Welcome young grasshopper, to the dojo of webmaster psychology. Here we will hone your skills until you are a blackbelt at acquiring links all over the web.
Everyone knows that the more connected you are, the higher your page will rank (and the more traffic you will get.) The more traffic you get, the more money you earn. So let’s start at the beginning: how does one “get connected”? How does one convince others to link to them for free?
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if your fellow webmasters (or “competitors”, as the case may be) voluntarily linked to your site?
My friend Michael makes an average of $370 per day on his blog. That’s an annualized income of $133,200 from blogging. I’ll leave out his last name so that I don’t violate his Adsense ‘Terms of Service’. ( For those who don’t know, it is against Google policy to directly discuss one’s Adsense earnings for a particular site ). The other day I sat down for lunch with Michael and asked him for his story: In a little more than 18 months, he went from earning less than $1/day to quitting his day job, and building a successful site.
Love it or hate it, Digg.com is a massive force in driving web-traffic. The well-known “Digg Effect” has put websites permanently on the map by bringing thousands of new viewers to web-pages overnight. (The ‘effect’ has also crashed many a server with its often-overwhelming tsunami of visitors). Long gone are the days when a simple “Digg This” could land a story on the front page. Today’s masters of Digg employ social-networking strategies to leverage submissions and gain access to the ultimate prize: that short-lived spot on Digg’s front page.
If you’re a WordPress user, this is something you can do in the next 3 minutes that can radically improve your average pageviews per visit. Click on any article in this site, and you’ll probably see a grey box down at the bottom of the page. There are lots of “Related Posts” plugins you can use, including the original 
Every first-time web publisher wonders “How much will I make with AdSense”. While the somewhat discouraging answer may be, “Beer Money” (or less, depending on your taste for beer), it’s important to keep in mind that there are those who generate astronomical amounts of advertising revenue with their sites.
