How many of the Top “Make Money Online Blogs” actually show you how to Make Money?

I think that the Top 100 List was meant to bring together blogs that can help the reader to make money online, even if the blogs are not necessarily focused on that niche.

Take Problogger for instance. According to your analysis only 15% of his posts are about making money online. But is it really?

I think that even when he talks about web design or about how to set goals for a website this is something you can use for making money online, especially if you are taking a long term approach.

Think about building authority, being transparent, building a community, and etc. Do you think these topics are not important for someone wanting to make money online?

I’ll have to agree with Daniel here, every Tom, Dick and Harry and his aunt is talking about the PR update, probably except for a couple of Johns…I would say you just caught them at the wrong moment – not at all to detract from your research, but I think of it in a slightly different perspective – the top blogs would have been around for atleast over 12-18 months, to talk only about making money every single day would be something that’s inhuman – its part of connecting with the rest of the Blogosphere IMHO.

To me, a make money online blog is a make money online blog if the author focuses on topics related to making money more so, than others.

One thing that occurred to me – have you tried taking an average rating for the number of make money online posts to the total number of posts and added an age factor too? You’d probably have a tough time calculating Darren’s rating in the very least – he’s probably made 1000s of posts in the 18 months that the blog’s been around. There are definitely more than a couple of gems in there.

The bottomline is, like Daniel mentions, authority matters in a big way. And you earn authority by being consistent.

Again, this is not to mean that the lower echelons of blogs (myself included, mine is not a make money online blog though)are not worthwhile – I’m sure some of them do a great job – they just need to keep at it and deliver the goods consistently.

This is a good post and one of my pet peeves. You are right…they all talk about how much they make and so on but very few of them actually show you how. I know it is hard to always post about making money but I try as hard as I can to give real ideas and examples in my blog. I think most of the “make money” blogs fail miserably in helping anyone out….and other than their blog maybe they really aren’t making any money??

Sounds like I have to include make money online in the title of every post for it to be classed as “make money” posts.

What you might be missing is that my blog isn’t intended for beginners. Beginners do benefit from it, and I answer lots of questions, but my core content isn’t written to attract beginners.

I think it comes down to what you perceive is a ‘making money website’.

Does a blog where the blogger posts about his earnings really help you make money online?

You refer to younger blogs and to an extent I agree with what you are saying. They are posting about making money online however a large percentage of them are just starting out in web development and have never actually made any real money on the web. I’m not saying that to be patronising however it means that the blind are leading the blind.

I do agree that many of the sites on the list do not talk enough about making money however in my experience, making money through a website is the easiest thing to do. It’s getting traffic to the site thats the hardest part, once you have a lot of traffic its very easy to try out different affiliate programs and make some cash and its very easy to find advertisers.

Interesting take on things Stuart and it’s always nice to see rankings from a different viewpoint. When you just take a small subsection like 20 posts though, the info can be skewed somewhat by certain events.

For instance I almost always write about marketing and making money and seldom write anything personal. But I had 2 posts about the FIRESTORM to let my readers know I may be offline and 2 about the re-design I was in the middle of. So 4 of my 20 posts were about things that were very rare, or in the case of the fire, I hope never even happen again. But I’m still happy I ranked #3.

I also think the name of that list was a bit of a misnomer and probably named that way to get ranked for the term Make Money Online. If it had been named Online Marketing Blog, then even things like SEO and PR topics would fit the title.

Linda

I could just give one example very apt for the topic.

With just a few changes to his linking structure following my advice, Josh one of my readers moved from 13th to 9th for “Make Money Online” without any serious influx of links.

He also has 2.5 times the pages in the primary index.

I was 2 weeks before Shoemoney on the hidden link in Widgetbucks, and the first to post about the fix. (both of those are in the last 20 posts) – I was also the person who worked out the real reason they weren’t ranking – do you discount posts that weren’t factually correct?

I suppose I should write something about how to make money online from forum sigs or HYIP, but I much preferred having the top post on Techmeme, and gaining 300 high quality links on the PR changes.

