Me Vs The Droid

Ouch, that laser has a bit of a sting. After learning about Salty Droid through the Scamworld video and article, I visited his site and spent hours reading about what he's been doing I was really impressed.

I really related to what he was doing and I started this site because I was sick of seeing some of the same things I think he was seeing. I'm not trying to put myself on the same level as someone that has tried to help the families of victims of people like James Arthur Ray, or trying to slap some sense into someone on an obvious path to self-destruction.

I thought I had found a kindred spirit so I was really shocked at the reception I got when I left comments on his site. It took me by surprise that people were accusing me of being one of the scammers when I created this site to help people find ways to make money online without being scammed and without giving me money. I was to eager to express my interest and wound up doing something stupid.

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Blogger vs Wordpress

Blogging is a cheap and easy way for people who don't know how to build their own website to start making money online. All you have to be able to do is write interesting articles. Two popular free blogging platforms are Blogger and WordPress.

If you're just starting out and plan to make money blogging you should choose Blogger even though I think WordPress is a more powerful blogging platform.

It seems a little strange to not pick the best tool but I also believe in picking the right tool for the right job. As I'll explain, Blogger is better than WordPress if you're just starting out.

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Strangers Won't Help You Get Rich Online!

Jeff Bezos is a founder of Amazon.com who has served as it's chairman and CEO for many years. He has a net worth of $18.4 billion mostly from the Internet.

If ever there was a man that could make a killing on the internet selling eBooks it's this guy! But he's not.

Come to think of it, why aren't Sergey Brin and Larry Page releasing "The Secrets Of Making Money Through Search Engines"!?!?!?

Is Mark Zuckerberg currently working on his "How To Build Wealth Through Social Networking Empires" seminars?

No, but some random guy you've never heard of puts up some money for a late night TV spot or a cheap webpage and you're ready to hand over your credit card number. What's the worst that can happen? You're out a few bucks right? WRONG! You can lose a whole lot more.

Checkout the video Scamworld: 'Get rich quick' schemes mutate into an online monster from theverge.com.

Also take a peek to see what The Salty Droid, who was featured in the video has to say about it here.

Blogging Is Not A Get Rich Quick Scheme

Over the years more and more people have been looking for ways to make money online. Many have turned to blogging. But how much money can you expect to make from a blog?

I addressed this topic back in 2008 in How Much Money Do Bloggers Make (analysis of a poll from Darren Rowse) and it turns out to be not that much for most. Now I'd like to address the same topic by looking at the stats of 7 of the 10 last blogs in tecnorati's top 100 blog list.

They're not the top of the list but also nothing to sneeze at either. Being in the top 100 when there are hundreds of millions of blogs out there is a very big accomplishment!

So let's look at what it takes to make the least, most popular blog and what type of success it has.

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Getting Better Results with Amazon Associate Program

The Amazon Associate program is one of the oldest and most popular affiliate program out there. It was the first affiliate program I joined.

I didn't have a whole lot of success with it at first and forgot about it for a while. Then I decided to try and learn more about it and find ways to improve my results.

It's also been a while since I posted on this site so I thought I'd come back and share some of what's been working for me.

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A Hard Way To Make Easy Money

A lot of poker players use this line, "a hard way to make an easy living" and I think it also applies here. This is literally going to be very hard if you want to get started.

This isn't a program where you sit and click your way to make money. Having the best technical skills or being able to program the best interactive Web 2.0 website may help but it's meaningless unless you put in a lot of physical work. I mean a lot. This might be the hardest you've ever pushed yourself.

Not everyone can do it, but I think a lot of people should try, even if you don't plan on making money from it. The rewards can be great. The affiliate program pays out 25% which is very high, and there are 10's of thousands of new customers buying every week. The top tier affiliates average over $100,000 a year.

This is not a scam but I'm going to tell you up front this isn't going to be easy. It may turn out to be the best thing you've decided to do, even if you never make a dime. If you want to learn more, continue reading below.

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How To NOT Start A Start-up

I saw this video the other day while searching for some information and I was absolutely in shock! While I have to say it's pretty cool to have that in your garage, and I myself have some older servers that I use to mess around with, this is the wrong way to start your start-up's data center.

