For me,  it cost tens of thousands of dollars, time missed with my family, about 20lbs of added gelatinous mass and swarms of stress. No joke, learning how to make a reasonable income online especially if your starting today is difficult but no impossible. I would venture to say that if your willing to work as hard as you do at your job, you’d have what it takes to make very good money online…eventually.

Learning how to make money online takes time just like any other thing in life. If you want to lose 20lbs, there is no miracle pill or diet, it’s gonna take time and consistent hard work. I know this first hand because that’s exactly what I’m doing now that I’ve learned how to earn an income. Everything worth having or achieving in life has a cost.

Now to answer the question: No! You don’t have to buy everything you get pitched on but I do credit a part of my success on the courses and ebooks I’ve purchased in the past. The first program I ever purchased was one of those “get rich quick” type of programs and while most would write it off as a scam before ever purchasing it, that program is what ultimately ignited my passion for learning how to pull money out of this giant we call the internet.

There will never be that one “end-all-be-all” program that takes you from complete beginner to making 5 figures a month. It’s the little bits and pieces from each of them that will help you start making money online. For me, it took about 8 months before I started making any money at all and then once the momentum kicks in, game over! Was it all worth it? Absolutely!

Let me ask you this…If I told you that in 2 years from today you’ll have a 6 or even 7 figure yearly income from home and all you had to do was spend 8 months learning and $10,000, would you do it? Compared to the cost of a 4-year education and an average salary of $40,000/year for a college graduate, I would have spent $100,000 and 4 years to learn how to make money online.

If you’ve watched Mike’s promo video on the homepage he emphasizes that it perfectly OK and even GREAT that you don’t know anything about the CPA networks and he makes it sound like it’s so agonizingly difficult to get accepted into the CPA networks. He wants you to believe that you can’t make it in the CPA world unless you pay him $300 to start and up to $99 a month to promote the offers in “his network”. Should we have to pay to make money on CPA offers when we can easily get accepted into at least one of dozens of CPA networks? Hell no, what a joke! Also, you should know that Mike’s “CPA network” isn’t even a real affiliate network. All they are doing is letting you send traffic to the offers with their affiliate link using a subid and then paying you half of what they make. Note that you will only be paid every 30 days when they are likely getting weekly wires direct into their checking account. If you build a relationship with your account manager at an affiliate network and you start doing some sales they will gladly pay you weekly with direct deposits right into your account.

Let’s talk about the other poor elements of this system that you might not be able to resist. The websites! When I watched the promo video at Affiliate Jump I have to admit I liked the fact that I could generate landing pages on the fly but that was until I saw what the websites looked like. Terrible! I promote CPA offers with custom built sites and I can tell you first hand that these sites will perform poorly on the search engines and I don’t imagine very many people are going to trust a page like this. The site basically has 3 banners on it with less than 100 words of content and there aren’t any other pages on the site to increase quality score. Aside from the websites this is basically an under paying affiliate network that costs you money to use.You are better off saving your money, joining a free affiliate network and outsource someone to build you a beautiful landing page to promote your offers.

Just my 2 cents gang, I would be glad to answer any questions you have about CPA marketing and I will get some posts up for beginners that will show you how to painlessly get accepted into the CPA networks and how to start promoting offers. You don’t need to pay Mike Filsaime and Joe Holland hundreds of dollars each month to get paid half the money you can make at a regular, free to join CPA network!

I have some good news that I think you will be super excited about, especially if your in a cash crunch. There are actually a couple ways to generate spendable cash on demand and Paypal is key for this to work. If you don’t already have a business or verified Paypal account you will need one. It’s very easy to get one, just sign up for Paypal and follow the instructions for setting up a verified account. This may take a couple days to do especially if you sign-up for an account later in the week or on a weekend but once it’s setup you are set for life. Once you get your account verified you can apply for a Paypal debit card. This card is just like a credit card and any money you bring into your Paypal account becomes available instantly for purchases or withdrawal.  With me so far?

Ok, now the fun part! Getting money flowing into you’re Paypal account. Your probably thinking you need a product to sell or something but that’s not the case at all. There is a little know network of Paypal based affiliate programs where you can go sell other people’s products and get paid for your sales in real-time directly to your Paypal account. For a list of over 200 instant paypal affiliate commission products go to http://www.instantpaypalmoney.com.

