The big problem is that a lot of folks don’t use blogs properly. There was a time where you could have thrown up a simple Blogger blog, write a couple short articles, put up some Google AdSense ads, attract some web traffic, and then watch the money roll in.

That doesn’t work any longer.

Sure, you might make enough to pay for a few beers, but it’s not going to put a roof over your head. The good news is that blogs are still extremely lucrative and can put thousands of dollars into your pocket every single month – if you know what you’re doing.

The premier blogging tool, hands down, is Wordpress. It’s free, works well, and is easy to use. The only requirement is that you have a hosting account such as BlueHost (who we use to host our websites and recommended) to host your website. In your hosting account control panel, you can automatically install Wordpress on your website in less than a minute by using Fantastico or Simple Scripts.

However, the key to making real money with blogs is to get creative. Yes, it’s a huge cliché…but you have to think out of the box. That’s why I use these 6 simple profit machines to maximize my income potential with Wordpress…feel free to steal them and build your own blogging empire:

Profit Machine #1: Authority Sites

Setting up simple Niche Authority Sites is one of the easiest ways to start making a profit online, but it’s also the most time consuming. I wrote out an extensive step-by-step guide to building your first simple blog in a post I made over a year ago: Make Money Online – Step-By-Step Method

Note: If you have no money to your name, you can use a Blogger blog to build your first authority site (as I recommend in the above guide), but I do recommend upgrading to Wordpress as soon as possible. It is far more customizable and offers you more opportunity to expand. Wordpress also provides a free blogs via their website, but you want the self-hosted option so you can upload your own themes and plugins.

It takes serious commitment to start one of these and stick to it – and you won’t see any immediate returns. However, if you post daily for 2 to 3 months, have a professional design and monetize it properly, you’ll be light years ahead of competing websites and you will able to pull in at least a few hundred dollars per month.

The real trick to becoming an authority site (rather than a boring “blog”) is to either position your company, your brand or yourself as an expert. This is a big stumbling block for a lot of people – most feel like they’re not an expert in any particular area. That’s simply not true. When I asked my Dad if he was an expert in anything, he said no…but that’s definitely not the case. He’s a perfect example…

My Dad spent 30+ years as a police officer and learned some extremely valuable skills that you wouldn’t expect. One of them was the ability to write grants that generated millions of dollars for equipment and additional personnel for his department. His success rate was incredibly high – over 90% of the grants he submitted were approved. That’s unheard of and it’s a skill that companies, organizations and individuals would pay thousands of dollars to learn. Starting an authority site about grants would be perfect for him.

You really need to think about your experiences and your interests. Even if you truly don’t feel like an expert on a topic, you can do research to become one. Spend an afternoon learning the basic “rules” of your niche and you’ll know more than 80%+ of the population, and that qualifies you as an expert.

Once you’ve established a topic for your authority site, spend some time doing research on the types of phrases people are searching for using a free tool such as Google’s Keyword Tool or a premium tool such as Micro Niche Finder. (MNF is highly recommended – it makes it very easy for you to find profitable long-tail keywords and to quickly assess your competition.)

Once you’ve found several keyword phrases that people are searching for, you focus your site’s content around those keywords and post to it daily. You build momentum for your new website by talking about your authority site on other blogs and niche forums, then offer to be a guest blogger for other popular blogs.

The potential with an authority blog alone is extremely high. It’s a very flexible model that can be expanded almost indefinitely, but it’s just one way to make money with blogs. Here’s a method that’s a little less conventional…

Profit Machine #2: Niche Storefronts

A lot of people don’t know that you can actually setup an entire online store using Wordpress. Whether you want to sell items directly from your blog, or appear as a third-party store and simply refer customers to Amazon as an affiliate, Wordpress can help you establish these profit machines easily.

There are a couple of different ways you can do it…

a.) You can download a theme that converts your blog into a storefront. Some of these themes are fairly advanced and require a fee to download, but you may be able to find some for free. Once you have your website established, you can use Paypal to accept payments. Some of the more advanced themes even have an “Add to Cart” feature built in.

b.) You can download a plugin that automatically pulls in products from websites such as Amazon or eBay. These plugins can automatically include a picture and short description from those sites, integrated with your affiliate link. There are free and premium options for these types of plugins, but the premium options typically provide more options and flexibility.

If you decide to establish a store, you will want to make sure that you add some unique content (as the content you add will be from Amazon or eBay and won’t boost your search engine rankings) and also implement a professional design. This is effectively a type of authority site, but you will providing direct links to products or services rather than information. It’s harder to get traffic to these types of sites, but the quality of customers is often higher as they’re looking to buy a particular type of product.

