He was the youngest prosecutor in Norwalk, Conn. He worked for the NFL and was an analyst on Court TV.

But if you Google Matt Couloute, the first thing that comes up is: Liarscheatersrus.com, a site that warns women web-surfers about men who lie and cheat in their personal relationships.

“It’s unfortunate,” said Couloute, as he walked in front of the Federal Courthouse in downtown Manhattan. “Anyone can go online and do that to somebody.”

I got this from here

With unemployment stuck above 9% and the gap between the rich and the poor widening with each fiscal year, Americans are doing whatever they can to make money. Fortunately, a wonderful little tool called the Internet is making it easier than ever for budding entrepreneurs to get their start. If you want to make money in today’s broken economy without resorting to crime or selling your internal organs, all you need is a little creativity, patience and ingenuity. Although you might not end up as the next Mark Zuckerberg, you might make some cash – potentially, a lot of it. Here are 10 ways to get started.

1. Promote Products Online

Whether you create a website of your own, or use one of the countless website design tools or social media sites that have flooded the Internet, you can promote other peoples’ products to earn a piece of the profits. Think of a product or niche that truly interests you and come up with a unique idea, even if that niche is quite popular. A site does not have to be particularly complicated to generate sales. For example, this site on online payday loan lenders simply offers a few pieces of valuable finance related content and a simple “Need a Loan” call to action box.

2. Sell Items on eBay

If you’re like most Americans, odds are good that you have a lot of “useless junk” collecting dust in your attic, basement and garage. Just because you no longer have a use for these items doesn’t mean that others won’t. Using the power of the internet, you can liquidate these items into real cash. eBay continues to charge low fees to sellers, and services like PayPal make it easy to get your money securely and quickly.

3. Buy AND Sell Items on eBay

Once you get a feel for eBay’s economy, you may find yourself spotting good deals, especially when auctions are scheduled to end at off-hours (early in the workday, late at night, etc.). By understanding how much a particular item will normally sell for on eBay, you can start buying low and selling high. Just be sure to take factors such as fees and shipping costs into account when you’re calculating your profit margins. You can aim for large profits on fewer items or amp up your volume while accepting smaller margins, depending on how much time you’re willing to invest.

4. Play Diablo 3

Blizzard, the company responsible for the 10-million-subscriber online game World of Warcraft, will start selling the hotly anticipated Diablo III in early 2012. How could this make you money? The premise of Diablo is simple – you kill monsters and collect virtual “loot” such as armor and weapons. What’s different about Diablo III from previous installments is that it will feature a real-money, in-game auction house. In other words, you’ll be able to sell the virtual items you collect in the game for actual cash, with prices dictated entirely by demand. This should be a great way to get your gaming fix while making some dough on the side.

5. Drop Shipping

Drop shipping allows you to set up an online store in order to sell real, physical goods without keeping a single piece of inventory. How? As a drop shipper, you advertise and sell whatever products you like. When you receive an order, you’ll transfer it to the distributor or manufacturer, who will then send the item directly to your customer complete with packaging that makes the item look like it’s coming directly from you. Meanwhile, you receive a cut of the profits. Your only overhead is the maintenance of your own site, and any money you pump into advertising.

6. Participate in Online Surveys

They may be tedious, but online surveys and studies do result in an actual paycheck. Although it may be difficult to find steady “work” when using this method, you may get lucky and generate up to $100 for just an hour of time. Most surveys will pay somewhere in the range of $5 to $10, but if you’re just surfing the internet aimlessly anyways, you might as well get paid in the process.

7. Sell Your Photographs

With digital SLRs rapidly dropping in price and consumer-grade digital cameras exceeding 16 megapixels, the tools of the trade for amateur photographers are far cheaper than they used to be. If you enjoy taking pictures of anything from scenery to animals to people going through their daily routines, your photos could be worth plenty of money online. Websites like Shutterstock.com are available for photo submissions. If they accept your images, they’ll pay you about 25 cents each time one of their members downloads it. That can add up very quickly if you have a large photo library and high quality images.

