Or, how not to survive unemployment

If you've spent any time on the Internet during the recession, you may have noticed a proliferation of ads promising great riches available for the taking from the comfort of your own home. You may have seen something like this:

"Earn $10,000 a Month from Your Blog!"

Don't be stupid. Of course it's a scam.

They're often selling a "proven system." Call me a cynic, but I'm guessing that their system involves selling a system that promises people great riches if they buy the system. As there is a sucker born every minute, this is probably a feasible business model. Is it ethical? Hmm... I'm going to go out on a limb here and say no.

Earning an honest living with your blog is difficult in my experience. When I started this site, I thought, "Hey, we'll just use a variation of the model that works in other media: Provide interesting content and make money from advertising." Simple enough, right? So I wrote all these blog posts. Granted, I'm not the greatest writer on the planet, but every once in a while I string some words together that people seem to enjoy. All of my blog entries get read hundreds of times. Some have been read thousands of times, and I've made hundreds of posts. You do the math.

The problem might be that I was highly selective about the products I chose to promote and the programs I applied to join. Better Business Bureau ratings mattered; credibility mattered. Everything advertised on this blog is legitimate, unless Google is serving get-rich-quick ads, and I have no control over that. It was important to me to get paid for honest work (producing interesting content) by promoting honest products and services.

Though I did everything right, hundreds of thousands of impressions later, let's just say that I'm not making anywhere near $10,000 a month. Heck, I'd be happy with a couple hundred a month. It seems people are not interested in possibly saving money on car insurance or reducing debt payments. They're not particularly interested in the books I've recommended, and -- wonder of wonders -- they don't even want to apply for jobs even though it costs them nothing and Indeed is the best thing going as far as I can see.

The get-rich-quick guys do OK though, I guess. That's what they say anyway.

So if you're looking to survive unemployment, I would say use your blog only as an advertisement of your skills, then sell your skills in the real world. Work is the only thing that works.

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