Former science teacher Steve Spangler has shown many Internet gurus how to really earn money online. His business achieves $10m a year without using advertising. Current thinking within many Internet “expert” circles is that there is so much information online that advertising is the only real way to grab attention.

Because of this there is a whole “guru world” all about pay per click advertising and Google AdWords helping you get the best return on your advertising spend. But Steve Spangler doesn’t advertise and he gets almost all of his business – some 94% of it – direct from search engines.

His business, Steve Spangler Science, sells products that make science fun for children. He is top of the search engines for a host of keywords thanks to using good, old-fashioned techniques. None of the modern, fancy search engine optimisation techniques for him. Instead, all he does is exactly what Google advises us all to do – produce web pages for people.

This means he has tons of content – he writes a blog that helps attract traffic, for instance. Then simple thinks like having meaningful links which explain what they are about, rather than say “click here”. That is helpful to human readers, but also helps his search engine rankings. The use of video has also boosted traffic via search engines, getting other people blogging about Steve’s science experiments.

What this example shows us – and which is detailed in Inc Magazine – is that search engine success is possible. All you need is content and concentrate on human readers. Do that and you could, like Steve, save yourself a huge packet on advertising. But don’t tell Google….!