The Internet is a great place. Where else can a guy sitting around his house in his boxer shorts compete with multi-million dollar companies? We live in good times and there are certainly a lot of opportunities out there to make easy money online. Every day I am amazed of the stories people tell me about how much money they’re making. One thing that still blows my mind is when I hear about the young age at which people are starting to earn large incomes online. I’ve heard of people 13 years old out there making websites for money. If I knew what they do when I was that young I’d probably be a billionaire.

It is very encouraging to hear these stories though because it seems that so many people are completely unmotivated these days. They go to their 9-5 job, complain about it constantly, get paid peanuts, then wake up the next morning to do it all again. Many people are now graduating from high school with no plan to go to college because they make more money online than their parents do working normal jobs. They have no chance of finding jobs that would pay this well in the real world, so working for themselves is the only real option. I’m surprised these young webmasters have the motivation to do all this themselves.. It takes most people years of working for someone else to become motivated enough to take matters into their own hands. Ten years from now these kids will be millionaires and we’ll all be picking their brains trying to figure out how we got knocked off the top of the totem pole. It turns out they’ve had their own PC since before they could talk, putting them years ahead of the rest of us.

Another great thing about making money online from home is that anyone can do it and it doesn’t matter where you are! This gives people in areas that don’t have good paying jobs a great opportunity to make a lot of money. Think of it this way: The internet essentially levels the playing field for everyone. Google pays the same amount of money for a click on a website owned by a guy in california as it does to someone in another country. If you live in a place with a low cost of living you will be comparatively richer than the guy making the same amount of money in a more expensive part of the country (like Seattle or California). People in other countries are even more well off. As long as the companies you work with will send checks to the place you live, the possibilities are endless. A few hundred dollars per month isn’t much use to me, but people in some places can live off that much money. I say if you’ve got to the point of quitting your day job and rely on web sites to make all your money, move somewhere cheap and live like a king!

~Wealthy Webmaster

This is something that gets people fired up fairly easily. There are webmasters out there making a lot of money online without resorting to any sleazy methods in order to get there. On the other hand there are people out there that will do anything possible to get visitors to their site and extract money from them. Search Engine Cloaking is one example of a black hat Search Engine Optimization technique.

Personally I don’t recommend black hat techniques, nor do I use those methods myself. I am in this for the long-term and the last thing I want is to ruin it. Cloaking for example will get your site banned from google if they catch you doing it. Sure you can probably get away with it for a while and manage to pull in a few dollars rather quickly, but once they do find out it is all over and your domain name is esentially garbage. I spend a lot of time building my sites, so I have a fairly large investment in most of them, and anything that will risk screwing up that investment is not worth considering.

Many SEO experts will tell you.. “forget SEO, go build a site with content and the search engines will take care of the rest themselves.” This is partially true. If you have good content you significantly increase the chances of people finding your site just by having lots of keywords and phrases sprinkled around on your site. Unfortunately this isn’t quite enough. You need incoming links to your site. There are both white hat and black hat methods of acquiring incoming links.

Black Hat Link Building
Some people use automated software that posts thousands of spam comments to blogs all over the world. Fortunately most blog comments have nofollow tags in urls, making this mostly useless for search engine purposes these days. Another method used is the cloaking as mentioned above. These automated programs can build thousands and thousands of interlinked pages with keywords sprinkled all over them. This will definitely help ranking for certain keywords within your site, but won’t help externally. Another thing is that if people find out you are cloaking they are likely to report you since they most likely won’t agree with it.. especially if they’re trying to take your spot on the search engine results page (SERP). Another thing I’ve seen is to create thousands and thousands of sites and link them all together. Luckily Google caught on to this a long time ago and takes into consideration the class C block the sites are in..so creating a ton of sites excessively linked together that are part of the same IP Block is going to get noticed. Google assumes they are owned by the same entity and penalizes them appropriately.

