Cohen decided to sue the blogger for defamation and filed suit against Google in January 2009 to make Google release the blogger’s name. In August 2009, Judge Joan Madden of the Manhattan Supreme Court ruled that Google would have to provide the blogger’s name so that Cohen could proceed with her defamation lawsuit. Google complied, and now the whole world knows that Rosemary Port, a 29-year-old student at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, is the owner of the now-defunct “Skanks in NYC.”

A few comments on this case from a legal perspective are in order. First of all, the court did not rule that Port actually defamed Cohen; it only ruled that Cohen had a right to file the lawsuit and forced Google to provide the information that would make the suit possible. Of course I wanted to know what Port said (wouldn’t you?) so I headed on over to the ever-reliable
New York Daily News and got the dirt. Port called Cohen a “ho,” a “skank,” a “psychotic lying whore,” and an “old hag.” Port also wrote that Cohen had posted photos on her personal website of herself fully clothed simulating sex with a fully clothed male at a party. The Daily News also said that Port was mad at Cohen for bad-mouthing her to Port’s ex-boyfriend. Ladies, pul-eeeze!

In my opinion, none of this drama amounts to a winnable defamation claim. Port’s smack talk about Cohen doesn’t contain enough facts to be proven or disproven, and there’s even a case from a federal circuit from a few years ago holding that there’s an expectation on the internet that bloggers will engage in exaggeration and hyperbole, and that nobody in their right mind would believe them enough to damage anybody’s reputation. (Yeah, I know you want the cite, but I can’t bill anybody by the hour for writing this blog, so I’m not going to give it to you. So sue me.) The one exception would be the bit about the photos, but there’s already evidence in the case that Cohen had posted some questionable photos on her site. Add to that the fact that Cohen is a frequently-photographed fashion model and therefore probably a public figure, and you get Port as the probable winner in this little catfight. Apparently Cohen realized this too, at about the same time she realized that Port’s little Blogger blog, which probably got 10 visitors a day before Cohen sued Google, had suddenly become a hot news item in Manhattan, where they eat this sort of thing up. Not the kind of fame your career needs if you’re trying to get hired in the Big Apple, so Cohen announced that she was dropping the suit—ostensibly out of the kindness of her heart.

I heard about the lawsuit against Google on Webmaster Radio (hat tip to Justin at seozombie.com for Twittering it), and I want to address all the things that the site got wrong, which are pretty numerous. For one thing, Webmaster Radio got the name of Port’s blog wrong (they called it “Skanks of New York.”) After that, they called the decision “precedent-setting,” and made this grand statement:

The decision removed any lingering comfort bloggers might have in the sense of anonymity on the Internet. As of last week, there is none and bloggers are on notice that they can be held responsible for their writing should it be deemed defamatory or libelous. The decision should also serve to stem the tide of nastiness found throughout much of the blogosphere. It might also have a rebound effect of opening the door to others who feel they too have been unfairly libeled in blog posts.

First of all, a decision from the Manhattan Supreme Court is anything but “precedent-setting.” Although New York’s weird nomenclature for its state court system makes this court sound like the great seat of high jurisprudence, it’s just a basic state circuit court whose decisions are only binding on the parties in that particular case. (It’s remotely possible that a different plaintiff who sued Google in Manhattan again could claim that Google was bound by the Cohen case under the doctrine of collateral estoppel [and no, I'm not going to explain that to you], but it’s not a sure winner.)

To sum things up: the New York court ruled that Cohen could make Google hand over Port’s name so she could sue Port. If a fashion model from Lawrence, Kansas, was the victim of a Blogger blog called “Skanks of Lawrence, Kansas,” and sued Google in the Manhattan circuit to get the owner’s name, Google wouldn’t have to face the wrath of Judge Madden again. They’d simply say, “What, exactly, does this have to do with Manhattan?” and file a motion to remove the case to Kansas, where it belongs.

