ONLINE EARN MONEY

I’ve signed up for a lot of mailing lists of people who promised to help me earn online cash in various ways. One of these is famous blogger Yaro Starak who’s just launched a joint venture project called BecomeaBlogger.com with Gideon Shalwick. I thought I’d do a serious, unbiased, review of what they’re saying, and selling, in their free eBook, The Roadmap To Become A Blogger. Note that I’m not an affiliate for their product nor am I linking back to their site so as to make this review unbiased.

My first gripe about the ebook is that it spends several pages up front of Yaro ’selling the dream’ like some Amway diamond recruiter trying to recruit new suckers distributors into ‘the business’. I find that annoying and it’s one of the problems I see in the whole ‘make money online’ blogging arena. While I have no reason to believe that Yaro is faking anything nor that he teaches people to do this, this kind of presentation encourages others to follow the ‘fake it until you make it’ route and/or creates great frustration among those who aren’t equipped to reach such lofty goals.

As we get into the roadmap it is little surprise that ‘passion’ gets mentioned as the first step. Unfortunately, this is a trap for many people. Their passion may not be something that will earn cash online for a number of reasons. I discussed this a while ago on OpTempo in this article, Arte Moreno’s Niche Blogging Lessons, As I said in that article, one may not be passionate about DUI lawyers or carpet cleaning services but providing a good advertising space to them can give you the time and money to enjoy your real passions.

The second milestone, Discover The Need, also misses the mark. Gideon beats around the bush but never flushes the hare and that hare is keyword research. If you don’t know if a keyword is searched for in Google or what the competition for that keyword is you’ll never be able to make consistent cash online. Sure, you can work social referral traffic but that traffic isn’t known for its reliable buying patterns and it requires constant attention to maintain. Organic search engine traffic will usually remain consistent once you’ve established it even if you don’t update a site in a year or more.

The third, Test Your Market, has a good suggestion in it and that’s to create multiple blogs to test out markets. I do this a good bit with Blogger blogs to try out smaller niches and so forth. I’ve also done multiple flagship sites as well, 4 or 5 of them depending on how you count. This milestone isn’t bad although for it to be successful keyword research has to be done before hand.

In the fourth milestone, Focus Your Efforts, Gideon sings a refrain from the ‘Content is King’ songbook and talks about developing an email list. He also mentions dumping underperforming blogs. While lightweight on specifics, naturally since they want you buy the upsell, it’s good basic info for getting started building a list. This isn’t my favorite business model since so many people abuse email lists but it obviously works well for some. He also mentions dumping underperforming blogs. Of course, these blogs can be flipped or repurposed to earn some cash. Maybe this is something mentioned in their advanced, paid, lessons.

The fifth milestone, Start Making Money!, is also lightweight. It assumes that you’ve built a solid base where you can earn some cash but this might not be the case and all of the work has been for nothing.

I got a good laugh from this statement in his intro to his ‘X-Factor’ section:

“ Gone are the days of targeting a small niche, writing up some mediocre content, and making a living from it.”

Well, yeah, if you write about just one niche. But in niche market blogging we aren’t talking about one blog but a few hundred that are targeted toward organic search traffic.

Gideon’s big X-Factor is combining online multimedia with social networking. Yes, this is a workable pattern for online fame but does it make money? Yes, it can, but assembling the resources to make it stand out and be effective requires some upfront cash as well as a degree of technical skill and artistic talent. Therefore, this isn’t a pattern that’s workable for everyone. I know you don’t want to see me in front of a video camera if I can help it!

His emphasis on multimedia and social networking is great for building fame with the hip Internet crowd, ie the folks who don’t buy stuff online through Adsense ads and affiliate links because they know what they are and/or think everything online should be free. But this social networking extravaganza won’t help the average person make cash online nor will it attract the average searcher who’s looking to buy something online.

Overall, I don’t think that the information provided in The Roadmap To Become A Blogger or in its premium program will help the average person make money online. Sure, there will be some exceptions for whom their mix of passion and multimedia talent allows them to excel in that niche. But, for the average person, it looks more like an exercise in frustration and disappointment than a way to earn online cash.LINK.....