99.99% of the stuff people are trying to sell on those forums is crap, but there's lots of general information there that's very good. BHW's "Making Money" section has a tonne of stickied topics under each subsection with good info.
The advantage of having web dev/sysadmin skills is that you can take a method people are running manually (and probably even example code that's floating around) and scale it easily to 100x what they're doing. You don't have to innovate, you just have to automate and scale.
Be careful if you use shady methods. If the product owner realises what you're doing, they'll kill your account and refuse to pay the middleman who will refuse to pay you. :)
If you meet/befriend other people in IM and establish that you're not a noob, doors will be opened to better offers/products and better terms for payment e.g., being paid three days after the end of the week ("net 3") instead of seven days ("net 7").
You can get $75 USD free credit when you register on Adwords (http://adwords.google.com). After a few days, you'll be able to decrease your bids on keywords to $0.01, so $75 = 7,500 people clicking through to your landing page/offer. Unless your conversion rate is atrocious, you'll make back far more than $75. This isn't a bad place to start experimenting. SEO works, too, but it's more of a "long haul" thing. PPC advertising gets you traffic right now, but you have to be careful that it doesn't annihilate your profit margins.
Wow, thanks for this reply, it's exactly the kind of info I was looking for. I've checked out those forums and most seem to have a great deal of noise, however, the stickies you mentioned in BHW do have a lot of really useful information to get started.
If you can filter out the noise, you can find a few gems. I've had good luck with taking existing promotion methods (which everyone and their brother are doing) and putting a unique twist on them.
If you can think outside the box, you can do really well.
Making the first $10/day is extremely hard. Once you hit $10/day, getting to $100/day is pretty easy. Then $1000/day... :)
The latter. You'll generally see strategies based around a certain facet of internet advertising (buy PPC ad placement, do SEO, follow people on Twitter discussing the item/niche, etc.), but few people will combine them or leverage them in new and interesting ways.
Yeah, I understood that. I don't blog and personally think blogging is mostly a waste of time (time spent writing = time not making money), but I basically explained the major concepts behind what I've spent the greater part of 2010 doing. Sorry if I caused any confusion.
