Making Money, Internet Marketing, and Outsourcing

Ok, this is probably a record breaking post in terms of length — so grab a couple beers and sit down for a long ride.

So I want to talk a bit about outsourcing today. There comes a point where, after spending 15 hours a day writing about yeast infections, midget thongs, and galactic warrior star trek leotards, you look at your blistered fingers and say “fuck it”. I reached the “fuck it” point last week. See, it’s not worth my time grinding out articles all day, every day – I can be far more productive finding keywords, getting backlinks, and setting up sites — and by not having permanent finger damage.

You too, if you survive the MMO journey, will arrive at a similar point. So what’s that point where you hire a writer to do your dirty work? For some people, you may hate writing articles so much that you outsource everything from the start.

I don’t recommend this.

You see, before you drop the money on outsourcing, you need to find your way a bit. You should, at least until you are making money online, have pretty close connection with your article writing so that you find out what works and what doesn’t. As exciting as it may be to imagine you can throw down 2000 bucks on articles and instantly make a killing online, this is not the way to go.

Why? Because making money online is MORE than just creating hubpages, info barrels, blogs, or whatever. It’s a SKILL. You can put up content and make hubs, but if you don’t know how to pick winning niches, you are going to waste a lot of money.

The only way to get this ability is to really just keep on throwing mud out there until something sticks to the wall. Once something sticks, you figure out WHAT makes it sticks and repeat the process, but this time more mud will stick. On and one.

Guys, this doesn’t happen by luck. It’s a skill – one that takes time to develop. Yes folks, making money on the Internet is a skill like any other. The more you do it the better you get – hopefully. When you first start, you don’t know what the fuck you are doing. You fumble around, get lost, and generally go in the wrong direction. But as you start to “figure it out” and make a bit of money, one success leads to another and before you know it, you are making a lot of money. You are confident of success in your MMO ventures. You know what brings that confidence? A past history of success. But before you succeed, you are probably going to fail. A lot.

I keep on seeing people reading up on how to make money online but actually never doing anything because “what if my website fails to make any money”? Guys, if you all your failure costs is 7 bucks for a domain name, 30 bucks for a year of hosting, and some wasted time, you’ve gotten off pretty damn easy. What about people who fucking lose their house and get put out onto the street because their business fails. You want to explain to a person who mortgaged his home for a dream why you can’t pursue your dream because you might lose 50 bucks?
How to Make Money through Keyword Research

I hear a lot of blogger types talking about how great content will make you rich. Nope. You can have great content, but if it’s not targeting money making niches, you won’t make anything at all. This is what “bloggers” do – they rationalize a sort of blogging field of dreams scenario where if you build a website with great content, people will come. Yes, this certainly may happen, but this is highly dependent on exactly what sort of content we are talking about. If you are talking about your day at work, the only person who fucking cares will be your mom.

Great content is well…great, but it also needs focus. You need to write great content about content that offers to solve (or point somewhere in the direction of) a problem.

Great Content + No Keyword Research = Salvation Army, living with parents, flipping burgers

But on the other side of the coin we have:

Great Content + Keyword Research = Babes, Beer, and Boats

It’s funny because that while shills like John Clown (who just somehow shams his way back into ranking for Make Money Online) and Pro (Bull Shit) Blogger talk their bullshit about great content making you rich, many bloggers online claim that they are not making any money at all. I was browsing the Adsense forums the other day and a couple people where talking about how it was impossible to make a full time income with Adsense unless you have 200K + page impressions each day. I had to laugh; I make a full time income off a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that.

Bloggers think that traffic = money.

Not so. Traffic is just traffic. Targeted traffic makes money and targeted traffic that are desperate for a solution make a LOT of money. You see there are three types of traffic I’ve found.