Profit Machine #3: Membership Sites

Membership sites are a tried-and-true method for generating long-term cash. There’s so much to say about memberships that we created an entire course called Membership Blueprints. With that said, using Wordpress to power and protect a membership site is a very smart way to go.

In fact, we use Wordpress for our Simple Cash Blog Membership, our most popular resource. It’s extremely easy for anyone to do. First, install Wordpress in the location you want your member’s area. For example, you’ll want to install Wordpress in a location such as: http://yourdomain.com/members/

After you’ve installed it, you simply need to password protect either individual posts or the entire member’s area. For the Simple Cash Blog, we password protected the entire member’s directory in under 2 minutes using a tool called the Instant Membership Site Creator, which we sell for less than $20. If you want to password protect individual posts or provide different levels of access, you can use a plugin such as s2Member.

The best part about using Wordpress for a membership site is that you can actually create content for the membership site in advance and schedule it to be posted at a future date. Your membership site could have a full year’s worth of content in queue without you ever having to touch it. (Of course, this might not be possible depending on the type of membership or the support you need to provide.)

The toughest part of the membership creation process is that you need to write an extremely powerful sales letter and provide “addictive” videos, articles and resources to your members. It’s significantly harder to get someone to subscribe to a $99 per month membership than to purchase a $99 product. Plus, if your content isn’t compelling enough, people will drop out. It happens all the time and some folks will even drop out immediately after joining.

The key for the membership site model is to provide an ongoing service or educational material to a very specific market, and to expose your membership to as many of those people as possible by partnering with others, advertising, article marketing and more.

Profit Machine #4: Local Businesses

This is a rapidly growing opportunity that nearly every internet marketer can take advantage of. Most small, local businesses do not have a website, but most are rapidly realizing that they need to have one. It adds an immense amount of professionalism to a business if they have a well-designed website, and younger generations use internet search as their first resource to find out reviews or more information about a business.

As a 23 year old living in Toronto, I can tell you that I have only tried out new restaurants if I was able to read their menu online. There is a fantastic fish and chips restaurant 5 minutes down the road that I would have never found if they did not have a website. The website wasn’t even that fancy – it was simply professional enough that it gave me confidence that it was a good business.

The potential here is HUGE. There are a nearly endless list of services you can provide to offline businesses…

* Setup their site using Wordpress, then design it using a related theme (there are a lot of great themes available for restaurants, professional firms, and much more.)

* Charge a yearly fee to host their domain and website for them

* Sell them on Search Engine Optimization services – it’s extremely easy to rank for search terms in small towns

* Charge a monthly fee to update their website for them as needed – news, updates, new products or services and more.

* Charge firms to update their website design or ways to make money directly from their website

* Charge businesses for the ability to sell products directly via their site or to accept online ordering

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg. It’s easy to sell these types of services to small businesses. Provide a guarantee and legitimate recommendations to improve their business and you’ll be able to find a lot of customers who are willing to pay for monthly services.

Wordpress is an extremely powerful tool, but you have to remember that it’s only a tool – you need to think out of the box and apply the techniques above to create a profitable website that produces residual income for months and years to come.

John and I have just officially re-launched the Simple
Cash Blog. We want to let you know what it’s all about
by giving you a report directly from our member’s area.
This is just one simple business model that pumps out
cash for us every month. It takes us 5 hours to create.

I hope you use it:

>> http://simplecashblog.com/5kpermonth.pdf

It’s a powerful membership that reveals our extremely
simple money-making business models (we have dozens)
in the form of short reports, checklists and templates.
In other words, you can flat-out COPY our money makers.

Here’s the best part though…

If you are an active member of a Rhodes Brothers
membership, you may be eligible for several months
of complimentary access to the Simple Cash Blog.

Just send this information in to our help desk:

1.) Your name
2.) Name of the membership you’re subscribed to
3.) Your Paypal e-mail address
4.) Your Paypal transaction ID

Our help desk is located at RhodesHelpDesk.com. Just
submit your request and we’ll try to get back to you
within 24 to 48 hours with your link for complimentary
access to the Simple Cash Blog and let you know how
many months of access you will be given.

Also, don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any
questions. We’d love to help you out.

I’m telling you, Private Label Rights products are some of the most under-exploited opportunities available on the market. With just a few small tweaks, you can earn money continuously just by doing the work once.

Here is some of the stuff that we’re going to cover over the next couple of weeks at PrivateLabelRightsHelp.com. Don’t miss it…

What are Private Label Rights products? – You’ll get a full overview of what PLR products are and how to use them.

How to Invest in PLR Products – Our tips and tricks for finding high quality PLR products to buy (and then sell for profit)

Why People Fail with PLR – How to avoid failure so that you can almost guarantee profitability with private label rights products.

