Sections:

* The concept of residual and passive earnings

* A 3 part process to build your empire

* Choosing keywords

* Creating content

* Building links

* Expanding what works

* Living the dream

The concept of residual and passive earnings

Anyone can jump into the world of making money online, and say, make money by writing freelance articles. This is easy to get started with and anyone can sign up on various websites such as Textbroker that will let you write articles for other people and get paid to do it.

Now of course this is great and if you can crank out several dozen articles per day you can make some nice cash. But, obviously, you have to keep cranking out the articles in order to get the money rolling in.

There is another way to take an article you write and see it become profitable. Instead of selling it, you can publish it as your own and then make money from it. If you publish it on your site or on a hosted site then you can put advertising on it and make money from that article over and over again.

For example, I have an article on one of my websites that is making about 50 bucks every month using this technique. It has been doing so for the last 3 years and has brought in almost 2 thousand dollars now.

Now imagine that you had hundreds or even thousands of articles like this, maybe not all making quite so much, but all making various amounts each day. A few cents here, a few cents there, and it all starts to add up.

This is residual income. And it is mostly passive in nature, because once you have the content published and ranking in the search engines, you don’t have to do much to maintain that ranking. It generally stays pretty much where it is unless it is an ultra competitive niche you have chosen.

Residual income. Passive income. You do the work, and the money starts to trickle in each day. You work harder, and more money trickles in. You are building an empire. Some day you will pause, and the money will just keep flowing in, whether you do any work or not. That is the power of passive income.

So much nicer than having to work! The trick is that you do have to work, and work hard, but it is for yourself, and for your own web property.

A 3 part process to build your empire

So what do you need to do? Well you need a website. Or, you can borrow one. In fact, you can use a free platform like Blogger.com or even Hubpages.com and publish your stuff on those sites and do quite well. They are free platforms to use and they are very easy to get started with but you do not actually own the blog. Those companies own your blog but you can still put ads on them and even sell products and do just fine. They do not really have any interest in shutting your website down for no reason, even though they could. They make money when you make money.

Now you can also go buy your own unique URL and get some hosting and set up your own website or blog but that is a bit beyond the scope of this article. If you want to do that there is a ton of free information out there on how to do so. It is a lot easier these days to do this now. Basically anyone can go to Godaddy.com with a credit card and for less than a hundred bucks you can get a unique URL, a year of hosting, and Godaddy will even install Wordpress on your site for free at the push of one button. It really is very simple to do and that company in particular has strong phone support and can talk any beginner through the process of getting a site up and running.

So it is a 3 part gig to achieve passive income: choosing keywords, creating content, and building links. Let’s take a look at all 3.

Choosing keywords

I struggled with this for years. In fact, I wasted an awful lot of time trying to make money by targeting the wrong keywords. You can do a lot of research on keywords and how much money they can make you with the Google keyword tool. Now the problem that I had is that I did not know what to go after. Should I target the valuable keywords that made a lot of money, but were super competitive? Or should I go for the long tail? So for the first few years of my online journey, I did a lot of hit and miss stuff. I ended up with maybe about a hundred posts after 2 years, with only 2 or 3 of them making any money each day. It was pretty pathetic really, for all the work I had put in.

Later on I learned a system for being able to pick profitable keywords. This was a system that not only allowed you to gauge the income potential of certain keywords, but also to determine if that keyword was too competitive to try and tackle and rank for. So after learning this system, I could now choose a bunch of keywords, then narrow it down to the profitable ones, and then narrow it down further to words that were easy to rank for and not too competitive. Needless to say, I spent money to learn this system, and I would gladly pay that money over again.

Unbelievably, you can learn this system and a whole lot more for only a buck. If you like, you can check it out over at the keyword academy. They let you do a 30 day test drive for a dollar, and then after that it goes up to something like thirty bucks per month. I still subscribe for that price and it more than pays for itself. Since joining there my income has shot up from about $250 per month to over $500 per month now and still rising.

Bottom line: don’t waste time doing any of this stuff if you don’t know how to pick good keywords. That is where you make your money.

This is not a sales pitch. Seriously, that is where I learned to choose profitable keywords and you can try it for a dollar. Cancel via paypal at any time. Easy as pie. If you can find big money keywords on your own that are easy to rank for, then obviously you don’t need help with that part of it!

Creating content

Now once you have a list of keywords that you want to target in order to build up this income, you have to create the content itself and publish it on your website. The idea is to create relevant content that does not read like a keyword stuffing robot wrote it. It should be naturally and flow nicely. I always shoot for 400 words or more.

