Passive Income Opportunities
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.
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.
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?
What is Passive Income?
Passive income is a hot term nowadays. No doubt you have encountered all kinds of hucksters touting all sorts of spurious “passive” income business opportunities online and in your daily dose of junk mail. But what is passive income, exactly?
Passive Investment Income
Passive income in brief refers to revenue earned without any active participation on your part. The most familiar forms of passive income are investment revenue - for example, interest earned by a bank account. You need do nothing more than park your money and receive your payments. Rental real estate is another oft-cited example (alhtough considering the amount of ongoing work it takes to manage rental properties, it’s hard to see what is “passive” about this income stream.)
The Best Passive Income Opportunities
The best passive income opportunities focus on investing your time, rather than capital. The key is that you must find a way to work once, but be paid many times. A novelist, for example, works a great deal up front to produce a book, but can potentially earn a lifetime of passive income in the form of royalties once it’s finished. Similarly, residual income from sales of services like credit card processing is a great way to build up a steady stream of passive income. Each sale pays over and over again for as long as the customer stays with the service.
Passive Income Online
Of course, as you might imagine, my personal favorite way to build passive income is online. I’ll write more on how to do this in my next entry.