Now some folks are upset at them because they say these three (and other “gurus” like them) are taking your money and not giving you the real goods. Take Griz over at make money online who has a new long rant about the Cool Aid these guys are selling and calls it blogging nonsense. Griz thinks these guys intentionally target new bloggers and fleece them of their money one month at a time through their useless membership sites. It’s all done under the guise of teaching them how to make money online but the methods they teach won’t work for 999 out of 1000 people.

These membership sites, Griz says, teach you how to Blog and that won’t make you money. Bloggers don’t make money because they have all the wrong kind of traffic. Internet marketers on the other hand, will make money because they understand how to rank their sites in the search engines and traffic that is specifically interested in what they are selling.

Splork over at his ways to make money online blog is saying similar things and he is upset as well. He clearly has a lot of disdain for these “A-List” bloggers who rehash the same thing over and over and charge clueless noobs for the privilege of reading it. These membership sites all preach the same “load of boring shit” according to Splork and the beginners don’t know enough to know that it is all a load of crap and they will never learn how to make money online.

Well, I must apologise for these harsh words of criticism from Griz and Splork and want to make sure Darren, Yaro, and Shoemoney know that I am very grateful for what they are doing. If it weren’t for them and their fantastic “How To Blog” membership sites, think of how much more competition there would be out there for all of us?

These three fine gentlemen are making sure that all the people they sign up for their sites will never learn how to compete with me and even if they do, they will probably be broke before they ever get the chance. I am extremely grateful that they are taking so many IM wannabe noobs right out of the gate and making sure they never learn the real ways to succeed online. 

Problogger, Yaro, and Shoemoney have been around for years cutting down the competition for the rest of us and I want to give a big “THANK YOU” to them for that. With the launch of their new membership sites, I can only hope they have spectacular success for many years to come. Lets hope they make a lot of money and are a big success at confusing and cutting down any potential competition that might be coming our way.

As for Griz, well that guy might have taught me much of what I know but he just won’t shut up. He keeps telling people how to really make money online which can only be hurting my business. The Internet is a big sandbox and there is room for everyone but still….shut up already. At least he only posts about once a month.

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You can try to make money doing paid online surveys or you can try to make a lot more money with lead generation. The art of getting CashCrate referrals is nothing more than online lead generation: you get leads for CashCrate and in turn they pay you a small commission. CashCrate is compensating you to go out and bring back potential customers to them. This is, in a nutshell, what affiliate marketing is all about.

CashCrate isn’t the only online surveys for money site that has a referral program and beyond surveys, there are thousands of other companies that you can make money generating leads for. This is why learning how to get CashCrate referrals is really learning how to make money online. If you can figure out how to successfully make lots of referrals for CashCrate, you will then have the knowledge of how to make money doing the same thing for other companies and “niches”.

When I get asked how I make money online I tell people I have a few websites and make money from them. People then invariably jump to the conclusion that I sell something (Ebay always comes to mind) as they have no idea that you can make money without having or selling a physical product. Usually the more I explain, the more confused they get as they just can’t grasp the idea of getting paid to lead someone to a product.

Lead generation is nothing more than another form of advertising. Advertising in one form or another has been around since the beginning of man and it is what makes the Internet tick. People seem to understand the concept of advertising on television, radio, and print media but they begin to get confused when confronted with the different types of advertising online.

The online world is different from any other media in that it is more immediate and produces results right away. When a company places an ad on TV, they are merely getting the word out and increasing brand awareness. They don’t make any immediate sales as a person viewing the ad would have to actually go somewhere where the product is sold and then buy it.

The online world is different in that it is both the viewing medium and the store. If you have an ad on the Net, someone can see the ad and immediately decide to buy the product right then and there. This opens up the opportunity for advertisers to make a lot of money and know exactly where that money is coming from. It lets them get detailed feedback right away as to whether an advertisement is working or not. The offline world of advertising involves a lot of guesswork and delayed numbers as to efectiveness while the online world gives an advertiser immediate and detailed results.