More important, there have been several other cases dealing with this very same issue. Some have held that anonymous bloggers are protected under the first amendment, while others have held, as Madden did, that they’re not entitled to anonymity if they defame someone. Many of these cases are in the federal circuits, which actually are “precedent-setting,” at least in a fairly large geographical area if the case gets filed in federal court. The law here is very much in a state of flux, and most people I know who blog are well aware that the hosting companies will out you in a heartbeat if somebody has their lawyer write a nastygram on letterhead. If somebody is thin-skinned (or you infringe on their copyright or trademark), there’s no need to file a lawsuit in order to get your name. In other words, the better informed among us don’t expect privacy, but we speak out anyway.

Port, apparently, isn’t one of the better informed. She’s filed a lawsuit against Google for “breaching its fiduciary duty” to protect her anonymity while she was using Blogger. Now, I’ve put up a lot of Blogger blogs, and I never saw anything in the little “I agree” scroll screen where Google agreed to protect my anonymity, let alone any implication of a fiduciary duty. WTF??? Which brings me back to the Site Build It Scam incident. A couple of months ago, Ken Evoy was blathering in the forums that he and his company had an “actionable claim” against the perps. LOL. An actionable claim means your attorney knows he can file the lawsuit without the court sanctioning him for bringing a frivolous claim. In no way does it mean you’re going to win—it means your lawyer knows he can bill you for upwards of $50,000 while you pay for discovery without incurring the wrath of the court. And as Cohen quickly found out, defamation might not wreck your reputation, but filing a defamation lawsuit almost certainly will. Or ask Brian Clark what happened to him with Lissie’s review of Scribe SEO.

Price: UAW is $67 a month; AMA is $47 a month.

Ease of Use: UAW spins your article by having you write three versions of each paragraph and mixing and matching them. It allows you to vary entire sentences within the paragraph and even write different content altogether for each spin. AMA uses the more traditional approach of having you substitute different words using curly brackets and the pipe symbol. For example, a sentence written “All dogs {like|love} bones” would publish randomly as “All dogs like bones” or “All dogs love bones.” AMA works from the basic structure of each sentence, so your paragraphs will look more alike. I personally find it easier to substitute synonyms with the AMA system than to write different sentences with the UAW system, and I wish that UAW would add an AMA type of spinner to its system.

Duplicate Content: neither UAW nor AMA pass Copyscape 100%. A really thorough rewrite in AMA with 10 spins for each sentence will get you pretty close, but that’s even more work than UAW’s system. I’ve given up on worrying about duplicate content—I used to believe the conventional wisdom that Google only ranks the site with the best backlinks and ignores the others, but then one of my colleagues suggested that I google “carrot juice has many health benefits” and all 10 results on page 1 of the SERPs have identical content. Now I’m a believer. But I still avoid duplicate content in the following instances:
* I don’t submit duplicate content to high-quality sites like Ezine Articles and Hubpages. These sites want original content because of their own internal rules, not because of Google’s rules, so that’s what I give them. (I’ve been known to submit a UAW or AMA spin to Ezine before sending it out through the article service, though, and it’s worked every time).
* I don’t submit duplicate content to any article distribution service (UAW, AMA, etc.), because that’s part of their user agreement.
* I don’t put duplicate content on any site that I’ve monetized, such as with AdSense, Amazon Affiliate, or eBay Partner Network, because Google doesn’t like thin sites set up only to make money.

Quality of Network: there’s just no comparison; the worst article directory in UAW’s network compares favorably with the best site in AMA’s network. UAW might at least screen their network applicants before approving, while all you have to do to include AMA material on a site is send them your URL. I’ve had articles appear on UAW sites as high as PR2; a few of them are still PR2. With AMA, I’ve followed my pingbacks and ended up at some really spammy looking sites with multiple pop-under windows that I can’t close and the like. The vast majority of these sites weren’t even indexed by Google, which means they’re useless for backlinks. I’ve had some of my UAW submissions drop off the site’s home page before they could be indexed, but at least the home page was indexed.