How to Become a Guru with PLR – Our secrets for gaining an immediate advantage in a market using PLR products

How to Use PLR Products for Memberships – Memberships are the bread and butter of many successful internet businesses, including our own. We’ll show you how we use private label rights content to make big money in a short amount of time.

How to Avoid “Toxic” PLR Products – If you’re not careful, you can do major damage to your reputation with private label rights content. Follow our rules to make sure you don’t get burnt.

…again, this is only a very small hint of what is coming at PrivateLabelRightsHelp.com. Go take a look now and be sure to comment and let us know how we’re doing. We want to answer your questions about private label rights products…and we want to help you get MASSIVE PROFITS with them.

It’s extreme!

When my brother John and I first entered the internet marketing business, we were absolutely overwhelmed by the number of choices. I remember an argument I had with my brother early a couple of weeks after we decided to become internet marketers…

“There’s so many different ways to get started. The Internet Marketing Courses we find are typically too expensive and are too complex for us right now. What do we do?”

We had to find the answer ourselves. Instead of buying the “next best” internet marketing course (some of the “gurus” are launching new products every week) we instead did some research to find the best way to get profiting immediately.

We figured that if we saw the money flowing in as quick as possible, it would motivate us more. We didn’t want to have to wait months for a paycheck.

It was around that time that we discovered the power of products that have Master Resale Rights (MRR) or Private Label Rights (PLR). With PLR and MRR products, you can literally copy and paste to have your own product that you can sell on autopilot.

Other people create entire products and then offer out Master Resale Rights and Private Label Rights to some of the products. Master Resale Rights gives you the ability to resell the product and also sell the resale rights to other people. Private Label Rights gives you the ability to resell the product and also modify the contents of the product.

When modifying the contents of PLR products, you can add in links to your sites (or affiliate links) and take complete credit for writing the material.

So, it’s like creating your own product without any of the work. And, you keep all of the profit.

If you want a free internet marketing course that explains all of the power of MRR and PLR products, click here to read the free Really Simple Method to Make Money Online.

It just doesn’t work that way.

But, you CAN make money online now and build a long-term business at the same time, if you’re smart about it and you have the right skillset. First, we need to figure out what kind of marketable skills you have. Here are some ideas…

1.) Do you have a knack for programming? You can go to eLance or Guru.com and find jobs appropriate for you.

2.) Are you a graphics designer? Start advertising your services using Google Adwords and the Warrior Forum. People need new graphics all the time.

3.) Can you write well? With just a little bit of practice and experience, you can charge $10 to $20 for a 400 to 500 word article. Start off by pricing your articles low, and then move up the chain as you get more and more testimonials and experience.

4.) Do you have a lot of connections to “important people?” Find people who are having problems or need a service, and then connect them to the people you know. Charge a royalty!

5.) Do you know how to build websites? Build websites for local businesses, or even setup simple blogs using Blogger.

6.) Does a local business need help moving inventory? Become a salesperson and sell it on eBay for them. (Become a consignment expert!)

There are a number of ways to get started and make money online now, but they *do* require a little bit of work on your part. If you want to build a long term business, though, you have the opportunity to earn between $2,000 to $6,000 per month in your part time.

For more information and a free video about building a long-term online business, click here now. (No experience or skills required – 100% free.)

I created an 18 minute audio to help you get started today. I talk about how to get started, what to promote and how to get traffic. It’s the perfect overview and I highly recommend you listen to it.

What to know what I talk about? Here’s the simple formula…

You start by doing some niche research, looking at trends, following smart people or just taking a complete guess.

Next, you need to decide what you’re going to sell or promote. You can be an affiliate marketer, you can sell your own products or you can start your own membership. Almost anything will work.

And lastly, you need to drive traffic using pay per click (PPC), writing blog entries, and writing articles. There’s a lot more you can do as well.

This formula is so simple but … IT WORKS. Of course, there is more to learn. There is a “secret” in the audio I created. When you hear me say it — and clearly explain it — you’ll see why the process I’ve outlined above is so powerful.

I’m not trying to scare you but you will FAIL if you don’t take my advice. You can pick the perfect niche, create the perfect product to sell or promote, and drive tons of traffic — but still fail. It’s important you listen to the audio succeed: How to Start Making Money Online (FREE).

By the way, if you like that audio, then you will love this stuff…

• Traffic Drill
• The Free Business Model
• The Really Simple Method

And, if you’re looking for other fantastic (very popular) blog entries, read these…

• Generate Traffic With Articles
• Make Money Online
• How to Use Twitter

Cheers,

~ John

p.s. Please share this article with other people. Pass it along and link to it. And, if you have about 10 extra seconds, please Stumble or Digg or bookmark this blog entry.

p.p.s. Subscribe to Rhodes Brothers RSS feed.

