You notice the word “quality” in the title there. The question is not how much original content you can produce, but in how much original *quality* content you can produce. Subtle difference there but in the end it may be of vital importance as some websites get thrown by the wayside in a Google update.

My idea of building a business is simple: start a single website and pour your heart and soul into it. Create lots and lots of articles that target various long tail keywords with the titles. Do this over and over again and let the site age. Promote the website by building links. Create strong links via guest posting and then create some custom content that is of really outstanding quality and promote it heavily. Keep doing this over and over again. Be in it for the long haul and be patient.

Now if you actually do all of that stuff and continue to focus on a single website then at some point you will gain traction. The sad thing is that if you go buy a brand new domian from Godaddy or wherever then it will probably take at least a year before you gain any real traction. When I say “gain traction” what I mean is that you will start getting regular search engine visits.

Once you are getting regular search engine traffic, the title of this article you are reading becomes a very important question. Why? Because the answer to it will dictate how quickly you can scale up your traffic, and thus your income.

For example, say that you have a website with approximately 100 articles on it. You have worked hard on it for a year or two and promoted it with a few guest posts. As the site ages your links start to kick in more and more, and your search engine traffic levels off at, say, 150 visitors per day. This number could be higher or lower depending on your particular topic and a host of other factors. But say that it is 150 visits per day, on average, and that you are earning $100 dollars per month from this traffic.

You have 100 articles published and are earning roughly $100/month from it. How can you easily turn that income into $1,000/month?

Do the math. Publish an additional 900 articles and you will likely be generating roughly $1,000 in income.

Of course the real journey will be a bit more convoluted than these perfect numbers. But ultimately if you take massive action and make your website 9 times bigger your income is going to skyrocket.

If you are serious about increasing your income then you should start looking at the idea of a daily quota. Each day is a gift and an opportunity. Each day that you do NOT publish any new content on your website is a missed opportunity.

Get a list of keywords from which to work from. Turn those keywords into unique and interesting long tail post titles.

Then sit down and start a timer and see how long it takes for you to produce a single 600 word article.

For many people who are just starting out, doing this might take an hour. For some it may take even longer. But eventually, if you keep doing this, you will get faster at it.

At some point you may be able to create a solid 600 word article in a half an hour. Some people can and will produce even faster than this.

Ultimately I would challenge every Internet marketer to increase their publishing speed until they can produce three articles in a single day. For most people this will happen most easily in a single publishing session.

Sit down and create 3 quality articles about your topic. Can you do that?

Now ask yourself: Can you do that every day?

If you can, you can make money online. If you can produce three articles per day then you can make a killing in the long run.

It will take time. It will take some additional effort to promote your site and build links.

My plan to publish 669 more articles are going to be divided up among the following topics:

Motivate yourself to create a business
Picking a profitable topic
Keyword research
Writing killer articles
Link building
Why you want a big website
Turning website traffic into money
Locking in your success
Building premium links
How frugality can set you free
Personal finance
Passive income
Dividend investing
Personal growth
Misc.

With about 15 topics or so that will be roughly 50 articles per topic. Some categories or topics will of course get more attention than others. For example, “why you need a big website” is probably going to be fully covered with just a few articles at the most. On the other hand, writing about passive income or frugality could produce hundreds of articles each without any problem.

One of my featured article series will be about “My path to passive income” which will tell the story of how I went from earning an hourly wage to earning several hundred dollars per month just from dividend payouts. Building a profitable website and creating passive online income is really only one step in this process. My real preference is to create even more secure income streams from investment income. Real estate is a possibility but it is one that I have not yet explored, and may not.

I am still a bit of a novice but it looks like dividend income from investments has some tax advantages over other forms of income. From what I can tell it is taxed a much lower rate, close to 15%. If you go get a day job your effective tax rate is at least double this. This is also the case if you make online income. So investment income looks to be very appealing from a tax perspective.