Evidently you’ve never had to push yourself harder or farther to make money online. Because if you did, you would know that the personal side of running an online business is just as important to your bottom line than how to optimize your landing page. In fact, far more so.

It is interesting idea to re-rank however much more factors should probably included such as timeframe, post frequency. Certain bloggers might post certain % of their posts related to Make Money. Eg. Blogger 1 may make 5 posts daily for 6 days and 20% gear towards Make Money. Blogger 2 may make 1 post every 2 days for 60 days having 80% of the post related to Make Money. Blogger 1 might have more money making posts than Blogger 2.

I blog primarily about driving traffic and building links. Without traffic nobody can make any money.

Sorry Stuart but I read many of those sites and I would say that 90% of what they write is about making money online.

You don’t think that PageRank has anything to do with making money online? Up until this point, PageRank has always been one of the most important factors that determine how much you can sell advertising for. So, you expect make money onlinerz to not talk about that?

You don’t think that affiliate program stats have anything to do with making money online? Zan Johnson talks quite a bit about affiliate stats, and why do you think he does that? Because it helps people to make money online.

You don’t think that blogging tips has anything to do with making money online? Come on Stuart. You’re trying to make that list the ‘monetization blogs top100′, and that isn’t what the list is about.

So what do Andy, Wendy, Maki, Daniel, and company have to do now, use ‘make money online’ in ever title? Would that satisfy your demands. If they stopped teaching how to build traffic would that make you happy?

Stuart sorry my man but this post isn’t even close.

I make money online by telling people how much money I make online.

I already told everyone how to make money blogging. Sheesh.

Wow, great post. I used to be subscribed to a lot of those blogs, but unsubscribed because they were all noise and no signal. I’ve been trying to perfect my feeds for a while now. Thanks for taking the time to do this! Saves me a whole lot of trouble.

I still subscribe to shoemoney, but mainly for the entertainment factor, guy’s crazy. lol

Interesting post and some great comments but as someone who reads damn near everyone on that list and works fulltime from home, I have to say that every now and then I get overloaded with money making information.

Sure everyone wants to make more money but seriously what good is it going to do when you go to each blog and are present with a new way to make money everyday? Your not going to have near the time to even test 10% of them if that were the case.

I think a little personality goes a long way. Sure we all may not agree with each blogger ( I know I have my biffs with certain ones) yet, I will still come back to check them out every now and then but most definitely I will analyze their feed titles and excerpts or full feeds just to see if it’s either A. worth a trip over there or B. Give them props on a great piece of information

I don’t think that just because it says “make money” in thier title that people should automatically assume someone is going to teach you how to make money. There are tons of other things needed in this business to be learned before the bills start falling from the heavens.

With that said I do believe 90+% of those bloggers listed do help teach people how to make money but they also know that it’s their blog. When it’s yours, you can do whatever you want, besides they are looked upon as established authorities and I imagine they do a lot better than a lot of us, which is why we are there taking in their words to progress further. With that said, you can only hope that while they may not be writing on a specific way, tactic or method of making money, they are probably including vital information on WHAT it takes to make money.

It was an interesting post Stuart as I love reading this blog, but something seems seriously left out here, almost like the post was rushed.

Anyway, hope all is well,
Ruck

I make more money than this and the 45n list combined each year… I just don’t blog about how I do it, and I don’t take any pictures of me with a check, or worse, a screen shot, because I’ve been down that road already, and it does nothing but get you negative attention. Although, I do get a little annoyed when I see other people being ranked higher when I know for a fact I make more in a year than any of them do, have or will, and mine has been consistent even without affiliate marketing anymore. Go figure. But yeah… I’m the best.

Interesting Stuart,

I look forward to your follow up. And my post wasn’t intended to be a criticism really, just thinking out loud. I totally see where your coming from, and if you want to know the truth, it is discouraging to go to some of these authority bloggers and NOT find information that is helpful.

Where’s the balance lie? One hand we want all the money making info, on the other we want to know it ain’t a robot on the other end. We like that this person makes a lot of money, it inspires us, fuels us to work harder and set higher goals. On the other hand we want to like this blogger and want to know more about them.

