There's a lot of crap out there. "5 ways to monetize your site", "6 ways to monetize your site", "7 ways to monetize your site"... I could go on (the only difference being whether you count Amazon as affiliate marketing, or its own category).

Because I have all the time in the world to kill, and you are obviously a very busy person, I have waded through the Google shit heap so that you don't have to. Am I not benevolent?

Starting out
How to build a niche site - SmartPassiveIncome.com - Pat Flynn has a great series of articles describing how he went from an idea to a website that is now bringing in >$1000 every month.

Getting people to your website by any means, fair or foul
How to trick Google into thinking you are more popular than you really are - SmartPassiveIncome.com
What Google likes, you should like too - SEOptimse.com

Wringing money out of them, ditto
101 tools to extract money from people on the internet - storycube.blogspot.com
142 more - my4hourworkweek.com

Persuading them to come back for seconds


I will keep this list updated as I come across new articles.

If you were to stumble upon the world of blogging by accident, you could be forgiven for thinking that most blogs are trying to make money by telling you how to make money. Very few seem to be making much any other way. Is it a pipe dream? Will you spend more on these crooks than you will ever make? Well, yes. And no.

You see, it doesn't have to be that way. With a little bit of technical know-how, all the results of this fancy software can be achieved using freely available tools. As for all the information that is in ebooks... well, don't get me started on ebooks. You can probably get the salient points from a handful of blogposts if you do a quick search on google. Because most of these ebooks are just a couple of blogposts glued together by extensive waffle/drivel to boost the page length.

No, you can make money on the internet without spending a penny if you know the workarounds. Luckily for you (and for him), this writer learnt a few of those tricks in an earlier, happier, pre-desert-island life.

Take this blog, for example. No money will be spent on it that it does not earn upfront. Any improvements will be purchased using money already earned. And a detailed breakdown of these expenditures will be published.

This is an experiment to see if you can get something for nothing. This is the Desert Island Blogger's manifesto.