The letter I wrote is below.  Feel free to copy it in any portion and send it to your own representative.  We must do everything in our power to defeat the bailout.

Dear Speaker Pelosi,

Last week’s defeat of the bailout of Wall Street was a victory for the American tax payer.  You know well that the overwhelming majority of the American people, more than 90%, are dead-set opposed to any bailout of any kind.  Recall that you and your colleagues are supposed to represent the will of the people, not defy it.

The Senate’s passage of essentially the same bill is a major disappointment, and indicative more of the fact that not all of them are up for reelection than anything else.

It would be the height of arrogance to assume you know better than the people you have been elected to represent.  The drafters of this bill are asking for $10,000 from every American family to prop up the corporate hogs that got us into this mess in the first place.

Recall the dire predictions made when the first request for a bailout was made: the sky will fall overnight if we don’t pass this bill right now!  Many days have passed.  The sky has not fallen.  Nor will it.

In a free market, businesses must be allowed to fail if the market is to remain healthy.  A massive deleveraging, while painful, is exactly what this country needs. Our over-reliance on easy credit and massive debt has pushed the entire country to the verge of bankruptcy.  We need to take our medicine and pay the piper now - delaying it will only make it worse in the end.  Yet proponents of this disatrous bill are only asking us to go still further into debt.  You must not allow this to happen.

Please do not succumb to the pressure from Wall Street hogs and bankers with ulterior motives.  You know the right thing to do: follow the will of the people.  And the people say, NO BAILOUT.  Period.

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.

I will soon announce my next investment from the stake. Pulling in a stream of passive income is lovely, but that $63 needs to be put back to work. Stay tuned.

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.

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.

1. Not too many existing pages on the subject (Supply).
2. Good search volume (Demand).
3. 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:

1. Guitar Making
2. 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.

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.

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:

1. People are searching for it.
2. There is not a lot of information out there on it (Read: Not many competing pages).
3. 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!

The Million-Dollar Dime Game Distilled

As you know, I write a number of general articles on wealth building, the economy, politics, and other related topics. For those who just want to track my personal progress toward a million dollars, though, there’s a new “Track Sean’s Progress” link on the top menu-bar, which will be limited to progress updates for the game itself.

I hope these new additions will help build your motivation to try the game yourself.

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?