A great Friday afternoon find. Enjoy.

There are ways to make real money online, then there are real ways to make money online. The difference? Amounts to be made. Pursuing “real money” can lead to frustration and make one susceptible to scams. Pursuing “real ways” will make one money, the trick is how to scale “real ways” to be “real money.”

eBay

Selling things on eBay can garner one money. First step is to open an account, and sell stuff. Doesn’t matter what, and I recommend doing a house cleaning sell the findings. This will 1). get you use to the eBay sellers format, and 2). start earning some positive feedback.

Some very good eBay information from a Powerseller is available here.
How to Sell on Ebay: Picking a Product

Scale eBay

After selling personal possessions, finding a second long lasting source of goods is fairly easy. One can offer to be an eBay broker and sell other people’s goods and take a percentage. Charge $5.00 to post and list, while taking a smaller percentage of the final sales price. This was is a no lose proposition.

Another way to scale eBay is to find dropship products. I recommend Doba as they have plenty of eBay tools to use. Post the offer, collect payment, and THEN order. With over a million products, Doba has plenty of products and niches to sell. Profitability is pretty easy to factor with listing fees (be sure to account for both sold and unsold products) and Doba’s monthly fee of about $50.00.

Zazzle

Zazzle is a print on demand product company. The masses supply the design, and Zazzle will print on a variety of products. Zazzle is much like its competitor Cafepress. Though Cafepress has been around longer, my preference is Zazzle. Zazzle allows one to print multiple designs on the same products. With Cafepress, the free account is limited to one design to one product. Meaning if you put a design on a basic white t-shirt, you cannot put another design on a basic white t-shirt (to do so, one has to upgrade to a monthly paid account- store account).

Another benefit to Zazzle is that it has a text design creator. For a non-graphic artist such as myself (all my products are slogans/text), this is a wonderful tool. Login, create a phrase, use the tool to choose fonts, sizes, and colors, and then chose products to put it on.

Scale Zazzle

With the text design tool and some dedication it would be easy to add numerous phrases and sayings over time. One a day would have at year’s end 365 phrases on any number of products. Need help choosing topic areas? Check this blog post about Google and Yahoo 2008 top topics, these topics will also be hot topics for text and phrases. If some are stale or outdated (2008 Bejing?), they should give you some ideas on how to keep on the look out for other topical interests.

iStock

iStock is a photography web site that sells pictures individually or upon subscription. Understand that one is relinquishing rights to photographs under their terms, but there is some fair amount of money to be made. The royalty is 20% of each download. However, each photo can be downloaded numerous times.

However, the standards are high. A quality digital camera will be required, a camera phone will not cut it. Then quality photos will be needed, above what you typically see on Flikr. Understand that many perusers will be looking to use the photos in marketing, keep that in mind for subject matter. Ansel Adam shots are nice, but subjects that present things like travel, weight loss, modern life/technology, etc, political topics, would be better sellers.

Scale iStock

Like Zazzle, volume is key. Post often and methodically, take photos of everything, but choose what you upload carefully. Maybe one in one hundred shots are worthy of loading, depending on your capability. For ideas, I suggest looking at picapp.com, and choose to browse their creative photos. One will see many photos that can be mimicked or improved upon.

Another scale is to continually add keywords for the photographs. Buyers will be looking for photographs based upon words that match what they are looking for. Woman, lady, female would need to be added to for any picture of a female. Do not rely on your first posting, continually add keywords as time allows.

These are three simple “real ways” to make money online. Money may not be great, but it will be scam free. Like any other business, perseverance will be needed.

Being relatively new to Making Money Online (MMO), it is interesting what one finds. One of my biggest complaints is the lack of true authority, those who write from experience. Seemingly a large percentage of MMO blogs just rewrite what others are saying, but have no experience to validate their ideas. This leads to repetition of false information. False ideas being promoted repeatedly, that eventually it is accepted as truth just through sheer volume.

The SEO Fallacy

The biggest falsehood out there is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Now, I do not deny there is a need for search engine optimization, just saying that few really know what it takes to be highly ranked in search engines. My belief is the reason few who actually know SEO (or other areas of MMO) write about it is that they do not want the masses to know their SEO secrets. They are making money at it, they have no incentive to let the world know how it is done. Have too many people doing technique X, fluid search engines like Google change how they rank sites.

Another reason very few people can write authoritatively about SEO is that very few people know what the heck is going on. Search engines are dominated by one company- Google. Google 1). keeps how they rank search engines a tight secret, 2). continually change how they rank pages to account for numerous variables. It is like shooting a moving target in the dark. Yet, there are many who claim to be marksmen.