The best internet marketing affiliate programs have the following characteristics:

* They track multiple sales. If you send a visitor to a merchant’s products, is your affiliate ID cookied (attached to that particular visitor) for future sales? A smart merchant will always follow up with visitors about upsells and offers, and you should be getting the credit for all of those sales.

* Sales are tracked for months, not days. Your affiliate tag on a customer shouldn’t expire for at least 30 days. Many merchants set a limit on how long a customer is “tagged” for, and if they purchase after this tag runs out, you no longer make any commissions from sales of that customer. The best internet marketing affiliate programs last for 60 days or more.

* You’re making a significant amount per sale. There’s no sense promoting a product if you’re not making at least $10 to $15 per sale. It’s barely worth your time. You should also be making at least 50% of the sale price. Some merchants offer 70% commissions or more.

* High conversion rates. If a product doesn’t convert, there’s no sense in promoting it. Also remember that lower priced products should convert much better than higher priced products. Track your numbers to make sure that you’re maximizing the value of each visitor you send.

* Pre-sales funnel built in. Many great internet marketing affiliate programs have a follow-up system built on that drastically increase conversion rates. This means more money in your pocket. It is also easier to promote these products because you’re offering “free content” to your website or list, not a sales pitch.

* Recurring commissions. Only a small percentage of programs out there offer recurring commissions, but getting customers into a recurring billing membership is invaluable because many customers will pay you for years to come, month after month. However, conversion rates for memberships are typically lower. Be sure to track your results carefully!

The Rhodes Brothers Affiliate Program offers multiple product affiliate tracking, high conversion rates, and pre-sales funnels ready to sell YOUR website customers or list. Click here to check it out.

Don’t have a website or a list yet? Check out my make money online post to get a step-by-step plan to make your first $1,000 online. (It’s 100% free.)

When trying to create traffic to their websites, a lot of people fail to look at the bigger picture. You can keep each piece of your traffic system simple, but when they combine, you have an EXTREMELY deadly force.

Let me show you a traffic strategy we have in place for one of our websites. It should give you some context what we’re talking about when we say “strategic internet marketing”…

We have FreeBusinessModel.com, which is a reverse squeeze page. We deliver a high quality video on the front-end which “hooks” in our visitors and convinces them to enter their name and e-mail address to watch a second video.

After they watch our second video, they are redirected to SimpleCashBlog.com, our $27 per month membership that gives away a wealth of business models. So, we immediately have the potential to make money from the traffic that we drive to FreeBusinessModel.com.

That means we can spend more money investing in driving traffic to that funnel. So, we hire out people to write articles and create videos for us, linking to FreeBusinessModel.com, and also advertise that site.

Cool, right?

Well, that’s not even the half of it. Here’s where it gets really good…

After someone opts in to our lists from watching the free video on FreeBusinessModel.com, we then send messages to them promoting not only Simple Cash Blog, BUT…

The ability to promote FreeBusinessModel.com and make money online from it. If you’re not following, we have an affiliate program built in to FreeBusinessModel.com, which means everytime that someone sends traffic to that site with an affiliate link that they create, they make a monthly commission from Simple Cash Blog (70% of the sale, to be exact.)

So, the more people that watch the videos at FreeBusinessModel.com and opt-in, the more traffic we get going to that site.

Are you following? — IT GROWS ITSELF!

Now *that* is strategic internet marketing. It’s not complicated to setup, it’s a bunch of extremely basic “building blocks” combined together to make one seriously kick-ass system.

That system will continue to churn money for us for years. We won’t be able to stop it even if we wanted to.

So, do you “do” strategic internet marketing like us? All it takes is a good idea and a few minutes of combining a few simple systems and you could have all of the traffic and cash flowing in that you can handle.

Check out FreeBusinessModel.com and see how our system works for yourself…

Download Make Money Online MP3
(right click the link and choose “save as” to save to your computer)

It’s about 30 minutes long, so you can listen on your way to work or during a walk. John also adds a bit of “jazz” and content himself, so even if you’ve read the post, it’s worth listening to.

He also makes a VERY good point…if you consistently follow through with the plan laid out in yesterday’s post, you’re going to have 300+ postings after one year. Google will LOVE you and you’ll be able to rank highly for just about any “long tail” keyword that you want.

(That means multiple streams of traffic to your site, more visitors and a lot more money.)

Note: I could easily add some “fluff” to this or turn it into a video and sell it for $47 or more, but I’m tired of people saying that they can’t make money online. Follow the advice in this post, print it out, and consistently follow through with it. It will make a huge difference in your life.

