Why Noobs Don't Make Money Online

I am accustomed to 4-5 hours of sleep. Been that way for years. Every so often I feel a bit rundown and end up crashing early. Happened last night - 8pm and I was fast asleep. Just 1 problem. At 2:15 am I'm awake - fully awake and ready to roll. So I saunter over to the office and decide to work on a few of those emails haunting my inbox.



(And that's just this weeks emails... can I say waaaaay over my head here!)

So I canned that idea in a hurry but I did check out the comments on my new post over at my "not as ugly as this blog" blog Being First with Affiliate Products At that hour of the morning my friends on the other side (and ends) of the planet are awake and Lissie from Passive Income Online had left a comment... we traded quips for a bit and this led to me re-reading a post from Lucky who has a blog called "Achieving your Goals". Apparently one of Lucky's goals was to get my attention and he did - you have to read this outrageous post Make Money Online Grizzly Style. OK - you don't HAVE to but if you do you might want to follow one of the links that point to an INC.com article written about a real internet success stemming from Vancouver. Nope. Not John Chow - I said a "real" success story. The story is about Markus Frind the creator of Plenty of Fish - the largest online dating site. 1.6 Billion (yes with a B) page views a month. Read the article - it will amaze you to learn the guy is pulling in $5 million a year doing little work with a staff of himself. (He has a couple of employees now who weed out the spam on his site) Basically the guy created a huge site sitting in his living room and totally dominated the big guns of online dating. (Match.com, Lavalife etc) How did he do it?

"Frind's account of his own exploits, published on his blog in 2006 under the title "How I Started a Dating Empire," says a lot about his worldview: "I spent every waking minute when I wasn't at my day job reading, studying, and learning. I picked out 'enemies' and did everything I could to defeat them, which meant being bigger than them. I refused to accept defeat of any kind." Around the same time, he returned to one of his old Internet hangouts, a forum called WebmasterWorld, and posted a brief how-to guide entitled "How I Made a Million in Three Months." It contained a blueprint for the success of Plenty of Fish: Pick a market in which the competition charges money for its service, build a lean operation with a "dead simple" free website, and pay for it using Google AdSense." (Italics added by Griz)

exerpt from Inc.com - Author Max Chafkin "And the Money Comes Rolling In"

Have you seen Plenty of Fish Oh it's ugly.

So let me get this straight. I am to believe that someone could take an ugly site - give away free product that people want - and pay for it all with Adsense? Oh and kick the cans of all the dominant players in the market at the same time?

Getthefouttahere...

Let's see what the Make Money Online Expert has to say about this...

Jeremy Shoemaker if you please...

By 2006, Plenty of Fish was serving 200 million pages each month, putting it in fifth place in the United States and first in Canada among dating sites. Frind was making amazingly good money, too: $10,000 a day through AdSense. In March of that year, Frind mentioned these facts to Robert Scoble, a popular tech blogger whom he met at a conference in Vancouver. When Scoble wrote about the solo entrepreneur with the ugly website making millions of dollars a year, his readers were in disbelief. At the time, AdSense was seen as a tool for amateurs. It might cover your blogging expenses, but it wouldn't make you rich. Frind's website was also downright ugly. A search-engine-optimization blogger, Jeremy Schoemaker, wrote that Frind was a liar. "Give me a break, dudes," he wrote. "You look so stupid when you buy into his crap."

Oh sorry Jeremy - you're a search-engine-optimization expert too. Silly me - I must of missed that as I was whizzing on by in the serp's.

Whew what a relief - now I know nobody could take an ugly blog, give out free info and dominate a niche where the likes of Shoemoney and John Chow and Problogger reside and actually make money at it using Adsense.

In fact Shoemoney was kind enough to give another opinion on people trying to make money with a blog... Want to Make Money from a Blog? - Don't Try

Enlightening - you need to use your blog to make money with other things (once you get famous enough of course).

Do you know why noobs don't make any money online? Because they will piss away all their time reading and commenting on the endless train of Social Blogging Ignorance.

I frittered away another hour reading the inane comments left on Shoemoney's post. I randomly followed a few links left by the commenters. Some fellow called IronBlogger left this comment;

Very good point Shoe, but I disagree with you on some levels. I love blogging and I love making money off of it. If blogs didn’t make money I wouldn’t still be doing it to this point.

So I naturally had to check out this fellows blog - he did say he made money after all.

No surprise - another wordpress site adorned with all the standard crap you see on a site built by someone who reads the A-List. No advertisers, no traffic, no comments, no readers - and of course the usual posts that scream "I'm a noob but I'm going to pretend I know how to make money by copying everything I see on the A-List".

