Back in the day, there were a bunch of techniques I used to make money. My buddy and I lived in our apartment together before we were 18 years old. Our parents really didn’t care what we did, so they let us get our own apartment. Our rent was $1,100/mo, and we didn’t want a 9 - 5 job… Making money from other larger sites, is all about finding the right niche. It’s actually really sketchy to me, relying on other resources for traffic, but you just kind of fall into it you know? So here are the ways we made our money in the past, and hopefully this opens some doors for you guys!

1. Photoshop Sites
This is still a very easy way anybody can make money, I kid you not. If you know how to use photoshop, and can create decent tutorials with proper grammar, etc… You can easily pull some money out of your butt, haha. Basically, you need to build a website with proper Ad placement, a quality design, a good name, a good domain, and a decently branded logo. You can find a decent PHP script out there that will let you write Photoshop Tutorials, and allow you to manage your tutorials with a backend (which helps). I used a script back in the day that was based off of flat files, which worked, but I really recommend finding or writing a script that uses a database. I used CuteNews back in the day :). But follow these steps and you will be on your way to some quick money!

• 1. Make your website, setup a system that allows easily managing Photoshop Tutorials.
• 2. Setup Google Ads all over your site, maybe 3 - 4 ads on every page.
• 3. Write some quality tutorials, take your time, and setup a good foundation of tutorials that stand out from the crowd!
• 4. The best way to get traffic is by submitting your tutorials to Tutorial Database sites. The 3 best places to start is Good-Tutorials, Tutorialized, and Pixel2Life.
• 5. Start exchanging links with other related tutorial sites.
• 6. Start find other ways to promote your site, SEO techniques, etc…

Okay… That is a quick 6 step run down on how easy it is to run a Photoshop Tutorial website. I still believe the industry is definitely money hungry. I imagine if you get submitted on the three sites I listed above at least once a week, you can probably make $50 a day. I use to get submitted to these sites almost daily, and pulled in $100+/day! This should give you guys a great idea and opportunity on how to build a site and begin getting traffic if you haven’t already. Make sure you keep your eyes peeled for any other Tutorial Database sites you can submit to, the more you submit to, the better! Build up those links, and learn some SEO!

2. Humor/Video Sites
Humor and video sites were pretty difficult back than, and I honestly don’t know if it would be easier or tougher now. There are a lot of resources for building up video popularity I would imagine now such as MySpaceTV, YouTube, etc… How it worked before was the same exact process as tutorial sites, but instead of tutorials, it would be videos. I would search around all day trying to find funny content, interesting videos, sexy videos, whatever it took to get submitted on popular sites. I would also post the videos in popular forums like eBaumsWorld. Running a video sites obviously requires a lot more bandwidth, but you get a lot more traffic. CPC Ads such as Google never worked to well for me on humor sites, I always ended up using CPM companies such as CasaleMedia and ValueClick Media. It might be a little bit tougher to get approved by these companies if you don’t already have an account. If you have some creative ideas, and strong drive, you could probably still make a site like this actually generate some revenue. Figure out ways to use submission sites and the big dogs such as YouTube and MySpace to your advantage.

PS. I use to run thehumorworld.com, I am considering starting it back up. Let me know if anyone has any creative ideas to get it rolling.

3. MySpace Sites
The big bad MySpace sites. Everyone really wants to get into this industry, because of the money that can be made. Everyone has read, seen, and heard the stories. There is a lot of money in this niche. Yahoo! Publisher Network really proved that point in October 2005 for me, I think I was the first person to throw YPN on my site. The night I put those Ads on my site, was a great beginning for me and a lot of other people. Months later, YPN didn’t like this, the quality and conversion from MySpace sites was not cutting it for them. So they slowly began banning us all. But as some people still know, there is still money in the MySpace niche, even with MySpace developing their own profile editor, providing their own graphics and help section. 200 million users don’t want to conform to just “their” help, people will always want to be unique right? Users want their page to pop, aka attention. The original MySpaceSupport script, was sold on Sitepoint.com. The original script was ripped off from me by an old friend of mine who decided to sell it everywhere (old friend I said). Sorry guys, that’s the truth. Than other programmers came along, took this script, fixed it up, and resold it again. Slowly down the road, better programmers came along, took the concept and made an amazing script that works perfect. It was bound to happen, but my buddy doing it 2 weeks after my site launch didn’t help me. Just go to Google and start searching “MySpace Resource Scripts, MySpace Turnkey Sites, etc…” If you want to get in the game, just follow everyone else, or try to come up with a unique concept like LoveMyFlash.com.

Conclusion
So what I am really trying to say in this blog is… The 3 ways I made money in the past and even now has just been finding the right niche, and sticking with it. The niche I caught was just at the right time, MySpace. If you don’t have the desire or drive to develop a new idea and market it yourself, find a niche, and attack it. Currently I have a lot of projects going on, trying to break free from this niche a bit. I started too many things, and I couldn’t eat it all. So I decided to get some to-go boxes, and put some of it in the fridge, while I focus on what I can eat at one time. Well there you have it, how I made money since age 16!*

Use these ideas to get traffic, use the ideas to come up with better ideas or build on top of them. Let me know what you come up with!

* Knowledge of Photoshop, PHP/MySQL, and SEO would definitely help.

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