One thing you will stumble upon sooner or later are membership sites run by self proclaimed marketing gurus that claim they will teach you the secrets to making money online. There are membership sites for blogging, affiliate marketing, pay per click, and just about any other twist you can put on the making money game. All you have to do is join any one of these sites and you will be a privileged member to a wealth of insider information that will set you on your way to fulfilling all your financial goals in life. Or so they say.

Some of these membership websites include:

Shoemoney System
Blog Mastermind
Third Tribe Marketing
The Keyword Academy
Wealthy Affiliate
 
There are many others out there but those are some of the bigger ones that you will hear about the most. Other marketers and bloggers will provide glowing reviews of each one of them in hopes you will sign up under their affiliate link so they will get a commission. These sites seem to range in price from around $30.00 per month to around a $100.

First of all, you should know that I have only joined one of them (for a month) but I have been around the block enough now to know what goes on in this type of site. There is usually a set of tutorial videos and a variety of other “training” aids the owner has put together. These might be webinars, eBooks, MP3’s, charts and other things that are designed to teach you all you need to know about how to start your own money making Internet marketing business. These are usually the biggest draws inside each membership site because it is through these vehicles that the “guru” explains his or her secrets and  system.

What You Really Get

Once you run out of the training materials, what are you usually left with? A forum. It is in the forum where you can then expand upon your knowledge by networking and talking to others. This is where you end up spending all the rest of your time, month after month unless there is new training material added. Now, what is wrong with this picture?

What is wrong is that all you have left is a forum that is full of other clueless beginners all trying to figure out and interpret the training material. The “gurus” might or might not participate in these forum discussions but I will bet you that 9 out of 10 times they leave the forums to the administrators they have hired. Forums can be vicious time wasters and especially so if you are conversing with other beginners like yourself. It becomes a free for all where everyone is trying to prove to the next guy that they know what they are talking about when in fact they don’t. You know they don’t because they are paying to be there just like you! 

What Is In It For Them?

One of the questions that any astute beginner who is trying to learn how to work from home and make money should ask themselves is: why is the guru giving away this information? If he or she is making such good money, why don’t they just keep doing it and keep to themselves? Why on earth teach it to others?  The answer is always the same: because they can make more money teaching their “system” or knowledge than they can by actually implementing it themselves. Plain and simple.

The brilliance of these guru run Internet marketing membership websites is that they will get your money month after month and in return give you some training material and a forum that the students are basically running more times than not. You are actually paying to belong to their forum and keep their business going!

Now, some of the training material these guys give out might be really useful and some of these membership sites might be better than others. I know for instance that with The Keyword Academy you get a guest posting system inside the membership site which might be very useful. However, my basic point of this post is to say that generally speaking, when you pay to belong to one of these “how to make money online and create a business” membership sites you are really getting a forum. And how much can you really learn from a forum of newbies all like yourself?

Know When To Quit!

The longer you stay with one of these sites, the less there is to learn as you will quickly run out of material and be left with nothing to do but converse on the forums and be part of the “community”. It is a brilliant plan really, for these guys to hawk their knowledge and receive a recurring monthly fee for putting out not much more than a glorified forum that they probably don’t even spend too much time in. They spend most of their time trying to enhance their “brand” and getting more people to sign up.

Always remember that marketing gurus are making more money by teaching than actually doing what they teach. If you do decide to join one of these paid membership sites, make sure you are willing to cut the strings after (or shortly after)  you have exhausted the training material. Don’t be one of those people who get suckered in to paying a hefty monthly fee just for a forum and remember, everything they teach inside can be found somewhere for free on the Internet.

Have you ever wondered how often Google crawls your site? If you post a new article about breaking news it would be great to have Google there right away to read your new post, index it, and then have it show up in Google’s search results.

SEO Meter.com is a new site that is free to everyone right now and will tell you how often your site is crawled. You have to submit your site to them first and have them accept it to be in their database. They only accept top-level domains and sub-domains and your site cannot be under construction or something you sloppily threw up. They do accept Blogger blogs by the way.

The picture above is the crawl rate for my blog (if you don’t have a wide screen you might not be able to see the whole thing) and as you can see my crawl rate is not too spectacular. Hey, Google has never liked me much no matter what I do. If you are the type who likes buttons with stats, you can get the HTML to put your own crawl cycle button on your blog or website (see the very bottom of the pic).

Right now the method SEO Meter uses to determine your site’s stats is by using Google’s cache and that is not the most accurate. You can read some positive comments about the tool and a few negative ones and suggestions on this blog entry.  I think the most important suggestion is for them to provide some script or a file to be placed directly on your site to get more accurate results. Because everything about this website looks very professional, I have a feeling this is something they will implement sometime in the future. If not for free, then it may be a paid service but that is just a guess.

If you want to know a little more about SEO Tips, SEO Meter and crawl rates here is a link to their FAQ’s which explains the importance of your site’s crawl rate. As I said, this is a free tool right now and free is always a very good price. I suggest you head over to SEO Meter.com  while they are free and get your site submitted.

The Ximmy rewards system is based on points. You earn one point for each submission you make and another point for each comment. If you are lucky and you hit the front page you get 15 points and I sure hope accomplishing that is easier than over at Digg! 

Your points can be redeemed for PayPal cash which is always a welcome thing because as you know I love seeing my PayPal account go up. You get $10 for 1000 points, $20 for 1800 points, $40 for 3200 points,  $80 for 6000 points, $160 for 12,000 points, and $300 for 20,000 points.  You can redeem your points for cash once you reach any one of those levels.

Another way to earn money is through the Ximmy affiliate program. You get $5.00 just for signing up and every person you refer that signs up will get you 50 cents. The payout minimum for the referral program is $25.00 and again that is through PayPal. 
 
 

The Ximmy.com website allows users to share any and all types type of content from the Internet including pictures and video. I do wish the cash rewards were a little bit easier to get, but this is definitely a step in the right direction. It’s nice to get paid for your efforts in building a website up. What do you think? Is this opportunity to earn some cash enough to make you abandon Digg and move over to Ximmy?