Internet Money Making Idea
Finding a Solid Online Passive Income Opportunity
In my last post on making money online, I touched on the basic principles behind what makes a site subject profitable. To review in brief, those are:
- Not too many existing pages on the subject (Supply).
- Good search volume (Demand).
- Lots of advertisers for the topic (Demand for your audience).
As you can see, the concept boils down to the most basic of economic concepts: supply and demand. If you’re selling a product, those two are all you need to know. But when giving away free information in exchange for ad revenue, things are a little different. Your product is not the information you provide, it’s your audience. Your customers are not your readers, they’re your advertisers.
This concept is absolutely critical to your success if you intend to make money from advertising. Gathering an audience and providing fun content is all well and good, but you have to ask yourself: Do advertisers want to reach your audience? If the answer is no, then you’re not going to make any money from advertising.
Failure to understand this concept is the reason why so many popular sites go under. They may have gathered lots of readers, but if those readers aren’t buyers, then no on will pay to advertise to them.
Recognizing a Good Passive Income Opportunity
To understand how this works, put yourself in the shoes of an advertiser. What sort of audience do you want to reach? It should be easy to see that advertisers want to put their ads in front of the people that are most likely buy the product or service they’re offering. Advertisers will pay big premiums to have their ads put in front of people who want to buy something right now. So if you want to maximize your ad revenue, that’s the sort of audience you should be looking for.
“Wallet Out” Keywords: Your Best Passive Income Opportunity
Often you can figure out if someone wants to buy something just by looking at the keyword they’re searching for. I call keywords that indicate that someone is ready to buy “Wallet Out” keywords. Let’s try it.
Pick a topic that you have a passion for. Personally, I have a passion for guitars, and have recently taken up building them myself. A site on this topic would be fun to make, so let’s consider the options.
First, who will our advertisers be? Chances are they’ll be companies that sell guitar making supplies. So let’s say you have a company that sells guitar making supplies. I’ll throw out two keywords, and you decide which searcher you would rather have see your ad:
- Guitar Making
- Guitar Parts
Now you might expect that either of these searches indicates interest in your products, and you’d be right. However, as it turns out, searcher number 2 is twice as likely to make a purchase during his web session than searcher 1. Why is that?
Passive Income Comes from Product Seekers, not Information Seekers
Someone searching for “guitar making” is likely to be looking for information about how to make guitars. He might be a guitarist who is idly learning how his favorite instrument is made, or a kid doing a research report for class. He might eventually end up deciding to try guitar making himself, and buy some parts to get started. But right now, he’s more likely to be in the learning stage than the buying stage.
Consider someone who searches for “guitar parts,” on the other hand. What is this person after? Do people go around idly searching for “guitar parts” just to do some pleasure reading? Or to research a report for school? Not likely. People who search for “guitar parts” by and large want to buy some guitar parts. Therefore, passive income from a site on “guitar parts” is likely to be significantly higher, on average, than from a site on “guitar making.” Put differently, the guitar making site will have to get a lot more traffic to earn the same amount of income.
As you can see, a slight shift in focus can create a huge shift in passive income potential.
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?
Renewable Wealth - First Revenue!
I checked my Google Adsense logs today, and saw that RenewableWealth.com got two clicks, earning me 71¢. Frankly this surprised me - the site has almost no content, and other than my posting here, I have done nothing at all to promote it. Yet already I’ve earned back almost 20% of my investment.
It appears that it won’t take long at all for me to double my stake with this method, and this tiny little trickle of revenue should continue indefinitely.
Then What?
And what will I do with the tiny sum of money it generates? Reinvest it, of course. 71¢ in a day isn’t much on its own. But imagine if I put up 100 more sites like this. Say they each averaged 71¢ a day. (A rather pessimistic estimate, actually.) That would produce $71 a day. Not enough to buy a yacht, perhaps, but that is $26,000 a year in purely passive income . Who couldn’t use that?
If You Can Do it Once…
Seeing as it only took a couple of days to put this site up, I could have 100 sites up in a few months. And if I can do 100, why not 500? Assuming they all average the same, that would produce $355 a day, or $129,575 a year on autopilot. It might take a couple of years to do this, but so what? $129,000 in passive income is enough to free you to do just about anything you want. You could take big risks without having to worry about going broke. That kind of passive income would give you the freedom to shoot for millions, or pursue your dreams, or do nothing at all, if that’s your thing.
Slay Your Inner Nay-Sayer
This method may not last forever. Heck, it probably won’t. But if you’re smart, and save, and diversify, it won’t have to.
The Inspiration
So how did I learn about this technique? There’s a little-known membership service called Super Apprentice, which is dedicated to this idea. It is run by Dave Moore, one of the very few straight-arrow, honest, real heroes of the Internet Marketing business. The service takes the concept a lot farther than I have covered in my brief discussion here, and provides a bunch of tools which automate much of the process, allowing you to publish revenue earning sites rapidly and efficiently. You should check it out if this concept appeals to you.
The service is not free, so I built RenewableWealth manually, in order to stick to the rules. It would have gone a lot faster had I been able to use the tools the Super Apprentice service provides, but c’est la vie. When I build my stake up enough to cover my membership, I’ll start using Super Apprentice to bump things up a notch. In the mean time, I’ll stick to Rule 6 and keep plugging away with what I have.
Can You Feel It?
Do you get the feeling things are starting to get exciting? I have now parlayed my dime into an actual revenue producing business. It’s on a very small scale, of course, but it can be replicated indefinitely, without a single additional dime being added. It is now self-sustaining, and it is quite literally only a matter of time before I have a million dollars. All that is required now is to work to shorten the time needed.
More importantly, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t do the same.
Inspiration and Resources for Building Financial Wealth
Whether you’re playing the game and looking for some inspiration or some help, or are brewing your own wacky idea, here is a list of resources and success stories to help you along the way.
Wacky Ideas
Every one of these ideas seemed crazy at first. Laughable, even. Who’s laughing, now?
- One Red Paperclip — A guy who traded a red paperclip for a house.
- The Million-Dollar Homepage — A kid who made a million dollars by selling space on his home page one pixel at a time.
- Plenty of Fish — A free dating site run by two people, the founder and his girlfriend, out of the founder’s apartment. They’re making over $1 million a year in Google Adsense revenue.
- How to Double Your Way to a Million — Stuart Goldsmith’s classic that inspired this site. Mr. Goldsmith has made millions over the years using the exact ideas he writes about.
Free Resources
With so many free tools available now, it’s easier than ever to make something out of nothing.
- The Gimp — A powerful free graphics editing tool. Why pay hundreds for Photoshop when the Gimp has almost all of the same functionality, and is free? All of the graphics you see on this site were created with it.
- Emacs — The best text editor in the world. This entire site was written in it. (No vi fanaticism, please.)
- Wordpress — A powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use blog publishing platform. This site is published using it.
- ReCaptcha — Having to enter distorted words to verify that you’re human is mildly annoying, but a necessary evil to stop the scourge of comment spam. ReCaptcha is a free service that actually makes use of the effort you make to decipher the words, because it uses real scans from old books that are being digitized. Thus, I ch0se ReCaptcha to provide the human verification for this site. Stop spam, and help preserve old books at the same time. What could be better?
Learn About Money
- The Motley Fool — A comprehensive financial education may be found on this site, all written with great humor and irreverence.
- Warren Buffett’s Annual Letters to Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders — Read every one of these letters from beginning to end, and you will learn more about business, the economy, the markets, and finance than in any MBA program in the world.