If someone applies for a SEO job and lists a degree as qualification, you should laugh and move on. Some people were born to sell cars, they don’t need degrees because their performance speaks for itself.

It’s the same for SEO (and especially SEM), your past performance is what should set you apart from the people who have wasted their time getting a search engine optimization degree. After all, isn’t SEO dead yet? Who really cares about on page SEO? Google surely doesn’t, neither does Digg or Delicious. Your Twitter followers don’t care if you’ve optimized your meta tags or what your keyword density is.

Quit living in the past, you don’t need a degree. This business is still the wild west, there are no rules you should follow, you should do whatever it takes to get your site ranked #1.

This week I’ll have a review of a unique directory I found online, don’t miss it. Yes, you read that right, a unique directory.

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Typically I find my workers/employees through forums like DigitalPoint, but the Craigslist Philippines is a great idea, one that I had never thought of. Give it a go and let me know how outsourcing works for you.

By the way, I’m always looking for talented people, send me a message if you’re one of them!

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So with that said I’m going to be shifting my focus away from “making money” to “earning money”. I still do everything the same, but with a focus on what kind of work you need to put in to get the desired results.

Earning money though web based ventures isn’t for everyone. I have a family member who told me that he had extra time and wanted to try to turn that time into money with the internet. I spent hours with him explaining what he needed to do, we bought a domain, got hosting set up, installed WordPress and wrote him a sample post. I detailed everything he would need to do over the next month in order to make it a successful month.

At the end of the month I went back to his site and guess how many posts he had…1, and it was the post I made for him.

I called him and asked what the problem was and he said, “I don’t think this is for me, it’s a lot more work than I thought it would be.”

Therein lies the truth. Making money online is not easy, but earning money online is possible. You’re not going to get rich overnight. That PPC campaign will not take off, your website will never rank number for for “laptops” and you will never be paid $50,000 to speak at a conference. However, you can make a very good earning online.

You’ll need to be prepared to work hard for little return in the beginning and trust that one day down the line it will pay off. That’s what I’ve been doing since 2004 and I can tell you that it has truly paid off!

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I can send about 3-5,000 leads per month and expect to be paid $1-$1.50 per lead depending on volume.

CareerBuilder is trying to screw me out of $2,000 so I need to replace them.  If you know of any companies that offer an attractive affiliate program, please let me know!

One other thing, does Dice.com have an affiliate program?

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If you learn 1 new thing per month you would learn 12 new things per year. Those would be longer lasting things and could be beneficial.

If you learn 1 new thing per year you would know 1 new thing per year. That just isn’t enough.

For the sake of argument, learning 12 things per year is the ideal situation and since months are roughly 30 days, that gives you 30 days to learn (maybe even master) one new thing.

Are you up for a 30 day challenge?

So I’m going to take this challenge of learning one new in the next 30 days. I don’t know what I should learn. It could be computer related or not, but it should be something you don’t know much about.

Here are a few of my ideas for things to learn:

Japanese – I have some Japanese podcasts and I really like the language. I’ve learned a very little bit and don’t remember anything from the 10 podcasts I listened to a few months ago. I don’t know how Japanese could be useful to me, I don’t even know any Japanese people, but it’s kinda fun.

PHP – I have 2 PHP books that I started reading last year. I know how to use the include function, and read and understand a little PHP, but that’s about it. I know PHP would be useful in programming websites, but it would take a lot of dedication to learn something this intense. I’m not very well suited to learning on my own without others supporting me at the same time.

AJAX – Honestly I don’t know much about AJAX apart from the fact that it lets you reload a section of a page without having to refresh the entire browser. It is also very trendy and “Web 2.0ish”. I don’t know if my technical skills are up to snuff to learn something that combines an existing language (Javascript) that I know nothing about and XML which I know very little about.

CSS – I pay a developer to turn my .PSD files into CSS. It is pretty costly when I know this is something I could do myself. I’ve never had the desire, or taken the time to learn much CSS. This one would actually be beneficial to me.

