Some people are saying that user generated content (UGC) isn’t profitable. For example, Adam Cohen recently posted a link on Twitter to an article on eMarketer that includes comments like this:

“Unfortunately, if things stay as they are, this frenzy of content generation and attention is not likely to produce commensurate rewards for marketers or site publishers.”

There are other quotes that are similar. There’s this idea floating around that since big companies aren’t making a killing that it’s not possible to make money with user generated content. Part of this thinking is the result of this wrong thinking:

“The prevailing wisdom used to be that user-generated content would attract advertising volume commensurate with its audience.”

But this thinking is just plain wrong. Let’s poke at both issues: (1) Only big companies matter and (2) advertising is the only way to make money with UGC.

It’s kind of silly to think that UGC only concerns BigCo’s and monster companies. It’s like only they care about making money. Or only Fortune 500 companies have skin in the game. That’s complete hogwash. Small and medium sized companies utilize UGC all the time, and many know how to make money with it. I’ll explain this more below; stick with me.

It’s also naive to think that the smartest way to make money with UGC is via advertisements. This is like saying that the only way to make money with magazines is with full color advertisements. What about classified ads? What about subscriptions? What about inserts? There are always multiple channels of revenue to utilize.

So, now I’ll spill the beans. What’s one really smart way to make money with UGC? Well, I’ll first give you this secret tip: If you can get traffic to a web site, you can make money. It’s all about traffic. If an online marketer knows that a site is getting traffic, money can flow. This is almost an absolute truth when it comes to “hungry markets” and “hungry niches” but it’s also true even with niches that don’t seem to have much hunger.

Here’s what I’ve done on several sites where we have user generated content (e.g., blogs). I simply provide a visitor with an opportunity to watch a free video or download a free report, then I capture their email address. From there, the real magic happens. I learn what my subscribers want, find or build a product, then sell it to them.

Here’s something to drill into your mind: The profit margins on this activity are insane. You can make a killing online if you can get users to generate content for you, which in turn drives traffic, which in turn gives you the opportunity to capture emails, which in turn gives you a list, which in turn allows you to build a relationship, which in turn allows you to provide something of value in return for payment.

That is just one way that you make money with content supplied by other people. There are many other models. If you’re interested to learn more about this “way of thinking” I encourage you to take a look at the 10x Method. It’ll help you understand how to find more excellent business models liek the one I’ve just clearly laid out for you.

~ John S. Rhodes of “The Rhodes Brothers”

p.s. Like this stuff? Follow me on Twitter.

If you want to make money you need to know how to make it easy for people to help you. It’s very difficult to build a strong business without getting some assistance from others.

In this article, I’ll show you exactly how to make it easy to get people to help you. First, I’ll talk about setting up affiliate support web pages. Second, I’ll talk about getting traffic to your niche web site or blog. Third, I’ll explain the importance of back scratching and helping other people ahead of time.

One of the best ways to make money online and drive traffic is to enlist the help of affiliate marketers. Internet marketing affiliate programs can lead to incredible traffic if you offer 100% commissions on big ticket products and services, which is exactly what we do with the 10x Method affiliate program. What affiliate marketer doesn’t want to promote a $47 product with 100% commissions?

But wait, you’re only going to get affiliates to promote your service if you make it easy. So, you need to take the time to provide easy affiliate link building tools, instant marketing set up tools, targeted keyword lists, free promotional images, email message templates, and so on.

Here’s the Rhodes Brothers affiliate product link creation page. As you can see, we make it easy to create links but also quickly access the sales pages. This is the kind of at-a-glance reference affiliates want.

As another reference, you should look at the Traffic Drill reseller sign up page. On that page, we explain reselling, we explain the benefits of being a Traffic Drill reseller, we explain the set process using simple language, and most important we make it easy to make money as a reseller. We maintain everything from the sales page to the sign up page to the member maintenance. Literally, we give you the power to own a membership without any hassle.

