Hey, YOU!
You’re here because you want to make money, right?
Well, stop wishing and start doing something about it!

Read this blog.  In fact, read all that you want.  The truth of the matter is that you’ll never earn a single penny if you don’t do anything about it.

I’ve never spoken at seminars nor have I ever been featured in the paper, but if you want to start making money online in 24-hours, Ewen Chia can help you.  This is what he has to say about his program:

Listen, nobody wants to beat his head against the wall trying to succeed.

Only an idiot would actually enjoy sweating and missing sleep and giving up family time just to sit and wait every day for money to roll in…and never see a penny.

But the sad news is that the vast majority of people who ever try to create an Internet business do exactly that — they work, they wait and absolutely nothing happens.

I don’t want you to have to settle for that. What I’ll show you is

• A simple plan that’s easy to do (it takes about 2-3 hours to set everything up, and I’ll walk you through every step)
• Dirt cheap, and mostly free (you’ll probably need about $25-50 maximum for everything you need to buy, like a domain and hosting)
• A method that pays off fast (yes, you can and probably will see profit in 24 hours or less)

If you want to start making money as soon as tomorrow, get this program.  It comes with a 60-day, 100% money back guarantee!

Go get it now and start making money online.  You’ll be glad you did!

Last year was not a bad one for me, but it had its ups and downs.  Like any business, webtrepreneurs have to be able to adapt to curve balls thrown their way.

2009 started off with a bang.  My eBay affiliate business was netting around $300 a month in January, $400 in February, and was set to earn $500 in March.  eBay, however, decided to cut off my account in March for no good reason.  After months of dispute, they never paid me in March and my affiliate account has been deactivated.  I have no idea why my account was flagged as all my sites stuck to their terms of service and all sites were original and clean.  Such is life, right?  I think they’re shooting themselves in the foot and this is just another blow to their reputation, in my opinion.

So, with that stream of income cut off, what’s one to do?  Well, it’s a good thing I had other moneys coming in from other sources.  I netted about $1000 last year from referrals and the few bucks I made from eBay.  Though I didn’t set any goals for 2009 and 2010 is already shaping up to be a very busy year, I’ll do my best to keep blogging and I hope to make 50% more this year than last.  Let’s see how things go and I’ll keep you posted!

A tried and true tactic to making money has been to build something from scratch and then sell it to the highest bidder once the going gets good. Just look at all of the mergers and acquisitions that go on in the business world; this should give you an idea of just how much money is potentially at stake for you. You could sell a small business to Google, for example, and net yourself $1.6 billion.

Taking the ‘real-world’ example and modifying them to something you can do in your spare time is pretty easy, conceptually. With all things, however, you are going to need to dedicate time and effort to making things work, grown, and prosper. It won’t be easy, but you can do it.

If you’ve never heard of it before, there’s a huge marketplace for websites on the internet. More than one, actually, but this post was inspired by an auction currently going on at the sitepoint marketplace.

This auction is for a premium, well established, monetized, popular website. Minimum bid: $500,000.00. Small fries need not apply. This auction caught my attention because I’ve used that site in the past. It also caught my attention because it’s being sold for at least half a million dollars.

So how can you build, market, and sell a website for a profit? The principle is easy: Build a site, build a following, then sell the site. Now, as webtrepreneurs, we all know that quite a bit of effort is required to make things work out. Starting this week, we will explore these 3 topics: how to build a website, a community, and finally, how to sell the website for a profit. Be warned: you will need to spend a few bucks to try this, but it takes money to make money.

The methods that I will teach you are tried and true; I’ve built a few sites using this plugin and the sites have already paid me back nicely. Bring a good attitude and a business spirit and get ready to jump on the online money train!

Are you interested in making money online? Then stay tuned and sign up for my RSS feed. We’ll do this step by step so that by the end of the series, you will have a website that you can build on and get it ready for sale.

The question for the ages. How does one place well for certain keywords on Google? I get asked that more often than I would have thought. I’m not Matt Cutts nor am I an SEO expert, but I have done OK for a few of my sites in the recent past. There is no one magic trick to placing well in the engines and Google surely won’t give away any tips or tricks. However, they do give you a set of very vague guidelines to help you get an understanding of how to build your websites.

Firstly, keyword search results, or your search engine ranking position (SERP) determine how well you place when a user searches for a given keyword that is relevant to your site/page. Google advises you to make your page for the humans that are reading it, and if it’s relevant to humans then Google’s Googlebot will read it and index it. In addition to content, Google recommends that you have other links going to your site and that you also create a sitemap. You should also make it accessible and avoid keyword pollution, page cloaking, and other malicious things.

From the paragraph above, you can see that there are at least 4 recommendations. From these recommendations, honest developers and spammers alike will be indexed by Google. Google then aims to remove the spam and keep the ham. The honest content creator and the Evil Marketing Spammers (the Ems, as I like to call them) both have the same set of guidelines, but somehow, it seems like the Ems are getting ahead of the game. While the honest content creators strive to provide good content, the Ems will work their evil magic to beat Google’s rules and algorithms in order to rise above other more qualified and relevant websites.

