Making Money On The Internet Isn't Easy After All

If you're serious about making money on the Internet, whether you want to make a full-time income or just a little extra cash each month to help cover your bills, then you need these three things: 1) a revenue stream (either a product to promote or some form of paid advertising to place on your site), 2) a website, and 3) traffic to your site. I can't help you with #1, but there are some simple solutions for #2 and #3; and my favorite is building content mashup pages. They serve as valuable resources to your visitors as I'll explain further below, and with tools like NIMS they're simple to create in just a matter of minutes.

Mashups have been called the “new breed of software”. That's a fair definition considering that most people equate mashups with being combined applications or services. However, a mashup doesn't have to describe the combining of two separate wares—it can also be created from the combining of text and media content from multiple sources as well. For example, if you have ever visited Technorati then you've seen a content mashup in action. That site doesn't create very much original content, but rather pulls snippets from related blog postings on thousands of sources and displays them on individual pages based on topic tags. That's a content mashup.

And it's very effective for everybody involved. Information consumers (or web surfers) who search for information on a topic and land on a mashup page are given a ton of topical data to pick and choose from, which usually provides a well rounded big picture view of the topic. Search engines love mashups and so the pages often rank very high in the search results, which means more traffic for the site—and site owners benefit from the higher search result rankings to gain more traffic and generate more revenue.

There's little wonder why the search engines would love mashup pages. If you think about what their core function is, to deliver related and relevant listings to users who search for a topic, and then realize what a content mashup displays to visitors: the most relevant content from, multiple sources that's related to the mashup topic at this point in time—then it's easy to see why the search engines would favor mashup pages.

By design a content mashup provides exactly what search engines want to deliver to their users, plus the added extra of the content being “at this point in time”. That's because the best content mashups don't just get created and then remain static, with the same information on them, forever.

A quality mashup page is going to refresh its content on a fairly regular basis, so that visitors today may see something different than visitors yesterday saw; and with good reason—things change all the time so what was relevant yesterday may not be today. That's what makes mashups so attractive to many. Regardless of what topic you're building your site around, the information, resources, tools, techniques or whatever within that area of interest are going to be in a constant state of change, so by updating on a regular basis a mashup page ensures that the information you're providing to visitors never becomes outdated.

All of this leads to a high quality experience for your site visitors and a quality relationship between your site and the search engines. So whether you're trying to make money on the Internet by earning revenue from your traffic, or just increase your site popularity and personal or company brand, developing content mashup pages on your site that are related to your field of interest is a great way to improve your results.