I’ve been toying with the idea of curating content on topics that interest me. Many times, it seems like I have to spend a ton of time digging through garbage in order to find quality sites and information. For people looking for good advice on ways to make money, this can be particularly difficult. Good luck to the poor noob who wanders into the Warrior Forum toward the beginning of his or her journey. They’ll most likely end up walking out with an armload of WSO’s that have drained their wallet, and brought them no closer to actually making any cash. But I digress.
What follows isn’t really all that much curation, but I found a cool site called curate.us that I wanted to take for a test spin. It’s free to use, and it makes grabbing information from around the internet fairly easy. From an SEO standpoint, I guess some people might not like that it creates snippets with dofollow links, but I figure that if you really are curating, and getting some traffic due to others’ content, the least you can do is send them a little bit of link juice. So anyway, here are some sites that I have personally recommended to friends of mine who wanted to learn more about making money online. This is not an exhaustive list, but these are a good place to get started. I recommend both of the following sites without any hesitation. I believe that they are good sites, run by quality people. If you are searching for an internet marketing mentor, I think this is a great place to start.
The Keyword Academy
I started out learning about making money online by reading Griz. He is something of a legend in the MMO field. He took a free blog and made a ton of money with it, much of it with AdSense. His story is worthy of its own post, so just know for now that I followed his advice and signed up for The Keyword Academy. This site has undergone a lot of changes. It started out being run by Courtney Tuttle and Mark Butler. Court was the face and the idea guy. He has since left (EDIT: Court is back and sharing great ideas again!!!), and TKA has moved from a model where the goal was to pick off easy keywords for AdSense dollars, to building high quality sites based on making the most of keywords. My main complaint about this site is that Mark could be more hands on with the community. However, the community, by way of the forum available, does a fantastic job of supporting both new and experienced internet marketers. They are an extremely helpful group. This is a membership site, but you can sign up for the first free month, get all of the information and leave, if that is your nature. I mention that because leaving would just be stupid. The most valuable part of the membership is access to the Postrunner guest posting system. It is essentially a one stop interface that allows you to post original content (for backlinks) on tons of independently owned websites. These are maintained by TKA members and many are very well cared for. Some are weaker than others, but you always have a choice about where your article goes. No duplicate or spun content is allowed. The best part is probably the price. As of this writing, the full membership, including Postrunner, is only $33 per month. If you are serious about making money, you just can’t skip this.
The other reason that I like TKA is the fact that they have recently completely redone their official ebook/guide to walk people through the process of building a top quality site based on keywords. It is not just a “how to blog” site. Check out The Keyword Academy for a month for free by Clicking Here. You might also want to check out my post, The Keyword Academy Review.
Smart Passive Income
One site that I think is a very nice fit for new folks online is Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income blog. Pat is about as friendly as a new kid on the block could possibly hope for. He lays out everything in several easy to digest formats.
One thing that I do really like about Pat’s site is that he makes podcasts available. Ever since I got an iPod a couple of years ago, I’ve become addicted to listening to things like audio books and podcasts. I actually find the podcasts to be the most valuable part of the site. There are a lot of helpful posts and videos too, however. The only knock I have on Pat is that he has essentially become an A list blogger, and he seems to be making most of his money from the “learn how to make money with a blog” niche. His income from actual affiliate sites, while impressive, is not his mainstay. Still, he seems like a good guy, and he offers a lot of good information for free. One of his latest Podcasts is sharing his best tips for affiliate marketing. I know that I’ll be listening. The guy posts his monthly earnings, and I’d be pretty happy to be getting his affiliate sales commissions. I’m sure there is some good stuff to learn.
Other Sites
There are a few other sites that I like and recommend a lot. For a beginner though, one of the worst things you can do is overload yourself with information. You end up with analysis paralysis, and nothing gets accomplished. I will surely post more later about other sites I’ve found useful. For now, if you are going to pick one of the two above sites, I’d recommend The Keyword Academy if for no other reason, to get access to Postrunner. You will quickly find that backlinks are essential in this game if you want to get noticed by Google and the other search engines. Grab the free month and see what you can do with it. Even if you quit, your backlinks stay put. I hope this helps a few newbies stay clear of the get rich quick jungle. It just doesn’t happen that way, and neither of the above sites will take you down that path. That is another reason why I like them. They both have an approach of doing the work now and reaping the rewards down the line. If you want to learn how to make money on internet projects of all kinds, these sites deserve your attention.
