Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

How NOT to Make Money Off an Info Site the WRONG Way
A couple of weeks ago, when I started this series on the many different ways a business can make money on the Internet, I listed three as the ones that most new business owners latch onto immediately:

• Auctions
• Affiliate programs
• Web stores

I listed making money with information sites as one of the lesser known ways. That's not necessarily true. Plenty of people have hopped on the Google AdSense bandwagon and are making—or at least trying to make—money online by putting AdSense ads on sites that otherwise contain nothing but information.

It can be a proftable business. But there are many scammers who have come up with attempts to beat AdSense and cheat the visitors who come to their sites.

So I've got to start my look at info sites with a warning against the types of products to avoid.

When someone tries to sell you something that promises to create content for you, RUN AWAY.

Autogenerated content is worthless for visitors, often violates the copyright of someone whose content the autogeneration program ripped off, and can get your site banned from from the search engine listings and blocked from using AdSense.

The appeal of autogeneration programs is an illusion of no-effort riches. Autogeneration scammers suggest that you can type a profitable keyword into their product and it will magically spit out page after page of keyword-rich content. They claim these pages will skyrocket your site to the top of the search engines and pull in hordes of visitors to click on your AdSense ads.

I won't go into all the reasons why this doesn't work the way they want you to think it does. I'll just hit a couple of high points.

Number 1, it's dishonest. Autogenerator programs strive to spit out worthless junk that no visitor will find worthwhile. The whole idea behind autogenerated content is to trick the search engines into bringing visitors to the site. The visitors then find the site so worthless that they have nothing to do there but click on the ads.

Number 2, it only works for a short time. Autogenerated content is the number 1 target for all search engine spam filters. Each program leaves an identifiable footprint that the search engines catch on to once they see it for a while. And as soon as they identify a site as being autogenerated, the site is gone forever from the rankings.

If you want to build a lasting business, there's no way to create it instantaneously. It takes time and effort. But a well-planned and well-built info site can be very profitable and can be a steady source of income for years. We'll go into that more in future posts.
Jeff