Financial Success - How To Make Money On Internet

For the sake of being interesting, let’s also just assume you have no money. Paid advertising isn’t really very controversial. You pay and your ads appear — simple and easy.

But what about promoting a site or product online without being able to spend any money? That’s much harder, as you’re quickly going to be branded a spammer if you go about leaving unsolicited URL s to your site on forums, in emails, or on blogs without welcome. So how do you obtain that welcome? The answer is almost too obvious: Contribute.

Talking about a product or site online without paying is generally called spamming. If you want to promote something, consider actually contributing to the community where you wish to promote. Tag your contributions.

Thus, pursue self promotion.  I feel almost bad labeling pursuit of self promotion an advertising method, because in actuality, it isn’t. If you’re like me, “advertising” and “marketing” sometimes feel approximately equivalent to “tricking people into buying things”. 

What I’m proposing is a bit of give and take, if you will — and I’m not talking about some “incredible offer you can’t refuse” type of giving. I’m talking about how honest participation can allow you to create a powerful voice on the internet (now that we’re in the blog era) — a voice you can use for free.

Start a personal web site, and start using it to connect to the world online. That’s what the blog era right now is really about. You’ve now got a method of personifying yourself online. That means you can gain readership around your voice, and you can begin establishing your identity in the web arena.

Blogs have allowed people on the internet to subscribe to each other. Pick your favorite writers, and subscribe to their blog. All of the sudden you’ve got great content streaming in to your newsreader every day written by only the people you cared to hear from. So how do you go about being the target of such attention?

• Blog — If you don’t live anywhere on the internet, nobody will have a place to go. Start by making a blog.  That can be considered as web site because the url will be recognized not as an affiliate link.  Start writing about things you care about. Was a news story interesting today? Blog about it. Like a product you found? Write it down in your blog. This is the beginning. 

• Blog About Blogs - Read other blogs on things you care about. Write responses to their entries on your web site and post a comment pointing users to your response. You’ve just started to gain authentic readership.

• Put Your Web Site (blog address) in your Forum/Email Signature - Whether on forums or in email, put your web site URL in your signature so that people who read stuff from you can reference back to it.

Write Articles - Become an expert. Tons of trade magazines and industry specific sites out there accept article submissions from anyone. Submitting onethat gets published means your URL can appear at the bottom of the article, which then immediately gets seen by thousands. For example, if you’re a web developer, get published on SitePoint or A List Apart.

• Tell Your Friends - It may seem obvious, but this is the first set of free readers you get for your site. No need to elaborate on this—just send out a quick heads up to everyone you already personally know.

• Ping Blog Indices - Blog indices (like Technorati) allow you to list your entries in a search engine that only cares about blog content. There are tons of these. Just enable the option in your blogging software to automatically tell these sites about your content, and you’re in. You’ve got time on your side here, too — these sites are currently like search engines with 90% of the garbage removed — they may become less effective as the blogosphere rapidly expands. Take advantage.

• Submit to Search Engines - I’m afraid to even bullet this one, because it shouldn’t consume a lot of your time. People always want to know how you improve their rankings on search engines. Here’s my advice: Stop trying. Search engines care about content, because they want to deliver people relevant information. People want that same content. Don’t worry about your rank — just worry about your content. The rank follows the content, not the other way around — don’t fight that.

The idea behind everything here is that you’re authoring real resources, then tagging them with your URL and identity. Authorship is your best method of acquiring readership through unpaid means, and you’re (amazingly enough) acquiring that readership by doing something good. Sound like a win-win? It is. Just keep contributing and let the links to your new site keep piling up.

Spending money in advertising is paying someone else to do all of this for you. You’re paying to piggyback off of someone else’s existing value. If you don’t have the money—do it yourself. Advertisers might just start coming to you instead of the other way around.

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