Some Knowledge

Here is how you make money on the net.  You sell information.  Copies of information cost you nothing.  You will need to follow this procedure exactly:

• Pretend to be rich
• Write as if you can’t spell
• Offer secret information
• Set up a site to take payments
• Be rude and obnoxious
• Call yourself The Rich Moron
• Offer a discount on your ebook
• Get your ebook from a PLR site
• Offer a money back guarantee
• Promote your website
• Make your money selling information on how to make money.

Any variation in this procedure is fine.  You don’t have to know anything about making money on the Internet.  The fact that you can’t write only proves you are a regular guy.  Look out for the authorities.

The Internet is a vast sea of raw data to some people.  Data mining is the process of using a computer to sift through a lot of material and find what a person is looking for.  A screen scraper is a web application that collects data off the Internet for use by another person.  Both the process of data mining and the tools like bots and screen scrapers are being used more and more as the quantity of information online increases.

How does this affect anyone with a blog?  The answer is that your public posts can be seen as a source of raw data for persons looking to promote their own websites and businesses.  Something you write might be seen as good publicity for some product.  Your popular blog posts might be reposted on another site to attract traffic to another person’s operation.  Your email address might be lifted off a website and sold to spammers.  If you were to post personal information this could be used to spoof your identity to apply for fraudulent credit cards or other services.

The FBI and the CIA have been using data mining techniques for years to track criminals.  The identities of the 9-11 hijackers was supposedly found with data mining.  Any database that is accessible can be a source for information on people that may be of use to some organization.  Computers are very quick and precise at sorting out information.

With the wide open nature of the Internet, anyone can use commonly available software to find out just about anything they need to know.  If you have ever used a search engine you have mined data.  It is just not possible for a human being to sort through such a huge amount of information.  If there is anything to be concerned about in your own interaction with the net, it is probably to keep information you do not want publicized private.  If you post something somewhere there is probably an application that can find it faster than you can remember where you put it.  Collecting data on purchasing habits and web usage is big business.

Since I started this particular blog I have seen more of my writing exerpted and posted to other websites than I have ever seen before.   WordPress is being mined for content.  I’m sure there are companies out there that do nothing but steal text from the net to post on their own sites.  Finding these links is as simple as scrolling through your spam comments.  I guess if what you say is important enough to steal you might be happy.  You might as easily be annoyed at people posting duplicate content and bogus authorship to your work.  As long as there is open access to your writing this will be a problem.

I’ve been writing up blog entries for years.  This is the first blog I’ve ever had that people have been reading.  I’ve also noticed a lot of robots reading this blog.  I can tell they are robots, because they leave spam comments.  I have ten times as many spam comments as real ones.  Maybe this is not a bad ratio.  Still, it interests me that I am seeing links to my articles appearing on various sites that have my work listed with a fictitious author name.  The last one was really comical.  It had obviously been through a bad translation.  I know how robots write.

I’m pretty certain the robots will pick up on this article too.  Copyright infringement was originally called piracy.  I can see if somebody wants to leave a link to something I wrote that was interesting to them.  That’s totally cool.  Still, having somebody else’s name put on something I write is a bit disturbing.  Even if it is spambots doing the theft, some person is behind this.

It may take me a while to look into this phenomena.  I’m sure there must be some information somewhere about bot piracy.  I just read about a games anti-piracy bot in the UK Register.  Information from the search engines tells me this is a spam problem, but doesn’t give me any information on copyright violation.  I checked out the one really wonky comment that got caught, and the website it was submitted from had already been closed down by the host.

I’m wondering now if the authority that this blog seems to have on Technorati is just an artifact from all the spam links that have been posted on my various articles.  It’s nice to have readers, but I wonder how many of the page views I get come from actual humans.  Maybe I should write articles for spam robots.  I could maybe hook up something interactive like a chat bot application in the html of an entry so the bots can talk to each other.  I am almost considering setting my spider loose on some of these spam URLs and see if it finds out who the heck these people are.  The spider seems to be good at finding emails.