Here’s another example. I like how Kevin Riley does affiliate marketing because he spends money on tools and processes that make my life easier. We don’t promote for many people, but Kevin makes it easy. For example, when he sends out emails to his affiliates he includes their specific affiliate URLs. I do a simple cut-n-paste and I’m done. There’s no effort and very little thinking, except for the marketing. I can focus and make money because it’s easy to work with Kevin.

Here’s a bit of business advice. If you’re serious about getting affiliates to help you, then spend the time and money to make it simple and make it easy for others to help you. The less “friction” you generate the better.

Bonus! If you’ve read this far I want to give you a gift. Please download Cracking The Code: Earn $20 Per Day With Free Blogs — Did you notice how easy I made that for you? It’s a simple click and you benefit without any more effort. The more you can do like that, the more loyalty and goodwill you’ll generate. This is the power of making life easy for others.

Let’s change gears now and talk about generating traffic to your niche web sites and blogs. What I’m going to cover is simple but effective. Don’t be fooled by how easy these things are to do.

If you look above, you will see that I talk about Kevin Riley for an entire paragraph (lucky guy). I’m doing that because now Kevin might link to me or help me. I would never demand traffic or links from Kevin, but I will ask very nicely. I’ll send him a note or I’ll send him a direct message on Twitter. (Hey, are you Following me on Twitter?) If I’m lucky, I’ll get some link love which translates to short and long term traffic.

Another thing you can do to easily drive traffic is build relationships with others via JVs and giveaways. Here’s an example. I did 90% of the work on the Simple Giveaway. I bought the domain, set up the page, and emailed everyone about everything. I coordinated the launch and I made it easy for my partners to do business with me. I was rewarded with tons of traffic and hundreds of sign ups to Free Business Model.

How else can you help others help you? Well, if you have a blog, do you have web 2.0 social bookmarking widgets installed? (Hint: I like Sociable.) At the bottom of this blog posting there are several buttons you can click to Digg, Stumble and otherwise bookmark this posting. (Please take action. Click-n-save!)

The last thing I’ll talk about is back scratching, both formal and informal. I’ll also talk about helping people ahead of time.

So, what’s formal back scratching? The idea is simple. You work within a membership or system with a group of other like-minded people. For example, maybe you work with the Rhodes Brothers via our coaching program. You can also find that kind of support inside Traffic Drill, which is dedicated to driving traffic to your web site. Plainly speaking, the idea is that you pay a small fee to help other people and have them help you. It’s simple but deadly effective.

Now, how about informal back scratching? The concept is straightforward. You would go out of your way to help other people via social web sites like Twitter. For example, just today I asked about 7-8 trusted Twitter colleagues to take a look at a new blog entry I wrote in a special niche. If they like the page and it’s valuable, they will likely Stumble or Digg that page. If it’s not good, they’ll give me feedback so I can improve it. Importantly, I make it easy to Stumble and Digg, but also provide me with feedback via Twitter. That’s key.

What works better, formal back scratching or informal back scratching? Honestly, they both work well. However, if you’re looking for guaranteed help or traffic, then services like Traffic Drill are your best bet.

What I want you to understand is that you will build up goodwill and karma over time if you know how to make it easy for other people to make money. Think about it. If someone is making it easy for you to make money, you’ll be loyal. You’ll drive traffic for them. You’ll praise them and help them. This karma and goodwill leads to joint ventures and revenue multipliers.

Do good unto others and it will return to you many times. It’s not only the “right thing” it’s the way of profits and a satisfying life.

We tell a lot of people that we’re internet marketers. But, what does that mean exactly? What is internet marketing? What do you really need to know?

There are many definitions for internet marketing. Normally I’d try to simplify things, like I would do for one of my friends or family members. But, I know you’re interested in internet marketing, and you want some details — that’s why you’re here.

So, I’ll start with a few simple ideas then I’ll build up. In many respects, internet marketing is simply another way of saying online marketing, online business, or work-at-home internet business. The core idea is that you’re using a computer and an internet connection to generate money.

Not Just Work from Home

You don’t have to work at home to be an internet marketer. Many IM’ers, as they are called, work for large organizations, marketing companies, and research firms. The central idea is that internet marketers do marketing online, usually in an effort to advertise, pull in buyers, and ultimately sell products and services.