1. Untargeted traffic (digg, reddit, stumbleupon)

2. Targeted traffic (organic search engine traffic)

3. Targeted “desperate” traffic (search traffic that REALLY need a solution)

Which one makes the most money folks? In my personal experience, I have found my sites that brings in targeted “desperate” visitors make 100 x the profit of my other sites with roughly the same amount of targeted but not desperate traffic. Now, keep in mind there is a LOT of variation here, depending on the niche – so this 100 x is not an “accurate” formula by any means — it’s just my personal situation. But hands down, desperate targeted traffic will make you a hell of a lot more money than just targeted traffic.

If you want to make GOOD money with Adsense (or affiliate products) you need to pick out some topics that can make some money here. Grandma’s fantastic cookie recipe and rocking chair cradles may fascinate you, but you won’t find too many other people interested in these topics. Now, I’ve had people ask me to look at their niches and offer some suggestions. One thing I tend to notice is that you guys tend to pick niches where there is no need at all.

You want to know how to make money online? You target desperate people who are royally fucked if they don’t get help soon. Yea, were talking about that poor kid with acne so bad he’s got to wear a bag when he goes outside. Or that old lady with cancer who has four months left to live.

So what’s the secrete of getting this targeted desperate traffic? Niche selection. This type of traffic is really just organic search traffic, but terms being search for have a lot of need associated with them.

Need folks, it’s all about need. The more need, the more clicks you get. Think about it for a second and it makes a lot of sense. Now, I’m not saying only target niches where people are going to croak in a few days if they don’t quickly click on the “instantly cure cancer with miracle apple seeds” ad that comes up. But you should look for those types of niches.

Still stuck? Ok, I’ll give you a super secret formula. But first, you just need to sign up for a shitty affiliate product that does absolutely shit. Just kidding.

So here it is what I ask myself before creating a niche site. If, pretending to be my theoretical visitor, I answer YES, I create the site for that keyword:

Will my life, some part of my life, or the life of someone I know, just plain suck if I don’t find a solution?

Simple eh? But oh so effective. I’ve found this works wonders for scoring clicks.  So go out and spread the gospel of your newly-discovered-only-found-in the-Himalayan-mountains cancer cure to the world, heal the faithful of their yeast infections and chunky hemroids, and spread the gospel of crap.

Now, facetiousness aside, there are some ethics to be considered here. As easy as it is to write some pure bullshit about going to sleep with Pepsi and honey smeared all over your face to cure acne, you should at least strive for a verisimilitude of honesty here. I confess to writing quite a lot of bullshit myself as an internet marketer (ok, a lot of bullshit. My current click bank scheme consist of utter and complete lies), but if someone poor bloke is dying of anal cancer, don’t fucking tell him to he’ll be cured by drinking green tea and listening to Raffy songs.
How to Make Money Online through Outsourcing

Ok, what was I talking about. Outsourcing, yes. Ok, so when to outsource. I suggest if you are making $500-$1000 or more a month, it’s worth considering outsourcing. Why? Because at that point, you know how to make money online. It’s simply a matter of replicating exactly what you are doing many many times over.

I stated in my last post that you should treat IM as a business – and it’s true. If you approach making money online as a business, you get work done and you get results. Set tangible goals and work towards them. You see me doing that here on this blog. I’ve stated I want to see 20k a month in less than a year. Impossible, right? Nope. Sure, I may not reach that go, but I’m going to damn well get as close as possible. If you are going to throw a god damn stone, make sure you flinging it as far as you can.

Now, one of the problems is to find a decent place to outsource. You might notice if you browse around places like Warrior forums that there are some cheap articles to be had. You might even see articles going for .80c -$1.00. Great deal right?

Nope and I’ll tell you why. The articles you’ll get won’t be in English, but Klingon. Folks, these type of articles have the quality level of an article produced if Jabba the Hut did twenty minutes with Dragon Naturally Speaking. Yea, that bad.

So avoid this shit because it is shit. Can you actually buy anything for .80 cents these days? Try leaving an .80 tip at an Italian restaurant. I can tell you for sure that next time you come back, that “cream” in your alfredo sauce is not really cream…

For a decent quality article, you are probably going to pay between 5-6 bucks. Were not talking award winning articles here or even articles your 12th grade English teacher would be proud of, but they get the job done.