White Hat Link Building
There are many ways to gain legitimate incoming links to your site. I’ve written about this already in the “phase documents” in the section about web site promotion. The main methods are 1) Create a site people just want to link to, 2) Exchange links with other sites, 3) Buy directory listings or other text links, 4) Submit to free directories. Don’t rely too heavily on any one method since search engines are constantly changing and may devalue directory listings in the future. If Google figures out how to tell what links are paid for you can bet they’ll start penalizing those sites too.

In conclusion I’d like to say please avoid black hat SEO. You make the rest of us look bad, and it will never work out in the long run! Unless you start the next million dollar home page, the chances of starting from scratch and making millions within a matter of months are pretty slim, but with some work and quality content you will see results, just be patient..

~Wealthy Webmaster

I was telling someone about the fact that I have a business making web sites the other day and they responded with “cool, not very many people out there can do that sort of thing and people need web sites made..” He misunderstood me and thought I made web sites for other people. That got me thinking about it and I thought to myself “there is no way to make money online building websites for someone else”. Sure you might be able to pull in a reasonable hourly rate, but once it is built you’re done getting paid. To me this seems like a huge waste of time. Nobody would pay you to build them a web site that wasn’t going to either directly make them money or otherwise assist them in doing so. A friend of mine offered me several thousand dollars the other day to build him a site that he was sure was going to make him rich. I declined and told him to find someone overseas that will do it for peanuts, because if I’m going to spend time working on a site it is going to be one that will generate long-term revenue for me, not someone else.

So that brings me to recurring passive income. This should be your goal when thinking about ways to make money online. You need something that will generate income for you whether you choose to work on your sites that day/week or not. Subscriptions are a great way to make this kind of recurring revenue. There are lots of people out there that have active subscriptions for things they don’t use. Auto-rebill is your friend.

Another great way is to promote affiliate programs that pay out multi-tier commissions, such as Mallcom or PECash. With programs like that it is possible to generate significant income without having to sell anything yourself. Just by referring other webmasters to the programs you get a small percentage of commission from their sales. The best part of this is that your affiliate isn’t losing any money signing up under you. The company pays out that additional cash out of their profits.

The more people you can get making sales for you, the less you need to worry about the day to day operations of your web site(s). By having many sub-affiliates you also diversify your revenue source, so one unfavorable Google update is highly unlikely to wipe you out completely (which happens to so many webmasters it is surprising).

Recurring doesn’t quite apply to the sub-affiliate program section mentioned above, but more to subscriptions. Adult sites often have subscription affiliate programs like this that pay a commission each month that a member continues their subscription. One great adult affiliate program like this is Adult Friend Finder. AFF alone pays out millions of dollars evey month in commissions.

Of course there are non-adult sites that work the same way, I just used the examples mentioned above because they are programs I am familiar with and have been promoting for a while.

So, Wealthy Webmaster in training, I leave you with this… Don’t spend too much time working on things that will make you a little bit of money now. If you want to get rich online, you need money coming in that doesn’t require active effort on your part.

Think passive, aggressively.

Technorati : affiliate programs, passive income, subscriptions

I found a new blog directory today, so for all of you that have a blog, go submit it now while the getting is good.  The site is BlogListing.net and if you hurry you can get your listing before there are too many other sites in there!

There aren’t a whole lot of blog-specific directories out there that don’t already have 10,000 blogs in them.  On the other side of the spectrum it seems that most regular web directories either don’t want blogs, or don’t have appropriate categories for them.

So if you have a blog, or even several blogs, go check out http://www.bloglisting.net and submit your sites today.

~Wealthy Webmaster

I found a new blog directory today, so for all of you that have a blog, go submit it now while the getting is good.  The site is BlogListing.net and if you hurry you can get your listing before there are too many other sites in there!

There aren’t a whole lot of blog-specific directories out there that don’t already have 10,000 blogs in them.  On the other side of the spectrum it seems that most regular web directories either don’t want blogs, or don’t have appropriate categories for them.

So if you have a blog, or even several blogs, go check out http://www.bloglisting.net and submit your sites today.

~Wealthy Webmaster