Actually making money - Forum Project
 

Due to Nato76's recent inspiring posts about internet marketing and affiliate programs, I have seen a flurry of posts on this forum asking for advice and other information regarding this newfangled internet thing. Could this be easier money than poker? Maybe so. Who knows...? At the very least it is always smart to diversify yourself. Especially now with the recent legislation a lot of us Americans are uncertain if our favorite source of easy money will dry up or not.
My proposal to you is this...

The Making Money Forum Project!

Let's figure internet advertising out together. I have some experience in this area, as I own a modest video game fan site which makes about $500-$1000/month. Hopefully I can also persuade Nato76 to join in and give us a little guidance as well. Ideally I will get 100-300 more of you interested as well to help out.
The plan is this.
1. We vote on an interest area. I would like to suggest sports, video games, or "how to make money on the internet" as possible candidates, since I think those would appeal to a lot of us and also a lot of other people. I am open to other suggestions. I didn't think poker was a good option since most of the money to be made with poker is through affiliates, and us Americans may have a hard time collecting on that, but if someone knows the situation better, then gambling could also be a good topic as well.

2. We each register a domain. The domain should be targetted to a niche, but also related to the groups interest area. Then each individual will have to cough up a little cash to host his own domain. If you feel like helping Nato out he has an affiliate code for hostgator.com that you can PM him for. If you already have hosting you can just point your domain to a subfolder with your host. If you would like a different recommendation, PM me.

3. The group will set up their websites. I am interested in learning about CMSes so maybe we'll try one or two of those out. We'll all link to each other, and then automatically, you'll have 100-200 incoming links. This helps in two ways. You get traffic directly from other folks sites and you increase your ranking in the search engines to get more traffic that way as well.

4. Each person in the group is assigned 3 "buddies" from the larger group. This will be distributed a little so everyone is helped. Now whatever you do to promote your site, you have to agree to do it to your 3 buddies as well. If you submit your URL to a web directory, then submit your buddies' too. If you get a friend of a friend who owns another website to give you a link, then get him to link to the other three guys too. etc... In search engines, links are everything. Google places a very high importance on links. This will increase your ranking in the search engine and ultimately drive more traffic.

5. Put ads on your site, from google adsense or otherwise. This won't be that important in the first month or so. In time however it will become extremely important. All the income is yours. The more you promote the site the more you will make. Nato76 is a prime example of how successful this can be.

6. I am not going to make a hard rule like your site has to be Page Rank 3 by month 4 or you're out, but if the rest of the group gets a couple levels ahead of an obvious moocher, we are going to cut you. No freeloading. The project will be more successful for everyone involved if we all make a little effort to get more traffic.

OK, so lets use this thread to get started. Suggest some interest areas and we'll get the ball rolling. I think it will be interesting to see if this process can be easily replicated over and over making us all very rich. In any case it will only cost you about a $100 if the experiment is a total failure. I estimate you'll only have to spend 3-4 hours a week on this.

Also if you are in email me at mxt196@yahoo.com
Use the subject line "Project Make Me Rich"
I won't be able to keep track as easily with PMs.

Max

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

Oh, I thought I should mention that there is no technical knowledge requirement. You'll learn anything that you need to know, and its not that technical an undertaking anyway.

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

I've a releative newbie to IM. But I've also just gotten started within the past week with some help from nato. I'm VERY interested in a project like this.

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

i'm definitely in

sounds like a great plan

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

I really like this idea. I vote for the making money on the internet. A lot of people are interested in things like playing poker online, online trading, Internet marketing, etc.

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

I'm definitely intersted, but i'm not sure I'm understanding the details of it all. Are we all working together in a unit on one area of focus or are we all finding a different area of focus and then starting from the ground up together....while giving support to one another and sharing ideas and information?

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

I am also interested!

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

I'm definitely interested.

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

i'm a complete novice in this area but am willing to put in some work to see how things go. if anyone can help me with the basics i'll be willing to learn. count me in

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

First thing we have to do is vote on an interest. How about adding a poll?

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

Works for me.

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

I'm a newbie like a few others here, but I would be willing to put the effort forth to make this work.

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

possible poll items:

restaurant/food
making money
sports
gambling
gadgets/technology
crafts/DIY projects

anyone want to add more? cap the list at like a dozen and maybe allow people to choose up to 3? does the polling feature allow that. never created a poll on here before

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

I'm definitely interested in this project.

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

Just my 2 cents, but I think the only topic that is really going to be of interest to everyone involved is making money on the net.

With the poker ban I think we should toss gambling out the window.

I personally love video games, I doubt everyone will, and I think we should choose a topic that all members will be interested in and passionate about learning. Since this is a business forum built for a bunch of poker players, I think money making is probably the best way to go.

I'll follow the crowd though, this could turn out to be a really cool idea, I'm excited.

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

Max, this is a great idea. I would definitely be in on this as well.

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

Ok, I'll create the poll. We'll vote on which interest topic to use. Before I create the poll I want to make sure I have decent categories. Feel free to chime in with suggestions. I'll cap it at 12 as someone earlier suggested. Keep in mind you don't have to eat/sleep/breathe the subject should your first choice not get selected, but an important part of the project is that each of our individuals niches align in some fashion to the group's interest area. This will help our overall search engine rankings.

