How do I Get Rich?
New Forums, and Some Resources for Getting Started with Passive Income
Good news: I have just added forums to the site. I’m hoping they will encourage folks to give the game a try themselves, and share their experiences. We can learn a lot more about achieving financial independence together than any of us could alone.
I have kicked things off with a post of some resources for folks who are just getting started with passive income online. These are free or very cheap resources to help you get going on a tiny budget.
I’ve also set up a revenue sharing program for the forums. You might have seen similar programs on sites like Digital Point. In brief, you’ll be able to earn a share of ad revenue from the forums just by posting there. It’s a great way to start your stake for the Million Dollar Dime game — and there’s no need to hunt for change in the street. All you need to do is join the conversation.
I hope to see you all there.
Renewable Wealth Update, and More On Leverage
I’ve added a bunch of content to Renewable Wealth over the past few days. I had been neglecting it for a while because I was busy with other things, but even the small amount of content that was there brought in a trickle of passive income the entire time, so my stake continued growing behind the scenes.
It was never my intent for Renewable Wealth to be a static “fire-and-forget” site, though, so now that I have some time to come up for air I am adding more content. (Static sites are a great way to earn passive income online , though - we’ll be discussing them more down the line.)
There are Opportunities for Leverage Everywhere
This is a good time to mention the concept of leverage again. You see, green investing is a great interest of mine, and I have been spending a lot of time trying to shift my investment portfolio to being as close to completely green as possible without sacrificing performance.
So here I am doing all this investment research for my own portfolio, which hopefully will produce a nice return for my retirement account as well as my soul. But all of that work can be leveraged to benefit me further if I write about it and share it with others. So, that is exactly what I am doing. I am simply writing about the stocks I have chosen for my own green investment portfolio, with a brief discussion of why I chose them.
The time spent is negligible compared to the total time I have spent on this research, but it allows me to profit further from my own work in several ways: 1) More traffic to my site; 2) When having to make my case for these investments to others, I am more apt to make doubly sure my logic is sound; 3) I can get feedback form my readers which might point out flaws in my thinking; 4) I can get others involved in Green Investing, which is one more tiny contribution to the future of the planet; 5) I can connect with others in the Green Investing community. Not bad for an extra few minutes to write up research I am doing already. Now ask yourself: is there anything you spend a lot of time on that could be leveraged in this way?
Leverage Your Passions
If you have a personal passion that takes up a good chunk of your time, there’s a good chance that other people share it. Consider how you might leverage the time you spend on what you love to help you progress toward financial independence. Put up a site and share your knowledge and experiences. You’ll enjoy it, and chances are you’ll profit as well.
Hobbies that Make You Richer
If you’re like me, your spare time is precious and in short supply. We all know that there are only so many hours in the day, and there’s never enough time to do everything we want to do. So, every day, we must make choices. But even the most insignificant seeming choice can have a major effect on your wealth.
When it Come to Building Wealth, Every Choice Matters
Think over all the various activities and hobbies you love. Chances are that some of those activities make you poorer, while others actually make you richer, whether you know it or not! Here’s a brief sampling of hobbies than can help you grow wealth:
- Gardening - Growing a vegetable patch, an herb garden, or some fruit trees is fun and relaxing, and will also save you money on your grocery bills.
- Exercise - Pick your favorite kind. The health benefits cannot be overstated, and they will save you enormous sums in medical expenses over the course of your lifetime.
- Fishing - Catch a free dinner from time to time. I’ve recently taken up crabbing, myself. There’s nothing like homemade bisque, especially when you caught the crabs yourself!
- Crafts - Make your own furniture, drapes, blankets, quilts, or anything else you enjoy making. You’ll save a bunch of money, and love the stuff you make far more than anything bought in a store.
- Blogging - Most any blog with a decent readership can earn at least a little income from ad placement.
- Hiking - pick up a book on edible plants
and harvest some free food while you’re out in the field.
- Brewing - If you’re a beer lover like I am, make your own.
- Cooking - Cooking is very relaxing, and home-cooked meals are almost always cheaper than prepared foods or restaurant fare.
- Online Poker - It can be very profitable if you’re good.
This list is by no means exhaustive. Chances are you can think of many other fun things to do, that don’t feel “financial” at all, that nevertheless make you wealthier in your pocketbook as well as your soul.
Now here’s a sampling of activities that make you poorer:
- Video games - They cost money and eat up precious time. (This one is a personal weakness of mine. I am working on giving them up.)
- TV - There was a great article published recently called How to Earn a Million Dollars by Not Watching TV. Tell your cable company to shove it, and throw your TV in the trash where it belongs.
- Movie Rentals - They may be cheap, but they’re not free, and take up a lot of time.