It has been said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  I would say that imitation is the sincerest form of laziness.  If these sites are going to troll blogs and gank content out of other people’s writing, why don’t they just write a bot that will compose decent text on its own?  Are people too dumb to write a writer bot?  It’s just persons looking to steal traffic for their own sites.  They even copied text off my blog entry yesterday about blog spam.  I thought this was a bit hilarious.  I know it will only take the spambots a couple minutes to find this post.  I just wonder who they will say wrote this.

Any day of the week a quick look at Google Trends will show you that most people are using the Internet to look up information on celebrities.  The Internet has become yet another branch of the mass media.  I guess it is nothing to be surprised about that people would use the net to look up information on things that interest them.

You can only get so much information from a stray snippet of a story on a TV news show.  TV and radio are serial media.  The information you get on the mass media comes in a stream that you can not control.  The Internet is parallel.  You can get any kind of in-depth information on whatever subject interests you.  It is not a producer in some TV network office deciding what you will look at, it is your own choice.

The days of sitting on the sofa being spoon-fed whatever information a group of news editors deems newsworthy are coming to an end.  With the net you can look at whatever interests you, whenever you want.  As soon as the media tunes into the new ways of operation we will see on-demand television coming at us from Youtube.  Already you can look at any kind of a fool video people think to post.  You can spend all day watching screen captures of people playing computer games.  People are no longer at the mercy of the media conglomerates.

The Internet can be your means of personal communications.  VOIP phones are becoming standard in  areas with high speed cable access.  With email you can correspond with people anywhere in the world.  Education can be as simple as hooking up to a university lecture podcast.  The whole world of information is as close as your imagination.  If you get bored with what you find posted by other people, you can write your own information in blogs, podcasts, and websites.

Still, I am a bit amazed that with as much information available to people at the click of a mouse that most of the information that is accessed is about entertainment.  I guess I should not be too surprised.  Entertainment is big business and billions of dollars are spent promoting celebrities and mass media.  The national pastime is not baseball, it’s spying on famous people.  Perhaps in the future we will have a society that revolves around useful knowledge, not popular gossip.  Perhaps I’m dreaming.

Are you an angry journalist?  There’s a website where you can post what it is that’s got you ticked.  Apparently there are a lot of angry writers in the world.  This site already had 2927 complaints.

It’s mildly interesting to read other people’s complaints about the news industry.  Mostly they are just complaining about things that affect their jobs or their business, like the Internet.  It’s pretty funny reading some of the stuff posted here.  This seems to be a popular site.  I guess if you haven’t got any news to report you may as well post your complaints to a forum.

So, you have a blog and some people are reading it.  You decide you want to find some way to make money off your writing efforts.  What do you do?

Basically, the way to monetize a blog is to sell advertising.  Any search engine can lead you to thousands of programs that sell advertising on blogs and websites.  Google Adsense is perhaps the most famous of these advertising operations.  What you have to do is to get accepted for the program you want to run.  Then you need to put a bit of html code on your page that will display the advertisements.  Television has advertisements.  Radio has advertisements.  Newspapers and magazines all make money from advertising.  So why not your blog?

In the first place, to make money from advertising, you will need a lot of viewers.  The payout for an ad is small on a per customer basis.  You make money on volume.  It is called mass media for a reason, massive numbers of people consume it.  If you have ten or twenty or a hundred viewers a day for your site, you will not make a lot of money from advertising.  You will need thousands of people to not only look at your site, but who will click on ads.  It’s a numbers game, and bigger numbers mean bigger rewards.

Well, maybe you don’t want to pollute your blog with all kinds of advertisements that have nothing to do with what you are trying to say.  Another way you can make money is to put a donation button on your blog.  Maybe you have some medical condition that needs attention and you want to appeal to the kindness of strangers to help with your problems.  Maybe you just want to ask people for money.  If you do that in the street, you might get arrested.  But this is the Internet, and cyber-panhandling is a recognized way to get money from your website.  Politicians raise money from donations all the time.  Churches all rely on contributions to fund their operations.  There’s no reason a person can’t ask another person for some of their cash.  Some people have even used cyber-begging to pay off their overdrawn credit cards.  Who’s to say what will or will not work in generating an income.

