Make Money Online And Don’t Pay A Dime sounds like an e-book, right? It ain’t – just my “how to make money on a budget” advice to someone who asked me. This is my “Newbie Orientation to MMO” of sorts…Spread it around, would ya?
This is a conversation I had on Facebook with someone not into IM (yet) – and her story grabbed me. I’ve edited only barely. Why am I posting a Facebook conversation?
This business we’re in has a million sharks in it, and the newbies are shark-bait. Rather than helping, a lot of people try to make the case that
This affiliate product of mine is a must buy, you won’t get anywhere unless you buy this product, with this link -
…and in exchange I’ll give you some FREE scraped EzineArticles that I found 2 years ago…But I spun them, so I think you can still read them…
Of course, the PLR content is “valued” at $1,797.37″ BUT you get it FREE IF you act in the next 3 Picoseconds…
Darn. Price just went up. Gotta be fast, those Picoseconds will get ya every time…
You know the game. Here’s the conversation, enjoy, and yes. It’s a long one. This is part one of … I dunno, several parts. Before continuing, I have written newbie-oriented posts on where to get started at SEOSage.org. I have a keyword series as well as a basic SEO series, and I cover tips that you might have overlooked no matter where you are in this game.
Check out “JamestheJust” at http://seosage.org, and my free ebook can be found there if you want to get started making money with your own website: http://ebook.seosage.org – wrote my heart out. It’s free. Grab it if you need to.
James-
Long ago and far away (OK, right here on FB) you mentioned you use WP for “all” your websites. I kinda wondered how many websites a guy could have. But that was before I read about making money from websites.
Caught your post yesterday about this Michelle person who made a thousand bucks a month from it and it got my wheels spinning. I’m a single mother, injured and unable to go back to work … but I can sit … at my laptop. You can see why internet marketing is interests me.
At this point my wheels were spinnin’ – and it got better:
What I’m hoping you can tell me is the link to a solid, no nonsense, no need to purchase anything STEP ONE guide to getting into this area.
We’ll call her Janet. . .
I was so taken by Janet’s question – and how to answer it – that I began asking around.
I asked Tracey Edwards, who was kind enough to post about it, Can An Experienced Internet Marketer Really Teach A Newbie and the following post after that. Before I read that, here was my off-the-cuff response to this friend of mine:
Janet -
If you go to my blog you’ll see a link to a guy named “Dave” – he’s got a 13k word post on making money with Amazon, and his girlfriend uses HubPages and I think other web 2.0 properties to make money. . .
His link is “Dave’s FREE Amazon” guide, right above the Amazonian Profit Plan link, which is a good guide that teaches a lot about competitive analysis, etc. – all you need for it.
This book’s worth the $97, but begin with Dave’s first, or see Paula and Wanda’s blog on affiliate marketing (authors of the Amazonian Profit Plan).
There are a number of resources I’d like to share with you – one that taught me a lot (though I started with the “John XFactor” book off the bat) was this blog from a guy that inspired me, Michelle and a number of people on my blog roll:
Mike Iser’s Tips
It covers a lot of topics, and if you scroll down you will see the “how I build my Adsense sniper sites beginning to end” – along with various sources to select keywords, etc.
There is also a free toolbar I’d get immediately, SEO for Firefox from SEOBook.com.
SEOBook.com training videos are free from Aaron Wall, a top SEO in the industry (my second interview was with him) – this tool will help give you the analytics you need for seeing if a keyword is viable.
Also, on keywords, I wrote a 2-part tutorial of sorts on HubPages – it’s 1/2 rant and 1/2 tutorial:
Best Keyword Research Tool Part I of II
You do not need to buy a single tool for keywords. I cover a process in there, a basic one that works – to get going with keyword research.
Learn that (keyword research) as it is square one, Mike Iser talks about keywords in the post I showed you up top – it’s very good information, but there’s more to the story.
I am currently involved in writing a blog with people like you in mind, too – one that begins at square one, going over SEO from square one. It’s still being written (an Elance job with a fellow IMer) – will keep you posted. . .
[Note, this is the link in the top right, not "my blog" but was working on it.]
A “definitive” guide can be found from PotPieGirl – she wrote “The DAM Way” (beaver dam) and “Squidoo for Newbies” or something like that – both in my sidebar, and I wish I had both when I first got started.
Lastly, to learn the basics of making money online – “THE” definitive guide (which is often referenced but I haven’t read it – I was already making money online):
Grizzly’s blog. It’s long. It will take 2 days to read through, BUT he knows his stuff, inspired thousands I’d say, and that is known as “THE” guide for AdSense monetization (again, I started out on the paid-for eBooks from day one, and if you had money I’d commend them to you).
