(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

“It’s impossible to earn money on the internet with a blog.” There’s too much competition. It’s a Good Old Boys club. Only the MMO people can make money, and they’re all scammers.

There’s another batch of articles making the rounds, all off which – essentially – complain about how hard it is to make money on the internet. (If it was easy, everyone would do it)

The characteristic these writers share is some sort of deep and abiding skepticism and bitterness, which comes through in all of their words. They also seem to share some weird sense of entitlement… inducing anti-attraction. As if people should pay attention to them, just because they deigned to pound on their keyboards.

To wit: reading about how it’s impossible to make money on the net (or anywhere) is boring.

Naming names is pointless. Never wrestle with a pig, right?

But the subject of making money is worthy examination in detail. There are several models, but only one of which I am entitled to speak of with some authority.

Authority model

Let’s start with the Authority model, which asserts that people perceiving you to be an authority will give you money.

Well, it’s true. It’s even better: the amount of money they give is a precise measure of their esteem of you as an authority. And that’s a good thing.

It turns out learning to be an authority is simple to understand. It’s a formula even, which I give you in the following 5 steps:

1. Write a lot of stuff that is factually accurate that is useful to at least one other person besides yourself.
2. Write like you were explaining it to your mom, or your dad, or your bratty little sister, whoever it is that’s some person requiring some sort of emotional engagement. Do not write to your professor (which is, of course, a bored TA grading the paper and not the professor).

   In a pinch, you can just write and see what happens.

   For example, after a year of writing, Alexa now tells me I’m writing to 45-54 year old women with some college education who work from home. Hookay, then… maybe I better find out who these ladies are… and how I can help them. Which means, find out what they want to buy.

3. Master basic SEO and don’t worry about the rest when you’re starting. Basic SEO is title element, article title and meta-description. These are hard enough to do well, it’s worth spending some time learning the craft. Learn the more advanced SEO later.
4. Write a lot of stuff. A lot. Then write more. Write every day if you have to.

   Be promiscuous.

   Be as accurate as possible if you want people to esteem you as an authority.

5. After you write 100,000 words, start promoting.

   Promote promote promote.

   Promote until the keys fall off your keyboard and your fingers are bleeding.

   Then go all Jimi Hendrix and super glue your finger tips and promote some more.

Really important: After writing a few hundred thousand words of useful, factual articles, you will, in fact, be an authority.

BUT…

Your authority is based on what you have written.

Exceed your authority at your own peril.

If you follow these guidelines, and work like a madman for a year, you ought to get around 300-400 hits/day with Alexa ~50k. That’s the extent of my (provable) authority.

If you have a head start with domain expertise or mad writing skills, you should be able to do much better.

Above all, learn to connect with people while you’re learning your fundamental skill set.

Which we need to talk about next…

Fundamental skills

You need 2 fundamental skill sets:

1. Writing & blogging, website maintenance & operation, promotion. These are the skills everyone writes about. Old news, old hat. But there’s more.
2. Domain expertise. You need to be good at something marketable – other than writing and blogging. Unless you want to compete in this arena (as I am).

   I round out my how to blog material (i.e., articles such as this), with a good mix of WordPress programming and code development into the stream of text pouring from Website In A Weekend. This is domain expertise independent of blogging. And it brings in search traffic.

Ok, this is doable. I’m doing it, you can too.

What about you?

But it’s really late early in the morning, so let’s talk about you.

• Are you using an Authority model?
• If so, what is your domain expertise? Do you know it? Are you building it?
• If not, leave a note about another model.