Resource Box: UAW gives you two links in a resource box at the end of your article. AMA lets you put two links in the body of your article. I’ve read that Google gives more weight to AMA’s system, although how much more is anybody’s guess. I also find UAW’s spinner for the resource box hard to use, but I’m probably trying too hard to vary the text. Keep it simple…you know the rest.

Affiliate Program: both services offer an affiliate program. Both services are closemouthed about how much they pay their affiliates and when.

Results: UAW made a noticeable difference in my traffic. AMA didn’t.

Verdict: starting in July, I’m going back to UAW. It’s more expensive than AMA, but the quality of the network is everything with this type of service. If you’re new to SEO and have no choice but to run the article marketing treadmill, then choose the service that will give you the most return for your hard work—even if it costs a little more.

If you’re just starting out in the make money online game, you might not know what a backlink is. A backlink is a link on another site that points to the site you’re trying to rank in the search engines for.

Beginners often put all of their energy into building a great site with quality content and forget that getting backlinks to that site is the other half of the equation for online success—the most important half. Of course, Google says otherwise. Google says that if you build great content, visitors will somehow find your site, read it, and backlink to it without being asked, because they love it so much.

Google has to say this, because they don’t like site owners getting backlinks by artificial means. They want their search results to be a meritocracy. This would work if there were no money to be made online and the ‘net was a pure marketplace of ideas. But the reality is, there is a bundle of money to be made online, and Google is making more of it than anyone. In fact, their AdSense program made $1.8 billion gross sales in 2008. In such a competitive environment, business owners use Search Engine Optimization seo(SEO) techniques to try to get more traffic than other sites in the same niche, or subject area.

On-page SEO consists of writing your site’s pages so the search engines (mainly Google) can tell what those pages are about and classify them into search results. Search engines get their results by using a programming formula (called an algorithm, or ‘bot/robot) to scan (crawl) the pages for keywords and their surrounding context. Google likes on-page SEO because it makes Google’s job of returning quality search results easier.

Off-page SEO consists of getting backlinks by various proactive means. Google doesn’t really like you being proactive with backlinks, but it tolerates some off-page SEO techniques more than others.

For instance, you’ll never have a Google problem if you e-mail a site owner in your niche and say, “Would you mind checking out my site, and if you like it, would you place a backlink to it on your site? This fits in with Google’s view of the web as a meritocracy, but remember that the web is also a competitive environment, and backlinks are so valuable that they’re a form of currency. That site owner will probably think, “What’s in it for me?” So if you’re lucky and he doesn’t just trash your e-mail, he’ll write you back and say, “I’ll link to you if you link to me.” Google sees even this type of harmless link trading as beyond the scope of its meritocracy, so it assigns less value to reciprocal links that point to each other. How much less? Nobody really knows; we just know that two-way links are less valuable than links that only point one way.

If you’re doing off-page SEO, it’s important to distinguish between backlinks that Google merely devalues and backlinks that Google actually punishes you for. Think of it as the difference between a civil infraction like a parking ticket, and a felony crime. Two-way links are a civil infraction. There are some Google misdemeanors in between, too. Google owns about 72 percent of the search engine results online, so it functions as judge, jury, and executioner.

In that “gray hat” area between the purely “white hat” one-way link, and the felony level, there are a lot of things you can do to get backlinks to your site. Most of them involve some degree of automation through SEO software, and that’s why they’re “gray.” Google hates automation, because when taken to the limit it allows one human being to bombard the internet with literally hundreds of thousands of sites and backlinks to sites. If you’ve ever run across a really crappy looking site with nothing but links and text that looks like some twisted form of Russian, you’re looking at an example of what in Google’s view is an internet felony. If you’re bothering to read this post, then trust me, you don’t want anything to do with this stuff. Not only are those folks utterly ruthless, but it’s way too much work: slap up 1,000 sites in a day, get 100,000 backlinks, make money for a week, Google nukes everything, rinse and repeat. Stick to white and gray techniques and you’ll avoid the Backlink Blues.

In my next post, I’ll talk about some software tools for getting backlinks.