I can't think of a single reason why anyone would do that. Some of the servers look like P3's and P4's. There might be some very old Xeons in there. Looks like they were picked up used. If you're thinking of doing something similar don't. In the rest of the post I'll go over the details on why with a better alternative.

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Google Dropping AdSense?

A few days ago in a post about whether Google was being fair to AdSense publishers, I mentioned how Google's share of AdSense revenue has actually been declining in the past year. In the beginning of 2007, Google gave an average of around 84% of revenue earned through AdSense back to publishers, but in the last 4 reported quarters, it's been 89%.

AdSense revenue also seems to have stalled, while revenue from Google's other web sites continues to grow. In 1Q04 Google kept $63 million from adsense compared to the $303 million they earned from their site. But in 3Q04 they only kept $184 million from AdSense which is tiny compared to the $3.67 billion in ad revenue they generated on their own sites. You can see how much it's fallen in the following chart.

Looking at these numbers, I have to wonder if Google might be thinking AdSense might be more trouble than it's worth?

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Blogging Buzz or Blogging Bubble?

You're likely familiar with the famous bubbles in recent history, the housing bubble, the tech stock bubble and the beanie baby bubble. They all have similar characteristics. It seems like a quick and easy way to make money and it creates interest in others to jump on board. The increased level of speculators in the market helps fuel demand, prices and revenue. It seems like we might be having the same thing going on and there might be a blog bubble. Quite possibly a bubble in making money online in general.

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How much money do bloggers make?

This varies greatly and many people don't even attempt to make money off their blogs, at least not directly. One of the reasons is that people are more interested in sharing their information and developing a good community than making money. Another is that many blogs won't generate enough traffic or write the type of posts that will convert their traffic into revenue.

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Can I Make Money Blogging?

For the past few years, blogging has become very popular and you've probably heard the words blog, blogging, blogger, blogosphere many times. You may have also heard that many people make money blogging and wonder if that is true. The simple truth is a lot of people make money through their blogs and it's pretty simple and cheap to do. For some, it's enough to pay for a nice dinner once a month, for others it takes care of their mortgage. Some have even managed to turn blogging into their full-time job. Whether you can make money blogging depends on many factors which I'll address in this post.

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Avoid going around in circles

Bob and Jim are sitting at their local bar, where they meet once a week to have a few beers after a hard days work. Their conversations are mostly the same, how they hate their boss, what's going on with their families and many times about how they wish they had more money.

There are a few people sitting around having their private conversations when some guy walks in, hands a wad of cash to the bartender and tells him drinks are on him the rest of the night.

All of a sudden, the bar is hopping and everyone, including some very attractive women, are buzzing around this guy.

Bob turns to Jim and asks: "Who is this guy and where does he get that kinda money?"
Jim replies: "That's Johnny, he's a NASCAR driver."
Bob: "NASCAR driver? What's that?"
Jim: "He drives around in circles really fast."
Bob: "That's it? Drives around in circles really fast? That makes money?"
Jim: "Tons!"
Bob: "Hmmmm..."

The following week Jim is sitting at the bar checking his watch, wondering what happened to Bob. Forty five minutes after they usually meet, Bob shoves the bar door open and heads straight for Jim.

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Earn money Earnestly and Honestly!

This is the most important aspect that can affect your success and I wanted it to be my first post.

There are many ways people try to make money online and offline with less than fair tactics and motives. Even normally fair and honest people get caught up in it. It is very tempting. The money can come in fast sometimes, or at least appear to, but it can quickly dissapear.

Doing business over a computer people sometimes forget where the money they are making comes from. The Internet isn't a river of money where all are free to drink. Every dollar you make online generally came out of someone else's pocket and you should never forget that.

In this post I can hopefuly convince you to go about building revenue online honestly.

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About HowToNotMakeMoneyOnline.com

The point here isn't to not make money online, but to understand how to go about it and what not to do. There is a lot of misinformation out there, the main goal of which is to put money in other people's pockets.

I frequently get asked about technology, including using the Internet to make money so I decided to create this site to share my thoughts and experiences with a broader audience. At the very least I have a place where I can direct people so I don't have to repeat myself.

There are thousands of blogs and sites out there that want to show you how to make money online. Unfortunately most of them have something to sell. Others that have sites on how to make money have had little or no success. They just copy content from others and don't have any more insight into profiting from the web than you do.

This site will hopefully be different.

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