8. Work as a Secret Shopper

Although it may sound too good to be true, many companies pay you to shop. The process is simple: you sign up with a secret shopping agency and go on an “undercover” shopping spree. After your consumerist jaunt, you’ll report back on your experience. Was the salesperson helpful? Was the food delicious? These are the types of questions you’ll answer as a secret shopper. This one falls more under the “occasional work” category than the “full-time living” one, unless you’re exceptionally lucky.

9. Sell Food on the Street

Sound lowbrow? It’s not. Food carts and food trucks are very much in style these days, and they can generate considerable profits for their owners if the food is good, the advertising is catchy and the locations are appropriate. Although you will need to take care of some initial concerns such as equipment, licensing and staffing, it’s possible to start very small while still making money. Something along the lines of a hot dog cart positioned outside of a popular local bar should give you some ideas.

10. Sell T-Shirts

People seem to love catchy, funny, novelty t-shirt no matter the quality of the economy. If you can come up with a few hilarious slogans and graphics, you could turn it into a business by contacting sites like CafePress.com. It’s also possible to sell t-shirts and other merchandise in person, especially if you live in a sports-minded college town where students will do just about anything to support their team.

There is one problem that has been bothering me the last couple years, I’ve done my best to ignore it but today it got the best of me. It’s all these search engine optimization gurus that find their clients, not by way of the search engines, but by way of e-mail spam and cold calling.

You send out an e-mail explaining to me that 3,600 people searched for my services last month. Well I am telling you that 11,100,000 people searched for SEO last month. By spending your time cold calling me and sending out spam emails you are missing out on 11,100,000 people who are looking for you.

Have you guys not noticed yet that most of the people you are calling do not want to talk to you, and most your emails go unanswered? 673,000 searched for search engine optimization last month, and if that keyword is too hard for you Atlanta search engine optimization got 1,900 searches last month.

Now according to your own math, if I can get one client for $1,800.00 per month, that will more than pay for your services every month. You guys go on to tell me that I will get at least one client per month from your services. I want you to notice the word at least
because this makes me believe it could be a lot more. Since you guys not do any web design evaluations for that price we’ll say that a nice looking site should be able to get at least 2 or 3 clients per month.

This means that if one client can get you $1,800.00 per month then three clients can get you $5,400.00 per month. The time you’re spending cold calling would be better spent doing exactly what you’re telling your clients they needs to be doing. If you take it a step further and find the 50 biggest cities in the United States and rank for those 50 cities you should be able to…well you get the idea.

Your math is correct, your problem is you are afraid to do what you are telling your clients they need to be doing.

I don’t believe your intentions are to do anybody wrong but here’s what’s going to happen. It’s going to take so much time to find new clients due to time spent begging that you’re not going to have the time to put into getting the clients site ranked.

My way you are already doing that. You are already ranking your website. You’ve already got the tools in place. You already know what you need to do.

Best of all it takes less effort to close a job because they found your site by way of the search engines. So they already know you know what you are doing.

And of course you do, because that is how you make your living.

Let’s suppose you have a big site launch coming up, or your boss has asked you to begin marketing one of the company’s sites. You know you’ll need to build a ton of links, so you get to work on some research. And behold, you find several sites will to build 1,000 “high-quality” links to your website for the low price of $19.95. Sounds like quite a deal, right? You go out of pocket for those 1,000 links, and sit back waiting for all that juice to come flowing to your site. You’ll be ranking number one in the SERPs in no time.

If that scenario sounds familiar, you might have a few things to learn about link building. Sure, you’ll probably get those 1,000 links as promised. But where will they come from? If you’re lucky, they’ll be generated by an army of robots spamming blog comments and forums for a handful of no-follow, no-worth links. If you’re unlucky, they’ll come from banned or bad neighborhood link farms, and you’ll have a bit of explaining to do when your company’s site gets penalized by search engines.