So, here are the two key ideas summarized:

• Most of the work is done online via the web
• Most of the work is marketing and sales related

As a quick aside, internet marketing isn’t only about search engine optimization (SEO), Google Adwords, or any other particular technology. Yes, technology is always in the mix, but internet marketing is more about the tactics, strategies, and methods to do business online.

The bottom line is that you don’t want to be fooled into thinking that internet marketing is one single thing. It’s a complex clustering of tools and techniques. And, internet marketers pick and choose what works best for them. Some internet marketers use 1-2 tools whereas others use the full spectrum. There’s not one secret or special technique which works for all internet marketers.

But, there’s more…

It’s All About Making Money Online

The heart of internet marketing is the set of actions and activities that make money for businesses, online and offline. In other words, when internet marketers talk about internet marketing, they care about one thing: making money.

Now, this might seem obvious, but internet marketers are both extremely focused and easily distracted. They are constantly looking for the Holy Grail of online cash: very little work, very high profits, and freedom.

Internet marketers therefore employ a number of tools and techniques to make money online. To make everything clear, I’ll provide several examples for you.

7 Internet Marketing Examples

eBay — Many internet marketers have used eBay as their key platform to make money online. Not only can they make money via auctions they can also use eBay to drive traffic to their sites. It’s also possible to build a customer list with eBay.

Article Marketing — With article marketing the idea is to write articles to make money. The “trick” is that you have an author bio box or author resource box. In that author credit box, you include links to your sites (e.g., sales pages, sign up pages, and so on). You can get traffic directly from article directories or from blogs and sites when people syndicate your content.

Affiliate Marketing — The concept of affiliate marketing is that you sell products for other people but you get a commission. Internet marketers often get at least 50% of the profits, but some internet marketers offer 70% commission or more.

Pay Per Click (PPC) — This is a way of driving traffic to a site via advertising. In most cases you bid on “keywords” which are the words and phrases people use to find content on search engines. The mother of all PPC systems is Google Adwords. The amount you pay per keyword or key phrase can range from just $0.01 per click through $50 or more.

Memberships — This is a more advanced internet marketing technique. You can set up a membership or club on a topic and then charge customers a fee for access. Usually memberships operate on a monthly basis, i.e., customers pay for access month by month. Although this is typically seen an an advanced online marketing technique, there are ways to set up simple memberships. Autoresponder memberships are a great example of simple yet effective memberships.

Offline Marketing — Internet marketers often make a lot of money by selling their services to small, local businesses. They still use online tactics to drive traffic, encourage people to make a purchase. Internet marketers can work with businesses offline on a pay-per-lead basis, setting up web 2.0 and social media tools, and more.

Private Label Rights (PLR) — Private label rights are “whitelabel” products, which means that the buyer has near complete control over the product. For example, you can purchase PLR products, do a little re-writing, and call the product your own in many cases. PLR is often affordable and effective. (Highly Recommended: Simple PLR Club)

We Keep It Simple

There are many other tools and strategies that comprise internet marketing. Honestly, I’ve only touched on the surface. I’ve kept this relatively jargon free and I tried to stay away from concepts like keyword analysis, squeeze pages, conversion ratios, web metrics, and the like.

We encourage people to try many different things but then focus once you see any money flow. Highly Recommended: Watch the free 10x Method video.

If you like this blog entry keep in mind that The Rhodes Brothers make everything as simple as possible. Our core objective is to help you make money online through internet marketing.

We have several affordable memberships and products to help you succeed. Yes, you can do it like “they” starting today.

If you want to know how to search Twitter you’ve come to the right place. This is the biggest, baddest more awesomest list in the entire world on searching Twitter. Really!

(Yes, I know that Summize was bought by Twitter. But, there are still many other ways to search Twitter and discover great stuff and new people to follow. You can learn all about trends and fads by using other tools. In short, this list of Twitter search tools is still important and relevant despite the Summize buyout.)

