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.

What would you take to a desert island?

All I could rescue before the ship of my pirate captors sank was my laptop. Yes, dear reader, that and my charger. After I finally made it ashore, I watched as the last traces of the pirates disappeared under the waves. I was alone on an island, stranded far from civilization with no idea of where abouts in the world I was.

Not only that, but my laptop had been drenched with seawater during my swim and there was no power outlet on this deserted island to plug it into anyway. Luckily I had soon rigged up a couple of coconuts into a make-shift solar panel and after carefully cleaning out the salt, my computer flickered back into life. Success!

It was fairly simple to hook up a simple aerial from a sharks tooth and the left femur of a long dead monkey. Before long I was hooked back up to the internet. But if I didn't know where I was, how could I be rescued?

My only option is to wait here until another ship comes by. Who knows how long that will be...

In the meantime, I was determined to make the most of my isolation. For a while I found easy gratification on a number of sites with barely clad men and women, but after a while it was not enough. Despair set in. I would never be rescued. I would die here alone and unloved. Soon the sharks circling off the island looked less uninviting.

And then I found Pat Flynn, blogger, dad and all-round hero. I was inspired. Could I too make a blog and bring in $50,000 a month?

There was just one problem. Pat and his pals don't stop advertising all the gadgets and software that you need to succeed. But I was stuck on a desert island with no credit card and no initial investment. I would never be able to afford Market Samurai.

Then I realized one simple thing: it probably didn't matter. All that stuff exists to get you to part with your cash for nothing. If you can do it with fancy software, you can definitely do it for free as well. And so the Desert Island Blog was born.