Content strategy is also dictated by the keyword list to an extent. The nice thing about working from a keyword list is that you have some freedom to create long tail variations and take each article in the direction that you want. For example, say that the keyword on your list is:

“earn money online”

You could easily create a post title from this such as:

“How to Earn Money Online While Living a Frugal Lifestyle”

So even though the keyword would appear to be about one thing, you can pretty easily take the article in another direction if that is your intent. Thus, working from a keyword list to create mountains of content still gives you the ability to be flexible and creative with your articles. Longer article titles are safer from an optimization perspective (short titles appear over-optimized) and they are better at pulling in traffic that you did not expect.

The other major challenge in publishing such a high volume of content so quickly is in the danger of repeating yourself. When you publish 10 articles per day you run the danger of repeating yourself, even if you do not intend to. So what I may do is come up with a content plan that has a huge series of articles that flow together naturally based on various topics. This could be planned and organized almost like a book would be, and each “chapter” would be a series of approximately 10 articles long. Thus, an entire “book” based on 15 different topics or categories would be about 150 articles long.

Another part of the content plan will be based on reader input entirely. Any new comment left on the website that is actually legitimate can be filed away to be answered in full by a new article. The site can also encourage people to ask questions in the comments, then these reader questions can be turned into full length articles. These reader questions can make excellent post titles as well because they draw in long tail search traffic that you may not have planned on or realized was a popular search phrase. Those “hidden gems” can pile up and make a big difference when you have several dozen or even hundreds of them.

So the marketing plan for the next few months is to produce 669 more articles on my flagship website.

Given enough time, patience, site age, link juice, and site authority, I have to believe that those 1,000 articles total will pay off in the long run.

I tend to write articles in the 600 to 1,000 word range. I would say an average is 700 words.

So let’s do some math. If we were to outsource the creation of these articles, they would cost somewhere between four thousand and seven thousand dollars.

669 X 700 X 1 cent per word = $4,683

669 X 700 X 1.5 cents per word = $7,024

My plan is to publish ten articles per day, which would take 67 days to complete the task myself and thus save 4 to 7 grand.

On the other hand, during that 67 days, it probably costs me around $2,500 just to live and keep my bills paid. Working a traditional job to cover those expenses would prevent me from creating the new articles.

So you have to ask yourself in regards to content creation and your current business model:

“If I take the time and effort to crank out 669 more articles for my website, is that a better use of my time then going back to a traditional day job and earning an hourly wage?”

In my case it probably is a better use of my time. There are several reasons for this:

1) I have built a full time income stream doing this before (so I at least sort of know what I am doing).

2) I have a decent platform to work from in that I use a one-website approach, put all of my energy into a single site, and I do whatever I can to make the quality level extremely high for all of my content. There is no junk articles, nothing outsourced, no spun content, etc.

3) I have built quality links to the website using premium guest posting as the main promotional tool. So, no spammy techniques.

4) I have a bit of age in the website and it is a few years old already so that helps as far as search engine trust.

5) I can put all of my time and energy into the website for 2 full months without interruption, working several hours each day and publishing at least 7,000 words of quality content on the site per day.

The bottom line is that I am confident that I can at least squeeze some profitability out of this website, and that of new content that I add. If not, it will be a failed experiment, but I cannot picture it as a total disaster. The site already has some age, trust, and ranking ability with the search engines. My publishing speed is an important factor too. I can write 669 articles in just over two months, whereas the alternative would be to pay about $7,000 dollars for that content.

Because my living expenses run approximately $1,200 per month or so, the cost of the content and getting the website up to one thousand articles is approximately $2,400 dollars. But it is also an investment into the future because the idea is for the new articles to receive residual search engine traffic for years to come.

