Internet Idiot

It was one of those grey New England days you get in February. The calendar had just clocked 2005. Snow was predicted. Seemed like a good day to make some money on the Internet.

Hah!

After all, a 10 year old kid, Cody, on our block here at the beach had his own website and was selling pictures of racecars for $20.

Being a software engineer, I thought it would be easy for me to get a website up and running. I had already done it a few times, but that was before the Internet had Windows and you had to use command language to communicate on the Internet. Even FTP (File Transfer Protocol) was done in command language. Windows made it much easier with its graphic interface.

I created my first website using the vi editor and HTML. It was mainly my resume at the time which was sometimes during the 1990s.and I uploaded it to my server using the primitive, non-graphical FTP program found on the UNIX system at my Internet Service Provider which I still use - theworld.com and the Software Tool and Die guys in Brookline, Massachusetts.

I got some programming jobs and forgot about the Internet for a few years. I look back on it now and I imagine that I could be making a nice living now on passive income if only I had kept it up, but no sense crying over spilt milk.

So back to February 2005. I Googled around and found a website that would allow me to design my own website without having to know a lot of technical stuff. I was really looking for information on Internet Marketing and Search Engine Marketing. I was a rookie in those areas and needed to beef up my knowledge, or so I thought at the time. It was the lazy man's approach to Website creation so I signed up for a product put out by Sitesell in Canada and run by a guy named Dr. Ken Evoy. It is called SBI! (Site Build It). It cost $299USD (still does) and I was able to use the package on the Internet on Sitesell's servers.

I was introduced to Keyword Research and soon had an idea for a Website, which became capecod-beaches.com. It has about 120 pages.

I became an affiliate of Sitesell and sold a few systems to local businesses from which I receive a small commission if and when they re-subscribe. It isn't much but it pays for my subscription to SBI!.

There was a ton of material to read in addition to the extremely detailed Action Guide that took you through the baby steps necessary to complete your keyword research, decide and obtain a domain name (I use GoDaddy), change the DNS to point to your servers, etc.

Unlike a regular Website or blog, Sitesell was the host so you did not have to get a separate host. I now use Hostgator for my Wordpress blogs, which runs about $10 USD a month. A domain name costs around $8 for a year if you use a coupon. Just Google for coupons.

So after buying a domain name and pointing it at your host company, you wait. It may take a few days, but eventually it becomes live on your host's server and you can begin to populate it with content. Content is what you write on a page or in the case of a Wordpress blog, a post. Content is not only text, but can also be pictures, graphics, and Video. Also audio which can be downloaded to your MP3 player.

The mantra at SBI! is content is king. They have revamped the old real estate mantra of location, location, location to content, content, content. You are encouraged to fill your pages with copious pages of content. The problem is that this content must be unique or you run into the duplicate content problem that Google abhors.

Well, the truth of the matter is that content is important, but lately it seems like back links are more important and now one could say that back links are king and content is the queen. SBI! mentions back links and even has a system to get you links to other like-minded websites. The problem is that these links are reciprocal links and are not as good as one-way links.

Let me explain a little about back links. It is just a hyperlink from one website to another, but with reciprocal links, A links to B and B links back to A. You have seen them all over the Internet; they are the ones usually highlighted in blue. Reciprocal links are not ideal. What needs to happen is that A links to a third party or intermediary website, B, and B links to C. Google likes this arrangement and gives more love to websites that link this way. Some call is Google love or Google juice.

The object is to push your website to the top of page one for your particular keyword or keyword phrase.

One was links are very important for obtaining a high "page rank" in the Google scheme of things. Page rank can go from n/a (no page rank) up to zero and all the way up to 10. When you first create a Website it has no page rank, but as you add content and back links your page rank should go up - the more back links, the better.

And the best back links are anchored back links. This is important because the anchor should be a keyword that occurs on your website. It becomes one of the blue highlighted phrases; do not use “Click here”. That is a wasted phrase.