Nothing – Then I could focus on my previous goal of working on one thing per month. Geez, it didn’t take me long to give up on one goal to go after another.

So what other things could I possibly learn? What about you? Interested in attempting to learn something for 30 days and compare notes?

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What would you do? How would you spend that $100?

All you have to do is send me an email with the best way to spend $100 marketing your website. The website could be new or old, but you can’t spend over $100 exactly on your marketing.

You could have articles written, buy PPC ads, buy a site review, whatever. Make sure you give me some details because I might be using your idea in a future post.

If you are the winner, you will get your choice of spending $150 on this site. $150 will get you the following:

Complete Site Review (1 review)

Contextual links (2 links in either one or two posts, your choice)

Sponsored Posts (3 total sponsored posts)

So all you have to do is send me an email with your best marketing idea under $100!

If you win I’ll contact you to get some info on claiming your winnings.

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I used to love you. I would tell my friends about the “car Google bought”, the mortgage “Adsense was paying for”, and so on. Now you are trying to destroy what you helped create.

In an outright foolish blog post Matt Cutts said, “I’d like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms.”

In other words, “We need data in order to be able to stop people buying links from anyone but us. Please screw other webmasters by being an un-paid rat, we’d appreciate it.”

Google, if you want my advice, stop fighting against webmasters, because if it weren’t for us, you wouldn’t have anything to offer searchers.

Webmasters don’t put content on the internet anymore because they want to. They write and spend money building sites so they can make money.

We don’t need a puppet giving us little tid bits of not actually useful help in “ranking better“.

But now you want us to stop making money by selling text links for page rank? Matt Cutts said, “Ash, there’s absolutely no problem with selling links for traffic (as opposed to PageRank).” How can I, as a webmaster, know what the intention of other webmasters is going to be? How can you, as a search engine, punish me for selling related text links? After all, I must approve links that are put on my pages. So even if they are paid, they are deemed relevant by me. It’s my site, and my content, leave it alone.

Oh, and on another note Cutts also said, “For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt.” Why should I punish people who are buying relevant links on my site by nofollowing them?  After all, didn’t you just say there is “absolutely no problem” with selling links for traffic?

They want a link, I think their site is worthy, they offer to give me money, it’s a win-win-win. It’s a win for me, I get paid. It’s a win for them, they get a relevant link. It’s a win for you, you find another relelvant site.

However, punishing paid links is a lose-lose-draw. I lose because people are scared to buy links. Advertisers lose because I won’t go to the trouble of giving them a link without getting paid. You won’t find the relevant site as easy, even though you’ll find it eventually.

I know with as many minor SERP updates, you can easily filter out 99% of spam. You aren’t going to catch that other 1% of spammers this way.

If you are going to alienate me and tell me that what I’m doing, and will continue to do, is against your rules, does that make me a “black hat”? And since you are saying that I’m on the wrong side of the line, what stops me from going all the way over and joining SEOBlackHat (No nofollow)?

If you still think this “Calling All Snitches” post is a good idea, keep it up.  You’ve just lost a follower and forced someone to the dark side.

Never again yours,

Brandon Hopkins

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This will be perfect for people that are popular with Digg or people who have a very strong and loyal following.

Personally I can’t wait to find out more about how it works and to see it in action. I’m sure there will be some bugs to work out, but TLA has awesome support and usually can resolve an issue within a day.

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That same volume of money is available on the internet in the auto industry. There are many ways to capitalize on that market, and I have found a pretty interesting one.

If you fit the profile of having worked, or currently work in the auto industry then I want to work with you to develop a website targeted to consumers.

Don’t worry if you are currently employed, this is an anonymous writing position. You’ll be able to write about your experiences (past and present) and also be able to pass along valuable information to consumers.

If this is you, email me at brandonchopkins@gmail.com for more info.

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