Good Links are Hard to Find

It’s natural to go after the low-hanging fruit links, the ones that you can just buy and watch flow in. And don’t think for a second that Google isn’t on to the idea. When a page of your site gets a link from another high quality site, Google thinks of the link as a vote. The site, in essence, has voted for your site as being a relevant source of information for [insert anchor text]. For example, I might link out to a site using an anchor text like wireless internet review, which means that I’m actually saying the page I’m linking to is a good source for information on, you guessed it, wireless internet reviews.

But links get a little more complicated. Think of every link as having two parts of value that it can pass — juice and anchor text. To keep things simple, a link passing juice means that it’s not redirected, it’s not marked with a no-follow attribute within the code, and it passes general value to a site, independent of the anchor text. This is why, in some cases, getting a link with the anchor text “click here” or even “this site” can still be valuable, depending on the source.

On the other hand, links pass anchor text, sometimes even independently of juice. In this way, solid link building campaigns can include some no-follow links that, once again depending on the quality of the source, could still pass some keyword value. But all the technical stuff aside, good links are hard to find because they are:

• imbed within relevant and well-written content
• coming from a site with authority and value
• actually seen (meaning the page on which the link appears does get traffic)
• relevant on both ends

If both the linking site and the site receiving the link share the same niche, there’s a good chance that the link anchor text will seem relevant to both sites. In some industries, you’re going to have a very hard time convincing potential competitors to promote your sites. But in most others, you just have to get a little creative.

How to Build Backlinks to Your Site – Anchor Text

No-follow and comment links get a lot of bad press. In truth, no proper link building campaign is complete without a wide variety of low-quality links. If you are actually building links, you need to have some low-quality ones coming in for everything to look natural. This is the same concept as with your anchor text, where having 1,000 links coming in with the same anchor text looks fishy, while a nice mixture of anchor text looks fine. Once again using “wireless internet review” as an example, think of some varieties that still carry the same general relevance:

• reviews of wireless internet
• wireless internet comparison
• wireless internet review 2011
• review wireless internet services
• wireless internet reviews

All five of our above ideas will still suggest relevancy for the original anchor text, while making your link building campaign look natural. Don’t be afraid to mix up anchor text in your link campaign. Doing so can’t hurt your SEO as much as it can help it.

How to Build Backlinks to Your Site – Sources

Now that you understand anchor text, let’s talk about where you’re actually getting those links, starting with what Google wants you to do. Link bait is a broad term used to describe content (whether it’s an article, video, widget, picture, infographic, whatever) that people link to naturally, because they find it:

• unique
• valuable
• funny
• frightening
• scholarly

There are some sites that simply thrive on link bait. For example, most news sites like CNN and MSNBC will receive hundreds of links per day because they publish relevant news articles that people care about. Besides being shared endlessly on Facebook and Twitter, they appear on secondary news sources that want to republish the story. The main idea behind link bait is to create value, controversy, or interest. SEOMoz.org provides a great article on how to create link bait.

One of the most popular ways to build links is through guest posting. This is because, if done right, it’s a win/win situation for both the link builder and the blog owner. The link builder gets the link they so desperately seek, and the blog owner gets some free, and hopefully valuable, content. The best way to guest post is within your own niche, asking your contacts if they would be willing to feature a post you’ve written on their blog. You can do guest post exchanges, but having too many reciprocal links can dilute the value of your links. Simply offer something of value, and you should eventually be able to build some high quality links.

Next, we have the low-hanging fruit like directories, article submission sites, blog comments, and some social media. These are generally low quality links, although submitting to the Yahoo! Directory isn’t a bad idea. Treat directories as a way to build some backlink variety, but nothing more. Submission sites like Ezine can be a place to dump low-quality content decaying on your hard drive to target some SEO keywords, but shouldn’t form your overall strategy.

If you choose to comment on others’ blogs and include a link back to your site, don’t spam. Spam doesn’t do anyone any good. Just like with forums, add value to the conversation or don’t bother. Blog owners are fairly relaxed about including links in comments if you contribute something valuable. Some bloggers even use WordPress plugins like CommentLuv to make sure you get some value from commenting.