I personally have read very little of it – but it’s so talked about that I have to say it’s got to be worth the read.
Make Money For Beginners Edit: Now some joker owns Griz’s first, monumental site…I highly DO NOT recommend going there. It’s a joke. Instead, go here:
How To Make Money Online With Griz
Some of the info is dated, and I’ll have to say a word of caution:
1) Do NOT ever get into a “link farm.” It’s a spammy thing to do, Google shuts people down, de-indexes, it ain’t good.
2) Do NOT think you need to buy any software – YES I sell software, to people who operate on a good level and want to scale it up – you don’t need a single subscription, you don’t need to pay out a red cent except for your websites.
3) Do NOT get caught with all the shortcut spammy methods. The two most popular are blog “commenting” software and forum profile spam – just my two cents, I think it can bite you later. . .
For backlinks, it is sufficient to get into article marketing, and read this hub on using ComLuv – a free service where you can find ComLuv enabled blogs and comment.
This is how I got 1200+ backlinks in a month (lots of fun, genuine commenting) and it will leave a link to your blog with the title of your recent post. It builds community, gets you traffic, and increases your “link popularity.”
That’s not mine – it’s really good though!
And I wrote this hub on Hubpages, among others:
Free Backlink Resources
These cover ways to get your backlinks – the off-page SEO factors that Google counts as “votes” as it were. You need diverse backlinks, nofollow and dofollow, high PageRank and no PageRank. . .
AND
You don’t have to pay a dime.
You don’t have to pay for keyword research.
You don’t have to pay for competitive analysis, or on-page and off-page SEO, SEO for your sites – my sidebar has free tools, especially SEO PowerSuite – Free SEO Suite. That is more than plenty, and I wish I had it when I first started.
See my Hubpage for example (no means definitive):
“Finding Low Compete Keywords With FREE Tools” (Keywords Part II of II)
You don’t have to pay for backlinks. See my Hubs.
“Where Can I Get Good Backlinks?”
You don’t have to pay to get spot #1 in Google. Believe it or not, you don’t!
When you *CAN* or once you’re in a position for that, these tools make scaling up your business easy and keep you competitive, but they’re not necessary to start earning money.
We can continue the conversation at my blog or here – feel free to ask anything.
I will tell you up front the people I trust most online, valuable resources, are all in my blog roll and the “Blogs the Flip My Lid” is full of good resources.
Where to from here?
Learn on-page and off-page SEO.
On page SEO: the meta data, in WordPress using a plugin called “Ultimate SEO” beats the pants off of “All in One SEO” and I wish I found it earlier. It will give you the ability to easily write your meta descriptions per post.
Including your title tags.
Download this Free SEO Tutorial.
Also: WP H1′s your titles for posts in most themes – good stuff.
Use headers with your keywords, and try to optimize for no more than 2 a page (meaning density-wise).
Why only 1-2? Bing will rank you higher and sends good buying traffic – though not much compared to Google – but it’s now the search engine of Yahoo! too.
So: 1-2 keywords that you are actively optimizing for = good times. This is my own method, but it works – though you can add in “LSI” terms and a small bit of other keywords, but density-wise keep it to 1-2 main keywords.
Also – shoot for 1-2% density of your keyword phrase, more is spammy, less may not register.
If you have any images, use your keywords in the “Alt” tags and descriptions, same with videos…
Send in your Sitemap to the SE’s…
“Nofollow” all your affiliate links…Man. Yeah, just download the tutorials from SEOPowerSuite and SEOBook, use SEO Ultimate as a free plugin (I just discovered it not long ago), you’re on your way.
2) Get a handle on where to get backlinks – for free. See my Hubs:
Where Can I Get Good Backlinks?
3) DO get the information from PotPieGirl from my blog – they’re free books, and Jennifer is a success story using FREE websites you can build on Squidoo.
You can do that on HubPages, too, though they are a bit different.
To make the most money? Make your own self-hosted sites. No sense in splitting the costs with the host, though affiliate links are not shared revenue on HubPages, Blogger or Squidoo (I don’t think).
4) I’m on JustHost and 1&1 for my Domain Name Server and Hosting – they’re cheap and I love them, have given me great service so far.
Bbut everyone swears by HostGator - they allow for different C-Class IP’s in your “reseller account…”
(You can basically sell their hosting as an affiliate that way, and get more use out of your own account.)
Later on, you might wish you had different C-Class IPs. I sure do. Why? Because you can backlink your own sites. If Google sees you get 100% or tons of backlinks to your own sites on the same C-Class IP, then those links will be less valuable.