I’m actually going to reveal one of my niches that I’ve used to make easy money online…I won’t give the exact site, but I do reveal the exact niche below. (It’s the example.) Why am I telling you this? Well…

While my website is only partially completed, it’s gotten ranked in Google for a few great keywords with VERY little work and it has made me a small, steady income on autopilot. If I had actually “followed through” with this particular website, I’d make a LOT more money…but there’s only so much time in the day.

(The lesson here is to FOCUS on the method below. Follow through with one website before moving on to the next.)

Anyone in the world can use the method below to get your website ranked well in the search engines, which means that you’ll be getting a lot of website traffic…and, if you can generate website traffic, that means you can make money with a variety of different methods.

Let’s get started…

This technique is going to have you create a “niche” website with unique content. Niche marketing, or creating a niche website to get traffic and then make money from that traffic, is quite possibly the most straight forward way to make money online.

Here are the literal steps that you follow…

Step 1.) Pick a niche and do keyword research.

Using a free keyword tool such as WordTracker’s Free Keyword Tool, pick a random niche and find some keywords. There are literally an infinite amount of different keywords that you can choose to get started with your website. For this example, we’re going to use the example of the parenting niche. So, type in parenting into the keyword tool. Parenting is a VERY hot niche, getting more than 34,000 searches per month.

(Don’t get worried about the term “niche.” It simply means “topic.” You can pick virtually any topic you want for your website. Do you enjoy pets? Working on cars? Traveling to Las Vegas? The possibilities are endless. Most topics will enable you to make money online.)

Of course, when we’re setting up our website, we don’t expect to rank highly for the “parenting” keyword directly. That is a very long-term goal that you can shoot for, but it’s certainly not feasible immediately. Instead, we’re going to be shooting for “long tail” keywords, or parenting-related keywords that don’t have quite as many searches as “parenting” itself.

Looking now, there are quite a few good ones…

Parenting tips
Teenage parenting
Parenting styles
Foster parenting
Parenting advice
Good parenting skills
Effective parenting

ALL of those would be excellent keyword phrases to target for your website. For this example, we’re going to go after parenting tips.

Don’t worry if you don’t find a “good” niche the first time around that you don’t think you can write about. What is most important is that you can write several articles about the topic, and that there are several long tail keywords available.

Why is it important that there are a lot of long tail keywords available?

You’re going to be writing articles about each of those keywords, targeting that keyword. More information on that later. But, you’re going to want to make sure you have PLENTY of topics to write about. For parenting, we have all of the topics we listed above, plus…

Tough love parenting
Spoiled teenagers parenting
Parenting toddler
Rules of good parenting
Parenting quotes
Parenting videos
Parenting plan

…and MANY more. I’m not going to list them all, but hopefully you get the point. Find a niche with plenty of various topics to write about.

CAVEAT: Don’t get TOO locked up on this part. Pick a niche, don’t doubt yourself, then continue. FOCUS, or you won’t be able to make money online. Too many people get caught up on this step.

OK, let’s move on…

Step 2.) Find a good name for your new blog.

OK, so you have that list of keywords from WordTracker open in front of you, right? What we’re going to do is go to Blogger.com and create a blog. It’s 100% free to do so, and from what I know, anyone in the world is eligible to make their own blog (please correct me if I’m wrong.)

We’re going to base the name of our blog on the keyword that we’ve chosen to target. If you recall, that keyword is “parenting tips.” So, ideally, we’d want the name of our blog to be:

http://parentingtips.blogspot.com
or
http://parenting-tips.blogspot.com

Chances are, those are probably taken. So, we can add a word at the front of it to make it unique:

http://bestparentingtips.blogspot.com
http://best-parenting-tips.blogspot.com
http://goodparentingtips.blogspot.com
http://good-parenting-tips.blogspot.com
http://myparentingtips.blogspot.com
http://my-parenting-tips.blogspot.com

…there are literally 1,000s of other variations you could go with, and most will probably be available. Pick one and go with it. Don’t worry too much about it, and don’t get hung up on it. All that is important is that it contains the keyword phrase in the proper order. If we were targeting a keyword phrase such as “good parenting skills,” we’d want to aim for these blog names:

http://goodparentingskills.blogspot.com
http://good-parenting-skills.blogspot.com
http://mygoodparentingskills.blogspot.com
http://my-good-parenting-skills.blogspot.com
http://goodparentingskillsinfo.blogspot.com
http://good-parenting-skills-info.blogspot.com

…Hopefully you get the idea. Don’t get too locked up on the name. An exact keyword phrase match is the best, but do NOT get worried if it’s not available. Just add a short word before or after the name as I show above, and try the dashed names.