Now another way for you to generate serious amounts of Paypal cash in a day is to sell WSO’s or Warrior Special Offers in the Warrior Forum. This forum has thousands of users online at any given time and if you create something cool to sell them for a discount then you will get hundreds of sales in a day. Don’t be stingy in this forum or they will eat you alive. Create a unique and valuable product and they will buy from you forever.

The thing that really pisses me off is if you sign-up for the advanced ready made campaigns they claim they are running you will lose a ton of money. They claim they are running all of these campaigns and profiting so I put it to the test and lost over $1,400 with the exact same keywords, ads and products they say they are promoting. One campaign I tested of “there’s” is an offer on the Copeac network called Foreclosure Coin. It pays $28 a lead and it shows people how to profit with foreclosures. I setup my MSN Adcenter account exactly like theirs and sent over 200 clicks and spent over $250. Guess how many sales I made….ZERO. Ok fair enough, so I moved on to one of their Myspace advertising campaigns promoting a Cell submit offer from Neverblue. Set it up the exact same way and spent over $50 in an hour with over 150 clicks and I bet you can guess how many sales I got again….Yep! ZERO! It’s funny to cause the clueless guy putting the video tutorials together was like “yeah, this is a super profitable campaign and it pays out 9 bucks and you only have to pay .32 a click so there is HUGE profit margins here”. I also tried another campaign of theirs for a credit report offer and I did make one sale which paid out like 26 bucks but I spent $300 to get it! Ridiculous!

Bottom line guys is this course is not worth the money you spend on it by any means and they rape you with upsells and downsells just to get in the members area. It literally took me 40 minutes from the time I purchased their first product to buy all the rest of their crap and to finally get into the members area. First they hit you with a $77 one-time fee and then they hit you with a $57 monthly fee and then a $197 fee and then another $50 or so fee so in all you can spend about $400 on this course. Save your money and start testing CPA offers on your own and you will probably learn more doing that then you will with this course. I’ve learned that unless someone is going to truly give you the exact keywords, campaigns and traffic sources they are using to make money you will waste money and time testing anyways. The guys at Zero Friction Marketing SAY they are giving you that but they aren’t. In one short sentences I will show you how to acheive the same results you will get with this course:  Ready? Ok, go pick ten random CPA offers and send related traffic to it and see if it converts. LOL

Google needs a block knocked off their shoulder and I believe this is just the way to make that happen. With Google treating affiliate marketers like garbage lately, affiliates will now take a decent size of their budget over to Yahoo/MSN and the reality is, MSN and Yahoo are converting a lot better than Google these days.

It’s funny…cause I really hope this alliance hurts Google so that all the advertisers spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on Adwords that got banned recently can come back on Google and tell them “You should consider other business ventures”! HAHA You better get your shit together Google cause you ain’t gonna be the bully on the block for long and you might think about treating your customers better than you treat toilet paper in the bathroom.

Let it be understood that this is an ideal long term strategy and if you take consistent action to create these sites regularly, you will always have assets on the auction block ready to be cashed out. Now I know you probably like the fast instant money and you don’t want to wait six months for a site to reach it’s potential but unfortunately that’s just the way it is. You have to have the long term in mind here or you wont be successful with this model. Believe me when I say that it’s well worth the wait and if you keep the sites for over a year, you can sell them and only pay the long-term capital gains tax of 15% should you decide to sell. Of course you can always sit on the sites and let them earn money for you without lifting a finger but you better make sure you are constantly promoting your sites and adding new content if you want to keep the traffic steady.

