How you can subsidize your own IM education for free

For anyone just starting out in IM, I have bad news for you. The chances are very, very slim that unless you are very talented, very lucky, or both, it will take you at LEAST a year of learning before you'll start to "get it" enough to make any money.

Now, I know that may sound like a generalization, but it's true for me, and it's true for everyone I've ever talked to about their IM experience.

But a friend/protege challenged me recently to come up with a way for him to get paid for his research and study into IM. He wasn't asking for a handout or a grant or a loan, but rather a way to get paid as a result of what he was doing online in order to learn IM.

I tried to think about what my own learning experience was like, and tried to re-formulate how I started using all the knowledge and mindset I've gained since then. This is what I told him to do, so I'll share it here too, in case anyone else can use it.

What I created for him was a sort of process or system for doing research on any IM topic (or nearly any topic, really) in such a way as to be able to create a monetized online asset WHILE you research your topic of choice.

So basically as you learn, you're going to create a record of that online, and pair it with a way for you to get paid. You answer your own questions, AND create an opportunity to get paid forever.

First, you need to create a some customized search tools. Use Google Custom Search for this.

The first custom search to set up is going to be a site search of all the article directories you can find, but to get started, all you need is ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com.

From now on, any time you are trying to learn more about something or answer a specific question about a topic, be it IM or just anything else, use this custom search box FIRST before you look elsewhere.

Find as many articles as you can that will answer your question about your topic. Bookmark them. When you answer your question, create a free blog somewhere. For this model, I use blogger.com because you can post via email.

Set up and configure the blog so you can post via email, and put some kind of advertising on it. I suggested that my friend use AdSense for now, but if you're a little more advanced, I recommend using something like CBPro ads instead (it makes more money in my experience, but AdSense is easier to implement).

Now, I use Thunderbird as my email client, and with a plugin for that called "Send Later" I am able to set any email I want to fire on a future date.

I take all those articles I found while I was researching and set them as emails to my blog's posting address, on a schedule of one per day for the first 7-10 days, then once a week after that. That's a minimum of 58 articles you need to create a whole year's worth of content.

If you use Outlook, you can do "Send Later" also, but if you don't have that option with your email client, try LetterMeLater.com - I looked at a lot of web-based email delayer services, and that one seemed to work the best for this. Plus, you can just use it via your own email service, which is good - in case they go under, you still have all your own emails on your side.

Now it's possible you got your research done and didn't have that much content.

If your initial question didn't have that much content for you to set up, we can fix that easily and make sure you're actually making your blog useful for others.

Create another Google Custom Search, and this time, include only URLs for sites that are Paid Answer sites. Like Google Answers was, there are several others out there. Just do a search for them.

NOTE: I use PAID answer sites (rather than Yahoo answers) because this tells me these are burning questions that were worth paying to find an answer, therefore, these people should respond to well matched ads.

Now, use your other Custom Search to find articles that answer these questions and pad out your content schedule for your blog.

If there AREN'T articles there that have the answer for these questions, do a little research and write your own article. Set this one up to publish in the future like the others, but set yourself a calendar reminder when this post publishes so you can social bookmark this piece of original content.

If you STILL don't have enough content for at least a year, THEN go to free Q&A sites like Yahoo answers for ideas you can search for articles on.

If you still don't have enough after that, oh well. Let it run with what you got and see where you are when you run out. If that niche isn't making you money, leave it be. If it is, do a fresh search, or consider paying for some PLR or fresh content (or create your own, if that's your thing).

That's it.

It may seem like a lot, but you only set up your custom searches once, and once you get the hang of setting up the blog, this is just a copy-and-paste operation that takes an extra hour TOPS beyond just doing the research (which you were going to be doing ANYWAY).

Will this make you rich? I doubt it. But it requires extremely little effort, and you can at least have a CHANCE to get paid forever, and you do it WHILE you learn whatever it was you were trying to discover.

Even if it doesn't make a cash cow, each of these blogs WILL begin to rank, and WILL have good cache times, and WILL get PR over time. Especially if you spend a little time every now and then submitting your RSS feed to places, commenting on related blogs, and other backlink building strategies.

That in itself has value, as you could use them to pass juice to other sites you may develop later on.

My suggestion on how to do more backlink building? Just be aware of what blogs you have, and any time in the future if you do research on the same subject, just keep an eye out for backlinking opportunities.

If it's not a subject you're going to delve into often, try setting up some google alerts with the same queries you used earlier. That should give you some leads on a regular basis.

What I told my friend then is, whenever he discovers some new site promotion method he wants to try, he should have several sites already going that he can actually implement and learn by doing the stuff.

He's already building some small assets as he goes, and I know personally, this method would have helped things "click" for me a lot sooner, because you actually get to see how it all comes together, and forces you to achieve the proper "editor" mindset vs. the "author" one most marketers adopt.

Plus, when you're learning the nitty gritty of IM, it's nice to have some actual ongoing sites to work on - you're essentially re-habbing your own sites - instead of having to start at zero each time.

That's fine if that's your thing, but I'm not out to build a name for myself. I just want to be lazy and make money, and I figure this method is a decent way to do both.

This is at least a very basic foundation upon which you can really go in any direction. It's also a very cheap and easy way to test a market, and how easily you can jump into it.

NOTE: I know some people are going to cry about "duplicate content" and all that. It doesn't apply. In fact, based on my previous experience, you can actually outrank the article directories for their own articles, especially if you post them to a topically focused blog and update regularly.

NOTE AGAIN: I also know some people are going to say building on Blogger is a waste - I agree that I prefer to build self-hosted WP sites myself, but remember who this method is for. I'm assuming you got little cash, little technical skill, and little knowledge about IM at all. That's why I pick the easy and free services that I did.

And I use sites like blogger.com and wordpress.com (and other free blogs) as linking sites and you know, puts some ads on there. It couldn't do anything but make you money.

NOTE AGAIN AGAIN: I also know some people will ask about whether there's a problem with the author's bio boxes and all that - look, you're going to lose some visitors like that, but that's what you get for free content. TV networks risk the changing channel too, but they still run commercials for shows on other networks.

Don't worry about it, just do it, and I promise you'll either be proved right, or pleasantly surprised - either way, you win.

Anyway, I hope some of you get some use out of this method, and if you have some of your own that work in the same spirit, please share as well.

My buddy's only been doing this a couple of weeks, but he's already getting nuts putting the opt-in boxes on there (and getting subs) so I think it's solid, and will be doing some for myself very soon.