Note: In our personal experience, it doesn’t matter whether you have a dashed name such as http://parenting-tips.blogspot.com or a “regular” name such as http://parentingtips.blogspot.com. Google seems to rank both equally to us, although some folks would disagree with us. You’ll be able to make money online either way, so don’t get locked up.

OK, so, let’s move on to step 3…

Step 3.) Write content for your blog.

This is the part where most people will fail. It’s so easy, it just requires consistent work and focus…yet so few people can truly “handle” it. You’re going to need to spend between 15 and 20 minutes per day posting new content to your blog.

(Yes, this system takes a little bit of work, but it’s worth it. It WILL help you make money online.)

If you can consistently focus on one blog, making one keyword-optimized posting to it every day, you’re going to attract the attention of the search engines, generate web site traffic, then be able to use that traffic to make money online by selling advertisements, using Google AdSense, or as an affiliate marketer. We’ll discuss that in just a bit, don’t worry.

First, let’s talk about what kind of content, specifically, you should be writing for your blog.

Once again, we go back to our keyword list…

You’re going to write an article, every day, revolving directly around one of the keywords that you found. Some of the keywords won’t make sense…that’s fine. You won’t want to write about those. But, as mentioned above, there are several different articles you can create using the keywords above.

Each of your articles need to meet the following criteria:

* the title should be the EXACT keyword phrase
* your article should be between 400 and 700 words long and should contain the exact keyword between 3 and 4 times, depending on the length of your article
* the exact keyword needs to appear in the first 50 words and the last 50 words of the article
* should contain 100% useful information that visitors would appreciate reading and builds credibility

…that’s all you need to do. Post one article, every day (or, at the very least, AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE) and you’ll be able to start generating traffic and then you’ll be able to make money online by monetizing the traffic. Of course, you need to get the ball rolling for the traffic to start flowing though.

Step 4.) Build links and get traffic to your site

Once you’ve started to write several articles for your blog, it’s time to start getting your site noticed by the world. The way to do this is with high-quality, one-way backlinks.

Many people get hung up on this part and think they need to buy backlinks, but you can get several backlinks for free. Here’s just a few free methods. Feel free to “mix and match,” you don’t need to use all of them…

1.) Go to Yahoo Answers, find 1-2 open questions related to your niche (use the “advanced” feature to search only for open questions) and post an answer. Use your website as a source for the information. Make sure your answers are high quality, not just cut and paste from your website.

If you do this once per day, you’ll have a ton of great backlinks directly from a reputable site. Plus, it takes only a couple minutes at most to post an answer.

2.) Go to a related blog and post a highly relevant, high quality comment on one of the posts. Post good content and a good response to whatever blog post that you’re commenting on, with a link back to your website.

Here’s a tip: Most blogs are setup so you comment using your name, URL and then the comment itself. Often, your name becomes hyperlinked and goes back to your site. To make your link more “relevant” from Google’s perspective, you should instead list your “name” as the name of your website.

So, for example, if we were commenting on a blog and our site was parentingstips.blogspot.com, then I would have “Parenting Tips” be my name. You’ll want to change it up…sometimes you might want to use “Good Parenting Tips” as your name, for example. Just post using a bunch of different “names” that are actually keywords and you’ll build plenty of highly relevant backlinks.

3.) Create a Squidoo lens and optimize it the same way you optimized your blog. Try to get your lens name to be http://squidoo.com/parentingtips or http://squidoo.com/parenting-tips/, for example. Put a bit of content on the lens, which you can steal from your own website. Just take an article or two from your website, re-write it a bit (takes 5 minutes or less) and then put it on the lens and link back to your site.

4.) Create another free blog on WordPress.com and point it back to your own site. You only need a couple high quality posts and then have them point back to your main website.

5.) Submit articles to our 3 main article directories: EzineArticles, GoArticles and SearchWarp. They should be keyword optimized, just like the posts you did for your blog. You can write about the same topics, but the articles do need to be unique. You should use the author bio box to point to your website.

6.) Post your articles on Digg.com. Even if you don’t get many Diggs for your articles, linking to your site from Digg helps increase your link popularity.

7.) Submit your website to DMOZ.org. It will take a while to get listed, but it’s a very strong backlink to your website. Note: your site must be high quality for them to accept it.

8.) Create a press release for your site. Using a press release service such as PRweb.com, you can submit a press release to all of the search engines for only $19. (Note: We are not affiliated with PRweb and don’t make any money when you submit a press release. It’s just worked out really well for us.)

This has gotten us a lot of high quality backlinks, but does cost a little bit of money. You can also submit a press release to many free press release sites.

