So to summarize:

You need to invest in your business. You will have to put in money, time, knowledge, or whatever else of value you can come up with, and eventually, a combination of all these things.

Also:

If you want other people to invest in your business, you’ll need to set up a value exchange. The results you get will hinge upon the level of value you give for the level of value you get.

So who is John Galt?

I can’t answer that for you. You’d have to read Atlas Shrugged for yourself, and decide on your own. That link will give you the ability to find the book at the best price that the market bears.

If you are looking to make a livable income from your endeavors online, or offline, that book can teach you a lot about money, and how to release yourself from the grip of a value-less exchange.

If you haven’t guessed, the discussion we’re having is continuing along the lines of today’s theme, money, with the assistance of a book reccommendation that ties much of the threads of our discourse together.

If you truly want to understand the nature of money, and how to put some in your pocket honestly, you’ll want to pick up that book and read it. It’s over 1000 pages long, and it’s one of the cornerstones of understanding the way currency can work for you.

You’ll notice that I tend to use the word “currency” instead of the word “money” in many of the references I make regarding getting free traffic and the like. This is because money is only one of the many types of currencies in the value-exhange scenario.

For example, I can teach you how to bring traffic to your site at no monetary cost, but you’ll still pay for it in time. Time is one of the more scarcer currencies, and is sometimes more valuable than currency. This is because, in our dealings with linear time as humans, once time is spent, it cannot be recreated in the literal sense.

When you read my words, you’re investing your time. What you invest your time in will manifest or be squandered. If you invest in the time it takes to read my words, I have given you the power to re-invest that time in ways that can bring you exponetial returns. Your five minutes of invested time now can eliminate wasted moments later on, and bring you the benefit of targeted traffic, or knowledge of better ways to spend the same amount of money for a greater harvest of money in the future.

Today I’m spending time to tell you the currencies you can use to get better returns on the investment you’ve made (or are going to make) in your online business.

Among the currencies you have at your disposal the main ones are

1. Time
2. Money
3. Knowledge
4. Your Conduct. personally and in the marketplace

You can leverage these currencies in several ways to improve your business. Some will get you better results than others, some will give you the same results, but faster.

At this site, I teach you multiple ways to use your time to leverage yourself into a position where you can earn enough money to get faster results. As your personal allotocation of time begins to shrink, you’ll want to find ways to duplicate your ability to bring those who seek your product or services to you.

But until the day comes that you can leverage your time. That is the currency you will exchange in return for your traffic.

Under that concept of fair exchange, before you employ any of my tactics to get more people to your site… realize that I’m operating under the presumption that your site is fulfilling all the basic needs of your visitors when they arrive.

Your site should have sufficient quality and quantity of information to satisfy both the search engines you hope will list you, as well as the visitors you want it to bring. Your site should have a way to get your clients to continue to stay in contact with the news of your site. And whatever way you want your site to generate revenue should also be prominently displayed in a manner in which your prospective buyer can recognize its value, not to you, but to them.

But there is another component to this puzzle. Your site must display your own sense of pride in whatever means you intend to participate in this value exchange.

This is why I don’t write about every method of getting free traffic – of the ones that are successful, some of them are not honorable. And that’s why, eventually, you must invest in your business for it to grow.

To relate this back to Atlas Shrugged, here’s a brief synopsis of the plot.

In this ficitonal account, the world’s economic systems are failing. You come to learn that it is through the influence of a single person, John Galt. When he encountered a system that gives people currencywho have not earned it, he pledges to stop the motor of the world. Some would regard him as a malicious destroyer of the world in doing so. Others concede that it was necessary for him to do so, in order to help speed the world to the conclusion of their new currency model, so that the thinkers or the world could returnand re-build.

The relevance for your business?

If you attempt to get anything out of your business, or your personal dealings in life, without investing some type of currency, you will fail. Period. You must exchange value for value.

If you’re getting a lot of traffic, but few conversions, you have to wonder – what way is my site failing to show its value? If you’re getting dismal search engine traffic, or follow-through for your reciprocal link exchange methods, it is the same question.

While I don’t necessarily agree with every word of John Galt’s dogma, I can align myself with the spirit of many of his words. In one of the speeches in the book, he states:

I am a trader. I earn what I get in trade for what I produce. I ask for nothing more or nothing less than what I earn. That is justice. I don’t force anyone to trade with me; I only trade for mutual benefit. Force is the great evil that has no place in a rational world. One may never force another human to act against his/her judgment. If you deny a man’s right to Reason, you must also deny your right to your own judgment. Yet you have allowed your world to be run by means of force, by men who claim that fear and joy are equal incentives, but that fear and force are more practical.

