Ok, I’m back after a long break from this blog. Why such a long break? Well, its no great secret that the money is not in the Make Money niche unless you have so much firepower that you can get to the top of the SERPs. Being on page two is nowhere in this game, so unless you can get high on page one, then you’re not really going to make much money from target search traffic. So I’ve been very busy building my business in other niches that are lower on competition and easier to crack into.

The traffic I target comes almost exclusively from the search engines and they click on PPC ads and some affiliate products that are real and actually provide value to the people who want to buy them. I make my living online doing this and its very satisfying because I make money honestly and don’t rip anyone off. Hence the title of this post.

If you go the route that most Internet marketers go, ie building the proverbial list, then hawking snake oil to your victims, then you might make a little money from screwing over some total noobs who want to buy into the dream. But the dream is flawed. Seriously flawed.

The major flaw in the general Internet marketing system is that 99% of the “make money” products that are being created and sold to unsuspecting noobs are crap. They don’t do what they say because whatever the hype is trying to get across, it is NOT possible to make $3000 in seven days starting from scratch. You can read all the ebooks you want, but most of them are going to tell you, in a roundabout way, to write an ebook about how to make $3000 in a week and sell it, for heavens sake!

The rest come up with all manner of priceless shit that make money for the person who wrote it because they’re selling it and clueless noobs are buying it. If you want to buy into this not-so merry-go-round, think long and hard about whether you can sleep at night knowing you probably just took some desperate single mother’s last $97 before her credit card got maxed for an ebook that will make her jack shit. Unless she’s willing to put in two years of hard work following the crap that it teaches. Except she hasn’t got two years, she’s being evicted from her apartment in a month. She was hoping the ebook you just sold her might make her enough money to pay her rent. But it won’t, will it because its just not possible to build a list in a bloody month.

Oh, wait, she can get a load of traffic from Twitter or Stumbleupon and that will make her rent money. Like crap it will. The book you sold her will earn her bugger all and she’ll be evicted all because of you. So I’ll ask you again, would you be able to sleep at night knowing you were doing this to people who don’t know any better?

If you can answer yes to that, then you’re a bastard and you’ll probably make a lot of money standing on other people.

Well I never want to make money like that. It just goes completely against the grain of who I am. So that Internet marketing model is not for me. And if you have a shred of conscience it should not be for you either. There are other ways to make money online and I’m doing it so I know its true.

I set up lots of websites in lots of niches and the money that they make collectively mounts up to a decent enough total that I can live quite well on, right now. That total grows a little each month as I add more sites to the collection. Its hard work and I put in a lot of hours writing decent, relevant content for those sites so that they’ll rank in the SERPs for lots of long tail keywords related to the niche, then getting links to those sites to push them up onto the front page for many of those keywords of the niches they occupy. That’s a legitimate working model and it’s one that really does make money. Without hurting anyone else.

So thanks to putting in a lot of honest work, I sleep at night real good, thank you very much. You can too when you stop believing the dream that is hyped across the Make Money niche and start rolling up your sleeves and doing some honest toil.

That’s all folks!

Terry Didcott
Make Money

Well, well… its 2009 already and almost half a year has passed us by since I last wrote anything in this blog. That one was called “Google Hits Where it Hurts” and it reflected on the many changes Google has been making on its algorithm and how it affects website owners of all flavours.

So it’s probably a natural progression to come back here several months on and look at what has been happening as well as take these changes and make something positive out of them.

One reason for this post is as a way of providing some of my other sites with a little added exposure as they all need it and this is the perfect vehicle for doing that. You see a major part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is getting links to your site. But not just any old links, you need strong link juice that only keyword anchored, one way back links can give your site. When they come from an authority site that occupies the same niche as yours, then it adds to the strength of the juice given in the link. And when that link comes from within a relevant post, you are receiving about the best you can get.

Figuring in the SERPs is all about the amount of authority that Google gives to your site. It gives most authority to sites that are totally relevant to their keywords and that have the most quality back links from other authority sites in the same niche. After all, this is a good indicator for Google that the links are genuine and that the owner of the site giving them is impressed enough by the site they are linking to to give them a keyword text anchor in that link which is relevant to the page, or article or post that it links to.

A great site linking strategy post can be found over at my sister site at thehonestway.com/blog which explains how you can create some authority for yourself using one link building strategy that works quite well for improving a site’s authority.

A really great article about using SEO to improve your edge in the SERPs can be found at another well informed site at How to Make Money Online with SEO. Here it takes a slightly different tack, but the basic recipe for success using search engine optimization techniques is the same.

This was not meant as a particularly long post, because I don’t want to be spending too much time working in the MMO niche as it is downright too damn difficult to rank well enough in to make money online from. Much better to be putting my time and efforts into my several niche sites which are benefiting greatly from the SEO techniques that I use and have explained in the aforementioned articles.

So as we’re now into 2009 already, may I wish you all a happy and prosperous year ahead!

Terry Didcott
Make Money