9.) Use StumbleUpon to stumble your website. It will help increase link popularity a bit, and also give you some direct visitors.

There are literally 100s of other ways to build links to your site, but the ones above are some of the easiest and most popular ways. After you get several backlinks, your site will slowly start to get indexed and appear in Google. After 30 to 60 days, you should start to see consistent, growing traffic to your website.

To track how much traffic you have, use a free service such as StatCounter or Google Analytics and paste the code into your blog. This is easy to do by going into the blog’s editor. Don’t be intimidated by the code. Scroll down to the bottom of the editor’s page and paste in the code that StatCounter provides you. Then, you’ll be able to see how many visitors you’re getting and from what places!

OK, so, you have a solid, established blog that you post to as often as you can. What’s next?…

Making the money!

Step 5.) Make money online by using Google AdSense and affiliate programs.

Using Blogger, it’s extremely easy to put Google AdSense into your blog. Immediately after putting it in, you’ll start making anywhere from a few pennies to a dollar or two per click. It’s not much, but with a site with high traffic, it can add up and bring you a nice side income.

Note: Do NOT click on the ads yourself…Google will ban you.

The other way you can use to make money is by putting other people’s products on your blog. Using an affiliate program, people will pay you a commission (anywhere from 5% to 75%, depending on the product) for every sale that comes from a person from your website. It’s very easy to setup.

There are several affiliate marketplaces, but the one we’ll go with is Clickbank. They’re a digital retailer that sell other people’s information products. You can often sell products on the Clickbank marketplace and earn 50-75% of the profit.

Go to Clickbank’s Marketplace to take a look at all the various products available…weight loss, make money online, muscle building, health, gambling…just about any niche you can think of.

Go ahead and search for your own niche. We’ll continue with our “parenting” example, and search for that. Looks like there are quite a few products. You’ll typically want to pick one near the top of Clickbank’s list…they’re the highest converting products, which means that more visitors that you send to them will be buyers. Here’s the top 3 that popped up for me:

My Out-Of-Control Teen.  Audio/Video EBook(R) Plus Online Parent-Coaching For Parents With Out-of-Control Teens.
$/sale: $19.32 | Future $: – | Total $/sale: $19.32 | %/sale: 75.0% | %refd: 25.0% | grav: 19.38

PC Tattletale – Parental Control Software. Parental Control Software Pays 51% + Annual Recurring Commission. Earn $25.47 Per Sale On PC Tattletale Software. Help Parents Keep Their Kids Safe Online And Get Paid To Do It. Affiliate Promo Material & High Conversion Rates For The Industry.
$/sale: $22.91 | Future $: – | Total $/sale: $22.91 | %/sale: 51.0% | %refd: 35.0% | grav: 17.16

Making Math More Fun – Math Games Package. Fun Math Games For School Or Homeschool Education – Printable Board Games, Card Games And Game Sheets For Children. Educational Games Ready For You To Print And Play. Makes Math Fun And Easy. Kids, Teachers And Parents All Love These Fun Math Games.
$/sale: $11.91 | Future $: – | Total $/sale: $11.91 | %/sale: 50.0% | %refd: 49.0% | grav: 10.23

All 3 are pretty solid options, but I think it’d probably be best to stick with the first two in order to monetize “parenting tips” properly. We don’t know if their kids are being homeschooled, but you could eventually expand your blog to include some home schooling tips and products.

So, let’s just go with the first 2. First, though, we need to sign up with Clickbank as an affiliate. This is 100% free to do. I’m not 100% sure, but I don’t think everyone in the world can use Clickbank, so some people will need to stick with Google AdSense. You’ll still be able to make considerable amounts of money, even if that’s the case, so don’t worry.

When you sign up with Clickbank, you choose a “nickname.” We simply plugin our Clickbank username into the affiliate link that Clickbank provides. So, for example…

Our Clickbank nickname is “rhodesbros.” So, to promote “My Out-Of-Control Teen,” our link would be:

http://rhodesbros.drake333.hop.clickbank.net/

To promote “PC Tattletale,” our link would be:

http://rhodesbros.cybersam.hop.clickbank.net/

To create those links, you just need to click the “create hoplink” link below the description of the product in Clickbank’s marketplace. It should look very similar to the ones I listed above. Be sure to test them after you create them!

What you’re going to do, is go back to each individual post on your blog, choose one from your list of products that “fits” in the best with the topic you’re writing about for that post, then put a one-line link at the end.

So, for example…for our imaginary “parenting tips” blog, if we had a post about parenting security tips, then we’d probably want to post a short blurb at the end of that post with something like:

“Want to make sure your kids are safe online? Click here now to visit PC Tattletale. It’ll tell you exactly what your children are doing online, so you can make sure they’re safe!”