As far as seo goes, I keep things pretty simple. I use the keyword I am targeting once in the post title, and once in the post itself. That is it. I would not stuff it into a post more than once, nor would I bother to bold the keyword or anything like that. Keep it simple and then build your links. That is how you are going to rank well anyway.

If you try to over-do the seo stuff you run the risk of penalty. It is not worth it. Write naturally and do not produce crap content.

Many people try to write horrible stuff that does not really answer the searchers question in the hopes that they will click on your advertisements instead. I discourage this technique and I think it is important to provide quality content over the long run. If you are building up a sustainable business then you want to have a nice website that provides genuine value and can pass visual inspection easily. Also, decent quality will gather more natural links over the long run, which is hugely important as we are about to see.

Building links

Now if you pick awesome keywords and write incredibly good articles, this will do nothing for you unless you build links. No one will show up and find you without the backlinks in place.

What I mean by links is that other websites have to link out to yours. You need incoming links.

Now if your keyword that you are trying to rank for is “cookie dough” then you could go and google that term. The top sites that are returned for that phrase are the best possible places that you could get links from for that keyword. These are the authority sites in your niche for this keyword. If you got links from the top 5 results then you would quickly rank very high for that term, probably number 1 in fact.

How to do this? You have to beg, borrow, steal, plead, be creative, be outrageous, sell yourself, sell your site to others, write awesome content and promote it, and so on. Getting links is actually easy, but getting excellent links is very, very difficult. If you can find ways to get the best links out there then you will make a ton of money. It is that simple.

So you can start with lower quality links. For example, you can write an article and publish it at ezinearticles or goarticles and get a link back to your site from them. This is actually not a bad link at all but it is not as good as the top authority sites in your niche.

Building links is tough and takes time. You don’t want to build them too fast anyway or you can be penalized for that too. If you devote 90 percent of your time to building links, and 10 percent to writing new articles for your website, then you will probably make a ton of money. Most people do the exact opposite and they make nothing.

You need links to make money this way. What I’ve said here just scratches the surface as far as link building. Remember, this is what 90 percent of your effort will consist of. It is that important. So obviously there is going to be additional resources here for building links.

Expanding what works

So let’s say you pick some good keywords, write some articles for those keywords, and now you are building links. You throw on the adsense and eventually you see a trickle of money start to pour in.

What do you do now?

Well, obviously you need to do more. More of what works. But there are a few ways to do that.

One way is to watch your stat logs and build on them. Most people use a stat program to keep track of the visits to their website and give them data about each visit. There are dozens of such programs but 2 good ones are Statcounter and Google Analytics. Both are free.

If you use one or both of these on your website then you can glance through the stat logs each day and find new keywords to write about. For example, say your site is about Cookie dough and you notice that someone found your site through a search engine after typing in “low calorie cookie dough.” You might not have an article about that yet, so you could write one and probably rank a lot higher for that term and get even more traffic for it. This method works really well because the search engines are already ranking your site for the term, you are just going to rank even higher for it by targeting a whole post at the new keyword.

If you go through and do this every day and write new posts for new keywords then it will expand the reach of your site and you will pull in more and more traffic as time goes on.

Obviously, aside from this technique, you can simply research related keywords for your niche and keep creating new posts for those words and then building more links to those new posts. If you keep doing this over and over again then eventually you will have a large authority site that is getting lots and lots of traffic every day and if you run ads on this site you will make a bunch of money.

It really is that simple but you do have to put in the work and also give it some time to age. But once you are successful at it, the money just rolls in.

Living the dream

Once you achieve a steady income from this passive system, you are going to want to protect it. You can do that by diversifying and expanding.

You want to diversify the ways that you make money from a site. If you only have one way to earn money online, and for some reason that becomes blocked or banned, then you are completely out of luck. If you have several different ways to make money from a site though, then you are protected from this complete disaster.

Likewise, you could lose a whole site. It has happened. For example, Google might decide that you are cheating the system and they will simply deindex your site. If they did this then you would probably lose at least 80 percent of your income, especially if you are following the techniques I outlined here.

So you want to diversify, and make more websites. If you can build up several web properties that are all making money from different sources, then you are well protected from random disasters.

Bottom line: you have to take action to make this stuff happen. It will not just fall into your lap. You have to make an effort in order to reap the rewards…..

• Making Passive Income Online Takes Deliberate Action Each Day
• Increasing Passive Income Starts with Keyword Research
• Super Pages – My Latest Revelation at Making Money Online
• Making Good Money Online this Summer = Bright Future
• Make Money Online over at TKA with Court

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