Now let’s get down to the nuts and bolts of what you will need to start rolling out highly optimized websites that search engines will love. The first step is to find a fairly simple theme that you can get ranked for quickly. We don’t want to be targeting terms like “work at home” because it will take you years to rank that site and a lot of work. Think long tail terms like “how to get rid of ants” or “how to build a treehouse”. You’re going to have to do your keyword research and the tool I use exclusively to research projects like this is called Keyword Country. What you’re looking for is some long tail search phrases that get traffic but the competition isn’t real stiff. Believe me when I say there are thousands of keywords like this which means you could easily have thousands of sites. This is simply a numbers game and the more sites you have the better. Imagine having 500 sites that each get 20 visitors a day. That’s 10,ooo visitors a day and lets just say that you are selling affiliate products and the average sale pays you $20, and your converting traffic into sales at 1%. That’s $2,000 a day in PROFIT for you while doing nothing and spending nothing on advertising. Of course it’s going to take you some time to create that many sites but just think where you could be in a year if you had someone doing all the work for you. Would it be worth it to make $60,000 a month if you had to work hard for a year or if you had to invest a little money up front?

Once you have decided on some good niches and keywords for your websites it’s time to decide how you are going to design your site. Even though I know how to create my own websites from scratch I use simple XHTML compliant templates to build my SEO sites. Google loves them and they are very clean and fast for the end user. Just do a search on Google for free XHTML compliant website templates and you will have plenty to choose from.

Now let’s say that your theme is “how to get rid of ants”. Luckily, I have already built a site on this very subject just to give you an example of how the site should be built. Go to how to get rid of ants and take note of the very simple design. This site literally took me two hours to create! The cool thing is, it’s now ranked in Google for a few terms and an article I wrote and submitted to Ezine articles is bringing in 15+ visitors a day.

Some key elements to take notice of with this site is it’s internal linking structure, it’s super clean XHTML compliant code, the adsense placement and don’t forget the sitemap. Also, notice how I use no follow tags going to my privacy policy and contact page. Privacy policies and contact pages usually contain very little content or duplicate content so linking to them with no follows is a good idea.

Once you have your site complete be sure to generate your sitemap at xml-sitemaps.com and submit it to Google’s webmaster tools, digg it at digg.com and then submit one unique article to ezinearticles.com.  Watch what happens over the next week or so and I think you will be quite pleased with the results .

I remember when I got my first website online. It was a crappy one page clickbank review website I got when I signed up for a money making program. I was super pumped about having my own website and was even more excited thinking about making that first sale. Well, like most newbies I just sat there and waited for that magical influx of traffic to my website but sadly it didn’t come. Hell, I didn’t know any better and I just figured that my site would start bringing in visitors from all over the internet. Boy was I wrong!

Like most newbies I got duped into paying for traffic from those “Get 100,000 visitors overnight” programs and then I joined those paid to surf programs and that didn’t work and finally I almost gave up!

The funny thing about that little story is that 90% of the newbies coming online to make money with their websites fall into this same trap. They get a website, they buy the junk robot generated traffic and join the paid to surf programs and still they make no sales and then they ask “why isn’t it working?”. First of all, if you are newbie and you are using these types of programs stop wasting your time because they WILL NOT bring you any money. I don’t know what someone told you but it’s garbage. Think about it for a minute…

If you have 10,000 people just like you, meaning they are a newbie that doesn’t know what they are doing and they are all a member at the same paid to surf program and they all want to make a sale on their website, why would any one of you buy someone elses product there? It’s like advertising to your competitor! I don’t mean to be harsh but someone needs to tell you the truth. If you are paying a paid to surf website for traffic then you are getting screwed because you will never make a sale there.

Now what about the “Get 100,000 hits overnight” programs?

These programs are even worse! These are those sites that advertise different traffic packages ranging from 25,000 visitors to 1,000,000 visitors for a set price. Did you know that these visitors are generated from a software program and not real people? Yep that’s right, you are getting screwed and again you will never make a sale with this traffic.

Ok, now that you know that you will never make a sale from these services it’s time to wise up and devise a marketing plan that really works. The first thing you need to figure out is who your audience is. If you don’t who you’re marketing to then how will you know where your market is and how to reach them? Different products and affiliate offers are marketed in different ways. Some offers are better marketed on Yahoo as opposed to Google and vice versa. Sometimes you want to use pay per click advertising and other times banner advertising. Maybe you will need a landing page or pre-sale page and maybe you are better off sending your visitors straight to the sales page of an offer.