A little background on keyword analysis may be necessary. I know, I know. It's boring, brain numbing research.

When some one wants to find out about something on the Internet, they enter a word or a phrase; a keyword or keyword phrase. Say you are searching for a way to get rid of woodpeckers. So you enter "woodpeckers" into Google. In a few seconds, Google will return a gazillion hits on Woodpeckers. You might find an entry that related to getting rid of woodpeckers, but it would be better to narrow down your search by entering "how to get rid of woodpeckers". This keyword is really a keyword phrase. It is also called a long tailed keyword. Now Google may return just a few entries relating to how to get rid of woodpeckers. It could be a few hundred or 1000s depending on the keyword, but not usually in the millions.

Now back to anchored back links. If you found that "getting rid of woodpeckers" was a great keyword, then it can become an anchored back link. The anchored back link would be surrounded by HTML which makes it a hyperlink which in turn points back to your website whose theme is how to get rid of woodpeckers. Lots of Google love here. The good Google juice is flowing.

The ideal Google juice comes from a Website that has higher page rank than your website. For example, if your website is a page rank zero, then a link from a pr 5 would be the cat's meow.

I kept adding pages to my Website, capecod-beaches.com/, and pretty soon I had over 100 pages. I wasn't making any money so I signed up for Google AdSense. If you haven't heard of Google AdSense it is a free way for Google to put advertisements on your website by analyzing what is written (your content) on the page or post (if you are using a blog). Then, based on the context of the information they find on your website page or blog post, they put appropriate advertisements on your page in spots you have pre-selected. If a visitor clicks on one of these ads, you make money and Google will pay you.

The problem was that I only had one website and at $299USD a pop, I could not afford too many more at that price. So In 2006, I thought I could sell websites to businesses. I sold a few. One to a local dentist and then I mailed a sales letter to about 100 dentists around the south coast and Cape Cod. No results so I gave up on that idea; it was income derived from my time, not passive income.

I found something called Private Label Rights (PLR) and an Australian company that had them. You had to build Wordpress blogs and every month you got a new niche idea or two along with about 40 PLR articles on each niche. This was called niche marketing and soon I had some websites on bad breath, gerd, and other ailments. Every month I would get a slew of PLR articles. Each article had to be re-written to avoid duplicate content. This took a lot of time, but with practice I could soon re-write an article in about 30 minutes.

The system required that you send articles to article directories like Ezinearticles.com so that you would get a link back to your website. I spent a few months with PLRPro, but it cost $97 a month and I still was not making any money, but my credit card was going up every month. They had a plan called “The 90 day Can’t Fail Plan”. It was 407 pages! Repetitive after the first 60 or so pages. They claimed you could put up 12 websites using Wordpress in 90 days. Each site would make $0.27 per day to make $100 a month at the end of 90 days. Didn’t work for me.

I got “Article Marketing” by Franck Silvestre

“Blog Farming 101” from Bruce Herder. He recommends setting up blogs on free hosts so that you can link back to your money sites. This has worked in the past, but indications are that Google will slap you down because of lack of relevant content.

In the meantime, I bought into a few ebooks on how to make money from ClickBank and most of them did not work. I later learned that they were just re-treaded free information scraped off the Internet.

Only an Internet idiot would buy junky ebooks, when almost all of the stuff they push can be found for free on the Internet. You just have to keep looking and you will find it. It took me, the Internet Idiot, over four years to find the right information and some guys who knew what they were talking about and without trying to sell you the latest whiz-bang re-treaded scraps. I was just looking in the wrong places and under the wrong rocks.

I tried John Martell's stuff. It wasn't my cup of tea. Neither was McCarthy's stuff. I didn’t have any money to attend their seminars. So I wasted another $500 and more on those products.

I got John Reese's Traffic Secrets for $1,000. It was too advanced for me so I sent it back and got my money back.

I tried Jack Humphrey’s 16 steps. I got his black book.