Since detailed tracking is possible online, the world of affiliate marketing has opened up where someone can get compensated for sending customers to a product or service of a company. This is what CashCrate referrals are and their affiliate prgram is one of the best for affiliates. If you doubt that please take a look at a couple of my CashCrate checks as proof of the amount of money that can be made.  

The Cash Crate affiliate program is run in house but many other affiliate programs are run through a second party affiliate network. Market Leverage is one such network that has many different affiliate programs under it and that makes it very easy to have a wide variety of things to promote. They have a check sent to your address every month by FedEx which goes way beyond what other networks do. When you start to reach the level where you want to promote things in other niches besides paid surveys, I recommend Market Leverage as one of the first networks you should sign up with. (it is free to sign up of course as they want your business)

Online lead generation can make you some very good money if you understand how to get targeted visitors to your blog(s) that are interested in the subject at hand. Much of this blog has been written to help you understand what you must do to make that happen. If you want to learn more about how to start earning money with CashCrate, please go to the beginning of this blog and read it from the start.

The concept is that you have a choice when you start a blog and write posts for it: you can try to make money with or without bullshit.

Most of you might know the “without bullshit” part which means you write the best blog posts you can in an effort to entice your reader to sign up for something. You want to sound credible and give a good review of the product or service in the hopes of convincing your reader to click through to sign up. Your blog is the written pretty much as well as you can because you want to sound professional. This blog, for instance, is pretty much “without bullshit” as most of the writing is done a bit deliberately and meant to be read and followed (even though most readers don’t give a shit and click away because all they want are quick CashCrate referrals the easy way because they are lazy).

The other way to make money online with blogs is by writing bullshit. For this you really need to use Adsense, Chitiqa, Yahoo publisher ads or maybe even some affiliate products but probably NOT CashCrate. You will be composing blog content that is not your best writing and quite general in nature. This works well for many niches like home improvement, gardening and many others where you can write very unspecific posts about a topic and never answer the readers question. The longer the posts the better and the more boring they are the better too.

The goal here is to write accurate yet long and boring posts that will bore the hell out of the reader and have them trying to get out as fast as they can. Many will hit the “back” button but some will click on an Adsense ad or an affiliate ad just to get out. Rather than wanting people to stay and read what you have to say, you WANT them to leave…preferably through one of your ads.

Most CashCrate blogs I see are not really either of these two options. They are just a page or two of copied verbage from the CashCrate site. Those will never get referrals which is why there are threads started everyday in the forum whining about “I can’t get any referalls, booo hoo hoooo”. Well if you got off your butt and started writing and putting some EFFORT into your blog and got anchored backlinks, you might get somewhere.

BTW even though I don’t care and there are not many hits to be had for the word “CashCrate‘, this blog is now often on the first page of Google for that term. And where are all the blogs that actually have “CashCrate” in the URL? Several people bragging in the forum about buying URLs with great CashCrate names. Where are you guys? No where to be found! Oh, THAT’S BECAUSE YOU DON’T HAVE ANY OPTIMIZED POSTS AND ANCHORED BACKLINKS! 

As I mentioned earlier, the bullshit strategy is probably NOT a good strategy to get online surveys for money referrals for sites such as CashCrate. For that type of referral you want to convince your reader through your honest writing or through payment proof in the form of check pictures and videos that good money can be made. CashCrate is legitimate and you can make a lot of money with them which is what you will be trying to prove to your reader. You can’t prove anything with bullshit so use that for one of your other niches.

The casual blogger puts up a family blog of photos or their life’s journey and they have no intention of ever making money. Yet other bloggers and potential bloggers have heard about blogging for a living and easy money making by blogging and so they set out to try to do it. Unfortunately for them, they have no clue how it’s done and have all the wrong expectations.

I am not a blogger but I do make money blogging. Does that make sense? I have a lot of blogs (including this one) and on none of them do I ever want to become well known, famous, or have a huge following. Really, I don’t care about anything other than making money. The blogs, and blogging, are the instruments I make money with and nothing more. All I care about is learning how to make money and getting more CashCrate referrals.