Another example…

If you had a post on your blog about teenage parenting tips, at the end of the post, you could add a blurb such as:

“Is your teen out of control? We have some more tips to help you tame your teenager. Click here to learn more and for a great report that will help you out.”

Then, you simply hyperlink part of that sentence (at least the “click here” part) to your affiliate link that you created before.

Something important to note here…do NOT “force” a product into a blog posting. If you don’t have a product that makes sense for a particular blog posting, you could instead link to another blog posting at the end of it.

Secret tip: Always link somewhere at the end of your blog postings…give your visitors somewhere to go and encourage them to keep reading! You could even create a list like this to post at the end of some of your blog postings:

“To read more Parenting Tips, click one of these links:

Effective Parenting
Teenage Parenting Tips
Child Parenting Tips”

…and, of course, each of those points to a different place on your blog. (This also increases your ranking with Google if you don’t overdo it.)

…

If you follow this step-by-step checklist, you WILL make money online. You cannot fail. You can even repeat the process over and over again…but, I HIGHLY suggest you first start out with one blog and make it profitable for yourself.

Some people have what it takes to make money on the internet, and some people don’t. It’s just a matter of pressing on when you’re discouraged. You’re constantly going to be facing an uphill battle…some people give up after 3 or 4 weeks and no money in their pocket, but others hold out and keep following the instructions above…then the money starts pouring in.

It truly is a “no-fail” system. It takes work, but anyone willing to put the time in WILL succeed.

If you’d like some additional help in getting started with the system above, click here to download a free report that reveals exactly what you need to do (with screenshots) to setup a blog on Blogger. We’ll also e-mail you even more techniques to get traffic to your site, plus show you some secret methods we use to extract even more cash from our sites.

Click here to get started with the system above (it’s 100% free)…

“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.

Note: To download a step-by-step technique that shows you exactly how to make money from writing right away, download the report at the Simple Cash Blogright now. It’s 100% free.

Here’s a quick brainstorm of everything John and I can think of when we’re asked how to make money from writing…

1.) Hire yourself out to write articles. Post examples of your work on a website, then go to eLance, Guru.com, and others to look for jobs. You can also go to the Warrior Forum, and after participating there for about a week, you can post a “special offer” to the Warrior Special Offer forum offering up a discounted rate for writing articles.

2.) Write reports for people. Follow the same techniques in #1, but offer to write reports, instead. Keep in mind as your reputation improves you can begin charging more and more as you attract veteran marketers.

3.) Create a niche website. Use WordTracker’s Free Keyword Tool to find keywords and then write blog entries in Blogger. Write one per day, 300-400 words long, targeting one keyword per article. Use the exact keyword phrases 2 to 3 times in your article, once in the first sentence. Over time you will build a stream of traffic that you can monetize with Google Adsense, related Clickbank products, and more.

4.) You can edit and write new content for private label rights reports and either sell them or give them away via your website. If you give them away, you can easily plug in affiliate links for related products and make some money.

5.) Research and write your own reports. This is our top “how to make money from writing” technique, and one we apply ourselves frequently. First, go to a forum and find pressing questions that are popular and have a lot of replies. Then, find the solution to that problem (there are typically a lot of solutions in the thread of the question.) You can then research the solutions, put in your own solutions, and add your own twist. Write a sales letter, then market it.

6.) Create your own PLR packages. If you enjoy writing articles, creating a PLR article package and limiting the number of copies distributed (20 to 30 is typically acceptable) and selling them for $5 to $10 per package for 10 or more articles can give you some short term cash, especially if you repeat the process over and over.

7.) If going offline is preferred, you can always write your own book and then self-publish it with a site such as Lulu.com, then list your book on sites such as Amazon. You can do interviews with people in your niche to increase your book’s popularity.

Big Secret — Proper grammar is NOT a must to make money online. Neither John nor I claim to have perfect command of the English language, and sometimes we blatantly violate it’s rules. Occasionally we misspell things in our e-mails or in our sales copy, or use improper grammar or a very non-formal tone. In fact, many markets respond better to a non-formal tone. Think about it…

Wouldn’t you rather buy from a person, rather than a big corporation? Most people would.

Keeping that in mind, there are some times when writing formal is necessary. For example, if you’re talking to professionals or writing about science-related topics, then writing formally is a must.

I hope this list of tips has gotten you thinking about the many different ways you can start making money online right now. If you’d like other models for making money online, be sure to check out the Simple Cash Blog. It contains a 100% free report that shows you, step-by-step, how to make money with writing.

Click here to download the report at the Simple Cash Blog right now…