So ultimately my plan is to do two solid months worth of hard work and then hopefully this will increase my monthly earnings in the long run to something that can support my living expenses. The alternative to that is that I will have a large website with approximately one thousand articles and some decent link juice and a few years of age to it. This would, in theory, make for a very “sell-able” website that should command a decent asking price, even if the site is under-monetized to an extent. My specialty has always been in volume publishing rather than squeezing profit out of existing traffic anyway. So this plan I have plays to this strength….go go go and publish like mad until the site is strong with 1,000 articles on it.

Yes those are my feet! Vacation is nice.

One of my current goals is to create one or both of the following things:

1) An income stream from a website.
2) A very “sell-able” website.

I am interested in making a sellable website because I would rather rely on dividend income from capital investments than from online income. This is a personal choice of course and I know many people who would much rather put their money into more internet businesses instead of finanical investments.

My thoughts on building a highly sellable website:

* Income goal $1,000/month or higher.
* Pageviews (per month, something in the tens of thousands, that is over 322/day)
* Unique visitors (first goal would be 100 per day, secondary is 500, then 1,000 per day)
* Original articles published (goal is “over 1,000 unique articles”).
* RSS subscribers (goal would be “over 1,000 RSS readers).

I think if I could reach all of those goals then the site could probably be sold for a decent sum of money. Alternatively, if the site is producing a decent monthly income of over $500/month then it might serve me well enough to cover living expenses while I build another business (or simply work on this business to increase to $1,000/month and beyond).

The truth is that I am a voracious publisher and if I am aggressive with pushing myself I can crank out five or even ten articles per day. This would put me at over 1,000 articles on-site within just a few months time if I really push it.

I have recently done a lot of work in writing and publishing guest posts so I do not think I would need a huge emphasis on link building. What I would do instead is to switch over to publishing exclusively on-site content. I already have 331 articles published so I would need 669 more written. I could easily come up with a massive list of keywords from which to work from and then start creating long tail, keyword-rich post titles out of them. I could do this over a week or two and have my next 669 article titles worked out and ready to be written. Then I would start writing and publishing either 5 or 10 per articles per day. I write very quickly and if this is my only major task for the day then I can certainly crank this out and maintain a daily quota. This is especially true if I know that I only have to do it for 67 days straight (ten articles per day would give 670 articles in 67 days, not bad if you can swing it).

At that point my website would have over 1,000 articles on it and hopefully all of the link juice I created would start kicking in as well. At that point I would probably do well to let things gel for at least a year and possibly take on a new strategy after amassing my thousand articles:

1) Go back to premium link building by pitching guest posts to powerful websites.
2) Build a community by installing a forum if there is sufficient demand for it in the comments of my posts (without enough daily comments I advise against installing forum software).
3) Start crafting ultra premium content, link bait, high-value eBooks, stuff that can create real organic links.

So my next task is to crank up the volume. Take my website from 331 articles up to 1,000. Once I am at that point I can stop and re-evaluate things. The site has some age, some trust with the search engines (not a ton just yet but it is growing) and a few decent links from guest posting. Those links will take time to kick in and produce results by aging a bit.

My belief is that if you already have a wide net cast then you can stop writing articles on-site and switch over to promotion or building a community. On the other hand, if you have less than a thousand articles on-site then you might want to get cracking so that you are hitting the long tail sufficiently….

Just my 2 cents based on past success. We will see if it holds true going forward or not.

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” - Mark Twain

There are two main paths in life that I could choose from:

1) Working for others (a day job).
2) Working for myself (building a business, living on investment income, etc.).

After being trained my whole life (through the education system) to work for others, and then having had a day job for approximately 16 years straight, I am happy to finally be trying out the alternative (be your own boss!).

Since I quit the day job I have realized several things.  The first of which:

Working a day job is like an addiction

A day job is safe, comfortable, and familiar. When you work a regular job, you know what to expect and exactly how it is going to make you feel.

Day in and day out, over and over again, the never ending toil.

Work becomes a means to spending money. Work, spend, work, spend. What else are you going to do with the money? You save some, invest some, pay your bills, and of course there is a bit left over to reward yourself! So you spend some.