Also, it covers your tracks from other IMers.
I’ll tell you this, too:
DO NOT show your sites to anyone.
Why? They’ll steal all your keywords, and rob your rankings. It’s a hard lesson I had to learn early.
To be continued…
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As you might guess, I’m not totally against comment spam or profile spams, However, I agree with you that noobs should stay away. Make sure you know what your doing before you fire up that chainsaw.
Also, I use webhostingpad and they are great if you are looking for something cheaper than hostgator.
Josh –
Yo – that comment wasn’t meant to poke you or anyone in the eyes, but in giving a beginner advice, I don’t want to be the one to suggest something that later on bites them.
Then I get to be that guy who told them it was a safe practice, ya know?
Maybe I should have edited that somehow, but I just had “Janet’s” best interest in mind.
The other issue is that I want her to realize, and anyone: that you don’t actually need all the hi-tech gear (which I personally own, and am a happy affiliate with) – it’s a luxury and not a necessity to make this work.
Thanks for the recommend on hosting, btw.
James, this is the best stuff I’ve read from you. It’s incredible. It SHOULD be an e-book.
Will be passing this on, for sure.
You should do some guest blogging at technshare… this kinda information would be absolutely welcome there.
Love it! This is going on the daily read for tomorrow on my blog. Maybe I’ll keep it up for two days.
Cheers,
Tia
Tia recently posted..Two Cents Tuesday- Insecurities Will Kill Your Blog
Tia –
You’re too kind, and chock full of the cool hangouts – thanks, Mrs. Google!
I didn’t think you were, and after all-I agreed with you.
Also, I forgot to mention that you did a great job on this.
It’s good advice but for a newbie I think it is too much advice still. Imagine if you knew zero about IM and then tried to digest all the info from all those links you posted. It’s overwhelming I think.
I would have to say that there is no good beginner guide out there. All I know that I believe in (there was a lot of worthless junk) came from many different sources over time. Some of it I learned on my own through trial and error.
Not to say people can’t learn IM quickly and successfully, but I think the vast majority of people who start struggle for awhile. And most of the people who struggle and/or quit never have a blog about it.
Okay, I feel a rant coming on. I’ll save it for my blog.
Carrie recently posted..August Update – Getting Ready
Part of the problem is that: information avalanche! I’m seriously considering writing up a guide – in all my spare time – for people like “Janet.”
It would have to cover a lot of real estate, but I have another book to write in the meantime, literally, + other client work…
+ my niches
It was cramming for a test sort of, and not wanting to leave anything out.
The other issue is that she’s not entirely green – she’s built websites and such, just not IM for herself as I understand it.
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Make Money Online And Don’t Pay A Dime – Newbie Orientation
Off-topic: you should add a subscribe to comments button. I think you had it with that terrible comment program who will remain nameless but now that is gone.
Carrie recently posted..August Update – Getting Ready
Off-topic:
I want to hear more about that “rant” comin’ on, let loose! Or email me. Wanted to hear you out on that.
Also, the “Entries RSS” is in the top right, under “Pretend this is a Cool RSS Button” –
See it?
Rant was posted on my blog. And totally not directed at anything you said here, just reminded me of stuff that has been percolating.
Of course, you would see my new posts if commentluv would ever update. It always seems to stick for me (on all blogs).
Carrie recently posted..August Update – Getting Ready
I do agree with Carrie in that there is a lot of information that might seem overwhelming. I know that for me, it took several months to even figure out what a backlink was. But I will say that there are several good links here. But I think that newbies need to be realistic when starting out. It is easy to get caught up in the hype.
kidgas recently posted..August Is Best AdSense Month for 2010
Good point – it’s also why in a recent project I told my client the same thing: gotta start small, define everything – this convo wasn’t to an absolutely green newbie, however.
She’d built websites and had done some client work (freelance editing), so knowing that going in it wasn’t as “scary” or info overload.
My stomach turns when I think of how much money I wasted when I first stumbled into this IM game. My biggest problem was trying to be all things to all men. I wanted to be an affiliate/write my own info products/make money with Adsense. And every string I added to my bow just got knotted around the last one until I reached the point that I couldn’t work out where one string ended and the next one started.
You have some great advice here but I’d like to add one more thing if I may. Choose a money making strategy that works for you and stick with it. Learn everything you can about it and focus purely on that one strategy until it makes you money. And only then should you look for another strategy to add to your IM bow.
Clare recently posted..Getting Started with Article Marketing
Well said, and 100% agree. Once I “knew” how to build a site that was good for AdSense – I thought I could do the affiliate marketing…I did pretty OK on the one product I was actually trying for.