Well, maybe you are too proud to beg.  Maybe you want to sell actual products.  Maybe an affiliate marketing business is what you are looking to set up.  Sales works the same way the world over.  Businesses will pay a commission on  a sale you make on your blog.  You direct people to the site where an object or service is being peddled and they cut you in for a piece of the action.  It’s as simple as posting a link with your referral ID.  You can really help people out who are looking for that perfect gift.  Your reader might not even know that they need that new lamp if they hadn’t seen it on your blog.

Alright, you don’t want to sell advertisements, you don’t want to beg, you don’t want to sell other people’s products.  Maybe you want to sell your own product.  Maybe you want to sell your paintings.  Maybe you want to sell custom tea cozy’s that you make in your spare time.  Take a picture and post it on your blog and start taking bids on your products.  Set up your own factory to make paper picture frames.  Sell all the old books you inherited from your Aunt Alice.  You will have to add shipping charges to the price of your items.  You may have to fill out customs forms to ship your stuff overseas.  You will be selling actual things you obtain for a low price for a higher price and will be making a profit.  Be sure to keep accurate records.

If you don’t want to sell something, you will not be able to make money on your blog.  You might sell the very words you type into your blog.  You might hook up with Pay Per Post and sell reviews of different products.  If you want money you will have to sell something, even if it is just your time.  Monetizing a blog is not something that is hard to understand.  All you need is a product and a customer to pay you for that product.  There are even software widgets you can get that will help you salt down your blog with all kinds of advertisements.  If you want to turn your blog into a job there are plenty of opportunities available.  All it takes is a little time and effort and you too can become a wealthy capitalist.

Trolling along on the net yesterday afternoon, I came across another free ebook.  After supplying an email address and a first name and waiting a good long time for a reply, I finally downloaded this trove of information.  As Adobe opened up the PDF file I noticed that the entire plan was summarized on page two of this document.

The money making plan went like this:

• Open an account with Clickbank.
• Represent some product that is offered.
• Offer this product as an affiliate on your website.
• Take money from product sales and buy advertising from Google.
• Keep buying advertising with profits until you reach high levels of sales.
• Siphon off profits to generate income.

This seemed like the standard plan purported as a business model for any get rich on the net program.  I can’t believe there is that much money in sales of an ebook.  After all, I got this ebook for free.  Anyone who goes to the Clickbank website can get the same business plan directly from Clickbank.

I have looked at some of the products offered on Clickbank.  I would not feel comfortable selling any such products.  This is why:  I wouldn’t use any of these products myself.  If they sold ebooks of fiction, I might see myself as a distributer.  If they sold products that were anything but get rich quick schemes, I might consider affiliate sales.  If any of the software that is offered by Clickbank seemed actually useful, I might think about selling it.  As it stands, the entire scheme seems shady to me.

Here’s an alternative business plan for personal wealth building.  Go to Monster.com and find a job.  Sure, you will have to work for your money, but it should be honest work.  When you save enough money from your job to start considering making investments, think about starting your own business.  The SBA has all kinds of resources available if you are interested in going into business for yourself.   You might even start a legitimate Internet business and make your fortune on the net.  Good luck.

If you want to make your writing easy to understand you should start with the main point.  State your subject clearly.  Use short sentences.  Keep your word choice simple.

Write in short paragraphs with one idea per paragraph.

If you have a lot of points to make use the bulleted list.  Do not do anything stupid to make your words hard to read.  This means do not use confusing backgrounds or fonts.  It is impossible to read some websites because the background obliterates the text.

Do not use long complicated sentences that confuse the reader.  Do not write in the passive voice.  Use a “subject, verb, object” sentence structure.  Do not misspell  words.