I am not talking about spending addiction here…..only the simple work-spend cycle, and how infectious it really is. Get a better job, buy slightly nicer stuff. Day job drones make perfect little consumers.

There is a sense of “hustle” in working your day job. Are you saying all the right things, keeping the right people happy? Are you safe and secure in your position? Are you helping out enough around the office, getting enough work done in a timely manner, etc.?

All of this mental overhead becomes obsessive at some point. All of it driven by the need to keep your salary. Work, spend, work, spend.

Oh please don’t let anything interrupt this precious cycle! That could seriously curtail my spending!

There is a certain comfort that comes from showing up to work every day and getting that paycheck. It may be miserable, but at least it is consistent, right? And you do get to reward yourself with spending!

Working a day job is easy, boring, safe, and mindless.  You get to spend money without much thought because you know you will just make more money by working.

Follow the herd – working for others is safe!

Business involves risk. Starting your own business involves risk. If this were not the case, you would not be in business, you would likely be working for a paycheck at the hands of a boss.

There is a mentality of working a day job that it is safer than entrepreneurship. This is understandable, because in most cases, this is probably true. Many new businesses fail, and many online businesses never reach success.

But realize that the safety of a day job comes with a steep price:

* Relatively fixed earning ceiling.
* Trading life energy for spending money in an endless cycle.
* Office politics and emotional cost of dealing with such.
* Work-spend cycle, rewarding yourself, and corresponding drain on finances.
* False security for some people as companies fold, jobs are lost, etc.

Is there safety and security in working a regular job? Probably when you compare it to building a business, yes. But the costs of that safety are quite high and the risk/reward structure of online business is still very enticing. For example, I started my successful online business while still working 40 hours per week. What is to stop other employees from pursuing a similar part time business start up?

Even without the added security (which is sometime false), entrepreneurship is still more desirable for me because:

Working for others is B-O-R-I-N-G

I can still remember the frustration and boredom that I felt 20 years ago when I took my first job.

After a week or two of training the job was no longer challenging. It had reduced me to a robot. And then to keep doing this, for how many years?

Two decades (and several jobs) later I was hired in to a position that I was told was “challenging.” Previously, I had referred to the new position as “a cushy job” and my boss corrected me, saying it was very intense, challenging, and detail-oriented.

Wrong.

A month later I was bored to tears, running around with two to four hours of down time every day, and helping my coworkers fix their computers.

And this was supposed to be challenging?

I would rather be an entrepreneur and face a failing business….at least that is exciting and challenging!

The ultimate goal is no job, no business, no work spend cycle….just investment income and frugal living

Ultimately I do not want a day job, nor do I necessarily want to manage or own a business.

I want enough investment income to cover my living expenses. Period.

That means having enough money invested that I can live on the interest/dividends without touching the principal.

That may seem like a fantasy but keep in mind I am not trapped in the work-spend cycle. I do not upgrade my car or my wardrobe based on changes of income. My monthly expenses are still going down as I optimize for frugality.

Living on $600 to $1,000 per month is not unthinkable. Having the investment capitol to produce that standard of living is not unthinkable either.

In the meantime, I intend to create businesses that PAY ME rather than succumbing to the work-spend cycle of being trapped in a day job.

Frugality used to be a dirty word. Now it is one half of my ticket to freedom.

Before I sell my soul and take another day job, I will focus hard on building my next business while also:

…..Getting a roommate to halve most of my living expenses.
…..Ditching my car to eliminate a ton of monthly expenses (gas, insurance, maintenance).
…..Ditching cell phone + internet and relying on free Wi-Fi for building the online business.
…..Consider geographical arbitrage to drastically lower my living expenses.

Extreme measures, to be sure. But so is working 40 hours per week and being trapped in the work-spend-work cycle. I would not do any of those four things lightly.