Category 1: selling your own stuff. That stuff can be a physical object (like a tool or a toy), or an electronic object (like a software program or an e-book that you own the rights to), or a service (like web design, which you can sell to anyone in the world; or lodging at your bed and breakfast, which requires your customer to come and visit you in person).

Most online entrepreneurs are chasing Category 1 monetization methods because the income potential is theoretically very high. But with that high theoretical income, you get lower odds of success. There are two reasons for this. First, it’s harder than you think to create a product that people are willing to pay enough money for to keep you in business. And second, online customers have no loyalty whatsoever–they’ll surf the net for hours to buy something at a lower price than you’re offering, no matter how much you cater to their emotions by offering them entertaining and engaging content. These two factors are the reason that most of the websites successfully selling their own stuff are large companies with access to a lot of cash for product development and promotion.

It’s true that a few of the A-list internet marketers somehow get away with selling 30-page e-books that they wrote themselves for $67, if they hype the product relentlessly and get an army of affiliates to buy advertising for them. But beware of the average newb’s claims that he bought a Lamborghini this year by selling e-books. Internet marketers are infamous for puffing their sales numbers. In reality, the refund rate on e-books is very high. And the majority of the book-buying public thinks that e-books are worth less than a book that’s printed on paper, not more. The odds are a bit better if you’re a programmer and know how to write software, but they struggle too. The biggest complaint seems to be the risk of spending a year or more writing a program that the public turns out not to want to buy.

If you’re determined to sell your own stuff, your best prospects are in selling hard-to-find physical merchandise, or using a website to sell online services one customer at a time, or using a website to get more customers to your bricks-and-mortar business. Don’t think you’ll get rich using a website to sell the shipping container of cut-rate power drills from China that you bought “wholesale” on Ali Baba. Just don’t.

Category 2: selling your traffic to other site owners who are selling their own stuff. In this scenario, you’re an independent salesperson working on commission, which is the internet business model best suited for the solo entrepreneur with no access to venture capital. Initially I was very resistant to this monetization approach. I didn’t want to sell–I hate selling. I also didn’t like the idea of someone else owning the product I would be depending on for my livelihood. I wanted to be completely self-contained and hang on to every cent of income that my business idea generated. It took me a year of spinning my wheels creating product after product that didn’t sell before I was ready to look at what other solo website owners were doing and admit that maybe–just maybe–they were smarter than me.

There are three ways to sell your website traffic online. The first is to set up “billboard” type sites and populate them with syndicated advertising from ad brokers. The most established of these is Google’s AdSense for Content program, where Google gives you a 20% to 30% commission every time one of your visitors clicks a Google ad running on your site. Most of the ad brokers only pay you a commission if your visitor takes some action, like clicking on an ad. The big sites with hundreds of thousands of visitors a day are the only ones that can collect money simply for running an ad that people look at. Making money with Adsense is one of the best ways to monetize your website.

The second way to sell your website traffic is with affiliate marketing, where you set up a page selling someone else’s goods or services. You get paid a commission every time someone uses your page to find the owner’s order page and buy his stuff. More and more companies are setting up affiliate programs that you can join and make it easy for you to set up your site with them. In fact, a number of solo site owners report that the two biggies, Amazon and eBay, make them the most commission dollars, because their customers know and trust those names. You should also check out Wealthy Affiliate review for another take on this type of income.

The third way to sell your traffic is by compiling an opt-in e-mail list from people who visit your site, and let other internet marketers use your list to sell their stuff. When you hear the term “joint venture” thrown around, this is what it’s referring to. It sounds impressive, but it’s really as lowbrow as selling your mailing list. If you see the acronym CPA in internet marketing, it stands for “Cost Per Action,” and it refers to how much another site owner will pay you for gathering names for an e-mail list.

That’s monetization, and it’s the first thing you should think about when you decide to work from home online. Don’t–I repeat, do not–choose a topic for your site based on your interest or “passion” alone, put up a site, and only then decide how to monetize it. Instead, your first question should be, “If I put up a site about X, how will I monetize it?”