Quick plug: If you want to keep up with all the cool stuff that I blog about on Internet Marketing Made Simple then please subscribe to my RSS feed. Here it is: http://imsimple.com/feed

Oh, and be sure to Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/webword

Enough advertising!

How to Search Twitter

1. Summize Grade: A+

“Search Twitter conversations in realtime – discover what people are doing right now.”

One of my favorite Twitter tools. This is the TWitter search engine to beat. Special note: Twitter bought Summize and it’s now Twitter branded.

Note 1: Create Twitter Search Feeds in FeedDemon
Note 2: Twitter Search

2. Tweetscan A-

“Tweet Scan is a real-time search engine for Twitter. We index all public messages on Twitter so you can find the conversations, people, and tweets you want. You can search by keyword, author, and date with results available via email, RSS, and Twhirl.”

Includes wiki and a blog. Niiice.

3. Twitter Fan Wiki Grade: A

“We’ve set this up as a place to post cool ideas, uses and feature requests for Twitter.”

This is an outstanding way to find stuff on Twitter and about Twitter. I highly recommend this web site.

4. Twubble Grade: A-

“Twubble can help expand your Twitter bubble—it searches your friend graph and picks out people who you may like to follow.”

Automagic to use. Fun. Fast. Pretty good discovery tool if you’re just starting out. If you’ve been on Twitter for a while, it’s a little less powerful.

Note: Crazy Bob

5. Twitscoop Grade: B+

“Through an automated algorithm, twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentionned more often than usual.”

Pretty cool way to discover information via a unique tag cloud display. Great way to get a feel for Twitter buzz; somewhat addictive.

6. TwitBuzz Grade: B+

“Twitbuzz is a new content filtering service that tracks and follows the latest popular links, conversations and people on Twitter. Twitbuzz addresses the desperate need for management of twitters vastly expanding social frenzy and organizes information appropriately and effectively based on a proprietary scoring algorithm. Twitbuzz prides itself on having high information relevancy and is competitive with other services in the space.”

What I like about this is the “Top Buzzing Links” section. Create way to find popular links on Twitter. Bravo! But, nothing too special beyond the Buzzing links.

7. Twitag Grade: B+

“Twitag is a #tag finder for Twitter Our goal is to facilitate and organize the most recent content tagged by users.”

This is a unique Twitter search engine which I like. It’s useful for really digging into Twitter. Could be quite useful for advanced users. Gives value to folks who hash like crazy.

8. TwitDir Grade: B

“A Twitter directory”

I love the Top 100 items they carry: Top 100 Followed, Top 100 Updaters, Top 100 Favoriters, Top 100 Followers. Very cool and useful if you love lists.

9. Twitter Search (Google custom channel) Grade: B

“A search engine that scans Twitter”

This is a Google custom search meaning that it’s not the “official” Google search. Nevertheless, it works well, exploiting Google’s search technology and indexing.

10. Flaptor’s Twitter Search Grade: B-

Plain vanilla, somewhat slow Twitter search engine. Unique feature: You can install the search plugin in your browser.

11. Twellow Grade: B-

“Twellow.com is currently grabbing publicly available messages from the Twitter.com micro-blogging service. We then analyze and categorize each of the users responsible for those messages into the various categories found at Twellow.com. By adding these people to specific categories we help you narrow your searching into specific niches where you can find who you are looking for.”

Currently in “alpha” mode and unclear about long term viability.

12. TwitterTroll Grade: B-

“TwitterTroll.com is the coolest real-time Twitter search engine!”

I find interesting stuff when I search but not what I would call perfect matches. This is a nice place to visit from time to time to find goodies in the nooks and crannies.

Note: TwitterTroll Creator on Twitter

13. TwitterMap’s Twitter Search Grade: C+

One of the early Twitter search tools. Was great when it first launched but not as serious or as robust as newer Twitter search tools and web sites.