I am an Internet marketer and not a blogger. I set up a blog and from the first post I try to strategically figure out what to write about, what keywords to use, how to get links, and how to get traffic. If I do succeed in getting traffic, then and only then does the fun start. Once I get traffic I then can figure out how to monetize it. Of course I have an idea before hand of what I will do but sometimes things change.

Being an Internet marketer instead of a blogger means that I pay special attention to figuring out what affiliate products to sell, where to put the ads, where to put the Adsense ads if I have them, and all things to do with ad placement and making money. Each blog is a big puzzle and when you get traffic to it you need to be able to figure out how to capitalize on that traffic and turn it into money. Internet marketing is a business and blogging is just how I do my business. With each new blog I begin, I am starting a small business online, or at least I am trying to.

Many of the CashCrate newbies set out to make a blog as they hear that is the best way to get referrals. CashCrate tends to get a young audience and many of them are teenagers and people in their 20’s. Blogging for 15 year olds is not something many of them want to do or have any interest in. All they end up doing is copying and pasting a few things from the CashCrate website and putting them on their “blog”. They think that is enough to get paid online surveys referrals but you can’t make money being lazy.

Blogging can be a business if you set out to make it a business and get search engine traffic. You can make a lot of money with the right kind of targeted traffic but you can’t make much money from return visitors which is what most bloggers are hoping for. The standard make money blogger hopes to create a following and become so popular that everyone will buy affiliate products from him. This is a dream that will never happen to 99% of the bloggers out there. Yet they are too naive to ever recognize this and they keep on trying.

Do you want to make money or do you want to be a blogger? That is the question you need to answer before you go to far with your blog. If you are writing blog posts and hoping they get Tweeted, Stumbled, and Digged, then you are a blogger and are not going down the right path to making money. If you want to learn how to make money blogging, then you need to learn about keywords, keyword research, getting links, on and off page SEO. You need to also learn how to sell things to your readers.

The second you land on her blog you know that the blog owner really cares about it (and likes pink). The main reason I chose her blog is that it has the makings of a real flagship blog that she can use down the line to join affiliate networks and make money. It is better than 99% of the other CashCrate “blogs” which people slap up on Blogger.

This blog looks pretty and it looks coordinated and you can tell that someone has spent a lot of time putting it together. Most of all, the pink color helps to give it a personality and that is a good thing. The blog looks alive, it is updated regularly, and through it you get to know a little bit about the person called TriNi.

 What Is The Goal Of The Blog?

The real question though, is what is her goal with the blog. Many people like to blog and just like having a place where they can record their thoughts and maybe have someone read them. They don’t care about making money. Other people blog because they want to make money and that is the only reason they do it. A third group might fall somewhere in between those two. In other words, they like blogging and would probably blog for free but they would like to make some money too.

I am going to assume the one and only goal of this blog is to make money in which case I have a few suggestions. The first is to do away with as much of the “clutter” as possible. If you have a blog that you want to make money with, you need to do away with as many of the distractions as you can. Your sole purpose with the blog is to get targeted traffic to it, have them sign up for an offer, and then leave. That’s it. Come, sign up, leave.

Get Rid Of The Clutter

In my opinion, the PayPal piggy on the right sidebar needs to be taken out because I bet not one person has ever donated a dime. It looks great but it is a waste of space and a distraction that will never make any money. Same thing for the Associated Content widget as that makes no money either and it a way people can leave or get distracted before they sign up.

I also do not like Twitter (I might be in the minority about this) and would take out the “Follow Me On Twitter” and the Twitter updates at the bottom. This is purely my opinion but I just don’t see how Twitter will ever make any money for a blog owner. An argument can be made that it does help legitimize the blog as a “social” blog but then again if you want to make money you are not going to do it with social traffic. I understand the reason for leaving it in but I just wanted to make the point that the more things you have like Twitter that distracts the viewer from signing up for offers, the less money you might make.

I would also try to consolidate the categories in the middle widget that goes way down the page. Holy cow, I have never seen so many categories on a blog and all the bottom ones only have one entry! Again, all those categories serve as a distraction. You want things simple so that they arrive on your blog, sign up for something, and leave.

Too Many Choices Are Bad

One thing you learn in advertising class if you have ever taken one is that you don’t want to give the viewer, listener, or reader too many choices. Many people make the mistake of covering their blogs with banner ads, text link ads, and any other kind of ad they can think of.  The mentality is “well, I just want to give my readers lots of choices and lots of variety of choices” and “maybe they will sign up for everything”.

In actuality, too many choices is a bad thing. When presented with a lot of choices, most people usually just move on because it is hard to make decisions. Making a choice between A, B, C, D and maybe more is hard because it requires you to evaluate things and that is more than most people want to do. Also, almost no one is ever going to sign up for several or more offers so putting lots of offers up hoping that people will sign up for them all is a dream.

I rarely have more than 2 or 3 choices on any one of my blogs that I hope to make money with. Again, you want someone to land on your blog, concentrate on the one or two things you have to offer, and then either sign up and leave or just leave. If you present only one or two options for them and they don’t like either one, they will leave and there is nothing you can do about it. But you want to make it easy for them by saying “this is what I am offering you: A or B and hopefully you will try one of them”.

All this being said, TriNi’s Make Money Online Fast  has 7 GPT sites that she hopes you sign up to but THAT IS NOT ALL BAD. In this case she is displaying the sites she belongs to and that is what her blog is about so it might be OK. I think the offers kind of run together too much and are a bit hard to tell what is what but that is just a layout issue. Again, make things as simple and clear as possible. I would maybe have less offers but that is a personal choice. I would for sure have the best performing offer on top and the second best one below it etc (which she probably does).

This Can Be Her Money Making Flagship Blog

One of the really good things about this blog is that she can write about anything money related and it will fit in. If she wants to change focus to some other way of making money or write posts about something else related to money it will look pretty natural. The blog looks great, as I mentioned before, and she can proudly point people to it and say “that is my blog” and get accepted into affiliate networks if she wants to. It is also something that she can continue to grow over time and hopefully be able to make into a money making machine.

In order to make it into that money maker though, TriNi will have to continue to get links, links, and more links. She needs to write articles and submit them to EzineArticles as well as a few other article directories. She needs to always leave comments on other blogs with keyword anchor text and not her name when possible (some bloggers will delete your comment if it is not your name).

Most importantly if I were she, I would try to do link exchanges with other bloggers. The problem here is that her blog is such a good blog that she doesn’t want to be linking out to many of the crappy CashCrate blogs that she might come across. 3 way link exchanges are best anyway and if I were TriNi, I would develop one of her other make money blogs  a little more, and then she can offer a link from one of her other blogs in exchange for a link to this blog.  If she has multiple blogs that are all decent, then she will be able to facilitate 3 way link exchanges more often.

It is too bad more CashCrate bloggers don’t have well thought out blogs they take pride in like TriNi does. If she works hard, she will be able to make it into a solid money maker and all her efforts will be rewarded. But in order for that to happen she needs a lot more anchored backlinks.

Ok so I’m not the type to bother people, but I need help!

How the hell do you do it?

I’ve been constantly reading up on this site, and now when I search google for certain terms, you’re already on the first page! If I remember well, I’m one of the first people you gave that link. I just had a few postings to read “backwards”.. so it’s pretty recent compared to mine I think.

I’ve been doing this “seo” thing for 7 months or so now and I’m still no where close! I manage to get just about 10 hits a day or so from google or yahoo but nothing big.

I’ve been doing everything that I’ve read up on… anchored backlinks, etc, etc,

Just please tell me where I’m going wrong, or what I’m “missing”. I’d really like to see my site raise in the rankings on Google.

And just to clarify, I’m not the type that sit around and wait for people to do stuff for me. I’m a pretty hard worker, but I just don’t understand where I’m going wrong.

Thanks for any kind of reply. I know you must be super busy.

First lets talk about this blog that has not been as productive as I had hoped. It’s that way with this sort of thing and you just have to accept it. This blog is about 2 months old and it only gets between 10 and 20 hits a day so it is not a big a success as the question leads you to believe. Unfortunately, many of those hits are not necessarily what I want either.

Paid online surveys for money .com now ranks on the first page of Google for things such as “CashCrate referrals” and a few other terms like that specifically about how to get referrals for CashCrate. I have been getting backlinks for that term so that has been a success but I had hoped to be higher up as that is not a very competitive keyword phrase.

This blog is also on the first page of Google for “today.com scam” (which does me no good) and for “comment blog demon review” which could make me a sale of that software someday maybe. All in all, not too impressive actually. For those two keyword phrases, there is little to no competition so that is why this blog ranks on the first page.

My blog doesn’t rank anywhere for the terms I have really targeted which are “surveys for money” and “paid online surveys“. Those are the two terms I want to rank for in the long run and I am not even in the top 100 for either of those. That is very disappointing and I had hoped to at least show up in the top 100 by now.

Blogging and getting traffic and making money is frustrating. Period. It is also something that takes time and lots of it. Again, that is why 99% give up and quit. Any blog I start I assume I WILL NOT make any money with for at least 6 months. 6 months!!! That is too long for most people right there.

THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT THINGS

The two most important things you can do is pick keyword phrases that have low competition that you will be able to rank for and then get anchored backlinks for those terms. Maybe my choices of “surveys for money” and “paid online surveys” have too much competition and I will have to give up and switch gears. That could happen but I will give it at least another 4 months before I make that kind of decision.

You can always find keywords that have little to no competition (like “Today.com scam”) and then you will get some readers but they won’t be TARGETED and won’t sign up for CashCrate. You need to spend time with the two free keyword tools and pick some keywords that you can target that have medium to low competition.

After you pick some keywords you want to target, you have to go get backlinks. Then you have to get more backlinks. And then when you have gotten more you need to still go out and get more. If done correctly, you will spend 80% of your time getting backlinks. You get CashCrate referrals and make money by getting your site on the first page of Google. You get on the first page of Google by getting anchored backlinks. Therefore, the act of getting backlinks is what ultimately makes you money.

How many backlinks do you need? I hear that question asked all the time. You need more backlinks than your competitors have and better ones. The sites with the most anchored backlinks coming from the highest quality websites are the ones who make it to the top of Google. So, if you are in a niche that has very little competition, you might need just a handful of anchored backlinks. But if you are competing for a keyword phrase that has a ton of competition, you may need THOUSANDS of backlinks and you might have to keep getting them to stay ahead.

That is how the game is played. He (or she) who has the most anchored backlinks wins. You also want to vary your backlinks so they are not all for the exact same terms. For instance, your links may be “make money with surveys”, “money with surveys”, “how to make money with surveys”, and so on. You want your anchored backlinks to have some variety so that it looks more natural to Google.

USING HUBPAGES FOR LINKS

On a side note, when you make some  HubPages to link back to your sites, you have to have an author score of 75 or over to have them be “do-follow” backlinks. I just started doing HubPages myself and that is what I have learned. I am not sure how you get and keep your author score above 75 but that is a drawback of using them. Also you are only alowed to link out to the same site twice in any Hub as I understand it. I see tons of HubPages authors with authors scores in the 90’s so it may not be too hard to keep it above 75.

MAKE FRIENDS AND TRADE LINKS!

How do you get more backlinks? That is always the million dollar question. You can buy links which I will not discuss on this blog and there are other services that cost money. In the end, one of the best ways to get links is to MAKE FRIENDS WITH OTHER BLOGGERS AND TRADE LINKS WITH THEM! The more blogs you have, the easier it is to arrage 3 way links and the more friends you have the easier it is to exchange links.

I have thought of and perhaps will start a page here on this blog in the future where you can list your name and contact info if you are willing to exchange links. If everyone who is in the CashCrate community got together and understood what they were doing and exchanged links, it would help everyone. Unfortunately right now, there are many people that have very poor 1 page blogs which are pretty much spam blogs. So that is a bit of a problem as I would never want to link to a spam blog.

That’s all for now.

Dan asks:

1. I know there are many sites with which I can earn money, but for now I would like to start with CashCrate. I know you believe that one should continue adding content to their blog instead of just having a few pages of tips and instructions for CashCrate. I can see how this would give the blog more authority. However, if I want to get CashCrate referrals, I still need these pages. If I make them the first few posts on my blog, they will gradually get pushed down as I add new content.

I was thinking of doing a blog detailing some of the other sites on which I have been able to earn money/prizes. How would one do this effectively while still keeping the focus on CashCrate referrals. I want to offer new content without burying my CashCrate links. Can I do this on a blog related to many different GPT sites, or would a traditional webpage type site work better?

Dan, figuring out the best strategy is one of the fun things for me about making money from online surveys for money  referrals and money online in general. There is no right answer to your question. As you can see, I have the same post at the top of my blog all the time. That is the post with the big check. That is my calling card for this blog and I feel it gives me some immediate credibility when a visitor stops by. I had the same exact problem that you are asking about.

So, I had the dilemma of what to do to make sure most or all traffic sees that check. I also have a page up top with the check and a video but I assume hardly anyone clicks that. I settled on keeping that post on top and having all new posts appear underneath it. I also tried to think of a way to put the “CashCrate check proof” picture on the right sidebar but decided against that.

You will have to figure out what works for you and your blog. You can try something like I did or come up with some other alternative. I am sure there are other inventive ways to do the same thing and make sure that your readers have access all the time to what you want them to read.

You are right that the more posts you have and the more words you have on your blog give Google more words to choose from and might make your blog appear in the SERPS for many different terms. You can make money with a one page blog or even one post but your odds are better that you will get into the SERPS by writing a lot.

2. You mention using three way linking as a means of getting one way anchored backlinks. So, I would create my flagship blog which another site would link to, and then I would give them a link on one of my secondary sites correct? If I do this, I will obviously want to focus most of my attention and new content posts on the main blog. Do I just use some of the content from my flagship site for the smaller ones? If not, do you have any suggestions for making the smaller sites different since I only have enough experience to write about so many money making sites?

The flagship blog should be your main money blog that you spend a good part of your time on. It should be your best work just in case you ever need it to show someone. You might even be able some day to charge for advertising. I am just saying that everyone should, in my opinion, have one blog that stands above the rest in terms of quality. 

You might be able to make other blogs that are related to your flagship blog but not on exactly the same subject. If your thing is making money, are there other topics that can relate to money somehow? Stocks relate to money. So do bonds, CD’s, loans, jobs, freelance work, and anything else you can think of that has to do with money. They can all be tied in to the same overall subject of money and might be useful to give and get 3 way links.

The more blogs you have, the more options you have. This is hard work I know but those that are successful making money with survey referrals, CashCrate, and other things work hard. Most CashCraters slap up a blog and 5 minutes later are complaining they have no traffic. LOL LOL. They think it all magically happens and eventually they give up. They conclude that the magic formula has been withheld from them or that it is all a scam. Making money online is not a scam, it’s just hard work!

I Almost Quit Which Would Have Been A Big Mistake

The first 8 months I was clueless and I wrote as much and as often as I could hoping people would love what I wrote and flock to my blog. A few of my posts got Stumbled and I was getting somewhere between 50 and 100 uniques a day. The thing was though, I wasn’t making any money. What is the purpose of spending so much time online if you are not going to be compensated? I was never here for the fame, only the money and I wasn’t making any.

Luckily, just as I was going to quit I found a source that revealed what you need to do to make money online which is what this blog is all about. You need to get targeted traffic to your blog from the search engines and NOT social traffic.

Why You Need A Flagship Blog

Anyway, that blog that I almost gave up is now one of my flagship blogs. This one could be as well someday as you can see how much writing and effort has gone into it so far. So, what exactly is a flagship blog and why do you need one?

A flagship blog is a blog you can point people to that almost acts as an online resume. It establishes your online presence and it is a blog that you will periodically update as long as you are making money online. You shouldn’t mind updating it however, as you should be able to make money with it. For me at least, it is much easier to work and spend time on something that is making me money.

Affiliate Networks Need To See Proof

You especially need a flagship blog so that you can join the affiliate networks. Making CashCrate referrals is only one of the hundreds of programs that you can join as an affiliate and make money with. CashCrate has a great referral program but you can only make so much with it. Once you become successful at making CashCrate referrals, you will want to branch out and make money with other ones as well. Trust me, you will.

Some of the affiliate networks you will want to join are MarketLeverage, Commission Junction, Neverblue CPA Network, ROI Rocket, the Ebay affiliate program, Adsense, and there are others. You need to join these networks so that you will have a big selection of products in many different industries to try to get leads and sales for. You are going to want to promote things other than CashCrate and these networks are where you will find many of your companies and products to sell.

Unfortunately, these affiliate networks will not let just anyone sign up. They want to see who you are, what type of Internet marketing you do, and determine whether they want to let you in. With CashCrate you were in automatically but with these networks you have to have something to show.  A couple of these companies (MarketLeverag and Neverblue) will even want to speak to you on the phone. Sort of a mini job interview / Q & A answering session.

Stop Making Spam Blogs

This is where your flagship blog comes in. I was lucky that by the time I applied to these networks I had my flagship blog to point them to. Once they took a look at that, they could see I had been around for almost a year, the blog was of medium to high quality and I was accepted right away. Take note, my blog wasn’t a spam blog with one or two pages promoting CashCrate. You might want to take this into consideration when you start a blog and try to make it as high a quality blog as possible.

Most of the blogs I see promoting CashCrate are nothing more than a page or two of spam. They are low quality and they all say the same thing:

1) Do you want to get paid for surveys?
2) Have you ever heard of CashCrate?
3) You can make great money with CashCrate
4) Here is a check payment proof picture
5) Make sure you use my link
6) Here is a tip or two
7) Don’t forget to use my link!

This kind of blog is not really a blog but just a page of spam. It takes little effort to do and if someone does find it they will probably click out right away. It is most certainly NOT a flagship blog and will not get you into any of the affiliate networks.

You Have To Work Hard To Make Referrals And Money Online

To make CashCrate referrals and to make money online you have to put in effort. Just like with anything else in life, you have to work hard to succeed. If you put out crap you will get crap in return. Start a blog today that you can be proud of. It won’t be great right from the start as you will have to learn how to write better and learn what works and what doesn’t. Keep at it and build your online resume. This business of making CashCrate referrals and money online is a long term endeavor and you need to start now so that you can be successful at making money in the future.

1) The biggest reason is that they are beginners and just don’t know how to get referrals. They don’t know much about  blogging, Internet marketing, SEO, or making money online. This is not to disparage them, it is just a fact. I know because I was totally clueless when I started.

2) The second reason is that they really don’t know anything about how to get targeted traffic to their blogs. Most don’t know how to get any kind of traffic to their blogs much less traffic that converts. Remember, there are MILLIONS of blogs out there and theirs is just another one of them. I know they think that their blog is THE BEST blog but in reality it is just one of millions.

Anyway, most CashCrate blogs are a rehash of the same old stuff. If you have a blog about CashCrate or any of the surveys for money sites, take a good look at it. Then take a look at your friend’s blogs. I’ll bet they have the same stuff on their blogs as you do on yours. C’mon, admit it. You know it’s true. There are thousands of CashCrate related blogs out there with basically the same stuff rehashed and rehashed again: the same tips, the same excitement over receiving a check, the same “sign up under me”. Why would anyone read it even if they could find it?

3) The third mistake is that most people spend all their time in forums leaving replies to threads hoping that someone will click the link in their signature. They jump from forum to forum all day leaving their posts with their links. I know, some people have had some success with this method but that is not a long term solution. Is that what they want to do the rest of their life: spending hours a day reading and leaving forum posts hoping people will click their links? How long can they keep that up before they get bored out of their mind and quit?

4) The fourth mistake that 99% of the CashCrate bloggers make is that their whole blog is only about CashCrate! HEY, what’s wrong with that you ask? Again, everyone is only talking about CashCrate and how great it is and “sign up after me”. If they are super lucky, they are hoping to get to the first page of Google for “CashCrate” and pretty much nothing else. Everyone has blinders on and can’t see past the word CashCrate.

When a new CashCrate blogger sets out to get referrals and starts their first blog, what do 99% of them have in the title or URL? They all name it CashCrate this, CashCrate that, Cash this, Cash that, I love CashCrate, CashCrate is cool, or CashCrate is the bomb. Do you understand that they are all targeting the same very, very small group of people who happen to be looking for CashCrate of which many might already have signed up?

The thing they need to learn is that there is a whole HUGE Internet world out there and creativity will in the end get the most referrals. The people who win the referral contests and get tons of referrals every day are getting their signups from blogs about subjects other than CashCrate. If you want to get paid for surveys through referrals, you need to use your imagination.

Do you understand that? You can probably make more CashCrate referrals by starting a blog about how hard it is to be unemployed than you can by starting a blog about CashCrate. If you want to make lots of CashCrate referrals, start a blog about anything OTHER THAN CashCrate! All it needs to do is to target a group of people who need money.

Lets explore some of the groups who might need money. This would include people who are:

unemployed
laid off
feaful of getting laid off
between jobs
getting married and need money
saving for a car
saving for anything
want money to buy video games
college kids
high school kids
in debt and need money
in need of money for dates
interested in online poker and need money
work from home Moms
work from home Dads
looking for a side income
looking for an online income

The bigger your imagination, the bigger this list and the possibilities will become. Making a blog about any one of these subjects will give you the opportunity to make CashCrate referrals if you get your target audience to come to your blog. People searching for any one of those terms or subjects has most likely never heard of CashCrate and they need money! That is exactly what you want.

So, the next blog you set up, make it about something other than CashCrate. Once you have your blog established (which will take time and effort), you will then have the perfect place to get new CashCrate referrals.

If I were starting again without anything, Blogger would be my choice of blogging platform. They are free and they allow you to put Adsense on your sites as well as affiliate links and banners. You might hear some other bloggers and Internet marketers say bad things about Blogger but I would ignore them. They will say it is ugly, they will say it for beginners, and they will say you should buy a domain. Ignore all that and start with your free Blogger blog. I myself have some Blogger blogs that make money and I know a lot more people who do as well.

Weebly is a second choice that is perfectly acceptable but they are different to learn. To me, Weebly is more confusing and I think Blogger might be quicker and easier to master. For both Blogger and Weebly you can make as many blogs as you like.

Blogger

Weebly

Once you have your main blog, you need to get links to that blog. I will cover this more in my next post but listed below are some more resources to get links. One of the ways you will need to get links is to build more blogs as well as Squidoo pages, HubPages, and then write articles.

Again, this is NOT EASY! All the people you see who brag in the CashCrate forums about how much they are making and how many referrals they have, own multiple blogs. Some of them have 10 or more blogs plus countless Squidoo lenses and so on. They won’t tell you much about what they do or how many blogs they have and they don’t want you to know. But I know that the successful ones have many different websites all working together or targeting different things.  

If you are going to make money online, you need to own as many resources as you can. You need to be able to give yourself some links and some link juice from your own sites. You need to be able to put feelers out there (think Squidoo) that will help bring people in to your main site. You also need to use these other sites for those valuable anchored back links.

Squidoo

HubPages

Another way you get anchored links is to write articles and submit them to article directories. These articles have a bio box where you will put a couple of anchored links back to your sites. These one way links from your articles will help your site get recognized for the keyword terms you want and they may bring a visitor or two. Keep in mind though that you will be writing these article for the LINKS and not for the few people who they will bring in. The two free article directories below are the best ones and EzineArticles is the absolute best. There are hundreds of article directories out there but EzineArticles is the one you want to make sure you never forget.

EzineArticles

GoArticles

Again, those guys (and gals) you see on the forums who are CashCrate Elites and talk about their referrals all have MANY BLOGS or websites. This is like a business and you need as many assets as you can get. Actually it is a business to some people as they make affiliate sales and survey referrals for a living.

REMEMBER, once you learn how to get paid for surveys and make Cash Crate referrals, you can make money the same way referring people to hundreds of different things. There are absolutely hundreds (probably thousands) of companies that have some sort of referral program and they are all willing to give you a small cut for bringing them online business. The more you learn, the more you test, the more you experiment, and the more blogs and online assets you own, the more money you can make!