This is an issue I’ve had to face because I’m pretty much trying to outsource most of my work now, focusing on developing sites and putting up articles. I’m looking at spending 2-4k USD a month here. Now, I want quality but I don’t want to pay 5-6 bucks an article. At 5 bucks an article, 3k USD will land me roughly 600 articles. Get it down to 4 bucks and it’s 750. 3 bucks and its 1000 articles a month.

Yes, my goal is to produce 1000 or so articles a month for the next 5-6 months. That’s roughly 5k-6k targeted articles. That’s a lot of content to handle. While I could permanently damage my hands over the next 5 months, I’d prefer that someone else lose their fingers, not me.

Can I get good quality articles (400-450) for 3 bucks only? Yep, I can and I have been. I’ve decided to share my source, since I notice many of you guys are struggling too.
The Best Outsourcing Resource I’ve Found

So I’ve been getting a lot of people asking me what I’m using to outsource my articles and If I’m willing to share. Sure. I’ve been using Human Rewriter for the past week to outsource stupid amounts of articles. This place is a fantastic article rewriting service. You can basically take any articles you find online…PLA articles…..your own articles…whatever, etc and submit the articles to them and get, within 24-36 hours, a unique article/s back.  The article/s passes copyscape. What I REALLY like is that this happens through an interface — every step is tied together so conveniently.

First you buy some credits. Then you can past the article you want rewritten into a form with keywords and the titles. You are given an instant quote (charge by sentence) and you can then spend a minute or so editing the article to get a cheaper price and submit. I find with 2 minutes of editing the sentence, I can get 450-470 words for about 3 credits (3 bucks). Not bad at all. Once the article are rewritten, you are notified. You can then log onto the website to see the article, line by line, compared against the original. If you are not happy with a sentence, you can reject that sentence with the click of a button. Easy!

How’s the quality? Stellar. I’ve dropped a 1k bucks on these guys over the weekend already and I’ve gotten hundreds of high quality articles back – much better than the shit you find on textbroker.com, or god forbid, warrior forums. You get the articles back FAST. It’s been 2 days for me to get 200 articles back since I first submitted them.

There are a few cool features as well.

They have built in spinner so you can auto  “spin” the rewritten article (I don’t recommend you do this for anything but third tier blogs — certainly NOT on your adsense sites) for even milage as far as unique content goes.  These auto spinners produce crap though, so be warned.

Another unique feature that’s actually usefull is that for another buck or two per article, you can get them to add a spin notation to each line (up to 4 words per sentence to be put into spin notation with up to four word choices choices each of those spin notated words.) That adds a LOT of unique content milage. The auto spinner produces garbage, but if you actually get them to add manually add 4 spin notated words with 4 different choices for your article (for every sentence in your article), you get an article that’s well written and can produce MANY different unique versions of itself.  You can then use the unique, rewritten and spun-notated  article they return to then generate a lot of unique versions of it. This is great is you need articles for Unique Article Wizard, AMA, or some support blogs.

If you sign up, you get a free 5 dollar trial which is enough for 1 or 2 articles to test the service out with. If you do decide to throw down some coin after that, use the coupon code “warrior” (lower case) to get 10 free credits (if you spend 25 bucks). If you spend 25 bucks + request free trial + use the coupon, you get basically 40 bucks worth of articles for 25 bucks. At 3 bucks for a 450 word article, that’s 13 or so articles — not bad at all!

So if you are looking to solve your outsourcing problems for cheap, use Human Rewriter, it’s the best I’ve found so far and I’m using it for thousands of dollars. Now the downside is that you actually have to find an article and submit it to be rewritten. But, considering the price and the quality and the whole interface that ties the process together, it’s not bad – I’m doing it for thousands of articles.