RELATED RESOURCES

* 10 Simple Twitter Secrets
* Fast and Simple Web 2.0 Traffic System

Looking for a great internet marketing RSS feed? Well, since we use Wordpress, we automatically have an RSS feed. Here’s our RSS feed:

http://imsimple.com/feed/

If you’re trying to understand RSS, let me first say this. You do NOT need to understand RSS to use it and exploit it. We’ve put together a report called RSS Super Glue which explains this all very clearly.

Now, if you’re trying to first figure out RSS (i.e., Really Simple Syndication) just think about it as a publication and subscription technology. An an end user, you can subscribe to a feed very easily…

First, you right-click (or control-click, you’re a Mac user) on any orange RSS button or RSS link. You’ll see these RSS feeds all over the place. Here’s our feed again:

http://imsimple.com/feed/

Just right click on that link then select Copy Shortcut (Copy Link to Clipboard, Copy Link Location), then paste that link into your favorite RSS reader. You can download an RSS reader, or you can use My Yahoo or iGoogle. 

If you’d like to experiment, subscribe to the PLR Model RSS feed. This is what it looks like, if you’re curious:

http://plrmodel.com/blog/feed

The PLR Model blog talks about private label rights (PLR). If you’re an internet marketer and you’re trying to really take your game to the next level, you’ve got to learn more about PLR. (Hint: Check out the PLR Model video as well. You won’t be sorry.)

Let’s keep going…

If you feel pretty comfortable with my two internet marketing RSS feeds, I want to help you get to the next level. There’s a lot that you can do with an XML feed that you might not know about.

Here are some examples:

1. If you use Twitter, then you automatically have an RSS feed! Here’s how to find your Twitter RSS feed. If you use Squidoo, then you can simply add that RSS feed to your Squidoo lens. Presto! You now have a Squidoo lens that is being updated every time you update Twitter. (We explain more tactics like this in RSS Super Glue.)

Hint: Follow me on Twitter. Nearly 1,000 people follow me.

2. I created a video called the YouTube RSS Feed Secret. As I write this blog entry, that video has been viewed over 43K times. A lot of people have watched that short video and it gets excellent reviews. Basically, I show you how to get an RSS feed from YouTube. If you paid attention to my note about Squidoo above, your mind should be swimming with ideas.

Hint: You can set up your own YouTube RSS feed and pipe it over to a Squidoo lens. Pretty cool, eh?

3.  You can set up RSS Radars. To keep it simple, just think of all the different ways that you can generate and consume RSS feeds. You can pump one feed to another page, and then pump that RSS feed to another page. For example, you could pump both your Twitter RSS feed and your various YouTube RSS feeds into a Squidoo lens. That Squidoo lens also has an RSS feed, which you can pump to other pages. This is the entire idea behind RSS Super Glue. (I’m not trying to pump that report, I swear. It’s just that I specifically created that report to discuss how RSS can change your internet marketing and online business.)

4. I strongly believe that Google is using RSS to dominate search. Remember, search is based on content and indexing. If you follow my comments about RSS Radars above, you’ll see all the “holes” that exist. You’ll also see how much information can be pumped from one place to another. My point is that when you use really simple syndication, XML and RSS, Google rewards you. They index you very quickly. In short, use RSS and your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts will pay off more quickly. You’ll get organic traffic sooner than you might otherwise obtain.

Hint: You might enjoy Google and the Dark Internet if you like my “conspiracy theory” about Google using RSS to dominate search.

That about wraps it up for now…

I’ll close this blog entry with a short commercial message. If you enjoy this kind of marketing material, and if you’re hungry for more, then I think you’ll really want to think about joining the Simple Cash Blog. Not only do we make all that complex mumbo jumbo easier to understand, we also mentor and help our members. And, members help other members make money online. Our community of 500+ members is smart and motivated.

Hint: Read our story about the creation of the Simple Cash Blog.

All the best,  

~ John S. Rhodes

p.s. RSS absolutely drives traffic. I’ve talked about that in the past. Twitter Followers are a list. Email subscribers make up your list. RSS readers are a list. That’s something you should keep in mind. RSS enables you to feed people great information, that they want, when then want it. That drives serious relationship building.