United Business Services

Permit me to go on a bit of a rant here. I am sure this will resonate with anyone who has spent any time online trying to make money.

Back in the day it was pretty easy. My first bit of success online was with ebay in 2000 through early 2002. Ebay started to get a bit saturated at that point and making money began to get more and more difficult. I stopped doing Ebay completely towards the end of 2003.

There began my odyssey for the next wave in making money online. This led to the early years of affiliate marketing and Google AdWords. Again, back in the old days (2004 and 2005) AdWords was simple. Kind of like taking candy from a baby. All you had to do was throw up an ad group with a bunch of keywords and boom, you were making money.

Alas, this too came to an end. The easy money disappeared sometime around 2005 give or take. Some niches lasted longer than others of course, but fast forward to today, and playing with AdWords is like swimming in a shark tank.

That is not to say you can’t make money anymore this way, but you really need to know what you are doing. To say competition is fierce is quite the understatement. We would recommend newbies that insist on trying pay per click start with Yahoo or the MSN ad platforms as they are not quite as saturated yet and seem to be a bit more forgiving.

Which leads us to our rant. Over the years we have followed pretty much all of the top gun gurus. We are on all of the big dog email marketing lists. We do this for a couple of reasons. One is that we feel it is the least expensive learning experience you can get online. Some of the top line copy these guys write (or pay to have written) is priceless. You can learn much just by reading the emails. Another reason is to keep a finger on the pulse of “what is currently hot”.

The theme we see today is that there seems to be an “inner circle” of these guys who promote the crap out of each others lists in a kind of “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” sort of way. They do this through sales incentives, contests and joint ventures with special deals to each other among other things.

Of course there is nothing wrong with this per se. We just feel that it is not always done in the best interest of the people who end up buying these big expensive courses.

So where are we today? You hear much about PPC which is pay per click advertising. You also hear a lot about CPA which is cost per action. You can build websites and sell your own products or other peoples through affiliate marketing. You can attempt to monetize traffic through Adsense or Yahoo publishing. You can blog, you can flog. You can create and sell software. I could go on and on here of course, as there are limitless ways to make money online.

But it all still comes back to one thing. Traffic. How do you put eyeballs on your website or online offer? The great irony here is that it seems like things are regressing back to what originally worked.

Links and content. Build quality incoming links to your site and provide unique quality content and you will get traffic. It’s that simple. It’s always been that simple. The trouble is people abused this with automated content generating software that produced nothing but keyword rich gibberish.

That worked for a while but the search engines are a lot smarter today and getting smarter all the time. What worked then no longer works today. But the theory is still the same.

Quality Incoming Links + Unique Quality Content = Traffic.

Check out our next post. We will discuss one of the fastest and easiest ways to generate those links and content and get your site to rank quickly.

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