What are you getting in exchange for what you’ve produced? When you spend time setting up links back to your site, do you think about the source of that traffic? Does how you come about that exchange have an effect on the quality of the traffic you get?

I believe it does. That is why I’ll continue to exchange this information I am giving to you for not just the time given back to me, but better search engine results. Go to the permanent link to this page, below. Study it and see if you can realize what I’ve done that will bring the results I desire. You can do the same thing with your site.

Hello everyone,

Just so you don’t get confused, I’m filling in Money Monday content before I go ahead to Google Tuesdays, and though all this is taking place on Tuesday morning (as I am pre-empting my pre-written material to do this), Monday’s date will be on these pages.

Or is that just More confusing?

If so, never mind, it’s not important, it’s merely relevant to know for feed readers, so you can be aware that the feed is not broken.

First, just a quick note to my subscribed audience that is related to today’s topic, then we’ll launch right into the tips. This is part of the tip, so if you read the tips on the site, you’ll want to see this too.

Thank you for all your well wishes. If any of you saw my post about my on-going illness and sent me an offering via PayPal, you’ll find that I won’t accept it unless you agree to take delivery of one of my products or a service. Why?

I only exchange value for money… I have one major rule when it comes to business. Regardless of my need (and I’m not in any urgent need, through God’s grace), I only exchange value for value. I’m proud of what I produce. If you don’t want, or already have, the fruits of my labor, I will not accept your money “just because”. I can’t take money I did not earn.

In other words, I’ll exchange:

my knowledge for money,
exchange my free time for the both my own personal pleasure of helping others, and the possibility of future business
my time for money,
a service for money,
my money for service, someone else’s time, someone else’s product and so on.

This rests on a central principle: my need is not the factor by which a decision should be made to secure my value – only my ability to provide information, services, or anything else I might have to offer.

I appreciate the offer, and the knowledge that my audience is filled with such loving hearts. And I demand from myself that every relationship in my life be as reciprocal as possible.

How is this information relevant to today’s upcoming information?

When I’m forced to be physically idle, I study – I have trouble being completely mentally and physically idle.

Many moments of my downtime are dedicated to learning the nature of the various currencies in the world, and money is one of those currencies. The events of last week led me to some deep examination of the book Atlas Shrugged, which has given voice to a principle I had previously not had the words to express. Here are some of the words from that novel. Read them, and I’ll be back with the next installment of Money Mondays.

When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears, not all the guns in the world, can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor—your claim upon the energy of the men who produce.

People were asking me this all the time “are there free ways that I can get traffic to my site, and if so, what are they?”

These are people who have heard or read somewhere that you can’t get free traffic online, and are pleasantly surprised to hear otherwise, OR people who know that it’s possible, want it, but may not be willing to pay the price.

Did you catch it? That was another hint about the biggest free traffic secret – you WILL pay a price. It may not be monetary, but you’ll pay. Either you’ll pay to get the knowledge, you’ll pay for the free knowledge in time, or you’ll pay with the time it takes to distribute your free knowledge – holding the biggest piece of the puzzle back.

With that last one, I’ve learned how to distribute my free knowledge in a way that leads the person who is really serious about investing in their business – either with time or money – back to my site.

I’ve been called crazy, to my e-face, for giving out so much free information. And from their perspective, they’re right. I am nuts. Why should I give it away when I can charge people for it?

Well they can keep on calling me crazy. I know something they don’t know, and it’s the reason I can sit here in my p.j.’s, when they have to get ready for work, even on this US holiday. Besides that, I’ve got, almost literally, a million of these free tips. I can write about them forever.

And here’s why it seems a little off. 90% of the people who read my column will never, ever, buy anything from me.

Ever.

That’s because they don’t realize that while the several thousand pieces of information I have or have found, will help you in the short run, but for both long-term and short-term results, the only way to get the kind of results I have is to duplicate what I’ve done, and these are techniques I reveal in my books.

This doesn’t bother me. I’ve tried to make my main web sites a resource for new webmasters, a collection of legitimate free traffic resources, with reviews of their results, like there used to be all over the Net in the early 90s, what I like to call “the old days”. When my site can help people who can’t afford my books, it sincerely makes my heart tingly and my chest poke out in pride.

Hopefully when they’re ready for the best results, they won’t forget me.