The rest became a flurry of 1/2 baked attempts to reproduce the “success” and I got less than 1/2 of what I didn’t put into it…focus breeds success. The rest wastes time.
I thought that hostgator doesn’t allow c class ips. Unless you go with their sister site i forget what that is. Because i have asked hostgator numerous times.
As to your post i agree that money does not have to be spent. But it certainly does help to scale things up and to get a good headstart. For instance i spent over a few thousand to get started. I like to jumpstart things but I should have started small and concentrated on a few sites vs many sites. But i would say i’m a lazy person i am not going to write 100 articles. I don’t mind paying for things that will make me money. Just weigh how much you pay vs how much you will make.
For instance for promotion you could spend a hundred on VPS so you can upscale your promotion and increase your workload instead of running a program and waiting for it to finish to go to the next one.
Different methods use different things. Like affiliate marketing in my opinion is different from adsense in a few ways. Instead of relying on pure organic traffic from rankings you could do a lot of things like PPC or twitter or fb or other blackhat/whitehat ways to drive traffic.
Adsense is a decent place to start and learn IM. Then move on to other things so you don’t leave your eggs all in the same basket.
To start from brand new not knowing what a backlink is, is pretty hard. I’d say you can learn the basics of what IM is in a month or two unless you really don’t use the internet or dont’ read anything it may take a little longer. After you got the basics down then you learn about HOW to make money. Then you just experiment, learn, ask questions, and make money.
Basics like What is a backlink. What are serps. Things that seem pretty common sense to IMers but a normal person would be like what in the world is that. A typical question someone asks me is:
Them: What do you do
Me: make websites
Them: Oh really how do you get paid
Me: I advertise for google
Then they go to ask me a few more questions and i usually just try to brush them off after that because it’s impossible to teach someone what i do without them knowing basics like what is a backlink, what is ranking in google, what is traffic, a blog, etc etc.
-Just random thoughts i had while bored.
Lastly
@Josh
“As you might guess, I’m not totally against comment spam or profile spams, However, I agree with you that noobs should stay away. Make sure you know what your doing before you fire up that chainsaw. ”
yes i agree. It really depends what you are trying to do.There is nothing wrong with profiles or blog commenting. I would say it can get a little blackhat.
For instance James uses blog commenting by reading other people’s posts and responding thus gaining him backlinks and traffic (by leaving his link with his real comments). This is the best way to promote your own blog.
But since i’m making xfactor sites and i don’t really care what the visitors have to say (that’s just the reality of it) Blackhat would be using something like scrapebox and spinning txt to leave comments and not reading their content.
When it comes to profile links I believe they are awesome. One it’s only a profile so normal users won’t be like DAMN YOU ARE SPAMMING. Stop SPAMMING ME like people that blog comment spam. Profiles are just creating your info (usually automated) for the whole purpose of it counting as a backlink.
That’s all i should ramble on for today.
Wow. You write like the XRumers, but in English. =)
I agree about your take on money scaling things up, my audience was someone who was (is) not in the best place for that. I’d love to be able to toss a few thousand – not there yet, life happened.
Re: Hostgator – you can get C-Class IP diversification (I thought?) through the resale account. Or, like you say, Blue Host or SEO Host…forget what it is.
Re: Profile links – I’m not on the boat. It’s a matter of scale at this point, I’m sure if I was operating at a large scale that would seem more lucrative. From my end, however, just thinking about the forum owner’s perspective – I’d hate that.
Of course you’ve got to run your business as you see fit – and I’m not here to harp on forum profile links nor those who use them – I just haven’t tried that crack. It’s been sufficient for me to rank simply using other methods, article marketing, spinning, blog networks like Unique Article Wizard and ArticleRanks, etc.
Thanks for you 2 cents! It’s one heck of a comment.
Hey James,
Just finally getting around to reading this series.. been busy.
Great stuff here, this kind of information is exactly what I was getting at when I approached you about SEOSage. It’s just so often overlooked or its tucked away in a book they can’t really afford and honestly shouldn’t have to buy.
@ Carrie and the people talking about Commentluv… Commentluv changed there system to where if you set up an account at their website, you can get the option to choose which post you want it to link to from your most recent X amount. I chose 8 so it lets me choose from my 8 most recent posts and link whichever one i want. It’s really awesome and everyone should go take advantage of it!
Matthew DC recently posted..SEO Basics Part 1- What is a Search Engine & How Does it Work
Yeah, that is cool about ComLuv, Matt – I noted on some other pro-bloggers they comment on their blogs and then use different titles every time. Good deep links, generates reader interest..
And it’s funny, the SEO Sage site and this FB convo and others just keep coinciding!