If you’ve been on the internet on the 90s to the early 2000, you will know what I mean by what IM guru are reluctant to tell you. Those are the days when the phrase ‘making money online’, ‘get rich online’ and ‘be your own boss’ was really famous and many got scammed online.
I am not talking about online scam but the real IM guru that sell products for you to start blogging. Blogging is a famous term then. By blogging it means that you start from scratch and write anything that you are interested in like hobbies, occupation or even talent that you had.
Famous gurus from the 2000s were big names like John Chow, Pat Flynn, Jeremy ‘ShoeMoney’ and many more. I love these guys and I even bought some of their product. Some work and some don’t but it depends on your part also. If you are lazy and broke, you can’t hope for anything.
It is during those days that I realize that making money online is not an easy task. You must have some skills and passion to draw your internet success. But what’s still pissing me off until today is the way that the gurus are presenting their making money online products. They made it sound so easy that any school children can follow their instructions.
Honestly, I bought their product because they tell their readers/customers on how easy it is to set up a website. I didn’t purchase because of greed for money or anything. I just want to learn something. I have passion for IM and I will learn about it no matter what!
The moral of the story (in my case), every business no matter where do you plant it, will get a rough start and this is including IM. I learned my lessons well and thinking back about it will surely made my day. Anyway, here I want to bare all what are the things that IM gurus are reluctant to tell you.
1. IM Guru said: Build your own website
Bare all:
There are many types of website. The most famous website for making money are micro niche sites (MNS), authority sites and e-commerce websites. Blogging will get you nowhere. Well, it will but for a long period of time.
2. IM Guru said: Buy a self-hosted domain and hosting (usually they will recommend Hostgator and Bluehost)
Bare all:
There are a lot of other cheap hosting provider out there. Hostgator and Bluehost are not bad hosting but it is expensive for newbies who just wanted to take their first step in learning. For example 123system offer $4 hosting per year. But cheap hosting are usually not the best hosting. I have bad experience with 1and1 hosting.
There are also a few types of hosting. The cheapest and that I would recommend for newbies are shared hosting. For full control of the hosting, buy a virtual private server (VPS). Search Google for more information about web hosting.
For domain, if you register a domain with a different provider, you will have to learn the steps to point the domain to the hosting. You will not encounter this if you have the same provider as your hosting company. For this, I personally, use different domain registrar and different hosting provider for security reason.
3. IM Guru said: You can get a cheap domain for $0.99
Bare all:
This is absolutely true, however you will sometimes need a discount coupon for that. In rare cases, you will stumble with $0.99 promotion while you were registering for a new domain. That $0.99 is just for the domain name. It is not including whois privacy protection. Without this, people can see your details if they check the domain name.
4. IM Guru said: Choose a profitable niche (topic) to write
Bare all:
The Google Keyword Tool is long gone. This is the best tool so far to find a profitable niche. The topic not also must be profitable but with low competition. Keyword research and the right keyword is the most important thing for a website to go explode.
At this time, the most popular keyword research tools are Long Tail Pro and Market Samurai. Most people now use LTP because it can count the competition and it can generate long tail keywords. You can try LTP for a 10 days trial, one-time payment of $97 or with monthly subscription of $27 (pro + platinum).
Market Samurai comes with only one time payment of $149. The trial version is for 14 days and if you purchase before this trial is over, you will have a discount of $50 and Market Samurai will cost you $99 for a one-time payment. Even Market Samurai is not a popular choice anymore but I still use it because it has a good user interface with different colors to examine competitors.
5. IM Guru said: Build backlinks to make your website famous
Bare all:
You can build backlinks by building web 2.0 properties, using Private Blog Network (PBN), blog commenting, forum posting, using social media, guest posting and many more. That is only for one website, yes, one only. That is really a tiring work for just one website. To make it worse, Google regularly update their algorithm for their search engine ranking.
People nowadays outsource this kind of stuff. A SEO package for a website is not cheap. It can cost about a few hundred dollars to thousands. You can find such package in the Warrior forum or BlackHatWorld forum. Those guys’ rocks.
6. IM Guru said: Write often on your website
Bare all:
The recommendation varies according to which guru you learn from. Some recommend once a day or a few times a week. Again, this is only for one website. If you have 10 websites, it will give you a total knockout.
You will also need to outsource this. It is easier than done. Cheap articles are always crap. You have to edit them yourself to make it readable. For tips, buy articles that cost more than $5 for a 500 word article.