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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.

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?

Yeah, that should do it.  The URL channels work fine - they're about 95% of what I use.  I use the custom ones to track things like different ad sizes and colors.

I got a mysterious click that I can't place.  I'm wondering if it was from here.  If I add MDD to my URL channels will it show revenue sharing clicks?

Yes, it would be wrong to say that you chose the "wrong" focus.  Rather, you chose a great focus, because it exposed a search term that can get you traffic, that is easy to rank for.  Now leverage it and add content that targets it specifically.

Real-world traffic-producing keywords are great assets in and of themselves.  Even if you original keywords never earn, if they allow you to discover keywords that do, then they have still paid off with interest.

My most profitable site consists solely of "unintended" keywords from another one of my sites.  It earns 4 times as much as the original.  But at the end of the day it was the original site that got me there.

You'll find that much of your traffic comes from those "unintended" keywords.  The trick is to keep track of them, and write new pages that target them directly.  That's how you can leverage a modest earner to build a big earner.

As for getting started - no, it is not easy, and it's not fast.  Not at the beginning anyway.  It was months before I earned anything like a steady income. 

Honestly though I think that's a good thing.  We've all heard a million "get rich quick" schemes.  This is not that - nowhere near.  This is a "work at it and build up an income" scheme. Which of course is why it works.

Had another strategic question regarding my first clicks...

So, for one of my websites, for the keyword combination I was originally trying to target, I'm on search page 10, but for the keyword combination that I got my first clicks for, I'm on search page 3.  Would it be safe to say that I may have picked the wrong combination and should try to subtly refocus my site (change the homepage title, meta keywords, etc) to be aimed toward the keyword combination that worked?  In checking WordTracker my original combination had a 13 count, and the new one has a 0 count, so was this just a fluke, or should I change my site based on this new experience instead of on statistics which may not be accurate? 

I'm going to try this anyway, but I'm wondering if this sort of adjustment is a standard part of a good strategy.

If you're earning single digits you're already on your way.  I remember the great excitement of my very first click, which earned me a grand 19 cents.  It was a while before I broke the one-dollar-in-a-day mark.

Well, at the time you wrote this reply, I actually hadn't made my first cent yet, but I'd done a lot of research, picked good keywords, wrote good content, submitted articles, so it was bound to start rolling in.

Nope.  Not quite as easy as I thought it'd be, but every day I'm learning new things I can do better.  And finally something has paid off, because I finally earned my first click.  In fact, two clicks!  A whopping $0.54!  Not gonna run out and buy some fur coats just yet, but it is a relief.  I actually made page 3 of a Google search for a keyword combo that I wasn't even intending to target!  Lucky for me, as that was how I got my clicks.  Hopefully this is only the beginning.

Mike

It certainly won't hurt you.  How much it will help depends on h ow relevant Google thinks your site in general, or a particular page, is to the content being linked to.

This is to combat the tidal wave of link spam - posting irrelevant links in comments on every blog in the universe, etc.

It can't hurt (unless you do it 5000 times).  But it's no substitute for other methods.

How much of the content need be relevant though?  If I'm just writing blog posts about things that interest me, and I write enough within the post about the subject matter, shouldn't the link be valid?