That’s an affiliate link by the way, so do sign up with it so I can buy a coffee or something to pay for the 3 hours of lost work it took to write this post.
Ethics in IM

Now, I wanted to bring up the ethics issue here, especially in regards to rewriting. I’m getting a lot of questions about whether you can take an article found on say an article directory and rewrite it for your own websites, blogs, etc.  You can, I feel, because the article passes copyscape and is thus defined, according to the web, as unique.  Now, I would certainly not take someone’s ebook or some famous novel and rewrite it, trying to pass it off as mine. But for website content, it’s certainly fine. Now don’t be an idiot use something like the service I mentioned above to rewrite someone else’s essay to be turned into your teacher, but for IM purposes, you can save a lot of time and money by rewriting. Most IM’ers do this. It comes down to your own decision about what you feel comfortable with.

The brutal truth is that there is a slider between ethics and money, the more that slider moves towards ethics, the less money you are going to make. You need to clearly define where your personal ethics lay. If you want to be purely ethical, well promoting affiliate products by lying or writing about topics and giving advice to people that you have absolutely not fucking clue about is probably out of the question.

But I’m going to tell you that an purely ethical Internet Marketer is a poor one. If you can’t part with your ethics a bit, you may want to look at starting a few authority blogs about real topics or developing a web business — you can make money that doesn’t require a breach in your ethics.

Again, I want to reiterate that you should focus on pumping out high quality content, regardless of whether your write it yourself or rewrite other article or commission someone else to rewrite/write. You should never sacrifice the quality of writing just to get “more out there”; each article should deliver some value and be as well written as possible.

Frankly, if you are decent writer, nothing is going to match just hunkering down and doing the writing yourself, but at a certain level, it’s not practical to do so any more. And if your budget has no limit, then by all means pay 10-15 bucks for an original fantastically written article.

But given a choice between someone else’s shitty rewritten crap showing up for a search and my own well written rewritten content show up, I’d rather it be mine.

I’m not saying be an unethical person, but you *may* have to compromise your ethics a bit in this game to make some money. If that makes writing fake reviews or rewriting article directory content for your own websites, well there are worse things out there folks, trust me. But ultimately, I’d rather give YOU guys the information and let you make the decision than to try and hide you guys from what goes on or from a resource you can take advantage of.

If you really do have a problem with the ethics of rewriting, then got a hold of PLA content and use services like the one I mentioned above with abandon or rewrite it yourself — there is no problem at all, ethically or legally with this.
CLICK BANK SNIPERS

Time to get back into the slimy side of internet marketing. You know, I am becoming quite attached to my midget thong. You really should consider buying one from me.

So yea, I’m starting this project back up again this week sometime. It’s been delayed about a week because I’ve been trying to get 400 articles outsourced then posted up and that’s been taking a while. I hope to have all these articles posted to my websites by Thursday. After that, it’s midget thong selling time.

I’ve avoided really going into the fine details of how I’m trying to sell my bullshit and get my sites ranked. Frankly, until I start to see some money, I’m not going to “teach” someone anything about this. I only want to show other people stuff that works for me. Click bank can make you a killing, but you have to have the right niches. I spend 10 or so websites in the wrong niche and I’m still waiting to see what’s going to happen with my other 10. My next 80 or so are going to be in different niches. Once you find a niche that gets sales, it’s just a matter of milking the hell out of it.
Adsense Snipers

With my hubpage success and info barrel success, I want to turn my attention to Adsense snipers. Now, I’ve personally seen that with a few “tricks” you can rank pretty high with self hosted domains for low to mid competition terms (1k-10k exact) without too much in the way of backlinks. Now, I’m not saying backlinks are not important, but with a very minimal number of them, it’s possible to get a niche blog on the front page and getting traffic in as little as a day to a week. I’m going to fling 100-150 of these sites out there and see what fruits I can scrape off the ground. I’m going after the low hanging longtails. I’ve seen this work with the click bank snipers sites and I’m predicting I can make a killing with a 100 or 200 adsense self hosted blogs. My aim is to get 1 – 2 clicks a day for each site. With 100 – 200 of those, that’s a full time income. I am really sort of applying my hub strategy to my own blogs. I may make 100 self hosted blogs in a month followed by 100 bogger.com blogs the next month – all following the same strategy. I am VERY excited to try this out. I still need to finish my click bank project and make some damn money out of it, but this is, I think, the next “experiment” on my plate.
Info Barrel Experiment

Ok, so I’ve very keen to see how much money I can make with info barrel over the next couple months. I have about 100 articles up so far, and I’m probably taking in 7-10 bucks a day on average with no backlinks. Over the next 2 months, I’m going to put up another 400 info barrels and work on some backlinks. I am confident that I can squeeze out 30 – 60 bucks a day (maybe more) with about 500 or so articles and some backlinks. This is my “side project.”

