The good news is that one can earn lots of money authoring internet content. The bad news is that it's not easy to do this nor to even predict what content is most valuable.

Any piece of internet content can go viral, getting millions of impressions or views, with little active promotion. Ro is a piece of internet contents' basic reproduction number, a low Ro means that those viewing the content will probably not distribute it to others, a high Ro means that those viewing it will probably distribute it. A paid toaster review in a blog would have a low Ro while a blog post about a home remedy that works to cure baldness would have a high Ro. If the same 50 people read both of these posts, the toaster one wouldn't go viral but the baldness cure one probably would, maybe after a delay of a few days for people to verify that it works. This article talks about this concept.

So when your hub or blog post only gets a few hits, that is because its Ro is low. Promoting it will help a little, but won't solve the fundamental problem that it just isn't all that infectious or interesting to people.

The good news is, if you author a truly original and innovative piece of internet content that people love, not that many have to see it for it to go viral and for you to earn a lot of money. This scenario self perpetuates because as a piece of content goes viral, it accumulates backlinks and rises in search engine result page rankings organically.

The other interesting thing is that you can't always tell what content people are going to love and share with their friends. For example, try to guess how many views this YouTube video has.

It has 27.6 million views. If this video had been monetized with AdSense or something similar, it might have generated 27.6 thousand dollars for the authors, assuming one ten cent AdSense click for every 100 views. If one comes up with just four pieces of internet content like that per year, one has a six figure income.

What lessons can be learned here? First, the guys from the video have some skills and talent. If you don't believe me, try reproducing their dance routine yourself. The lesson here is that to generate a piece of internet content that goes viral, it probably helps to have some skills and talent related to the piece of content: for a poem to go viral it helps to be a good poet, for a funny video to go viral it helps to have some talent at comedy, etc. Something else is that to go viral, a piece of content needs to be about something that a substantial number of people care about. There are lots of young people world wide who like dancing, but this may not be true for a variety of niche subjects. Another thing is to try to make content that is accessible to people around the world who may not speak English: anyone can enjoy the video above, regardless of language spoken. Another lesson is that it helps to not be authoring content that inherently has a low Ro, like the toaster review example.

The good news though, again, is that the next piece of internet content you author could be the one that makes you rich and famous.

I'd welcome any suggestions that people might have on authoring internet content with a high Ro, but I suspect that people who really know about this are not talking.

This post Copyright © 2009 by Sudon Imous, All Rights Reserved