We all know of the people who start a “money making” blog, give it three months or so, and then quit. I wonder why? Anyone who’s been reading the Make Money Online genre for long enough knows that it can be done. The drawback? It takes more than the hour or two of work that many people are touting. They lie, I tell you, they lie!
For example, you am working on a site utilizing affiliate links that will sell, for the sake of illustration, pencils. To do so, you have to do the following:
Do keyword research and try to figure out which ONE niche in the world hasn’t been tapped out yet.
Decide on that one.
Get a domain name. All of the reasonable ones are taken, so you get one like www.i-sell-pencils-that-write.com.
Plan the whole project out.
Do some more keyword research, because surely there is something better out there with more people who want it and fewer people selling it. Oh, and something that costs more, so you’ll get a bigger payout per purchase.
Nope. It’s not there.
Sign up with all of the affiliate marketing outfits that have companies who sell pencils listed.
Get approved (or rejected) by each individual pencil-selling company.
Spend several hours looking at the banners and links offered by each pencil-selling company. Do they match the colors on your site?
Set up a static website (a pain) or blog to market the links. This is more involved that it seemed when you first thought of this idea.
Write the content and embed the links. Make sure that the content is interesting, keyword heavy and correct. Realize that this is not easy when you are writing about pencils.
Get images to make your site look good. Jack around with making sure that the images are properly aligned and all that crap. Curse. Oh, and don’t forget about the copyright. 
Stumble a few posts while you sit and wonder if you are wasting time with the whole thing.
Decide if you are going to sit around and wait in the hopes that Google will grace your site with optimum placement in a few months, or if you are going to buy some Adwords.
Attempt to work the numbers, but realize that you really have no idea what you are doing. You also realize that all of the numbers are not provided, so it is sorta like trying to solve x + y = 3z (It may be possible to solve that problem, but I wouldn’t know, because I am an idiot at math, which is why I have online checking.)
Ponder whether or not you should put Adsense on the site. Will visitors click the Adsense instead of the more profitable affiliate links? You’ll never know unless you experiment. So much for instant gratification.
Realize you hate stupid pencils. Break one.
Just do the best you can. Get the darn thing DONE. Put it out there and hope it makes you a few hundred in residual income now and then.
Realize that social networking to promote your site would probably help. Scream. Sign on to MyBlogLog.
ad infinium…
I think this is why so many people are writing about making money online. Actually doing it is a bit tedious and boring. Kinda like work.
Exactly one person has entered my Contest at this point. One. Uno. Are you guys going to let the $$ go to that person without any competition? Just wondering….