- Eating Out - Expensive and unhealthy.
- Online Poker - Very expensive if you don’t have the skills or discipline.
Now I’m not saying you should give up every single activity that you love that also costs money. But it comes down to this — when faced with a choice about how to spend your limited free time, why not give preference to your hobbies that actually make you richer? You’ll still be doing what you love, while taking one more step on your path to personal financial freedom.
A Brief Intro to SEO, or, “How Do I Turn That into Making Easy Money Online?”
So I was talking with my buddy Serge yesterday about this project, and he was intrigued. he asked for details about how to make money online with little to no up-front investment. Serge is a professional Poker player, so he has plenty of flexibility with his time, and wants to build up some passive income to help smooth out his earnings.
Making “Easy” Money Online is Not Always So Easy
The advice is always the same: find a need and fill it. That holds true for most anything, including information - and that’s where the Internet comes in. I told Serge to find a search term that has the three magic properties for making money online:
- People are searching for it.
- There is not a lot of information out there on it (Read: Not many competing pages).
- Advertisers want to reach the people who are searching for it.
I then pointed him to some free tools like the Google Keyword Research Tool, and WordTracker’s Free Edition. He did some poking around, found a few words that seemed to fit, and said, “OK, how do I turn that into making money on the Internet?”
Sometimes I forget that not everyone is a geek like me, and some folks won’t know how to throw up a web page off the top of their heads. Super Apprentice is a great tool for making money online whether you’re a gearhead like me or not. They automate 95% of the process and little to no technical knowhow is needed to get started.
Of course it isn’t free, so I haven’t been using it for the game, but I do use it for my other projects, which earn me a very nice online income.
SEO in a Nutshell
Back to the topic at hand. The short answer to Serge’s question is to use Search Engine Optimization, a.k.a. “SEO,” to get a high ranking on search pages for the keywords you have identified, then put ads on those pages. The search engines will bring you traffic (eventually), which will earn you revenue. It’s really quite simple in principle. In practice, SEO is a complicated process, but there are great sites like this one to help you get started.
In brief, SEO is mostly about getting inbound links from other sites that have your keywords as anchors. You can do this any number of ways. Super Apprentice makes getting inbound links pretty easy, but the stake isn’t big enough to pay for it yet, so I’m sticking to other methods for the time being. More details on this to come.
The first step is to find those topics. Find the need! Then fill it, by writing some content with information on the topics. Give people what they are looking for. If you do that, the traffic will come. And with the traffic will come revenue.
Until next time!
How to Create Passive Income Online
As you’ve no doubt noticed, passive income is a major part of my wealth building strategy. Passive income in general is one of the best forms of leverage available, especially for someone with limited resources to start with. Online passive income is where the real magic is, however, as the potential for leverage is all but unlimited.
Creating Passive Income Online
Many people think that to build wealth online, you need strong technical acumen, along with serious marketing skills, and you need to build up a huge site that gets millions of visitors. The truth is that none of these is necessary, and shooting for massive traffic is rarely the right decision, at least at the outset. I prefer a different approach.
The early stages of the game are all about thinking small. That’s a good thing - it’s easier to have confidence in yourself and stick with it when your goals are modest. However, I personally believe that the entire game can be played by thinking small. In fact, that’s precisely what I intend to do.
How to Get Rich Off Pennies
I’m sure you’ve seen about a million ads and sites proclaiming near-instant wealth online. Most any regular Internet denizen has to be pretty jaded at this point. But set aside all that breathless marketing language about making millions overnight. Instead, ask yourself this: Do you think you can make a site that earns $1 per day, on average?
That seems attainable, right? You don’t need a lot of traffic to reach that goal. A few tens of visitors a day will often be sufficient to earn that much from Adsense. If you do affiliate promotion, you may need even less.
The truth is that most anyone can build a site in a day or two that will likely end up bringing in $1 a day in revenue. All that is required is for you learn a few simple techniques and put them into action. (More details on these soon.)
The Magic of the Passive Income Business
So if you can make a single $1-per-day site in a day or two, what’s there to stop you from making a hundred? Answer: Nothing at all. Just repeat the process a hundred times. It may take several months, but so what? If you own a hundred of these sites, you’ll be pulling in $100 a day, which is a passive income of $36,500. Who couldn’t use that?
And of course if you can make one hundred, then why not three hundred? This may take a couple of years, but again, so what? $300 a day equates to over $110,000 a year. Imagine if you earned a six-figure passive income online. Imagine the freedom and independence that would bring.
You may now begin to see the seeds of my plan to earn a million dollars . Build a site, collect the income, and reinvest it in more sites. My first is already up, and I have the funds for at least two more. The snowball is rolling…
So why isn’t your first site up yet?