If you build a high quality site with relevant and valuable content, the links will eventually come. While low-quality links have always been a strategy for the short-term, good links come only with time and dedication. Even guest posting takes an enormous amount of time and provides significant value, so it’s worth using as a primary link building strategy. But in the end, creating valuable content on your own site is the best way to build links, even if it’s a tough pill to swallow.

Most people believe their website needs to be perfect before it goes live, but my question is, perfect from whose perspective?

I had a lady the other day that was driving my employees crazy!

Every time they would get the website like she wanted, she would come back with another thousand changes, most conflicting with what they had already given us.  I was forced to get involved. And I say forced, because if I am not interested in the website, customer or topic, it’s really difficult for me to care one way or the other how the site turns out. All that matters is that the customer is happy, and we get paid. I am sorry but that’s just me, but I’ve got to pay the bills.

You see, I believe it is the fine tuning and tweaking that goes into the offer, business model, and website that will make or break a business.

I am talking about the tweaking and fine tuning that can only be done after the site has gone live. When a business launches there should be a group of people driving traffic to the site, analyzing how that traffic reacted to the site, and then tweaking, and fine tuning that website before running another group of test.

The problem is that a lot of companies do not want to be associated with an inferior product or one that is lacking in capabilities and the ones that don’t care about their credibility normally don’t have the money for the testing, tweaking and fine tuning that has to been done daily forever.

I’ve been making my living online for the past 10 years and I can tell you, that without the desire and dedication to push a project through, it would be difficult to start a business from nothing with nothing and it become a success.

The desire that motivated me to start, build and continue running Geeks on Steroids has always been money. The problem is that as the need for money declines you begin looking in what areas your time would be best spent, and normally fighting a new start up isn’t the best use of time.

It’s the reason I started this project and dropped the ball.

At this moment and time I do not have the need, time or desire to start a new project. The amount of time it takes to start making money with a new business could be better spent working with one of my older already established businesses.

However as I write this I am reminded of one business I would be interested in, just for fun.

Here lately (lately being for about the last year or so) I’ve been getting bombarded by these so-called local SEO gurus.

Their idea is, you can find people to market your business to off-line, in your local area and tell them how great the online world is. From there you sell them an SEO package worth thousands of dollars.

My problem with this is that if you knew what you were doing you would be marketing your business online and not offline.

You see, small business owners are not stupid.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got no doubt that with all the professionally written scripts and emails going around these guys can get some small business owners interested, and even sell a couple. But the majority of small business owners will go online and do some research first.

While these guys are killing themselves running around educating potential victims, I’d like to go online and wait to educate that person before they get ripped off. As the lazy local SEO rolls out of the bed, I am sitting online researching, studying, watching and learning about them. While they are meeting potential victims at local breakfast, lunch, and dinner places, I am buying domain names and building websites. By the time they’ve cold called 200 people to get the first person to agree to meet them, I’ve already gotten their spam email, written and article about them and ranked for their name.

They get the local business all excited about the online adventure and when that business owner gets his credit card in his hand and goes online too make that purchase he’s blocked by my site.

My only problem is I have no desire to do SEO, Outsource SEO or Consult with people.   

But done correctly I think I could get a ton of traffic to the site. I guess you could build a website that reviews SEO’s and enforces the good ones and downgrades the bad ones. You could have a back office that allowed the good SEO’s to write articles and leave comments on articles but have it invitation only.

Other words, you would need three people to vouch for you before you could become a member of the site. Once you became a member you would have access to all kinds of free tools, as well as the ability to write blog post that would show on the site under your name or carry on private chats that are not shown to the outside world. You would also have access to a staff of professional SEO’s as well as SEO and conversion tools.

And while all these tools will make the site a home away from home for most SEO’s the fact that the website is getting thousands of visitors per day who are looking for SEO’s will make it a must have for anyone looking to start an SEO business.