What you have to do to make money online — really
Yesterday Joe Dodge made a post about worthwhile things to spend your time on. His list — write great content, build connections, build a CMS, make sites you are interested in, learn new things, update regularly.
Here is my list, perhaps they’d make good New Years Resolutions for you:
1. Read & Participate in Forums — being active in the online community is important. I give 100% credit to where I am right not to forums. I found out how much you can make online through forums (everywhere from a couple hundred a day from Adsense to millions from other ventures.) I found where to start. I found out what I needed to do to reach my goals. That being said, at some point you are going to be spending too much time on forums. Stop posting for a while and put those ideas you’ve gathered to work. It will pay off!
2. Focus on what you do best — if you are a programmer, program great tools and pay a writer to make content for you, pay someone else to design a site for you.
3. Don’t read what the “experts” write — read what the successful write. (That may rule my blog out, depending on your definition of success 
— lets just say I went from completely clueles, making $0 a month online to living comfortably entirely from my online ventures in under 2 years.)
4. Test, test, and re-test. I can’t think of anything easier to do that can increase your income by many multiples. I don’t know why more people don’t do it. I’ve helped people with Adsense sites double to triple their earnings through a few very simple tests and changes!
Do those four steps and you are well on your way to online success!
Usually the experts are the succesful, or else they aren’t really experts are they? Better would be: “Don’t trust everything you read” because a lot of people talk nonsense.
I agree with your first point though, and it’s definitely important to stay involved, and network with others.
Comment by Dennis Pallett — December 28, 2005 @ 11:50 am
There are a lot of experts about just about everything online. They have opinions on beliefs about all different kinds of things. You can ask them pretty much anything in their field of knowledge and they have an answer. The problem is that many of these experts haven’t made a whole lot of money from their knowledge.
One example, web designers. I would venture to guess that there are tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of web designers out there. But just because someone can design a damn good looking website doesn’t mean they aren’t living paycheck to paycheck. I can point out some very ugly pages that pull their owners in over $1,000,000 a year..
Comment by Andrew — December 28, 2005 @ 10:25 pm
[…] on more rewarding issues. Update: Andrew Johnson over a WebPublishingBlog.com also has a similar themed post inwhich he makes a good point. “Te […]
Pingback by Ozgression » Blog Archive » The Best Ways For Web Publishers To Spend Their Time — December 29, 2005 @ 1:35 am
Which forums do you participate in? For me its Digitalpoint, Sitepoint, and Websitepublisher. Any other good ones?
Comment by Joe — December 29, 2005 @ 11:36 am
Those are the three big ones for me. I also spend time reading several domain boards such as domainstate.com and dnforum.com. There is also webmasterworld.com
Comment by Andrew — December 29, 2005 @ 12:26 pm