In the meantime, I like to focus the majority of my attention on that 10% that really, really get it, that know that while getting my tips one at a time will help, my low-price premium information will explode their results exponentially.

Oops. I did it again. I just told you the Biggest Free Traffic Secret ever. And I didn’t even realize it.

There will be more later… right now, I need to take another nap, and finish up my Advanced guide to RSS, since it goes on sale later this month. I’m going to see Hero again, and out to eat. I’m supposed to see Garden State, too. Remind me to tell you what I thought.

If you’re in the US, have a great holiday. If you’re not, have a great day anyway.

Today is a holiday in the States, and for once, I’m taking advantage. And so we’re going to a type of holiday format for Money Mondays, in which I will reveal, if you’re paying very close attention, The Biggest Free Traffic Secret in the world.

I’ve actually already revealed in, several times, in this very space. If you look at this page, you have some inkling of it already. It’s not the same nature as Friday’s Biggest Google Secret in the world… this is more of a Napoleon Hill type of Secret, an open secret that will lose its value if I came right out and told you.

Today, all day long, admidst my relaxation, I’ll post hints to it. You can go ahead and guess in the comments section and I’ll tell you if you’re close.

The prize?

If you correctly guess the Biggest Free Traffic Secret in the world, you’ll never be lacking visitors at your site again.

Instead of having the Money Monday posts show up on the archive pages, I’m going to do a short and sweet version on today’s extras day. This will give all the surfer folks who missed Money Mondays a chance to see the posts on the site, and give more exposure to the site I wanted to feature yesterdays.

They’ll be coming up as soon as I put the finishing touches on the final version of the RSS Book.

That’s right, today is the last day you can get it below regular price, with all the lifetime updates that come with it, and the reseller rights that you won’t be able to get Ever Again. Sale ends at midnight.

And today is also the day I’m going to announce what’s going to come next for the RSS series and the KSTW series. So keep your ears on….

There’s nothing wrong with your eyes or your feed reader. I spent most of the weekend awake and brimming with ideas, as well as talking to people who are big fans of my latest book. So today’s Google Tuesday will be short and sweet – I’ll go back and fill in Money Mondays sometime in the next 24 hours. I’m waiting for an email back from a client who is doing incredible things with Google AdWords, and I wanted to dedicate Monday to his site.

I’ll be back with some Google Tuesday info in a little while.

I make 70% of my income from sales of ebooks I’ve written, one about Google, one about using RSS to get more traffic, and about 15% of those sales come from Clickbank affiliates.

I make about another 7% from affiliate sales, around 13 percent from additional consulting that comes as a result of my ebook sales, and about 10% from limited advertising on my site – I’d sell ad space in my newsletter, but I don’t publish on a regular basis yet.

As you can see, I make the most money from sales of my own books. So how do can anyone do this?

I’m a little tired, so I’m just going to put these forth as steps. If it is a popular topic, I’ll fill in the blanks in the newsletter a little later.

1- To start, I researched what audience would be most appropriate for me to cater, to given my knowledge and experience so far. I didn’t want to just start another site about making money online, because at the time I’d made the most money from advertising, at prices un-heard-of now. I wanted something with low competition and a healthy enough market to sustain me when I came to dominate it.

2- I chose a niche narrow enough to serve on my own, but wide enough to grow. I had decided early on that I would prefer to work with people new to the internet but not to business – I’d teach them to save time and money in gettng people to their sites, because that’s what I already knew how to do.

3- I employed all the free ways I knew how to get traffic, in order to establish myself.

4- I researched and tested lesser known techniques on my site and those of my new audience, then used this book to learn how to compile my rambling thoughts into a format that I could sell. (I got much better in my second book, and in upates to my first one. )

5- I gave away 90% of what I know, in the form of this site, as well as the original one, in a 2500 page member section with more free information, a couple of free ebooks and a newsletter. I kept building my list and using 100% free methods to get new people to the site to try what I knew for free. What is now my second most effective source of free traffic has been my news feed.

6- At a certain point, the traffic you can get for free plateaus, then peaks again. Many techniques that generate free traffic end up costing you in time. At those junctures, I supplement my free traffic with inexpensive advertising in ezines, joint projects/ventures, and other sources of paid traffic, such as pay per click advertising.

That’s pretty much it, rinse, repeat with new product or site(s).

