If you do any kind of Internet search (using any search engine) and search for the phrase "make money online", you'll pull up a huge list of blogs, advertising agencies and other kinds of websites. What most of them have in common is that they parrot information coming from one or two authority sources. They won't identify the sources, even if they know what the sources are. That's because they want you to think that THEY ARE the source. I'm deviating from that norm by pointing out some sources, instead of parroting yet again.

Gaming Google

Google is the most popular search engine on the planet right now. It's no secret that blackhatters have been gaming Google for about as long as it has existed. The problem is that they can, and they do, get caught. Vic of Blogger Unleashed is a former blackhatter who's giving away all the secrets for free. Don't be surprised if you see other bloggers parroting his information without identifying him as the source.

I have no idea if Vic has any other websites or blogs that are still used in a blackhat fashion, but Blogger Unleashed isn't one of them. That blog exists for one reason: To tell YOU the truth about how to make money online without getting slapped around by Google.

If you can get past how many times he drops the "F-Bomb" in a single article, you'll learn more secrets in ONE DAY from his blog than you'll learn from a so-called "A-Lister" in a year. I recommend ignoring the colorful metaphors and head straight for the meat of what he's telling you. It's quite tasty.

Guilty By Association

Until BloggingZoom (which his since changed hands) came along, I had no idea who "Vic" was. In fact, I didn't even know it existed until I read about it somewhere, probably at Court's Internet Marketing School. While I haven't dug deep enough into it to find out, I'm pretty sure that Court is a co-founder.

Another blogger that Vic has a tendency to associate with on a regular basis is Grizzly at How to Make Money Online for Beginners. Don't let the blog fool you — Grizzly will make more money using a free "blogspot" domain in a year than I ever will, no matter how long I have this blog.

Sponsored Posts

It's no secret that Google targeted blogs that used PayPerPost to write sponsored posts, including mine. Why wouldn't they? We disclosed and we wrote them in a way that was transparently obvious to anyone including Google. The problem is that the paid links were against Google's terms of service — terms that most bloggers didn't know or care about until after their PageRanks got slapped down to ZERO.

Google had the right idea, but the way they implemented it and enforced it was all wrong. In fact, it was so wrong that a lot of bloggers wrote scathing articles about Google. I wrote about it, but I really didn't go that far with it. There's a huge list of people who did (and still are).

Mike at TwentySteps recently came up with "Paid Links – The Solution". While you might be able to get away with something like this, I think it would be a temporary solution at best. Google would still figure it out eventually. The interesting part about his article is that it drew the attention of Ted Murphy of IZEA but not Matt Cutts, the enforcer of Google's policies on paid links.

In the past, I wrote about sponsored post ethics. I'm telling you right now, sponsored post ethics be damned! If you don't want to get bitch-slapped by Google, you have to do one of two things: Either stop writing sponsored posts or write sponsored posts in such a way that they look like all the rest of the articles you write, without making any kind of disclosure. I chose the first option, but then how to make money online has been nothing more than an experiment for me.

It's all about the traffic, stupid!

I'm sorry, but I'm not calling you stupid. If you don't pay attention to traffic, however, then I'll be happy to call you stupid. The key to learning how to make money online is to learn how to drive traffic to your website. Affiliate programs and programs like Google AdSense will not make you very much money at all unless you receive a lot of traffic.

Despite what you may have read (even on this blog), social websites like BloggingZoom, Digg, StumbleUpon, and others are not about directly driving traffic to your website. That's what some of them want you to think, but I assure you it's not. It's all about getting your website ranked high in the search engines, particularly Google, while making them a boatload of money (well, at least most of them).

If you get your website (blog or otherwise) stumbled, dugg or zoomed, you'll get traffic and that much is guaranteed. It's a temporary traffic spike, however, and it doesn't last unless it keeps happening day after day. The important part is that your pages will move higher up in the search engines and draw more search traffic. Search traffic is the traffic you want if you want to make money online.

Final Thoughts

I wrote this article as an experiment. I'm looking for a particular type of traffic. If you read the whole thing, I mean actually read it and not skimmed it, you'll know exactly what kind of traffic I'm talking about. I'm not too concerned if I made some grammatical mistakes here and there because that's not what this article is about.

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