Sell kits to suckers telling them they can get rich with blogging, tweeting or Facebook

There are two ways to get rich: 1. become a plumber or other trades person or 2. start a website promising other people you have the keys to getting rich on the internet.

If you have a blog or website, do it because you like the job, have something to say and can write. Keep your day job and don’t expect to get rich quick.

There is a local site on PEI that was bragging about having thousands of daily readers and making money from advertising. He gets a couple of hundred readers per day and the ads were from companies he owns. That’s a sure fire way to make money from blogging, pay yourself.

Other than real work, porn and hucksterism are the only get-rich-quick schemes that works on the Internet. I’d throw in gambling but it is illegal and you may get your knuckles broken.

The only people making big money from internet advertising are Google and the con artists. Google has secret, proprietary software that places context sensitive ads on websites. Google is the 800 lb gorilla of internet advertising and their profits show it. The other advertisers are struggling for a piece of the pie. That excludes the porn and gambling sites which are reported to make big profits. 

The mechanics of internet advertising

When blogging and personal websites started, people could make money from putting ads on their websites. They got paid for click-throughs, when a reader clicked the ad and went to the advertisers site. Even more money could be made if people purchased something from the site like Amazon.com.

The metric for this is CPM, cost per thousand impressions. The return to you as a website publisher is about $.005 CPM. Translated that means you can expect to earn about $15 per month if your site gets 100,000 impressions.

That return is average. Two Google word ads, which are some of the highest for click through, would pay about $40 per month with 100,000 page reads.  That number of page reads and visitors is very difficult to achieve in the crowded Internet with over 130 million bloggers and 1 trillion unique URLs.

Display ads are generally ignored now by readers, except the new ones that pop out and block your view of the stories. You will notice more and more of them on commercial news sites since the old display ads have low click through rates.

Notice how many videos on the internet including YouTube have pre-roll commercials? That’s the newest irritating trend since display and click through ads are being ignored. We can expect to be annoyed by them more often since many people will wait for the ad to see the video.

SEO advertising

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the new buzz word in internet ads. You purchase and SEO program and set up your website with content using the top search words for this month. People flock to your site because you have the hot topics. You wait for the money to roll right?

Wrong, people don’t stop and read these cookie-cutter websites. First, you can spot them a mile away. Second, they don’t contain original content. Most of what is on an SEO site is on millions of other sites.

The only people making money are the SEO software and SEO site kit publishers. Again the story is the money in the gold rush was made by the people who sold shovels and pick axes.

Since the death of Michael Jackson, a new trend has arisen – virus infections in SEO hot topics. Last week most of the sites that promised the real video of the killer whale killing the trainer were portals for viruses. Each week a new hot topic in the news becomes the source of virus infection. Two weeks ago, the luge accident was a hot topic and more than a hundred top sites in Google’s search for “luge accident” were virus infection web sites.

Showing you how to get rick quick

These sites promise you the real way to make money on the internet, which is not a lie. When you given them your credit card to set up your own money maker they have made the only easy money there is on the web.

Some programs show you how to set up a website and wait for the illusory big bucks to roll in.

Other programs are pyramid marketing where you set up your own system to sell the same kit, re branded with your name, to other gullible fish that float by.