With my poetry sites, I’m working on building a network of sites for poets and spoken word artists. It’s not like it was when I first began to perform in the early 90s… every time I turn on Def Poetry Jam I get my feelings hurt… but that’s really another story for another day. This sidebar was just to let you know, with content sites, once you pass the 100,000 page view mark, you can start hosting advertising. You might not make a living off it, but if you find the right niche, the extra money doesn’t hurt.

I think that’s it for Money Mondays. Remember to come by on Google Tuesday!

When the whole banner ad thing tanked, before the popularity of text ads evolved, I really started to miss my extra income. At the time, $300 extra dollars a month was like getting an extra check. I hadn’t gotten a good high tech job yet, and at the time I was working a temp position at a place where I never dreamed I’d be hired permanently and getting a salary that made an extra $300 a month look like chump change in less than a year.

So I started looking around online for a way to make extra money. I’d ben a part of Allen Says Warror site since 1998, probably – there’s an ebook with a testimonial from me. I was going by my full name, Atinuke Abayomi-Paul, before I figured out that no one on earth can say my name properly.

I lost my membership info to that site no less than five times in the space of a year and a half, and each time, Allen patiently re-sent my information. (Now he has an automated system – I had to re-create my reseller information again a few minutes ago.) The last time he sent it out to me, he was particularly nice to me, which inspired me to choose his products to resell.

I’ll never forget the feeling of my first online sale, it’s that same feeling you get the first time you make money that’s all profit….. It was easier than I ever expected – all I did was advertise the link in every free way I knew how. Took about two weeks of consistently promoting the links, but I did it.

The experience led me to start doing research on what I could make money from – and it was simple to learn how to do it from watching what Allen did. In addition to applying his system, I had to buy a product, try it out for myself, and if I liked it, then I could suggest it to other people.

One key thing I noticed that the pages that sold the product I chose did, was that it didn’t try to sell on the first try. It captured the person’s information, then gave them a sampling of great information as follow-up.

One day they either dropped out or realized the value. it was really that simple – after a certain point, it was a numbers game. For each product, a certain number of people would like what was being offered. Then you just had to figure out how to either get the offer in front of enough people, or find products the pepple you already had targeted would enjoy.

So how can you profit from affiliate sales? I find the easiest way these days is to join Clickbank and find products to try and then promote, that are aligned with your site’s content, the promote them to your list with honest testimonials every now and again.

The only problem is, it’s hard to search Clickbank’s site. They make it into a directory style, so you have to go through page by page. An affiliate portal I belong to created a searchable download of all the products in Clickbanks’s database, which should help in finding something to promote.

Happy Hunting. I’ll be back with my last tip about how I make money now.

The first money I made online was really non-marketing.

I was around in the days when you could build a really good site, build up its content, and host banners for other people, filling your remnant space with non-exclusive ads from companies that had good run-of-network CPM payouts. I cashed in on impressions only for our main sites back then. $300 – $600 ( See an archive of the main site my various partners and I ran from before we changed the domain name.)

We were also briefly part of About.com’s network of poetry sites. Ah, those were the days. Shortly after about two years of constant checks from advertising, rates dropped and the money wasn’t worth the quality difference for our visitors to continue to display banner ads. Around that time, I started looking for alternatives.

Can you still make money from advertising? Sure, but until you build up to at least a mlliion page views per month, don’t expect to make thousands of dollars from it. But if you read that last article, you know that the key is to “spend less than you earn”.

Still, the money is out there. You just need to do your research, increase your traffic so that you’ll start getting accepted to the existing programs, test different formats and placements, track the results, and turn the whole thing into a system.

(And if you build a list at the same time, you can either charge for the ezine itself, or run advertising in each issue. But that’s really for another day.)

So where can you find advertising to run on your site? Obviously the preference is to have a mix of advertisers that will pay you per impression, as well as per click.

To earn money from clicked ads, I find that Google AdSense is easy to set up, and after you learn how to work with the system, can pay enough so that they’ll actually send you checks (the threshold before they’ll go out is $100). We’re going to feature a site that teaches many of the tricks of the AdSense trade tomorrow on Google Tuesdays, as well as the reason I think you should really sign up for AdSense today, whether or not you think you’re going to make any money from it.

Another program, that pays you via paypal once your account balance hits $5 is TextAds.Biz.

You display text ads on your site – advertisers can run ads just at your site, or throughout the Network.

But what I like even better is that you can place filler ads on your own site advertising whatever you want – rotating text ads for your audience on your own site, free. Great for Affiliate products.

Jim Edwards says this better than I ever could, though I will be back to finish my story.