Other than that, I strongly urge you to sell your traffic, not your stuff, when you’re first starting out. You can’t make money online without traffic, and getting traffic is a full time job in itself. Add on the time it takes to develop a product that real customers, other than the very gullible, will pay money for, and suddenly you’re no longer a solo entrepreneur. Know what you’re doing before you go down that road.

There are several types of passive income that you can make online, but I’ve chosen to focus on the two that are easiest for the solo web entrepreneur to learn, set up, and repeat, without hiring help or spending a lot of money to get started. Those two types are income from affiliate marketing commissions, and income from advertising commissions. I’m doing both, and I’ll be writing about both in upcoming posts.

For people who want to work from home with an online business, there are a lot of misconceptions about passive income. People who are new to the internet, known as newbs, think they can earn passive income without doing any work. There are also people who have been trying to make money online for months or even years who still think they can earn passive income online without doing any work. These folks aren’t newbs–they are noobs. If you go to the Warrior Forum or Digital Point, you’ll see newbs and noobs all talking about how they did (or are going to do) 20 minutes of work, and made (or are going to make) hundreds or thousands of dollars. Ignore 99 percent of these people. Actually, for now, ignore all of them. Once you have a good solid background in making money online, you’ll know which 1% to pay attention to when you run into them on a forum.

Passive income is work–a hell of a lot of work. People think it’s easy because when you’ve been doing this for a few months, you can get a website up and running in 15 minutes and start selling your stuff. But without knowledge, just putting up a site isn’t going to help you. You need to get a basic understanding of internet marketing, and you need to do specific research on the niche you’re working in. You do niche research to find out whether your niche is monetizable and how to best monetize it. You do all this before you even think of registering a domain name or taking a site live.

When you’re first starting out, learning the concepts will take you one to two months. Niche research will take you about a week of intense work (20 to 40 hours) per niche. Putting up your site will take 20 minutes. Then, getting traffic to your site will cost you either time or money. Once you have traffic, you’ll finally have passive income–unless you’re working a very competitive niche, in which case you’ll have to fight to stay on top.

Sounds boring, doesn’t it? It’s like being in school–you have to read and learn from many different sources and make the concepts fit together in your brain until they make sense as a system. Step by step instructions might get you a site, and maybe even make you a little money, but you’ll never be as successful as you’d be if you understand the theory behind the instructions. When you know the theory, you can work in many different niches, including niches that most internet marketing noobs pass up in order to get to the same low-hanging fruit that all the other noobs are chasing. If Google changes its system, you’ll be ready to change with it, because you already have a working knowledge to build on. And you’ll always be several steps ahead of your competitors who haven’t studied and learned how internet marketing works.

Set aside time to read and learn. I suggest Learn How to Make Money Online, work from home jobs, and Make Money Online for Beginners.

You’ll read all kinds of bad advice on the internet to “find a subject that you’re passionate about.” Oddly enough, most of these so-called “business advisors” tell you to do this right before they try to sell you something to “help” you. Run from these people.

I’m passionate about my business. My business is making money on the internet, and what makes me passionate is waking up the next morning with more money in my bank account than I went to bed with. The subject matter? It doesn’t matter to me. I’ve written about hundreds of topics I thought I had no interest in, and when I start seeing paychecks coming in, I get very interested all of a sudden. Making money by working from home is just like any other job. Most days are pleasant but not especially exciting. A few days suck, and a few days are out of this world. But there’s nothing special about the subject matter of online business that’s any different from the real world. The thrill for me as a business owner is knowing I’m the master of my own domain and that I have the power to get what I want. If the topic I’m working on that day thrills me to bits, that’s icing on the cake.

Making money online can be boiled down to three simple steps: (1) identify a group of customers with money to spend and the urge to spend it; (2) choose an established online business approach to get them to spend that money on your site; and (3) set up your site, get traffic, and make money online. Simple, yes, but not easy.