So far for categories I have...
1. Money Makin'
2. Sports
3. Technology/gadgets
4. Video games
5. Crafts/DIY
6. Gambling
7. Restaurants/Food/Diets

As soon as I get 5 more reasonable suggestions, I'll create the poll.

I'm impressed by the early interest level so far, and I think we will definitely succeed in our goals. Please if you haven't already send me an email at
mxt196@yahoo.com
with the subject line "Project Make Me Rich", just so I don't have to hunt down everyone's email address from this thread when I send out the kickoff email.

Max

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

[ QUOTE ]
I'm definitely intersted, but i'm not sure I'm understanding the details of it all. Are we all working together in a unit on one area of focus or are we all finding a different area of focus and then starting from the ground up together....while giving support to one another and sharing ideas and information?

[/ QUOTE ]

Warder,
We are all working together in the sense that we are going to pick one area of interest to focus on. However each individual will be responsible for their own individual websites and content. You'll have your own income from your own ads. The tough part about this business is actually promoting the website. It is my feeling that as a group using some simple guidelines we can achieve better results (through link exchanges, collaboration, etc) than we would be able to individually as far as search engine rankings.

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

email sent, I can't think of any more topics off the top of my head but will post if I do.

Any of those topics really fly for me except crafts and DIY

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

Email sent...another possible category could be transportation?

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

Topic #8 - Cars

Just thought of another one...
Topic #9 - Travel

OK, If I don't hear any more in the next hour, I'll just post the poll with 9.

Max

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

books/magazines/other printed media?

music?

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

OK, 10 is good, one of these will probably win anyway. Pick your top 3. Spread the word. We need a few more good men/women who want to take up the challenge.

Max

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

I'm in, sounds like fun.

My only advice on your initial plan is that we DO NOT ALL USE THE SAME WEBHOST. If we're all on the same Class C IP block and linking to each other Google is not going to give much credit to our links.

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

I am definitely interested, and am currently planning a sports website.

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

BradleyT,
That sounds like good advice. Seems like this collective experiment is already paying off.

Max

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

Also hopefully we choose a topic that has enough niches that each of us can pick one. Although I did choose makin sweet moolah, I don't think I have any unique ideas/experience that wouldn't be covered by 2-10 other sites if we get 50 people in on the project. Categories like sports, music, and cars obviously have enough smaller niches for each of us to get a unique one. We'll see how the voting goes.

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

I'm interested.

I am not sure whether we should have similar niche sites or completely different. I see your point that we can share backlinks and improve our SEO and share traffic, but maybe totally independent ventures sharing ideas is better...

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

I think for this first project, we should all stick to the same general subject. I think this makes it easier for us to lay out a step by step plan that everyone in the project can easily follow. Say we all choose cars and each pick a car type. Then we could easily lay out a plan such as "Day 8 - write an article about tires available for your car and try to find google images of various tire mods for your car".

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

max,

I think this is a solid idea. As dc just mentioned, depending on how many people participate, it may make more sense to have a bunch of threads that target a demographic rather than the same topic - for example, everyone's task is to "start a site that would be of interest to 18-25yo males" or something like that.

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

Yes. The aim is to each have a somewhat unique niche within a common broad category. This way our links to each others sites will seem to fit in when google analyzes the pages.
Just as a couple examples...
If the category was making money a couple niches could be
1. Starting a small business
2. A sample investment portfolio (tracks the investments additions/subtractions)
3. Real Estate Market news
4. Using adsense to monetize a site
etc...

For sports you're right its more obvious, just pick any random team or player and build a site around it.

I think any of these categories could work.

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

El Diablo,
You are correct. Depending on how many people we get, we may have to select two categories or try to broaden the selection. Right now I don't think we'll have that problem, but who knows?

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

I think that sharing some traffic will be nice, but the beauty of this idea is sharing ideas. There are many ways to approach making a sucessful site, and we will all have good and bad ideas. If we execute and share results of our theories on our sites and share the results, we will save time and money on efforts that don't work.

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

max,

I don't have time to be involved in this right now, but I'll check in and offer any advice I can as you guys get going. I think this is an excellent idea and look forward to seeing the progress.

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

max are you gonna be posting some timetables here? like have domain names ready by sunday and choose a webhost within 1 week. this might help to keep everyone on the same page for the most part. of course it's not a hard deadline by any means but may motivate some people to get things done.

also will we be focusing everything in this thread. it might help to do 1 thread for choosing domain names and registrars. another thread for choosing webhosts and content management systems. another thread for initial content... you get the idea

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

Hi guys. Count me in. Been interested for past 4 months. What's the count of interested participants so far?

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

I'm in

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

[ QUOTE ]

I personally love video games, I doubt everyone will, and I think we should choose a topic that all members will be interested in and passionate about learning. Since this is a business forum built for a bunch of poker players, I think money making is probably the best way to go.


[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, except do we actually know anything about making money on the net? <grin>

As to the linking....doesn't having lots of outlinks reduce your google pagerank?

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

Money making sounds like the best of those, though I'd be interested in any of them except sports.

Re: Actually making money - Forum Project
 

wmspinger,
This is something that I don't know and we will need to research a little bit. There are some pretty big sites with lots of links out, so it may have to do with the ratio of incoming to outgoing. I don't know. I am sure the google method is proprietary, and no one knows for sure. However google also isn't the only search engine out there and a lot of pages have higher rankings in one place versus another. The goal is to get near the top of the search results on google, MSN, or Yahoo. Then you've got it made as far as traffic.