Making Quick Easy Money on the Internet
Off and on for the last several years I’ve explored affiliate marketing. This includes creating and founding sites like Pokerblogger.com along with a handful of others. When I pursue something, the course of action I find that works best is to just dive in and get started.
It all started when a friend of mine told me about an 18 year old he’d written a house loan for that had made $500,000 in one year with affiliate programs by creating MySpace layouts. Apparently these layouts were so in demand that all we had to do was create a few layouts, put them up on a website and profit. I headed out, bought a book on CSS and got started. As I was chugging along I decided to take a close look at the site that we were getting our inspiration from. This was in the 2002 - 2003 timeframe when Google’s AdSense was really taking off. What I found was that the site was completely gaming the system. Having become an a Google AdSense publisher he was using this PPC affiliate system to create his income. The site owner was somehow serving advertisements completely unrelated to MySpace, social networks, layouts or anything else having to do with the content. Instead ads were appearing for mortgage, real-estate and other extremely expensive and profitable keywords.
Upon further investigation, I found out that the site owner had registered sites that pertained to real-estate, mortgages, law firms, etc. and simply had keyword heavy content on these sites. The sites had strange, URLs and didn’t come up very high in search terms. The ads on these sites were being generated by Google AdSense and then he had written a script to copy the AdSense portion to his high traffic site, thus generating much higher income per click than one would with relevant links. Since our site was following the terms of service for AdSense and not cheating the system, we were only getting pennies per click which wasn’t ever going to add up to much. To this day, however, this remains one of our most successful sites in terms of visitors. Proof that just following the “hot topic” of the moment can certainly add up to a large amount of visitors, even if you’re not in the first page of search results.
Now we were on a mission to find something else to work on. We wanted a big payout, something that was popular and something we had interest in. Poker was always of interest to me so we decided to create a site that was focused on blogging about online and real life poker. This site required a great deal of effort. In order to gain new visitors and maintain a high ranking we had to post a blog entry daily. This meant we had to recruit a staff of volunteer and revenue share bloggers to participate. In the beginning we were doing great, right out the door we were making money via Google’s AdSense program. Soon, however, we were instructed that we not able to use AdSense on our site since it was unrelated to poker. We switched to AdBrite and watched our revenue go from a few dollars per day to pennies. Motivation was lost for all those involved, as much as we pushed each other to continue writing and increase visitors the dismal return was too low. The site was sold to one of the original founders and has since basically fell into disrepair.
Onto the next project . . . we decided to create lots of websites covering many different areas and thus giving us many different areas to cover. We could then refine and focus on which areas were most profitable. These would all be using AdSense again, and would all be “safe” areas that wouldn’t violate the terms of service. We sincerely felt there had to be an honest way to make quick easy money on the internet.
This project never took off either, unfortunately we’d lost sight of one very important ingredient for any type of success - a lack of passion. We were writing topics that had nothing to do with what we were interested in. In the end, there’s one really successful group of individuals making money on the internet with affiliate programs.
These are the bloggers that give advice and inspiration to those who want to make quick and easy money on the internet. By publishing advice with suggestions on how to start up your own site and sign up for affiliate programs they have you doing all the actual legwork. These sites are very well done and full of factual information - but they’re essentially at the top of the marketing chain. By providing the tools and infrastructure for you to create your own site, they build their business by enabling the entire affiliate marketing industry. Everyone else is simply going to do “ok” - but real success in this area involves enabling and defining the industry.
There’s nothing wrong with the the affiliate marketing blogging community, the strategy used is quite simple. Basically you’ll see them using the most recent, bleeding edge technology to teach people new to affiliate marketing how to use technology that is one or two years old. This puts you, the new marketeer, in a distinct disadvantage since you’re only gaining information that is already old hat. Today I was taking a look at a site that was using video blogging to teach people how to write blogs . . . does that mean it’s time to go video? Sure seems to be the current trend. Anyhow . . . I think I’m done chasing this rabbit . . .
Enjoy!
What is hopefully my final attempt to quit smoking starts today. I don’t expect it to be easy, but I’m growing quite sick of the control I let smoking have on my life. After trying to find someone to quit with, it appears I’ll be going at this alone. Wish me luck!