Welcome to RealMoneyReviews.com! My name is Darin and I started this site a LONG time ago. However, this site has not always been like this.

You see, I once was naive thinking it would be an awesome idea to start a review site for really crappy information products and services pertaining to making money online. At the time, I was relatively pretty young; only 18 as a matter of fact. That was almost 3 years ago. At the time, I may have been very much like you, starting to look for ways to make money on the internet.

I came across site after site telling me that I could make a fortune online by taking online surveys or doing data entry work. It seemed to be too good to be true, but I fell for it anyways. What a waste of time and money. People still haven’t quite figured out that online surveys and “data entry” just do not cut it. If you were looking into these two methods to make money online, forget it! It’s not worth the time or investment.

Then I came across affiliate marketing. I read a book by Rosalind Gardner entitled The Super Affiliate Handbook. Now, if you’re a COMPLETE newbie to affiliate marketing, it’s a good, long read and really does cover all of the basics. Don’t expect to find any super powerful marketing tips in there though. Leave those tips for this blog! But for $47, it’s not too terribly bad for the complete beginner. If you want all of the basics in one resource, purchase it if you want. I’m sure you can find all of the same information doing a little more research on your own, but if you want to save some time, then go for it. I just wouldn’t recommend it to anybody that already knows the basics of affiliate marketing.

Basically, I applied some of those tips into the first version of this website (now we’re on version 3). I made a review based site on the topic of making money on the internet. I was definitely in selling mode at the time. I talked up every product I could find (online survey sites, data entry, some worthless ebooks, etc.), just hoping to make a quick buck. I had two problems in this approach: I treated my readers as morons thinking they would buy into my hype. My second problem: I don’t even know if I even had any readers. My site was simply not getting any traffic. That’s a big issue when it comes to making money online. You need visitors if you even hope to earn a dime.

A few months passed and I wasn’t making any money. I needed to learn more. I was a little bit frustrated with this whole online business thing, but I didn’t give up completely. I moved on to version 2 of this site (remember, we’re now on version 3). I applied a few more tips I learned along the way from various ebooks and other online resourced. I learned that content was very important to gaining visitors to my website. I found out that I could reprint articles from article directories for free and post them on my site. I also maintained my own money making opportunities page, but still promoted the same crappy products, hyping them up so my visitors would buy. I also learned about Google Adsense and incorporated that into my site. I signed up with Bravenet for a free newsletter tool to gain subscribers, and learned that I needed to get people to link to my site, so I participated in hundreds of link exchanges. I spend a good couple months marketing the site in this way. I made it to page two on Google for “make money on the internet”. Awesome I thought, but for about 2 years I only made maybe $400-500 off of this site. After marketing it for a couple months, I quit.

Now I’m back, but this time I know what approach to take. I’m no longer going to write content solely for the search engines, but for my readers as well; good quality content. I’m not going to reprint articles! Duplicate content sucks and Google hates it. No more trying to promote really crappy products and opportunities to “get rich quick”. I want to give my readers something that they want to come back to and learn from. If I promote a product, I want to make sure it is beneficial and works and not just something that everybody already knows about. I want to provide free tools and services for my readers (I am a programmer and I love it!). And last but not least, I do want to make some money; however, this site will not be used to make the bulk of my income. I just want to share some honest tips with my readers on how to make money using the internet. Tips and ideas that work for me and hopefully for you too.

Enjoy and feel free to drop me comments at any time!

-Darin