There was a time in my life when I though about owning my computer and having high speed Internet service, and I thought to myself:
“I should be able to use this power to create something amazing. Something that earns me income.”
So I started building a website, one article at a time, and a few years later I sold it off for $200,000 dollars.
There are probably thousands of ways that you could earn income from your PC, such as freelance work, taking paid surveys, or selling products on eBay.
But I want to talk to you today about how I created a system to build up a passive income stream from my website that I eventually was able to sell off for all of that money.
That system could be called, simply, “Building an authority website.”
* Why build an authority website? Why this particular business model?
* How am I actually going to make money from this website?
* If this is so easy why is everyone not doing it?
* How do I get started with building this business?
Why build an authority website? Why this particular business model?
The most precious resource on the internet is attention.
If people are paying attention to you (and to your website) then you are in business.
If people come to your website every day, you can turn that stream of traffic into income, and thus you have a system that generates cash for you. This is very powerful.
So how do you get that stream of traffic?
You build a website, then you promote it. After you promote it, the traffic will hopefully show up for free, every day, day after day.
Search engine traffic is valuable because once you have acquired it, it tends to be fairly stable in that it is recurring. If you can build up a lot of search engine traffic then you can create a powerful income stream.
You may have heard about websites that have been penalized in the search engines, or Panda updates where webmasters suddenly lose all of their traffic, and so on.
These things are obviously real and they do happen, but that does not mean that you have to build a website that is in serious danger of such a penalty.
Most websites that get penalized deserve to lose traffic to superior offerings on the web.
But if you follow the strategy that I outline here on this website, you will have very little to worry about.
Why?
Because I teach you how to create the absolute best content in your particular niche.
So if your website is about “American muscle cars” then you would analyze your competition, then create a resource website that is absolutely BETTER than all of the websites that you find.
Now you might be saying “I am not that skilled! I can’t possibly build the best website on the internet for my topic!”
Nonsense.
If you have passion or expertise about a topic, then you can learn to write better and better articles over time as you continue to refine your writing skills.
People think that they have to be a great writer to succeed on the internet. This is not true. You have to have good ideas, and be helpful to your audience. They don’t care if your grammar is a bit off or if your writing is not super polished. Nobody cares. They came to your website when they did a Google search and they care about their own problem and how they can solve it. If you can help them solve their problems then you can make money online, regardless of how well you write.
Most people fail because they don’t publish anything at all. They start a website and then…..nothing. They might put up an article or two and then they run out of steam.
My philosophy is that you need to start putting up articles every single day, and keep doing this for a long time. This will build an income stream that is sustainable and resistant to the whims of Google algorithm updates.
For example, anyone can build a tiny niche website that only has about 10 pages or so on it. Then they promote the site heavily and get it earning income based on good ranking in Google for a particular keyword.
This is a poor business model in my opinion because you are putting all of your eggs in one basket. If you build an authority website instead, then you are spreading out your risk among hundreds or (hopefully) thousands of web pages.
Now these pages are all on the same website, and Google *could* penalize the entire website all at once, but this is not likely to occur if you follow the basic course I have laid out here for you. And the flip side to that idea is that if you ignore the one-website approach and attempt to diversify by creating multiple websites (bad idea), then you will probably never see any income at all because it is so difficult to build enough link juice for all of your sites to get them ranking.
If you want to earn money with your computer, there are a million ways to go about it. But building an authority website is perhaps one of the best ways to slowly build up a sustainable and powerful income stream, one that could even replace your full time day job income some day (like it did for me).
How am I actually going to make money from this website?
If you have a large authority website and you are getting regular search engine traffic to it every day, then there are a couple of different ways that you might turn that stream of traffic into money:
* Google AdSense.
* Direct advertising deals.
* Selling affiliate products and getting a commission on each sale.
* Publishing and selling an eBook.
* Creating a product or service and selling it directly to your audience.
* Creating a membership website and charging for admission to it.
* Selling the website for a lump sum once it is profitable.
To be honest, I never really found a better or more efficient way to monetize my first flagship website than to simply run Google Ads on it and let them do their thing. I experimented heavily with direct ads, but these failed to produce more than AdSense in my particular case. This is actually going to be pretty rare and more people will be able to experiment with monetization and find better ways to make money than with simple ads.
None of this means a thing though if you do not have regular search engine traffic every day, and so that is your primary objective for the first year or two. In fact, I would recommend that you not even try to monetize at first in the interest of getting more organic links coming in.
