Get a real job
What I’ve tried to make very clear in my posts so far is that you really shouldn’t be creating websites or blogging to make tons of money. Unfortunately we have thousands of self-styled money-making gurus on the internet, most of whom have neither a BS in CS (although in fairness they do all seem to have a BA in BS) or a MBA. Now I’ve tried to be fair and balanced(unlike some news channels I mean it) and show you how to create new websites, setup blogs, and even where to find moneymaking resources if that is your thing. Now I’m going to show you why the whole thing is a house of cards waiting to come crashing down.
The Blogobubble:
The preponderance of easy to use blogging software on the internet means that everyone and their grandmother’s goat has a blog (pot, meet kettle, I know). In order to make money from their blogs people need traffic, and lots of it. So what’s a would be millionaire to do? …..
Pyramid Schemes:
This technique made me think of “The Office” episode where Michael is explaining to his staff this brilliant new business opportunity he’s involved in and Jim walks up to the white board and draws a pyramid around his presentation. So many bloggers think like Michael. Let’s see, how do I get popular, I know, by recruiting even more beginning bloggers out for a quick buck. I’ll write articles about their articles and they’ll write articles about mine…… Seriously, how many pages have you gone to which are little more than a quote of someone’s post, a synopsis which you could have gotten just from reading the snippet, and then a link? This link trading is nonsense. How many pages do you have to go through before you get down to the original content? If the number is not zero then it’s too many. Give me just the facts when you’re sending me to another page, not your two line review. Eventually the blogs that only write fluff are going to get separated from those which actually produce content. Advertisers want results, the people want to RTFA (or at least enough of it to post their highly educated comment like, “FIRST POST!!!”), the money is going to flow towards the content eventually. And no, I don’t care what you think of another blogger’s page, because I know you are hoping that they will write the same kind of review for you.
Black Hat Advertising:
These are the spammers of the blog world. They’ll go to social bookmarking sites like digg or stumbleupon and game the system into pushing content to the top. In exchange they want your cash. These soulless weasels want to take one of the only areas where egalitarian meritocracy (I guess I could talk about markets and group mean group estimation here if I weren’t so lazy) still exists and cheat. Plain and simple, their content is not good enough to make it to the top naturally, so they cheat. If you have ever even considered using one of these groups, do the world a favor and kill yourself.
Now how do the Blackhat’s do their dirty work? Pink Hats….
Pink Hats??
Most social bookmarking sites are dominated by men. So here’s what you do, you find a titillating picture of a female, give this woman a sexy/slutty name, send friend requests to every guy you see…. and profit. Men being the one-track minded creatures we are fall for this like lemmings. HornyAllAlone18 wants to be my friend????!!?? Score! Now with sites like Stumbleupon if you friend someone you’re more likely to see the pages they suggest. You can put a link to you site in your profile. Oh and if you’re feeling really evil you can just send out messages to people asking them to check it out and write a review for you… because this is your first ever website.
Other Psychological Tricks:
Besides the old standbys of pyramid/get rich quick schemes and sex what else can one do to drive piles of traffic? Other less nefarious options include posting comments on every blog you can find with a link back to your website, stalking the people who come to your website and thanking them for stopping by, and prizes.
Prizes? Oh yeah, I love this one. Using the renowned human inability to judge odds blogs will offer a chance to win a prize to some random blogger who(pick as many as you would like): Signs up to your mailing list, subscribes to the RSS feed, writes a review of your blog, creates some original marketing campaign for you, etc. When people get the ability to gamble for free they jump right into it. So for a relatively modest cost a blogger can bring in lots of traffic.
Playing to the natural human tendencies( greed, ego, feeling part of a group, be creative, grab a business psychology/ marketing book and leave your soul at the door) works every time.
Link Bait:
What’s link bait you ask? Link bait consists of top ten lists, pictures of animals acting like humans and talking like script kiddies, telling people how your switched to Ubuntu went (seriously, it’s not that hard, shut up about it already), jokes, and anything about how great/evil Bush/America is. Oh, and guess what, most people don’t even produce the content themselves. They go around collecting it and then post it as their own. That was easy.
And in Conclusion:
To me anything short of black hat advertising and outright stealing isn’t so bad. Then again, I’m not your priest/rabbi/pastafarian minister. What else…. Oh yeah, you know what else works well? Rants about how everyone tries to drive traffic to their websites.
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