As you read advice about working from home online, you’re going to run into a word over and over again: “niche.” In online marketing, a niche is a particular segment of the internet using public, and it’s how you’ll analyze your potential customer base. The mistake many website owners make is in thinking of a niche as something small and unique. Offline, that might be true. Online, throw that concept away and go as big and generic as you can without confusing search engines like Google as to what your site is about. (You keep your site’s mission clear to Google by doing good keyword research, which I’ll cover in a later post.)

Throw away your beliefs about making money online by offering something innovative that nobody else is selling. I know you can point to all kinds of examples of business owners who made a killing working in a small market. Those examples only make the headlines because they’re so unusual, so they make interesting news. Small markets spell doom for beginning website owners, unless they’re very lucky or well connected. As an online business owner, you need to think like Wal-Mart when you choose a niche.

The next step is to choose an online business model. Again, think mainstream. I can’t tell you how much time and energy I wasted in the past trying to find a business approach that hadn’t been done before. I was being stupid. I ignored the fact that the internet has been a stream of commerce for about ten years now, and the pioneers of net marketing have found business models that work. Those models are out there for you to use, so use them. Looking back, I think I was trying to avoid competition by doing something different. The hard business lesson I learned is that if there’s no competition, then it’s probably because there’s no money to be made doing business that way. Competition is your friend–it shows you where the money is, so learn to live with it. Your job, as a small business owner online, is to identify niches and business models that are less competitive than others, so you can slide in under the radar while still doing something that works.

There are two primary successful business models online that are easy for the solo website owner to replicate: (1) publishing a website that runs other people’s advertising and taking a commission from it; and (2) publishing a website that sells other people’s stuff and taking a commission from it. If you’re new to internet marketing, you’re probably shocked. Commission sales? No way!

Open your mind to the idea that commission sales are ideally suited for the solo website owner. You don’t need to keep merchandise in stock in your basement and run a shipping room. You don’t need to develop and distribute your own product, such as an e-book or widget, that the public wants to buy from an unknown name (you). And commission selling is truly passive income. Once you have your sites up and running, maintaining them is a part-time job, or you can use the profit from them to hire someone else to maintain them for you. Last of all, commission sales plays to your greatest strength as a solo website owner: the merchant who owns the product or service you’ll be selling for him needs what you can bring him for his survival.

What does the merchant need? Massive amounts of traffic. Traffic is the lifeblood of internet marketing. But not just any traffic. The merchant needs targeted traffic. Targeted traffic is internet users who are looking to buy exactly what the merchant is selling. As a niche website owner, you’re in the perfect position to feed targeted traffic to the merchant, who will pay you to do so. You won’t be the only one. Because stuff on the internet is so cheap, the merchant needs to sell more and more goods or services to make a profit. So the merchant needs thousands of people like you feeding him targeted traffic.

That simplifies your job as a website owner: get targeted traffic to your site and let the merchant monetize it and pay you. If you want to be the merchant instead and own the goods you’re selling so you can keep all the profit, be my guest. There are solo entrepreneurs online who have done this, but they’re the other 1% of the 99% who fail in their first year. Being a merchant is harder than it looks. You’ll probably ignore my advice because the profit potential of being a merchant is so tantalizing. Being a successful merchant is like being a rock star–many are called; few are chosen. Commission sales online is grunt work and not very glamorous, but the business model has been tested over time and is a reliable source of income that a solo website owner can achieve with limited resources and not much money invested up front. With commission sales, your job is to get traffic and get paid for it. Period.

How much do you get paid? If you check my sidebar, you’ll find a website owner who goes by the nickname “Grizzly” who makes $40,000 a month from advertising commissions. He doesn’t write e-books, and he doesn’t have a wholesale goods operation and shipping desk in his basement. He gets traffic and gets paid for it.

Interesting thought, isn’t it?

There, I said it. If I were hawking my products to try and take advantage of you, I’d follow up with, “but not if you follow my exclusive system.” So that’s my first piece of advice for people who want to work from home online: beware of any advice that’s going to cost you money. Promise yourself right up front that the number one tool in your toolbox as you learn about working from home is your brain.

