Online earning: no tricks or shortcuts, just hard work

by Sapphire (January 25, 2008)

This post from Darren Rowse about how many hours and years he put in before becoming a successful pro-blogger got me thinking about how most of the big names try to make it look so easy, and how that’s really a disservice to their readers.

There are three ways to become really successful online: hard work, uncanny good luck, or dishonesty. Lately I find myself thinking that third one is more common than we’d like to admit, and some of the big names who never share even a smidgen of their methods actually can’t tell us how to build a huge online living honestly… because they didn’t. They lied and misled and said one thing while doing another.

My point is not that dishonesty is unethical. It’s that cheaters do not share their secrets because you might be a whistle-blower. Now, honest people won’t tell you every secret, either, nor should they - they have a right to protect what they’ve built. But they tend to share a bit more than cheaters because they don’t have that extra layer of paranoia that comes with talking out both sides of your mouth. And you know what else? I don’t think most of them have a secret.

I know one or two people who have sites more successful than mine. They’ve shared a lot of their methods with me, including some juicy, clever tricks. None of those tricks ever made a huge difference for them or for me. The reason their sites are successful is that they’ve worked hard, they’ve followed the basics, and they’ve been at this longer than I have. That’s it.

When I look at my own sites, it’s similar. I’ve thrown every trick and shortcut I know at this one, and the traffic and earnings are just okay while one of my most crappy sites was bringing in over $100/month with maybe 800 visitors all last year and part of 2006 (it’s drying up now because most of the earnings were from text link ads). Why did that site make it, and not this one? Why did my other similar crappy sites not make it big? Part of the answer is luck - right niche at the right time. Domain age. But also, I submitted that site to more directories than any other (back when that was a standard way to SEO your site). I even bought RoboForm so I could do it faster. Maybe that was the key…? Who knows?

In the past I’ve wasted a lot of time looking for tricks and shortcuts. Now I just work. I know I need more knowledge and skills from somewhere, but it’s so easy to get sucked into studying what you think is going to give you those that sometimes even trying to educate yourself becomes a time sucker. It’s really frustrating… but on the other hand, sometimes I think if you just keep at it, the opportunities will appear eventually anyway, without you going out of your way to hunt them down.

Posted in Blogging
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