Learn From the Ems

Then question then becomes simple. As content developers and non-spammers, what can we do in order to make our websites better than that of the Ems? How can Google find favor in our sites, given that we don’t have all the time, money, or other resources that the Ems have?

Lucky for us, Google has given us some starting points and the Ems have given us plenty of knowledge and insight into doing well for ourselves.

1. Human Readable Pages: Google recommends that your page should be human readable. Well, aren’t all pages readable to humans? I would say “sort of, yes”. However, what Google really means is this: “Make your content so that our bot can read it”. In other words, don’t create one huge .jpg with text on it. Googlebot will think it’s only an image. Don’t make your site in Flash if you’re not using any text that can be parsed. If possible, use only valid HTML code. That’s kind of what they’re saying. Googblebot is impressive, but it is not able to interpret things other than text so it goes through your source code and looks at what’s inside. It then makes sense of your content and indexes and ranks it accordingly.
   It also seems like Google cares about how much content you have. If there are two sites of similar quality, content, and ranking, I think that the one with more content will be ranked above the one with a lesser rank.
2. Incoming Links: In the Google Webmaster tools, there’s a way for you to check incoming links to your site. I’m not sure how the big G finds and categorizes the incoming links, nor do I know what they count as a valid incoming link, but that does seem to play a big role into placing well in the search results. We can learn from the Ems here and use some strategies if we really want our content to be found. We (as individuals) can create accounts on sites like Squidoo, Blogger, and Wordpress. We can then create content on each of these sites that link to our site. This is kind of an odd strategy because you are then creating SPAM to promote your quality site. I’m not too fond of this approach but I have used it in the past with a small degree of success. Likewise, you can create accounts to social bookmarking sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon and hope that your users will like your content. These two strategies combined can help your site to place higher in search engines.
3. Accessibility: Lastly, Google says your site should be accessible. This does not mean making it only so users can GET to your sites, but it means making the content “accessible” to people with disabilities. You do this simply by adding “alt” tags to your images and by adding titles to links. Make sure to validate your site using the W3 HTML validator.

Getting indexed by Google is the easy part. People will find you and people will get to your site eventually. If you employ the above strategies and work on building solid content, people will find your sites more frequently and you’ll start getting more and more hits organically. Keep your eyes peeled and examine the sites made by Ems. They’re good and you can learn a lot from them!

Way back in 1963, J. S. Adams established the “equity theory of management”. I find his theory a bit obvious and extremely applicable to entrepreneurs and all sorts of business minded individuals, but I want to discuss this theory with you today.

In short, the theory “attempts to explain relational satisfaction in terms of perceptions of fair/unfair distributions of resources within interpersonal relationships” (1). Very simply put, this theory says that there is a tie between what you feel you are worth in a certain setting and how you feel about your worth or compensation.  In a business setting, this means that an employee may feel like they’re being treated unfairly if they’re paid too little (or too much? Yeah, right.) for their work.  The relationship between the pay for the job and the fairness of the pay based on the amount of work (“equity”) that you put in can lead to either an increase or a decrease in work satisfaction.  Click on the image below to get a bigger version – it’ll help you visualize this theory better.

So what does this have to do with blogging?  Well, it’s pretty straightforward, I think.  How hard to you work on your blog?  What kind of time and commitment are you giving your blog?  How thorough are you when you make posts?  Do you research your topic?  Do you spell check?  Do you make posts that make sense?  Are you active in your blog’s community?  Do you answer the emails that you get?   If you’ve answered “yes” to these questions, then you are definitely working hard and deserve to receive recognition or payment for your work.  If you’ve answered “no” to some or all of these questions and yet you believe that you should be getting paid to blog, then you need to wake up and smell the roses.  There’s a definite tie between the amount of work that you put in and the amount of money that you get paid for your work.

I recently received an email question from a newbie blogger asking for my honest feedback on his blog.  I know it probably was a shot in the dark to send me an email, but I appreciated the note and felt as though this person cared about my opinions.  So I took the time to research his blog, figure out what I thought about it, and compose a nice email detailing my views.  It took about 35 minutes out of my already busy day but I did it as a favor for this guy.  I never received acknowledgment of receipt nor did I receive a simple “thanks” or anything else.  I don’t mean that I felt like I was owed anything, but I what I got out of this transaction was that the blogger didn’t really care to hear about anyone else’s opinions, even though he asked for it.  I don’t think his blog will be around very much longer if he keeps up this attitude.

If you’re involved in your blog’s community and are actively putting in sweat equity into your blog, Adams suggests that somewhere down the road you will feel like you need to be compensated for your work.  And I agree.  How you can be compensated varies, but if you have any kind of audience it is your duty as a blogger to work hard to monetize your site.  Private ad sales, paid reviews, or otherwise,  you need to figure out what kind of payment you want to receive from your blog.  Don’t give up and keep writing!  The money will follow…eventually.

1 – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_theory