Shoemoney On The Topic

One true authority in MMO is Jeremy Schoemaker, aka Shoemoney. Shoemoney has a couple of very good posts on the subject:

Why I do not like 95% of SEO Experts
The Screw Google Mentality

Both posts contend that one should not be so bothered by SEO. Since reading the Screw Google Mentality I have adopted that stance. Trying to figure out what Google wants is a losing battle, because it changes daily. Another reason is that SEO takes a long time, a dirty little secret few will say. As Google only updates its Page Rank (PR) about quarterly, any results of SEO efforts may take three months out. Then how does one know an increase in PR is because of a change of keyword density from 2.5% to 3.2 %? Or because one moved keywords to the front of titles rather than the middle? By the time PR comes around one has done so many things that any increase cannot be attributed to any one or even any number of factors.

What To Do

First, adopt the Screw Google Mentality. Pretend Google doesn’t exist and push a blog or web site that way. If Google did not exist, what to do then? Create links, posts comments on other blogs, do article marketing, pursue social media traffic, etc. My philosophy is when my sites “make it,” Google will be around and will give its due credit. That extra love from Google will just be icing at that time.

Second, figure out what SEO tips are easiest to do and do those. Then don’t worry about it. Trying every trick in the book would just be exasperating. Pick 3-5 easy techniques, do those and don’t worry about. Here are my favorites-

1. Dofollow links- find ways to get dofollow links to your site and pursue those. One good way is to find dofollow links is at 5aday on Twitter.
2. Install SEO plugin- search for a SEO plugin in WordPress and install it. This is my favorite because it is a set and forget technique.
3. Include keywords in titles.

That’s it. One I don’t have to even do, the software does the work. Another, I only have to do when I do blog posts. The other has the benefit of possibly delivering immediate traffic. So, I consider it a twofer, as my number one link building technique is commenting on blogs, it also serves to build traffic through community interaction.

Other than that, my worry is about getting traffic today. That is enough of a challenge for anyone, but at least that game is winnable.

Many bloggers complain about the use of keywords for comments names, claiming this makes their web site look spammy.  I can understand the sentiment for those outside of SEO.  You know the ones who use a blogger or typepad subdomain account, or may use Wordpress but don’t even bother to change default theme.  But those who optimize and then use some form of dofollow plugin to encourage comments shouldn’t complain.

Yet they do. Sigh.  Usually with a big rant about spammy keywords in comments and a big declaration that they will no longer allow keyword comments.  That real names must be used, but real names have not been used since the advent of the Internet.  I argue that a tad bit of link juice for a thoughtful comment is an acceptable trade. Still, the trend continues and will only grow.

To find out if a web site wants names or allows keywords just check what was approved for other comments.  Sometimes this takes some digging but it will become apparent what the site wants/allows.

So, what is a SEO’er to do? Well, for one these same bloggers often do not turn off the dofollow plugin.  So, finding names that relate to blog posts/web pages is needed.

The best use is to develop pages or posts about celebrities in your niche.  Most people will not put 2 & 2 together if you stay off the A-list celebrity list, so write about a celeb or noted person in the niche, then post comments with that persons name.  Now, I am not saying post as that person, I am saying post as yourself and just using that name. Doing a bit of keyword research should unveil a large number of possibilities for good search engine rankings.

John Wayne’s real name was Marion Mitchell Morrison. Do a phrase search for John Wayne and you find over 33 million results.  Do a phrase search for Marion Mitchell Morrison and you get just over three thousand hits.  Not only could you rank for these with some on page SEO, but your dofollow commenting can use all kind of name variations Marion Mitchell, Mitchell Morrison, Marion Morrison, Morrison Mitchell, etc.  Few would put it together and if the did would they care?  Most bloggers would glance at the name but focus on the content of the comment when deciding to accept it.

Then there are noted individuals, in all fields there are top dogs and few get any web press.  Watch Oprah on any day, and if her guest is not a regular ala Dr. Phil, you will probably find few results for the name.  But that day, I guarantee search requests will spike for that name.  What if you already had a page optimized for that name?

Every niche also has lingo and terms that could be utilized.  Technical terms, acronyms, etc.  You want to look for terms that are not typical words, and could pass for one’s name.  Or what could also pass for an Internet handle (but not obvious keyword phrasing).  I have a site for Native Americans.  Using tribal names is a good way to optimize that site- after all Dakota was a popular name in the early nineties.

As another example, one could be have a fishing or fish site and use the names angler, betta, bigmouth, chum, or stink bait.  While none of these could pass as given names, they do come off as clever Internet handles.  But try catfish stink bait and your name screams spam.  Searching for a fish site the American Sportfishing Association is ASA.  Write a page or post reviewing the American Sportfishing Association and post comments using Asa as your name.  It just takes some time and thinking to find what you could utilize.

Order the web sites you comment on, I sort by niche for my primary sites I keep pushing.  Then I have a long list of dofollow sites that allow keyword names.  Then I have a list of sites that dofollow but only want names.  The nice thing about the names list is that I don’t hit them as often, so I don’t feel I would be burning them out.  Besides I use them primarily for microsites anyway.

This is the XRIOT personal blog.  Purpose will be three fold:

1. Push XRIOT offerings and websites.
2. Help new bloggers to Making Money Online (MMO).
3. Whatever, I feel like.

Welcome.

Special thank to Taris at Power-Maxx for pointing me to freefoto.com