There’s a ton of advice out there. Millions of people are looking to work from home online, because of the economy and gas prices, and because for most of us, a home based business represents a better life. Anytime you have this kind of interest in something, you’re going to have a rogues gallery of charlatans following close behind, offering advice for a hefty fee.

Most of that advice is going to be dead wrong. The online business world is a mirror image of the rest of the business world: it’s dog-eat-dog, and there are a lot of people who will lie to you in order to make a buck off you and feel good about it. If they’re really slick, they’ll make you feel good about it too so they can come back and rip you off some more.

Some of that advice is right or partly right but it’s way overpriced. They charge you extra money for handing you everything you need all boxed up for you so you don’t have to reach into your toolbox and use your brain. See my post on Site Build It review and also this gem of a video at Is Site Sell, Site BuildIt a Scam? if you’re not convinced that the business-in-a-box approach is the wrong one.

But some of advice is not only good advice, but it’s available for free. You’re farther ahead already if you’re reading people who aren’t trying to sell you something. After you’ve been reading for a while, you’ll know that you can trust your sources because what they tell you squares up with what you’ve learned elsewhere. Only then, if one of them points you to a product that will cost you money, should you consider taking out your Visa card. Another example of using your brain and doing your own research, instead of doing what you’re told.

The first obstacle for people who want to work from home online is learning how to use their computer. If all you know how to do with a computer is turn it on and open Internet Explorer, then you need to get busy and learn more or find some other way to work from home. You don’t need a college course to learn to use your computer–you need your brain. For instance, I’ve been teaching a friend how to build an affiliate sales site so she can work online from home. She’s learned that I’ll usually answer her questions in five minutes if she emails me, so for a while she got in the habit of shooting me an email every time she ran into a snag. After I wrote back and told her to keep trying different things for 10 or 15 minutes before emailing me, she started to make real progress.

Was I being unhelpful? Hell no! In the 10 or 15 minutes she took to learn it herself, she also learned what doesn’t work, so she won’t make those mistakes again. She also learned how all the different tasks of building a website fit together as one process. You can only understand the process by doing it yourself. Following step by step instructions in a box only teaches you to follow the instructions. Is it frustrating at times? Sure. Does it take hours and hours at first? Absolutely. But my friend is on her way to gaining knowledge that no one can take away from her. Even if computers change, even if Google changes its algorithm, even if AdSense and affiliate sales are no longer viable, she’ll be able to roll with the changes and keep working from home online.

Along with avoiding the scammers and using your computer, you need to learn about business if you want to work from home online. Tell yourself on day one that this is not a hobby for you, and promise that you’ll be absolutely ruthless in testing what works and doesn’t work, and throwing away what doesn’t work if it doesn’t pay for the time and money you’ve invested in it. The beauty of an internet home business is that the cost of entry is so low. You can get started for less than $100, so it draws a lot of people who have never run a business and don’t know what it takes to run one. The sincere desire to succeed isn’t enough. Even working around the clock isn’t enough. You need to be smart–street smart. A business that isn’t making money isn’t a business–it’s a hobby. A business that makes money is a business, even if you’re doing it in your pajamas.

If you’ve been paying attention as you read this, then your business sense has already kicked in, and you’re thinking, “How do these wonderful people giving away this information online for free get paid for what they do? That sounds too good to be true.” Good–you’re thinking like a business owner. I have the answer for you, and it’s probably not what you think. Check out my next post, and you’ll be surprised, pleasantly.

Every click on the “buy” button makes the site owner a $75 commission, and it makes Dr. Ken Evoy, SBI’s owner, $225. Not bad. Apparently a lot of SBI affiliates think so too. Back in early 2008 when I first started looking at ways to work online from home, I did a search on “Site Build It Scam” and got page… after page… after page of results.  They were all affiliate sales sites like the one I describe above. With any online product you expect to see a few affiliates making this kind of sales pitch, but this was a swarm.

