Make Money Online: It's a Catch-22
There is a cold truth in the make money online (industry, shall we call it?) that many internet marketers and aspiring internet markers alike still continue to dispute. “Content is king” they all say. Let me translate for you: What they mean to say is that "Going on and on about the same regurgitated s*^%, in the name of content, is king." Otherwise, how could John Chow, Problogger, and Yaro Starak remain popular? Reading their blogs is like the movie Groundhog Day.
In this article I will assume that you at least have a general sense of what a backlink is. If you don’t, please come back to this article after you do.
While to a certain extent you do need content, to an even greater extent – you need backlinks, and lots of them! If you want to dominate the SERPs for a highly-coveted keyword phrase like make money online, you are going to need backlinks to get you there. Sure, content on your website, preferably in your area of expertise, is a wonderful contribution to the world, but no one will know about it and you will never make money online unless you have backlinks – plain and simple.
If you are a beginner internet marketer and you do not know what backlinks are, I plead with you to stop reading this right now and research what backlinks are. Know backlinks like the back of your hand. If you don’t, all your efforts to make money online will be a complete waste of money (and worse – a waste of precious time!) Time is something you cannot earn back and I urge everyone to make the best use of their time that they can.
Why are backlinks so important in the world of how to make money online? Well, for one: backlinks are one of the only ways Google can really distinguish you from your competition. For example, there are millions and millions of blogs and websites written (well written, even) content about making money online. They all can’t sit on the first page of Google when someone types in “make money online”, so who should be there? Most of them have wonderful, well thought out content and aesthetically pleasing templates. They all mention the phrase make money online multiple times throughout. They all edit their META tags and alt tags with the target keywords “make money at home” and so on. They all swap blogroll links with other bloggers. They all post no-follow links on social network sites such as Technorati, Blog Catalog, Twitter, and others. They all might even write a few articles like this one I’m writing and place a backlink pointing to their website. Then they might go back to their own blog and write more keyword rich blog posts. Some might even do these things consistently everyday.
Why are they still not on page 1 for “make money on the internet” or whatever their target keyword phrase is? Doing these things can get the ball rolling to make money online, but they don’t push that ball over the hump, so to speak. Doing what everyone else does is nothing but inertia – and we need momentum. Backlinks are 99% of what contributes to success when trying to make money online, but ironically, backlinks are what 99% of people either completely ignore or undervalue.
Have you seen a couple of the sites that are on page 1 of Google for the search term make money online? One of them (I’ll be nice and not name it) barely has any content on it! What does that tell you? Most of the others (with the exception of 1 – I love you Grizzly!) are full of BS. There are some others like The Keyword Academy, Blogger Unleashed and a few others that are genuinely helpful too, but trust me - most aren't.
Quality backlinks are realistically the only gauge Google has in order to rank one site higher than another when all the other variables (META tags, content keywords, keyword rich domain names, etc) are the same. Anyone can get millions of spammy backlinks or backlinks from totally unrelated sites or PR0 sites, but who can get natural backlinks or backlinks from a competitor’s site or authority site? Sure, good content can help to get some natural backlinks and good content is recommended, but unfortunately it’s not enough to push us over that hump.
More specifically, we need one-way backlinks – non-reciprocated backlinks. Is it hard to get legit one-way backlinks in mass numbers? Yes, it is. This is why most people never make money online. Figuring this part of the equation out is the key to make money online.
Why do competitors not want to give out backlinks? First, they are the one who wants YOUR backlinks and want people to click on their affiliate ads – not yours. Second, the top competitors receive tons of requests for a backlink and always obliging with it gets tiring. Third, having too many links on a blogroll or on a single page looks spammy and will get them slapped by Google. Forth, why should they? It’s an unfortunate part of human nature for us to be competitive and uncaring toward those we don’t know. Who is simply going to “send us a link” just for the sake of doing so? Most people – the people who could actually help us out by doing so – won’t.
To be blunt: Getting backlinks is a giant catch-22 situation. Everybody needs them, but nobody wants to give them away. We have to get most of the backlinks ourselves, but it has to look like they were given out by someone else. And once again, they can’t be spammy. Learn what high quality backlinks are and figure out how to get them. Easier said than done, right?
So… Let’s go over some things here: 1. We can’t buy backlinks (This is a big no-no according to Google. Don’t do it.) It gets expensive anyway, and in the beginning, who can afford that? 2. Nobody who is successful in our niche wants to give us a backlink unless you befriend them – and most of them aren’t open to that. 3. Most blog comment backlinks are no-follow and, thus, are pointless. 4. Spammy backlinks from obvious link farms will get us de-indexed. 5. Social network backlinks may or may not be no-follow; regardless, even if the links are do-follow, the type of social traffic they are likely to get us won’t click on our ads to make money for us anyway. 6. Writing articles and submitting them to multiple article directories produces a bunch of duplicate content that will get us nowhere fast. Also, remember how precious time is? 7. We have to find a select group of people who agree on a symbiotic relationship when it comes to backlinks and we have to work together to overcome problems 1-6 that I just mentioned. This is the equivalent to the concept of knowing the “right” people. Find those people; if you seek them, you will find them. Giving away what we need (backlinks) is, in my opinion, the best and easiest way to get what we want (backlinks). 8. You are still going to have to write a lot of articles and get a lot of backlinks by your own means.
There is a universal law: If you want something, give it away. It is more commonly known as, but is the same concept as – “If you love someone, set them free.” Take this to heart – even when trying to make money online. If something is universal, then it’s universal no matter what. Above all, work hard for what you want and you will eventually get it.
Carpe Diem,
Janet Smith, author of “Nomad’s Guide to Make Money Online” and perpetual digital nomad