Joe Kumar’s “30 Days to Internet Marketing Success” where he interviews a group of Internet Marketers on how they use 30 days to achieve Internet Success. Not very helpful.

I tried “Bum Marketing” from Travis Sago and his “5 Step Bum Marketing Rollout”. Another was “Bum-Marketing Secrets”. He suggested you write 50 articles per day! You just need five “decent” websites, but he doesn’t define decent or tell you how to find these decent websites. Like most of these ebooks, the question is always “Where’s the beef?”.

Holly Mann has a wide-ranging e-book called “Honest riches e-book 2007”. It gives a good introduction to Internet Marketing in 95 pages.

Then there was “Niche Marketing on Crack”.

Mark Thompson’s “The Commonsense Guide to Profitable Websites” has some good information but like a lot of these ebooks, it is really just an advertisement for his website which will run you $27 a month.

“How You Can Seduce The 900-Pound Google Gorilla” by Fred Myson that is free, but is just an ad for his $97 e-book, Website Content Riches. I bought it because I also bought Website Content Wizard, a program by David Watson to spin content. David’s videos were incomprehensible, but Fred explained how to use it. How to take one article and create 100s, even a 1000 articles from one original article.

The term “spinning” is where you take an article and create copes of that article. You then submit these “unique” articles to article directories like Ezine Article.

I bought some other software that was helpful – Keyword Elite for finding good keywords and SEO Elite for getting back links from high page rank websites. Some prefer a newer model, Keyword Samurai.

Those were just some of the things I subscribed to or bought in 2007 and 2008. They weren’t much help for an Internet Idiot.

By this time (2008) I had dropped PLR Pro and was looking for the next big whiz-bang bonanza that was going to make me some money. AdSense was making me about $20 a month so it took five months before Google cut me a check.

November 2008 was the month I found Alex Goad and his Google Conquest product. I shelled out another $1,000 based on his claim that with his system we would be making $200 a day in 60 days. Boy! Am I gullible or what? I never saw a sales letter I didn't believe and nor turned down a hyped up offer I had to have.

In addition to the $1,000 up front, I also had to pay $97 a month to Alex Goad. I created lots of blogs so that by the time I realized that I was not going to make anywhere near $200 a day or even $2 a day, it was time to jump ship. By this time my AdSense had risen to the colossal amount of $1 a day. I was hitting pay dirt. Not!

Along the way, after I dropped Google Conquest and got my $1,000 back, I ran across something called 5 bucks a day by Dennis Becker. I recommend it, but it wasn't something I wanted to do because it involved Google Adwords where you place ad on Google, but they cost you money. Just the opposite of AdSense. Dennis recommended his other product 1Kadayclub. So I tried that too. Dennis recommended Matt Levenhagen and his Blast system. So l signed up for that too. The problem was all these guys had websites with recurring charges and I was going broke paying for them every month. So I stopped getting their stuff mainly because I thought I would lose my shirt fast gambling on Google AdWords. Instead I lost my shirt slowly on all these schemes.

Then, I got an email from eBay saying that they had dropped me from their affiliate program for lack of activity. They got that right and I haven't been able to get back in since. It's called eBay Partner Network now and is an affiliate program run by eBay. I am still trying because it can be very profitable.

I still am an affiliate of Commission Junction and Amazon and I run their ads on some of my blogs, but nobody has bought a thing yet.

Remember, I am the Internet Idiot.

Listen. This is hard work. Really time consuming. This Internet business. At least with a 9 to 5 you only have to work 40 hours a week. You get to play golf on the weekends or go to the driving range after work. I had to give up sailing catamarans. I must spend at least 60+ hours a week on this stuff and I am never finished. There is always something else to do, even on Sundays. No day of rest for me.

The biggest pain is all the emails I get from offers I signed up for. Once they get your email address the emails never stop filling up your mailbox. A pox on aWeber. They are the culprit that makes it possible to automatically send emails to your mailbox forever. It’s called an autoreponder. I am in the process of unsubscribing to them all. This is very tedious but as an Internet Idiot, it’s my fault that I get these emails in the first place.