The fact is that if you choose a profitable topic then it is all about building authority and getting more search engine traffic. For example, my flagship website was getting about 100 to 200 visits per day, and it was earning me about $100 dollars per month. So it was a pretty easy leap for me to say “OK, I need to be getting more like a 1,000 unique visitors per day, rather than just 100.”
But how could I do that? By creating more articles on my site and building more authority (via incoming links). Eventually I had an average of over 2,500 visitors each day to my site. I did not do this using Twitter and Facebook or sharing via social media and so on. I did it by writing over 1 million words and also by pointing lots of links at the website.
IF you have a profitable topic then all you need to worry about is increasing search engine traffic. You can experiment and learn more about monetizing efficiently later on, once you have some people showing up every day. It is a mistake to focus on monetizing too early in the game, when you don’t have enough volume to properly test things. Wait until you have at least 100 uniques per day before you start testing monetization.
Always start with AdSense in order to get a baseline of income. I would let it run for at least a week, maybe a whole month. Then you can start trying to optimize your revenue-per-visit by trying other methods of monetizing.
But ultimately it is all about the search engine traffic. Your main focus for the first year or two is simply to increase that flow of search engine traffic every single day if you can. The best way to do this is by publishing multiple articles each day on your website.
If this is so easy why isn’t everyone doing it?
It is fairly simple to build an authority website if you have at least a decent level of knowledge about a topic, but many people will never follow through with it because the rewards are separated by such a large time factor from the work required.
What has to happen is that you have to slowly build up a strong website over a period of months or even years without seeing much return on your effort.
Then, after a certain point is reached, you will start to see a trickle of income. This will likely be after you have:
* Several dozen articles on-site.
* Several links created that point at your website, both at the home page and to deep pages.
* Some age to your site, probably over 6 months at least.
Where you really want to be is to have something more like:
* Several hundred or even over a thousand articles on your website.
* Several hundred links pointing at your site, many from strong domains or “real website.”
* Several years of age.
If you are building income with an authority website, then those are more like the real figures that you want to hit.
Most people do not have nearly enough patience and vision in order to build a business like that.
What you are essentially doing is sharing your expertise and knowledge with the world by devoting large amounts of time to publishing articles online.
Some people thought I was crazy when I was working on producing new articles every day for my flagship website. When I was earning a few hundred bucks per month, people would nod politely and say “well, that’s nice that you have a little extra spending money there!”
These people did not see my greater vision of creating a full time income from the website. I had one friend who also made a website and said “I just want to be able to cover my hosting costs for the website.” What? Are you nuts? I was in it to make big money and I did not like it when people belittled what I was doing.
Now that I sold my flagship website for $200,000 dollars, none of those people can scarcely believe it. They are shocked by that amount of money and had no idea that someone could create such a valuable web property.
It is a huge risk to sit and write articles every day. It is a risk to put long hours into building an authority website that may or may not earn a decent income in the future. But ask yourself:
* How badly do you want freedom from working for a living?
* What else are you going to do with your time instead if you choose not to build a website? (most people just waste time with television, mindless entertainment, etc.)
* Do you have expertise in a topic that could be profitable online?
How do I get started with building this business?
You can start with the beginners guide and also check out this simple plan to making money online.
But ultimately my advice to you is going to boil down to this:
* Pick a topic that has profit potential.
* Start publishing insanely awesome and helpful content.
* Do everything you can to build links to your website.
* Keep doing this for several years.
Of course you can get a lot more details listed in the guides that I linked to above, but that is the basic formula for building a successful authority website.
I also urge you to pick one topic, build only one website, and stick with it until it becomes successful. Diversifying is a wasteful distraction in this business. You need to concentrate your efforts on a single web property, in my opinion (and experience).
It is easy to harp on the idea of “quality articles” but in reality this really is the key to everything. My flagship website sold for $200,000 dollars because hundreds of the articles were of exceedingly good quality and stood head and shoulders above the competition.
So if you want to make money with your PC then I would urge you to consider the idea of building an authority website. Every article that you publish on your site is another source of future income. Keep putting up new articles on your site and stay in it for the long haul, and someday you will have a full time income stream from your efforts.
Can you make money quickly this way? No. But you can make a lot, and you can essentially buy your freedom some day if you work hard at it.
If you find this website at all helpful my only request is that you share it with others. Send them to:
http://www.makemoneywithnowork.com/
Thanks!
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