better in niches with less competition, especially from other Internet Marketers who, in this fast make money niche, are all trying to out-SEO each other using every trick in the book (and some using the tricks in my own SEO book!)

Ok, not such a long winded Griz style post this time as I simply don’t have time for it - especially as this niche, despite its fast make money name, does not fast make money for me anything like the niches that I’m spending more time in do!

Here’s to fast make money ways in the niches!

Terry Didcott
Freedom Writer
Make Money