Just a fine line on a make money blog. I have one myself, so I suffer the same criticisms. I don’t have me a rant blog or a talky blog. It’s a make money blog because the majority of what I post is just that. But sometimes I just want to talk about something different that day. Probably has to do with my posting count though:),

I see Jon made it out of his cave. Maybe if you didn’t make so much money you wouldn’t have gotten so criticized. Then again, I personally have never come across any criticism from your famous check. I could be missing it, but the general consensus I get travelling the web is that everyone truly respects you. Even if your a hardass.

I post screenshots but I am not afraid of criticism. If someone wants to criticize I simply pick up the video camera and film me logging into my accounts. It doesn’t get much more real than that.

Anyway, this is a very interesting post, and you got the gnads to throw this up there. I was just reading somewhere (can’t remember) where most bloggers tend to get in a twist when these sort of ratings and rankings come out. Sheesh, just being on there would be a nice compliment, but you know, enough is never enough.

Best,
Ruck

Court,
This post IS close. Take John Chow’s response in this very thread as he give his motto about “I make money online by telling people how much money I make online.” He doesn’t tell you how, just how MUCH he makes. How do his pictures of food, friends, and other so called “interesting things” help anyone make money? THEY DON’T.

Another thing is that all you top 50 guys generally stick together as also evidenced in this thread. Your blog does help people but many of them don’t. Man, critisize one of you guys and you all come out to defend.

BTW, are all you guys finished talking about PR yet? I mean really….don’t you have anything ORIGINAL to say in your blogs?

Just as an example, any kind of SEO post is also about making money since you need visitors to make money…

I could go on…

This is a very saturated niche but somehow Ive managed my blog to be no. 11 in google for this keyword.

I think what a lot of these “top” sites are really writing about is news that online affiliate marketers need to know or are going to be interested in if they”re serious about making money online. To this effect, things like Google PR, paid links, and Web 2.0 optimization are important. After all, these effect the world of webmastering, and are therefore something that professional webmasters need to know.

As for you observation about the lower level blogs actually having more readily applicable information, I couldn’t agree more. As much as I’m subscribed to the RSS feeds of most of the top ten on the list, I find that I’m less concerned with checking that feed every day. Rather, I’m more interested in what a plethora of smaller guys are saying because, well, they’re actually giving me something that I can turn around and flip into a conversion.

There’s a lot of defending going on for something that was just a non flaming observation.

Make money online is quite a broad niche with many factors affecting the process directly, including Pagerank even though the big blogs are now saying it’s not that important after all.;D

I’m happy you said this. I was just talking about the same thing today. I’m tired of “make money online” blogs talking about paid links and Google page rank.

I have a blog about making money online and I try to avoid blogging tips and page rank as much as I can, because there are just too many posts on the subject. Maybe they should cut out the blogs that are loosely based on making money and more about SEO.

I don’t know how I bumped into your blog but I love what you write.
I am very naive and new about blogging and all its entail. I am in medical field but I love to write, that is the reasons I blog but I also love technology. Before I turn into the bloody field, I was a nerd. I just subscribed . Jamy

Hey thanks, you have to be appretiated for telling your readers about the important thing. Even I am maintaing a blog http://bucksfrominternet.blogspot.com which tells about online earning opportunities. And you are right that newbies have to write more in order to attract more readers. Just now I can breath for some time because until my page rank was 0 , i was having less than 10 readers but now after I got a value of 2 I got upto 30 and still increasing. Thanks for supporting people like us.

For attracting more readers I am posting payment proofs which is working well right now.

i have stopped reading these how to make money online blogs because i feel like i know pretty much everything they talk on their make money online blogs. those blogs are for a total online newbie blogger in my opinion.

I’m not a top money making blog but decided to add a Google Local technique to mine. I found a fellow ranking 1 for the main payday words + major city name. I wrote a step by step on what he’d donig on my blog check it out and post about it if you want. Let me know what you think.

http://www.oooff.com/php-affiliate-seo-blog/affiliate-marketing/making-big-easy-money-with-google-local-search/

Yeah, some of the well known blogs started out with interesting content on the subject of making money online but then got boring when they became famous. Not in your case, though, love your posts!