Ever since Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a lightning storm, men have been trying to tame the mighty electron and turn it into dollars. Today, we call this practice online marketing, digital marketing, and a few other phrases that all basically mean the same thing – building websites that put cash in your bank account.
Some bloggers are hostile to the idea of monetizing their blogs. I’m not one of them. Note that every link to a book or product you click on here at Thumotic is suffixed by an affiliate code, and of course, here’s the snazzy sales page for the Thumotic 30-Day Challenge. Money is not the only reason, or even the most important reason why I write, but more money is always better than less.
If you’re new to the world of online marketing and considering investing serious time and energy into it, here are three things you need to know before you get started.
1) Making Money Online Is Easy
Anyone can start a blog. If you’re intelligent, write reasonably well, and invest a decent chunk of time to producing quality content, you will find an audience. It will probably be small, but it’s out there. Whoever you are, there are people who will relate to you, and there will be people who want to learn whatever it is you have to teach.
The most fruitful niche, in my humble and completely unbiased opinion, is the Red Pill Blogosphere, i.e. the PUA/Counter-Feminist/Reactionary/Dark Enlightenment community. It’s a small and tight group today, but there’s a lot of room for aggressive expansion as our offensive and un-PC ideas gradually, and then exponentially gain traction in the mass consciousness. Hey, stranger things have happened. You think history is over? But I digress.
If you find your voice, readers will find it too. Start a blog, pop off emails to Delusion Damage, Society of Amateur Gentlemen, Free Northerner, and all the other fine gentlemen hosting regular link love. Behold, on the second day, the blogger said: Let there be traffic.
Once you have a blog and a few readers, making money is easy. Sign up for Amazon and Clickbank affiliate accounts, and start earning a small cut off of whatever products you recommend to your readers. Of course, it goes without saying that you will only recommend genuinely good products, as the unscrupulous marketer who puts money ahead of his readers, quickly finds himself with neither one nor the other.
Here are a few financial success stories in the Red Pill Blogosphere:
Matt Forney is on track to live off his various online hustles.
Danger and Play is earning some good walking around money via his iHerb and Amazon affiliate accounts.
I make a nice side income from sales of The Freedom Twenty-Five Lifestyle Guide, The 2012 End Of The World Tour, and The Thumotic 30-Day Challenge.
Roosh is making enough purely from his online income to travel the world in style and basically live the location-independent international playboy dream.
In addition to these, the non-Red-Pill segment of the internet, i.e. about 95-99% of it, is filled with guys making decent to excellent money off of various business, generally selling obscure products to tiny market segments. I’m talking about business opportunities so small, they would not even strike the typical person as an opportunity. Review sites for adventure travel in northern Thailand, outsourcing guides to specific second world countries, importing knock off watches and purses, importing extremely specific industrial equipment, hotel and flight affiliate marketing sites, nightlife review sites, martial arts training DVDs – the list is literally endless.
Open a new tab and Google some random bullshit. The first ten results will be guys like you making money off it.
2) Making Money Online Is Really, Really Hard
Let’s revisit those success stories from above: Matt Forney, Roosh, D+P and myself. Here are a few things we all have in common:
1) We each have 5+ years of experience writing blogs, and we have each written hundreds of thousands if not millions of words.
If your business plan is to come out of the gate with comparable writing skills as us, you need a new plan.
2) We are all voracious readers and life experience-whores, the result being that we can offer our readers a unique offering of useful information and perspective on the world.
If your business plan is to do a better job writing about training and supplementation than D+P, or out-do Roosh in the sex and travel niche, you need a new plan.
3) We are all broke.
Or at least, we’re not making fuck-you money. The vast majority of bloggers make nothing. A small slice make beer money. A much, much smaller number make enough money to live off. In fact, I would bet the only Red Pill writer who makes a comfortable living off his writing is the guy with a pair of million-plus monthly pageview sites, and a dozen books.
Fortunately, these guys are generally running lucrative careers in their non-logging hours. But before you jump headfirst into a career as a digital marketer, consider that you will most likely not make any money off the hustle for years, and maybe not ever.
3 Making Money Online Is Still A Hell Of A Lot Easier Than Your Other Options
Building websites and earning money is hard, success is uncertain, and there will probably be a long and unfruitful ‘building’ period before you start making real money. It’s a long and arduous path, and there are a dozen reasons why it might not work out for you. Maybe you keep picking the wrong niche. Maybe you don’t have the guts to put in the work. Maybe you’re not smart enough to consistently write posts that other people care enough to read.
In a world with boundless opportunity, I would strongly dissuade anyone from investing time and resources into an online marketing career. In the world we live in however, the risks you take devoting finite resources to online hustling do not have an obvious opportunity cost.
Say you’re an 18-30 year old man with a 120+ IQ, a fire in your belly, and some basic writing ability. You have no idea what sort of career you’re interested in.
Should you go to law school?
Should you start a career in finance?
Should you become a software engineer?
Should you find a job in the public service?
Should you start mailing out resumes?
The paths above are not necessarily bad. Many in our generation will be successful in those fields. But you are kidding yourself if you think that there is any easy path to success for the 21st century American male. Yes, the online hustle may turn out to be a dead end.
So could anything else.
The only difference is, family and friends will stare at you with jaws agape if you drop a hundred bucks on a year of hosting fees, but nod approvingly if you spend a hundred thousand on a law degree from Podunk U.
There’s a lot of misinformation on both sides of the online marketing debate. The Optimists will tell you that it’s easy peasy Japaneasy. The Pessimists say its impossible. The reality is that making money online is possible but – like most things worth doing – will require your blood, sweat, tears and time.
Enough Foreplay. Let’s Make Some Money
Here are some excellent resources to get you started on the basics of web development, ecommerce, monetization, and the nuts and bolts of various online hustles.
Matt Forney (also here)
All of these people are already doing a far better job than I am of monetizing their online presence, and they have been doing it for some time. If you have any interest at all in making money online, call in sick for a week and go through their archives from ass to elbow and back again.
If you have a niche that you think you can dominate, go for it it. It absolutely is possible. I have personally met dozens of men doing it and living the dream, dicking around Southeast Asia while Clickbank, Amazon, Cafepress, Zazzle, and Shopify deposit money in their accounts. Are you an expert in something? Start getting paid like an expert.
If you can string a decent sentence together, you’re ahead of 90% of your peers. Such is the world we live in that if you can write competently, you are exceptional. Can you write? If so, you have a rare and marketable skill. Start getting paid for it.
Do you have the requisite work ethic to learn what you need to learn, put in the hours building sites, and grind through long nights of creating content? If so, this guide has pointed you in the direction of a lifetime of freedom, wealth, location independence, and – if you choose to build products that help people, rather than just scam them – meaning.
Go get em tiger.
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Speaking of making money online, check out The Thumotic 30-Day Challenge and The Lifestyle Guide.
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