I am not one of those people who wants to say ‘I told you so’, so I won’t say it… but I will share a story that will say it for me.
This is a comparative story between two different people, but it focuses mostly on one of them and the reason for that will come clear shortly.
I know of a person who, I shall not name and shame him, specializes in building websites and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
For those of you that don’t know, SEO is the process of putting your website on the front page of the search results.
For example, if someone searched for the phrase ‘how to make money selling self-hosted newsletters’ (made up phrase btw), the websites at the top of the first page of results will get a ton of traffic.
SEO is an evolving process that changes every year. What worked like Gangbusters five years ago is unlikely to work today. Some of it may, but not all of it.
Search engines like Google and Bing update and change their algorithms and search results criteria regularly, forcing SEO specialists to learn and develop new methods to get websites onto the first page.
A person who is good at SEO and can land a website on the first page of results for many search terms will get paid handsomely for their efforts.
You see, if you land on the first page of the search results, you can get a lot of free traffic to your website which can result in you making a lot of sales either from product sales (yours or affiliate products) and advertising revenue.
Many SEO specialists use their skills to land their own websites on the first pages for multiple search phrases and generate a passive income through a combination of product sales, affiliate commissions, and advertising revenue.
The products they sell can be eBooks and eCourses that they have created around specific niches that they are able to land websites onto the first page of the search results.
I remember studying the work of a young Australian guy who had a portfolio of websites all generating him a passive income so that he didn’t have to work a day job and could while away his days tooting on illegal reefer cigarettes.
He was living the dream!
His dream, not mine… but boy, was he living it! 🙂
I remember watching a short video of his where he showed how he had landed a simple website dedicated to ‘affirmations’ on the first page of Google for an ‘affirmations’ focused phrase which sent a lot of people to his website where he was generating around $1,000 each month in passive income promoting a single Clickbank product that was about… you guessed it… ‘affirmations’.
So, as you can see, knowing how to land a website on the first page of the search results using SEO is an incredibly powerful skill set to have.
Going back to the person that I know who is an SEO and website building specialist, he is currently begging clients for much-needed work as he needs the money to feed his family.
This surprises me a lot because every time I read about other SEO specialists, they are always banking passive incomes thanks to what they know.
One such person is a woman called Victoria, who published an eBook called ‘How to Write Blog Posts that Hit the Google Front Page’.
Victoria specializes in writing content that lands on the front page of Google.
As well as doing it for herself and for other people, she created an eBook and put it up for sale using the Gumroad platform. It’s possible that she has it for sale on her own website and on other platforms too. They very often use multiple platforms.
If you look closely at the image, you will see that her eBook is priced at $29.99 and she has sold 155 copies of that book on Gumroad giving her a nice $4,648.45 in sales.
Gumroad fees are yet to come out of that, but that’s not bad for one eBook, is it?
Bear in mind, she has published other eBooks and is selling them on Gumroad and possibly other platforms too.
Victoria also offers a service where she plans out a content strategy for your website, priced at $997. I don’t know how many of these she has sold, but that’s a nice little earner if she has.
This woman has turned her knowledge into a product that is earning her a (semi) passive income.
The difference between her and the guy I was talking about earlier is that she has taken her skills and made several products that are earning her money without her having to do anything else other than point people toward them.
She is also making money from her website content and her writing skills.
The other chap who is currently begging clients for work because he needs money, was advised many times to create digital products and use his skills to create niche-specific websites that would earn him affiliate commissions, but he didn’t.
Well, that’s not strictly true, he attempted to make a few websites but he decided to try and ‘game the system’ and use software that populated his Amazon affiliate websites with stolen and ‘spun’ content which eventually got his websites removed from the search results.
Spun content is content that has been put into a software tool that spins the words around to make a new version of the same content which, before AI, was incoherent and pointless.
He was warned that trying to game the system and do anything that is slightly ‘iffy’ instead of sticking to what worked, would come back to bite him on the bottom… and it did!
Instead of following a plan that was proven to work and building a website that could generate affiliate commissions, or write eBooks about SEO and building websites (which he knows a lot about), he flipped and flopped from one ‘dodgy’ idea to another looking to make a quick buck.
And now…
He has no passive income helping him out each month and is now forced to beg for work so that he can earn money to feed his family.
He can’t even spend any time creating any digital products as he needs to chase work and that means his time is spent reaching out to people and chatting with them as a way to solicit work from them.
The point of this article is that making money online is not that difficult as long as you closely follow a plan that has been proven to work time and time again.
As soon as you deviate and start trying to game the system for a quick buck, you will become unstuck and penalized for your actions.
There is no need to game the system.
You can make money online relatively fast, you just need to not do the wrong things… stick to only doing the right things.
It’s that simple!
If you would like to know how I make thousands of dollars each and every month selling simple, easy-to-make digital products without trying to game the system. If you’re interested in learning more you may want to click the link below and learn more about how to make this dream your reality:
