I have been writing a lot recently about affiliate, search engine optimisation, blogging, marketing, backlinking, and other things which relate to making money online. One thing that I would like to avoid completely is becoming one of those people that makes a living telling people how to make a living, I am certainly not making an online income which I can call a 'livable wage'. If I was to hazard a guess I would say that 98% of those that try and tell you how to make a living online either a) were not making a living online before they were writing about money, or b) have never made a living online. I read an article recently which claimed that almost all profitable independent websites made their cash by telling people how to make cash themselves, an impossible and unsustainable circle.

Instead, I will tell you how not to make money online - that is certainly an area from which I can draw upon my existing knowledge! I recently read a theory that you need 10000 page views per day to make a living online, well I have 6000 page views per day and make less than 10% of what I would call a 'livable wage'. That logic is of course completely flawed, as most of my page views are on pages which attract reads on the basis of keywords which make me very little (if any) advertising revenue....... "only write to valuable keywords then",some will shout...... that's all well and good but I have yet to truly find a high paying keyword which doesn't come with some of the best search engine optimizers competing for them! The truth is that I do write to well paying keywords, the result is almost zero traffic, and an occasionally worthwhile bit of revenue. It is my low paying keywords which earn me the bulk of my crust online, in fact about 75% of my income comes from traffic generated by low paying and low competition keywords. Sometimes my days earnings are made up entirely of dozens of clicks between 5c - 20c in value.