Arrange your pages in short columns so that it is easy for the eye to follow from one line to the next.  Try to avoid long passages that require scrolling.  Clearly state the point of your message.  Do not confuse or mislead the reader.

Clearly identify who is speaking in quoted text.  Make sure your facts are correct.  Be honest.

Avoid jargon and overuse of acronyms.  Summarize your conclusions at the start of a piece.  Most readers will merely scan your work.  State the facts in a simple manner.  Complicated structures are not style, they are sophistry.

With a little practice you can write easily understood prose.  You want to communicate and convince with your words, not confuse and annoy.

I’ve just been reading some really convoluted web pages about keyword use in content and meta tags.  If search engine optimization is really so complicated how does anything ever get found?  It seems to me that any keywords you use on a page would be obvious.  It has to do with the subject of your page.

If you have a web page that sells dolls, “doll” would be the obvious keyword.  “Toy” and maybe “dollhouse” would also fit the category.  There is no point paying somebody to optimize your site with irrelevant keywords because you are just trying to sell your dolls, not cars, not airplanes, not movie tickets, just dolls.  Apparently multiple uses of the keyword on the page can cause people to be repulsed by your content.  Nobody wants to read something that is so repetitious that it is ridiculous.  Even search engines don’t like this kind of content.  I can recall visiting sites that were nothing but a long list of irrelevant keywords.  This kind of blackhat SEO will get you nowhere these days.   Search engines have gotten too smart.

So, how does a person go about optimizing a site for keyword content?  Might I suggest that you have a clear subject and state your purpose in clear and concise prose?   This might seem the obvious way to go about getting page views for your site or listings on the search engines.  For instance, the keyword for this page is going to be “keyword,” but it would be pointless to keep saying the same thing over and over again.  Still, there is the word “doll” all over this page, but this page has nothing at all to do with dolls.  A keyword analyzer would still see “doll” as a keyword for this page, unless it had enough AI to realize that this page was about keywords and not dolls.

It might be important for your rankings to get the proper keywords into your page header.  Still, this is something that should be obvious.  What is your page about?  That is your main keyword.  Does a good title affect how many people will view your page?  Sure.  Does having content that suits the title affect how long people stay on your page?  Yes.  Should you pay somebody to do the obvious and include common relevant keywords in your page?  Why would you?  This is something you should be doing yourself or your page designer should be doing when they make the page.  Just use common sense and make your content as useful and salient as possible and the keywords will automatically be optimized for your page.

A quick search of Google returned over 17 million hits on the terms “content creation.”  There are many companies starting up or that have been in business for a while that provide content creation services for websites.

One of these businesses, SEO Content Creation and Linkbait Services sells content for between $35 and $250 a page.   You can either specify topics for this place to generate copy on or leave them to create pages on their own.  The buyer gets copyright to whatever material they contract for.  Apparently, writers are being organized to sell material to online services.

Of course it was only a matter of time before writers started to cash in on the Internet.  There is so much material available online that nobody would have the time to read or catalog it all.  That’s why there are search engines.  Still, it’s interesting to realize that the pages you post to your blog could be sold as copy for a decent price.  If you are interested in writing material for a targeted market you can always go to Helium Marketplace and attempt to sell your work.   Then again, there is always the possibility of starting your own content creation business.  You would probably need to recruit writers, who could be found by trolling through the various blogging communities online.

With all the websites online it is not surprising that copywriting has gone digital.  You can even take online courses to learn the tricks and skills of copywriting.   If you are writing articles and content for your blog now there is the potential to get paid for the writing you are doing.  Of course there are also Pay Per Post operations that will pay you a fee to write reviews and advertisements for products on your blog.

The world is becoming swamped with the quantity of material that is available on the Internet.  You can now buy content for your websites right online.  Writing is an occupation that fits in well with the kind of instant communication that has made the net possible.  In future, I think more opportunities will become available for people who like to write.