The weird thing is that there were no negative reviews of Site Build It. I found one that was fairly neutral from 2006, buried in a forum down on page 8 of my search results. I knew the product couldn’t be so good that nobody had ever had a bad experience with it, but at the time, I didn’t think anything of it. In August 2008 I ponied up my $300 and bought SBI.

You see, I was a newb. Here’s what the Urban Dictionary says about newbs:

Newbs are those who are new to some task and are very beginner at it, possibly a little overconfident about it, but they are willing to learn and fix their errors to move out of that stage.

I might have been a newb, but I wasn’t a n00b—I looked at the sites of SBI members and saw that many of them ranked high in the search engine results on their keywords. And Ken Evoy boasts that the majority of his members are in the top 1% of Alexa traffic rankings. I knew I needed traffic to make money online, so I thought the SiteBuildIt scheme would work for me. Hey, I was a newb–what do you expect?

It took me a long time to slog through the Site Build It “program,” which consists of 10 extremely wordy tutorials with about 10% useful content and 90% sales copy praising the SBI system. After I came up for air, I started looking around in the SBI forums, which are a big part of their sales pitch. “Friendly, helpful, supportive,” is what Dr. Ken Evoy calls them, and he’s right about that–as long as you buy into their groupthink. We’ll talk more about SBI groupthink in a bit.

After I had gone through “NicheChooseIt!” (all SBI products have exclamation marks), I had a domain name and had put together a basic two-column theme from their site builder utility. But I couldn’t shake the doubts I was having about how I would monetize the site. You see, Site Build It tells you that it’s not all that important to think about a monetization strategy before you register a domain with them and write content. What they tell you is that if you write lots (and lots and lots) of great content, money will come to you. Somehow.

Finally, in November, I waded into the forums and started exploring how people at SBI were doing financially. After spending an afternoon reading I found hundreds of posts by people who said, “I can’t figure out how to monetize my site.” These weren’t newbs, either. Many of them had been on SBI more than a year. Many of them had over 10,000 visitors a month. Many of them had written over 100 pages of content. But they were making chump change.

Dr. Ken’s advice?

Write more content.

These folks aren’t newbs. They are n00bs.

n00bs, on the other hand, know little and have no will to learn any more. They expect people to do the work for them and then expect to get praised about it.

I’m a writer by trade. I’ve been writing professionally since 1986 and have been teaching college writing since 1989. And in the last 24 years I’ve had my fill of writing and not getting paid. I got into internet marketing so I could get away from that game.

Although you wouldn’t know it from the lack of negative reviews in the Google results, many people besides me have had suspicions that Site Build It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. A blogger from Australia wrote a posted called Site Build It scam review. Ken Evoy spotted it and wrote a long (long, long) post on the SBI forums about what a terrible review it was. Fair enough. It’s his house.

That was where groupthink went into action, and hordes of SBI n00b zombie trolls descended on Lissie’s site. A few of them were civil, spoke their piece, and left. Some of them left comments more than 2,000 words long with an excruciatingly detailed SBI sales pitch in an attempt to overwhelm the thread. And some of them belittled her and threatened her with lawsuits and having her site taken down.

That’s how groupthink works–if you say something negative to a true believer, you’re evil. Not wrong. Not mistaken. Evil.

I didn’t know SBIers were like this when I was still struggling to make Site Build It work for me. I only saw it from the inside, where everything was cozy and everybody agreed on everything. Now that I’ve seen it from the outside, that’s enough to scare me away–even if the product makes money for its users.

Other people have done a better job than me of explaining why Site Build It is unlikely to make you much money. You can find some of them at Is Site Build It a Scam? and How to Make Money Online for Beginners along with advice on what really works for making money online. And the advice is free. Grizzly won’t try to sell you anything. And neither am I.

I left SiteBuildIt in January 2009 and took a new approach to building my internet home business–one that actually works. It takes time, and I lost six months and $150 on SBI. But I’m no longer a newb–or a noob.