Resources for getting started with passive online income on a budget.

[Sean]

This is adapted from a recent email conversation with my friend Mike.  If you want to get started earning passive income online, and don't have much of a budget to kick things off, here are a bunch of resources to use that are cheap or free:

Hosting:
All the major hosting companies offer big discounts for buying a year or two of service in advance.  If you have a couple hundred bucks to get started with, then I'd check out IX Hosting.  IX is unique in that they include free static IP addresses with several of their plans, along with unlimited addon domains.  Both are key for this business.

If you're really getting started on a shoestring, though, you'll probably have to go month-to-month with your hosting.  If that's the case, then there's really only one choice: Host Gator.  They're the only reputable host that doesn't charge an outrageous startup fee for month-to-month hosting.  They also offer unlimited addon domains.  No free static IPs, but that's not a big deal when you're just starting out.  And I've heard nothing but good things from their customers.

Keyword Research
For keyword research, I use wordtracker's free version to get traffic amounts.  It's also a good tool for finding related keywords on a subject:  http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com.

To find advertiser interest, Use Google's adwords tool.  Be sure to show the "estimated average cpc" column, plug in $100 for the "maximum CPC bid amount," and sort by the cpc column to get an idea of how much advertisers are paying.  (These figures are HIGHLY inaccurate and tend to greatly overstate your earnings potential, but they're good for measuring relative worth.)

To estimate competition, for a keyword, I just use Google itself.  Search for the keyword in quotes and see how many pages come up.  The lower the better.  50k is about the cutoff point for whether it's worth pursuing a keyword with this method or not.

Finally, for link building, start with http://goarticles.com and http://ezinearticles.com.  Publish articles there on your topic with backlinks to your site. 

Also check out http://courtneytuttle.com/ - lots of great info there on SEO and link building.  I'll also be writing a lot more about it on http://milliondollardime.com, so be sure to check out the blog from time to time.  Or better yet, sign up for the RSS feed or email updates.

Publishing
I recommend Wordpress as a publishing platform, even if you're not doing the blog format.  It has tons of plugins for SEO and such that make life easier, and it's pretty easy to use and customize.

Down the Line
If and when you put together a bit more of a budget to work with, then I strongly recommend you sign up for Super Apprentice.  Its $97 monthly fee may seem high, but I assure you it's worth every penny and more.  Its built-in link-building tools alone are more than worth it, as evidenced by the fact that there are a number of sites out there now charging more than $97 a month for this service alone.  And it offers a lot more goodies that will save you a huge amount of time, trust me.  And isn't that what getting into this business is really all about?  Having your time to yourself?

Stick Together
Last but not least, be sure to frequent these boards and let us know how things are going.  I'm personally happy to answer whatever questions you might have.  Good luck!
 

[Sean]

One more thing - when researching keyword competition, it can also be useful to search for pages that have your keyword in the title or an anchor.  In Google, just search for intitle:"my keyword" and/or inanchor:"keyword".

Google places heavy emphasis on keywords in titles and anchors, so this can be a good acid test for keywords that seem promising, but appear to have a bit more competition than you'd like.  Typically I'll check these for keywords that have competition in the 50k-100k range.

[Mike]

So much for changing the names to protect the innocent... so I might as well continue with some follow-up questions and comments here (though possibly off-topic enough to start some new threads):

1) Do you happen to know what search engine Wordtracker's free version bases their results on, and if it's returning number of searches per day, or...?  I ask because they had no info about this in their FAQ, and I sometimes get conflicting results between Wordtracker and the Search Volume columns in Google's Adwords tool.

2) Do you have some more tips on how to get started well with Google Adsense?  I also mean stuff that they don't talk about in their FAQ, like if there are particular pitfalls to avoid in relation to site content, page-rank and advertiser interest?

Comments:
- So far HostGator is great and has several site control panel tools that along with their high storage and bandwidth capacities I'm finding very useful and more than worth the price.
- The Courtney Tuttle site does have a ton of useful and easily digestible information.  Her WordPress SEO templates are great starting points for creating your own templates after making some alterations.
- And so you must deduce that I also find WordPress to be a great publishing platform that can save you a ton of effort even if you can build a site from scratch with your own bare hands.

[Sean]

Hey, I didn't tell them it was THAT Mike.  You let that cat out of the bag, bro

RE: your questions:

1) Wordtracker uses aggregate results from several search engines, including Google, MSN, and Yahoo.  Its numbers shouldn't be taken literally because they're based on random samples, so they're not always accurate.  Especially for small niches, they can be skewed by one guy in Saskatoone doing a bunch of searches on any one day.  Their numbers are more useful for relative comparisons between keywords than absolute metrics.

I saw this a few months ago: there was one guy in Tawas, Michigan that was setting up a new business and wanted to figure out how to do check processing.  So he searched "Tawas check processing" and every possible variant you could think of.  Of course this just happened to occur while wordtracker was doing its sampling, so it looked like "tawas check procesing" was a really hot keyword when it wasn't.  And of course there were no sites dedicated to check processing in Tawas, Michigan, so it looked like there was very little competition.

The result:  www.tawas-check-processing.com, tawascheckprocessing.com, creditcards.lovetoknow.com/Tawas_Credit_Card_Processing, and many other me-too sites popped up a couple of days later.  Most are now defunct as they realized that there wasn't really much of a market after all.  Funny stuff. 

By the way, Google's internal numbers are notoriously inaccurate.  Again, use them for relative comparisons.

2) The only real pitfall with Adsense is not to click on your own ads, because they're quite zealous about tracking that stuff.  But I think you need to separate adsense from getting search rankings in general.  Adsense is not the only way to profit from your traffic after all.

There are some pitfalls with SEO - the Court blog is a good place to learn about them, but basically it boils down to not looking like a spammer.  So no links from irrelevant sites, no sudden additions of 50 million links, no language that spammers and huckster commonly use, etc.  Most of it is common sense.

One thing that she said that rings true is that a lot of people over-complicate thing unnecessarily.  95% of it boils down to: 1) Keep adding content, and 2) keep getting links.

Re: your comments - glad you like Hostgator.  They really are an excellent deal.  And Wordpress is great, not just because it's such a huge timesaver, but because it's easy to hack if and when you do want to change something.

Plus Court's SEO themes alone make it worth it.  You might have noticed that the mdd blog theme is based on one of them - I just mucked with the colors and graphics a bit.

[David]

Hi all,
Just thought I'd drop a line - I'm trying to get started in this passive income business, now that I'm tired of hearing Sean's stories of success and contrasting that with how much I hate getting up early to go to work.  I'm working on selling a car so I can roll that cash into startup capital for SuperApprentice.  Hopefully it will pass smog soon... 
Mike, are you trying to do this without SA?  How is that going?

[Sean]

Welcome aboard.  I'm hoping to get a project going soon where we can leverage some of our work by interlinking and such, but I have more research to do before I can get it going.  In the meantime, post your questions here.