Arrgghhh!

Oh, I almost forgot Brian Campbell. I met him on Facebook. He gave away lots of free information. He made some high fulutin claims and I tried it for a couple of months, but again, the beef was missing. Another waste of money and precious time by the Internet Idiot. He was going to teach me how to be an Internet marketing coach. How can you coach something you don’t understand? I have remnants of that venture gathering digital dust on my hard drive.

The next thing I tried was Dave Gale's 30-day challenge and I created more blogs using Word Press Direct. This was free for the 30-day challenge, but after the 30 days there was a recurring charge of $40 to $120 a month and more. Too rich for my blood so I quit it after 30 days, but I built about 15 more blogs.

I now had over 50 blogs that were making less than a buck a day.

Do you see why I am an Internet Idiot?

Anyone with half a brain would have given up years ago, but I am the village Internet Idiot and I don't know how to stop. Any normal person would have recognized a bad deal, given up and turned to something more productive like writing short stories and novels.

BTW, I am working on a novel. I have 57K words written so far, but I don't have time to work on it any more. Only 50K more words to go and the first draft is finished. Hallelujah!

But I was still looking for how to make money online, still searching for the Internet's Holy Grail and I scoured the Internet and lo and behold I found a blog by a guy called Grizzly. He lives in a very remote area of Canada. It wasn't even a proper blog; it was a Google blogspot blog that Google provides for zip. Good Grief! He breaks all the “so-called rules”. Google owns all his stuff lock, stock and barrel so you can never sell a blogspot if you wanted to, but Griz doesn't care; he makes thousands every month from his blogs. And there is nothing for sale. Nada. He has reams of free information that tell the real truth about how to make money on the Internet. He has several blogs and there is so much stuff to read that I haven't even scratched the surface.

You see, every thing you need to know is on the Internet. You just need the right keywords to find it. And it's all free.

And you know those bonuses that the hyped up sales letters offer you and claim they are worth a minimum of $1.997. Most, no all of them, can be obtained on the Internet for nothing or perhaps a couple of dollars.

Hark unto me all you seekers of Internet fortunes. You don't have to go to the Warrior Forum and buy those OTOs (One Time Offer) and waste your money. Google brings it to you on a Google platter, free. Yes, you heard me right, free.

Wake up, people.

Griz has a list of good guys that give you the real scoop on how to make money on the Internet. Griz said I should look up Courtney Tuttle and Mark Butler at The Keyword Academy. I did and tried their $1 offer for 30 days. What a revelation. What great information. Their Forum is priceless.

Next, Griz recommended Vic Franqui and his blog, Blogger Unleashed. So I trundled over to Vic and got some more good free information. Warning! Vic uses a lot of profanity telling it like it is, but if you can rise above his colorful language, his information is pure gold.

I figure I was just an Interne junky, getting high on load after load of stinking hype. I am on a better path now and on the road to recovery. I am meeting some very helpful and neat friends over at The Keyword Academy.

And you know what? I have applied some of the lessons taught by Griz, and Court, Mark and Vic and have seen my AdSense earnings rise dramatically. I had my first five bucks a day in May 2009 and it happened because Court, Mark, Griz, and Vic are straight shooters and tell you the right way to make money on the Internet.

Like Hub Pages.

Like anchored back links.

Yeah.

Thank You Mr. Grizzly, Court, Mark, Vic and you too Lissie. You guys have made my year.

I believe that if I follow the mostly free advice by these stalwarts of Internet marketing and how to make money online, that I will soon see some significant income from my blogs.

The main reason I wrote this tale of woe was the hope that I can help those who are trying to make money on the Internet also known as Make Money Online (MMO), from making the embarrassing mistakes (it is very painful to remember them) and dumb decisions that I made as an Internet Idiot.