Making Money Online, Ten Things I Wish I Knew As A Beginner

August 12th, 2008

For as long as I can remember, my idea of making money has always involved not having to work physically for it. I would imagine myself being a real estate investing mogul, or some second incarnation of Warren Buffet, well I think you get the picture. It was then only natural that as I learned that there were people making serious money online, I’d look hard into it and try to cut my slice of the pie.

I sent money to more scammers than I care to admit, and I don’t think I have to say that I failed miserably, and repeatedly, at turning a profit. My latest push into trying to make money online was with the launch of my personal finance blog, Your Finish Rich Plan. It’s now a 5 month old blog that is getting decent organic traffic.

Instead of talking about my trials and tribulations, I’ll just say that Grizz’s, Vic’s, and Court’s advice have helped me turn my blog around. I’m not saying that I’m raking in the dough, but I’ve seen the improvements and it can only get better because I got thrown in, and got out of, the sandbox. Whoo-hoo!!! And that brings me to the first one of the things I wish I knew when I was starting out.

Google’s Sandbox. Yes it does exist. I don’t think anyone who’s serious about making a living off of online ventures can say it doesn’t. You might have been lucky and avoided it, depending on your website’s topic and how much traffic you managed to get when you launched it, but guys, it exists and I’m painfully aware of that.
Pre-Owned Domains. Vic is very vocal about buying pre-owned domains and to be honest, I didn’t see the point because I couldn’t see the reasoning in paying around $50 (or more) for something I could get for $10, with the keywords I wanted in the URL. Was I mistaken! I launched a sniper site and within a couple of weeks I was pulling in 150 uniques a day with a healthy CTR, inching my way up to $4 a day and BAM! Got sandboxed. It’s been a month now, and I have no idea when it will come out. Oh, and I’m lucky if I make $1 a day now. Lesson learned.
SEO-optimized themes. When it came to choosing a theme, I have to say I went for “pretty”, and the results were anything but! Since I switched to a more search engine friendly theme (courtesy of Court’s theme directory), my organic traffic has increased. Justin at SEO Zombie also has very nice themes and if you need to understand SEO from a conceptual standpoint, his website is the way to go.
SEO in and of itself. Without proper SEO, you’ll have a hard time making serious money. There are on-page and off-page factors that you have to take into consideration. At first, you might be taken aback by the technical jargon, but it’s really not as hard as it sounds. Besides, if you can’t sit down and learn what you need to in order to be successful, you’re probably not cut out for this!
Anchored Links. If what I’ve said earlier scared the crap out of you, or if you don’t want to learn too much about SEO, then drill this one into your head. It’s (almost) all about anchored links. They’re your ticket to online success, as they’re one of the biggest factors to getting organic traffic
Traffic. All traffic is not created equal. I learned this with StumbleUpon. I had an article hit it big on SU and bring me around 1,000 unique visitors in 2 days. I made a whopping $6 on Adsense in that time frame. I was being sandboxed then, so all I got was social traffic. Looking at my stats now, that same amount of organic visitors (visitors from search engines) would have netted me anywhere between $30 and $150. Now I’m not saying that referral and social traffic are worthless, not at all. They serve their own purpose and are invaluable when you think of the new friends you can make and the people you can genuinely help out. They can be monetized when they reach high enough levels. But from my experience, and especially for beginners, organic traffic is what gets you paid.
Diversification. Coming from a financial background, I’m ashamed to say that I truly expected to build one website and build it till it could provide me with a full-time income. It took me to discover Vic’s website, and his $1/day from 100 websites approach for me to realize the error of my ways. Ironically, I got thrown into the sandbox a couple days after this epiphany of sorts. I’m still nowhere near where I need to be in terms of diversification (I only have one monetization model, which is Adsense on a couple of sites) but it’s in the back of my head. Don’t sweat it too much because it’s best if you perfect your skills at one method before moving to the next, but never fail to make diversification (several websites, several monetization techniques) a key component of your overall strategy.
Specialization. On the surface, this is the contrary of the previous point, but it isn’t. I made the mistake of making my flagship blog one about “personal finance”. There’s no way I can rank well for “personal finance” at my current SEO knowledge level, with a website that’s less than 6 months old, with less than 100 posts. This will most likely be a several year process, but I’m confident I can make it. On the other hand, I’ve managed to rank quite well for a couple long tail keywords, and working on improving that. If I was able to achieve that with limited SEO knowledge, and a too-broad website, I have no doubt I would have had great results with a more tightly focused website.
Investments. You get what you pay for. I am using a number of tools to grow my business, some of them free, some of them I had to purchase. While you’ll come across the occasional awesome free tool, as well as the (not so occasional) crappy paid tool, the general consensus here is that you get what you pay for. So if you’re serious about building a business, then you can’t back away from a couple hundred dollars worth of investment, especially when you consider that it’s a much smaller investment than a “traditional” business, and as long as you apply the right principles, you will succeed because time is on your side.
Instant Results. Call me arrogant, call me stupid, call me blind, but I really walked into the make money online arena expecting to be kicking butt within 2-3 months. What a sobering experience. Maybe it also had to do with all the crap I’d been fed. You know, the “turnkey operations” and “magic bullets”. The thing is, I want to build this not for next month, not even for next year. I now realize that many of my competitors will throw in the towel, while newcomers will be at an instant disadvantage as my sites will be older, and I’ll be savvier, with a better and stronger infrastructure. I know now how little I knew, and how foolish it was of me to expect that kind of results.

So if you’re a beginner reading this, don’t think for a second I’m trying to intimidate you or otherwise trying to convince you not to do the make money online thing. All I’m saying is: make sure you go to the right sources. Here are the ones that have worked for me:

Grizz’s Make Money Online For Beginners & his newest MMO project, Make Money Online With Grizzly

Courtney Tuttle’s Internet Marketing School

Victor Franqui’s Make Money Online Blog, Blogger Unleashed

Justin Briggs’ SEO Zombie

Terry Didcott’s Make Money Blog, The Honest Way

Frank’s Optempo

Five months into my journey, I very much feel like I have so much to learn. This post was in part motivated by the fact that some of those guys who help us out so much get in trouble and get their sites de-indexed and/or reported to Google because of it. This is a (feeble) attempt at giving back some of the knowledge that they have given me. Of course I can’t be as technical as they can but I also wanted to keep it simple.

Once again, thank you guys, it’s a pleasure tapping into your brains.