He has a Guest Post by another generic Noob who calls himself MoneyMakingGuru and enlightens us with a post about SEO. Did you know that there are 3 things that you just have to do to make your wordpress blog search engine friendly? The money guru tells us that we need;

1. Plug ins
2. Link/Banner Exchanges
3. Guest Posting

Really?

I have a question? Do any of these people ever check the serp's - the search engine results pages. I ask because this IronBlogger fellow has the infamous Top 100 Bloggers that will make you money online list Yes the same list seen countless times on noob sites across the net hoping it will attract all the big names and nobodies to their blog. The list is of course a joke - there is only one site listed that will actually teach others how to make money online (Vic's retired BloggerUnleashed) while the rest of the list is full of the usual social bloggers like Darren Rowse and crew who certainly make money online (by selling crap to the likes of IronBlogger) but don't teach a useful thing about making money yourself.

Here is my Top 100 - the only qualification needed is that you actually teach people how to make money online, know SEO and can prove it in the serp's.

Court Tuttle/Mark Butler

Vic Franqui

Josh Spaulding

Me and everyone who reads me and now understands SEO and Google.

I'm a little short of 100 but that's because these are the only people who truly understand SEO and explain it to others. Want proof - they all rank well in the serp's. Go see where all of IronBloggers list ranks for "Make Money Online".

As for his SEO advice - maybe someone should mention that the two top sites on Google for MMO are Blogger blogs - not wordpress. They don't use plug ins, banner exchanges or have guest posts. Come to think of it neither does my wordpress blog and it outranks everyone on his list as well.

Noobs advising noobs while copying social bloggers who don't have a clue about SEO either. I get so frustrated when I hear people claim to be in the MMO niche. They don't make money online and they sure as hell don't rank in my niche. They are social bloggers going nowhere fast and dragging all the other noobs down with them.

I did get a kick out of one of the names on his list,



Did you catch it? Middle... "Broke"... hehehe Some truth to that.

Speaking of Caroline - I know I have been a little hard on her in the past mainly because she flogs all the A-list crap and doesn't make any money but plays the role as well as any of the pretenders. Case in point.

Here is a post she wrote recently Matching Revenue Streams to Traffic Sources She talks about Search Engine traffic

"SE traffic is more receptive to on-page advertising such as AdSense than other kinds. Now the trouble is, programs like AdSense are very easy to implement so many bloggers put those ads up first but it usually takes a few months to build search engine traffic because your site needs authority before it is going to rank for any decent keywords and that takes time."

Yup - she is right.

"To do well with programs like AdSense each post needs to be targeted well to a certain keyword or group of related keywords and these keywords need to be something that advertisers are bidding on. Many blogs are not focused enough to do well. Mine is a prime example - most of my mosts are long, and rambly and don’t focus on keywords all that much so when I was running my AdSense experiment I found that the ads were very poorly targeted to my audience."

Yup - right again.

So my question is this; Caroline since you don't make money from Adsense and you don't have any search engine traffic worth speaking of, where did you get this sage knowledge? Obviously not from experience - this is stuff one learns as one succeeds - not fails. Didn't you mention you made a whopping $15.26 in Adsense in January?

Would any of my readers care to take a stab at where her info came from? That's right - I see her lurking about here just like half the people on IronBloggers list. Caroline - I don't blame you for being a bit put off by me as I admit I have been hard on you (for your own good I think) but maybe you can see why. You take my knowledge - post it as your own and not a word or link of acknowledgment as to where you learned it. There is only one person online who has that knowledge and posts about it... I'm not mad and you are welcome to join us anytime - you have talent but you have your head so far up the A-List behind you are only hurting yourself. I can teach you how to make money - they can't. Are you really proud of flogging crap to your readers to make a buck? At the very least you could start giving credit where credit is due.

By now I should tell you this post is going nowhere in particular - it's what happens when I get up in the middle of the night and start surfing the web. I try and avoid doing this as much as possible - it irritates me beyond words when I read all the crap out there. I shouldn't care but I do. Maybe that is my point - do you spend all your time reading crap online? Do you know how to spot all the bullshit? Do you know why Marcus Frind succeeded? Do you know why IronBlogger won't succeed?

Here is part of a post by IronBlogger exuding his Adsense wisdom;



Ahhhh... Adsense makes a blog unprofessional. It makes people run away...

It apparently made him run away when he checked out my site;



Apparently my blog didn't look good enough for his list;



So there you go folks - words of wisdom - a site has to look good and have decent content to make money online.

Don't tell Markus Frind that... or Google... or me...

Ugly just doesn't work - so unprofessional...

Cheers,

Griz

Just for balance - here is a great article by Leo Dimilo regarding the professional approach to building Flagship sites. Internet Marketing and the Case for Remarkable Content

Update - When you crap on someone and they are gracious enough to turn the other cheek - well I can respect that and I'll go slither under a rock. Caroline well done - check out The Indirect Power of Social Traffic.