I’ve also noticed that info barrels seem to rank higher than hubpages. Which leads to my mini challenge:
Hubpages vs InfoBarrel

So, I’m going to write two 400 word articles with the same title and same number of long tails and post them at the same time. Over the next month, we are going to compare which articles get indexed faster and which ranks higher. I’m going to put my money on InfoBarrels because I’m finding that they often outrank the hubs they are supporting.

Now, lucky for you guys, I am going to create a new hubpage ID and a new info barrel ID and post them for you guys to see. Everyone will be able to see for themselves which article ranks higher. I’ve been getting a lot of questions about how to write for Adsense and how to layout hubs/info barrels. Well, I’m going to show you directly now.

I’ll update this section with LINKS to my hubpage and infobarrel articles tomorrow, so check back.
How to REALLY Make Money Online

Will MMO, you have to have a bit of dedication. Most people want results now. Perhaps it’s the society we live in that seeks instant gratification for almost everything, but if you are going to be sorely disappointed if you start a couple websites and expect the cash to come rolling in the next day. Nope, won’t happen.

But if you keep on going at it, something will happen. It might not be next week, next month, or even 6 months from now, but if you keep smashing a rock with a hammer, eventually it’s going to shatter.

Once you get around 10 – 15 bucks a day, something clicks in your head and you have an “oh” moment. It dawns on you that yes, YOU yourself can actually make money on the internet. It’s one thing to hear other people talk about making money, but when YOU start to make a bit the wheels of your head spin and it all becomes real to you.

So how do you get to that 15 dollar a day point? A lot of hard hard work. Getting that first 1000 a month in the hardest part. If there is a proper analogy for MMO, it’s that MMO is a dessert. If you can just cross that dessert and reach the other side, you can make money. The problem is, getting to that other side is tough – pretty damn tough. There are a lot of skeletons you’ll see along the way – those burn outs that start voyage so full of passion but they find out part way that MMO is a lot of work and not easy money, they give up.

About a year ago, I started out doing IM with a friend. We were both pretty passionate about living on the beach while earning money – who wouldn’t be? Well, our dreams of drinking coconut juice and flirting while Thai girls seemed pretty much only that after 3 months of hard work and not a dollar to show. The difference is that I continued to work at it while my friend threw in the towel. What has he done in 4 months? Let’s see…talk about making money.

What have I done? 700 hubpages, 200 info barrels and 30 self hosted blogs.

That’s a lot of difference folks. You know what? He’s STILL talking about making money. Just not right now you know? Next month, when the weather’s not as hot or maybe when he’s got some spare time. Yea, and YOU are going back to the gym next week too, right? We’ve all heard that bullshit before. It’s called giving up.

Guys, if you want to something in life, you have to seize it with both hands and don’t let go. I’m not just talking MMO here, but everything. You know why? Because anything worth having in this life takes work, takes sweat, and takes effort.

Guys, you want that perfect six pack – you are going to have to work your ass off for 6 months to a year. Overweight and want to look like Brad Pitt in tights? Sorry, those click bank diet pills I’ve been hawking don’t fucking work. The only way to achieve anything of value is through sweat and sacrifice.

Guys, this principle applies to everything in life – including MMO. If you are the sort of person who likes to make New Year’s resolutions, then you better do some soul searching and evict that bullshit or fucking give up – either do it or don’t even try. There is no compromise here.

That mountain in high guys, but if you can take the first step, you’ll find the next step in reach. Over and over and soon enough, you‘ve climbed the fucking stairs.

Work hard and make money online