What is a spammer?

Why do I make websites?

I’ve just realized websites alone have never made me anything resembling serious money and I’ve been making them on and off for about 10 years now.

The original plan this year was to use the Internet to earn a living.  $10 just isn’t enough and it is time to consider my options.

This blog raked in all of $10 since it started a few months ago.  Yes, I do get enjoyment out of writing articles on a topic that fascinates me (start-ups and games!) and getting to the front page of Hacker News was indeed awesome, but really, as with all things, it does eventually become a chore once burn out hits.  The money would have kept things interesting, and that isn’t flowing.  So what should I do next?

Spam blogs make money.  And I can’t compete with them for SE traffic.  Since my primary target traffic source is Search Engines like Google, this means I either evolve into a spammer or fail.

A spam blog can get 20 visitors a day within a few hours of going live assuming you have the basics down.  You’ll never get natural back-links of course, but you will get that SEO traffic and then you pump the ads.  The spam operation can be almost entirely automated and is easily metricated to allow for some serious optimization.

Compare this with a “manual” blog.  I mean, I can see it being a good idea if you have a business on the back end and you drive traffic to it by writing relevant articles of interest to your target market, but if you plan to write for profit without a back-end, forget about it!  It’s just not going to happen unless you’re happy to wait a year or two for a potentially measly payoff.

I’m going to ponder spamming a little more and will have a bullet point post up in a short while.  Come back in a few!

DONE!, click here for the bullets