Building Wealth Online
I was on vacation, but my money kept working
So I just got back from a nice vacation back home to Mississippi. I visited family and friends, went to my cousin’s wedding, went fishing, and had myself an all-around great time.
Meanwhile, my passive income projects kept plugging away, unconcerned with my absence. In fact, earnings from Renewable Wealth had a big jump — so big that I almost couldn’t believe the totals when I added them up. I had to re-check the figures two or three times to be sure.
During my month off, my stake more than tripled, to $210.10! It all came from advertising earnings from this site and RenewableWealth.com — 100% passive income. My humble little dime has been multiplied precisely 2100 times, in just a few short months.
My stake is starting to grow to the point where it’s time to consider opening a separate bank account for it, so that I can add interest to my collection of income streams. It will also serve to help keep up the barrier between my stake and all my other finances. I know that as the stake starts to grow, it will be more and more tempting to dip into it for one reason or another. Better to separate it completely, and keep it working toward my goal.
I’ll be posting the latest complete accounting of advertising earnings in the reports section soon, so you can see how revenues have slowly crept up as more people have found my sites.
In the meantime, have you started the game, yet? If not, there’s no better day than today.
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.
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!