The key to making sales online is targeting the buying and researching audience of your market. You don’t want to waste your time with people who are just out to kick a few tires. For example, if you are promoting a money making program and its called Nick’s Money Making Program you want to find the people typing keywords into the search engine like the following:

• nicks money making program review
• nicks money making program scam
• buy nicks money making program

These are called ‘buyer’ keywords as in these people are ready to buy but need a little push from you. There are thousands of products being sold online and there are millions of people ready to buy something at any given time. You just need to get yourself in front of them and reassure them it’s ok to make the purchase. So how do you get these people to your website?

Here is where you need to decide if you are going to pay for laser targeted visitors or if you are going to take the free approach. If you want to pay for high quality visitors targeted to what you are selling you need to use Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing or Microsft Adcenter. If you want to use free methods of promoting your website you will need to write articles, create blogs and join forums.

The lesson to be learned here is there is no effortless way to get good quality visitors to your site without spending money on PPC advertising or putting in the elbow grease with free advertising strategies. Paid to surf farms DO NOT work and neither do the “buy 100,000 visitors” programs.  Stay tuned for my next post on free website promotion techniques.

Now don’t get me wrong. Back in the day I remember a local college sending me a survey and I got paid $100 to take it and send it back. However, it’s not like I could find 100 of these surveys to take a week and they actually found me somehow. So, what is the online paid survey crap all about? Basically they are databases filled with affiliate offers to companies that give away prizes and even sometimes a little bit of cash. Hardly worth paying any money to join such a program because you will work at least 100 hours a week to make any money at all and if you get lucky you might get entered into a drawing to win money.

The only one getting paid off these survey programs is the people who operate them. They make money on your signup fees, they make money on the survey database because they are just affiliate offers and then they have you on their mailing list to send you even more crap later on. If you’re still hard pressed to give it a go, signup for the free survey sites out there like Survey Club or Nielson Net Panel. They are free to join and you stand a better chance at making money with surveys with these companies without paying a dime.

If you’ve been screwed by on of these companies I suggest you contact your state attorney generals office or file a complaint with the BBB. If you haven’t signed up for one of these programs now you know to keep your credit card in your wallet. Basically all these programs are is how to be an affiliate marketer by using Google Adwords or how to make money on Adsense. All these guys are doing is leeching off of Googles massive credibility to make a buck and big bucks they have made. In the foreseeable future I predict that Google will begin to show it’s ugly side with a myriad of lawsuits against these crooks and they should.

For those of you affiliates out there promoting these programs or entertaining the thought of promoting these programs you better think twice because if you fire up even one campaign in your Adwords account promoting a make money on Google offer you will get banned for life. Even if your landing page has a link going out to this type of offer you are toast. I know of a dozen guys at least that have been banned in the last couple weeks and they don’t give a damn about how much money you spend with them. I know guys that spend 100k or more each month with Adwords and they banned them without warning.

The bottom line with this whole make money on google stuff is don’t buy it and don’t promote it. You’re asking for some major trouble if you do.

I’ll be honest, writing articles is what launched my internet career via the more risky and profitable way and I’m sure you’ve heard of plenty of other people who have hit a few goldmines writing articles. The risky and profitable way of writing articles involves writing them to get ranked in the search engines on certain keywords and of course the article would contain an affiliate link or a link to one of your websites where you would then make sales. Now the reason I say this is risky is because you spend a lot of time writing articles and out of 10 articles only 2 of them might even see the light of day on page one of Google. Not to say that this method isn’t effective or that it doesn’t work but there is a lot of front end work to be done in order to start seeing results. I have heard of several people hitting the jackpot with articles and making tens of thousands of dollars from just one article so if you have the time and the patience to give it an honest attempt, go for it. If you want a good starter course for learning how to make money with articles you should check out the Bum Marketing method by Travis Sago.

The other “safe” method is to become a freelance writer for webmasters who need content for their websites. A decent writer can easily fetch $10 per article and get swamped with enough work to keep them busy full-time. Obviously you would have to enjoy writing to take on a full-time writing position but I can tell you from first hand experience that the demand is certainly there. To get started you should sign up for a provider account at Elance.com and start bidding on writing projects.

Let’s make some money!

Kris