Each of those four things represents about $75 to $200 dollars per month in potential expenses. Eliminating just one is not significant, but pairing up two or three of those ideas would reduce monthly expenses to under $600/month.

If my next business becomes profitable quickly enough, none of these measures will become necessary. But I would strongly consider any or all of them before I went back to the work-spend-work cycle and grinding out 40 hours per week plus.  If you are stuck in the work/spend cycle then it is very hard to break free and purchase your freedom.

I have successfully worked my way up to $1,000/month in online income twice over.

Here is a step by step guide explaining what I did in order to achieve that:

Step 1 – Created a single website with a profitable topic

It is too easy to get distracted as an Internet marketer. Every new business model that you read about becomes “a shiny new object” that you might pursue with your own online efforts. All of this serves to distract you from the fundamentals that can help you to build up a solid income online.

My advice is simple: choose a profitable topic and create one website.

Just one.

Put all of your energy and resources into that one website.

If you are writing new articles, publish them on your flagship website.

If you are building links or doing promotional work, it is all for your single flagship site.

“But what about diversification?” people will screech in horror. “You could lose all of your income overnight if you do this! It’s too risky!”

Not in my experience it’s not. What is risky is starting multiple websites and then burning out because none of them take off at all.

Spreading yourself too thin is the real risk.

My flagship website was earning me over $1,000 month in less than two years time. I seriously doubt this would have been possible if I was spreading my efforts out among multiple sites. It is very difficult to build authority and link juice these days.

Concentrate! Do not diversify.

Step 2 – Promoted the website in a variety of ways

Promoting your website is necessary if you want to earn money in any kind of reasonable timeline. Otherwise it could take years and years before your content gains a foothold in the search engines.

Because I was only focusing on a single website, I could afford to experiment and try all sorts of different things for site promotion. Some of it worked, some of it probably fell flat, but ultimately it was “all good.” My site became successful in the search engines and received mountains of free traffic. This is what ultimately made it so profitable.

So what did I do for marketing and promotion? Here is my quick list of things that I tried:

* Guest posting on related websites (this is the most important one!)
* Manufactured links – cheap links that helped some but will be totally worthless unless you have some authority from “real” links.
* Link bait – custom creative content with the intention of earning real world links.
* Resource articles – some of them were over ten thousand words in length. Again, stuff worthy of linking, bookmarking, etc.
* Free eBooks – given away freely, without even an opt-in. Give away value to build good will and incoming links.
* Paid traffic - I threw some paid traffic here and there at my premium content, my best stuff.
* Networking with real people in my niche. Exchanging links, guest posts, doing interviews for each other, etc.

I cannot say for sure how helpful any of that stuff was, but all of it put together helped me achieve my income goals.

Had I done none of it, my site would have failed.

It’s the old adage: “Half of our advertising does not work. But we do not know which half!”

Focus on a single website, and go nuts with a variety of promotion. It will all work out in the end.

Step 3 – Published high volumes of quality content

If you did the first two steps:

1) Create a single website with a profitable topic.

2) Promote your website in a variety of ways.

Then there is just one thing left to do:

Publish quality content daily.

That’s it. That is the remaining pillar of your success. If you have profit potential and your site has been promoted, then your only remaining goal is to publish quality content every single day.

Now, you do not have to publish every single day, but I think you are crazy not to. Reason being, every day is an opportunity for future income growth. If you fail to publish, you are missing out on future income.

Can you publish two quality articles each day? What about three? If you can do two or three per day then you will reach income goals MUCH quicker.

Volume matters. Publish multiple articles daily and you will reach your income goal within just a few short years.

Any questions? Let me know in the comments!

I just met a very smart financial guy online by the name of Sean. He has his own website called Renewable Wealth and he seems to be talking about all of the things that are getting me excited lately.

Namely:

Dividend investing - (He writes about this here). Since I sold my website I have been investing in dividend bearing stocks as well. Buy and hold stuff. Boring, but highly effective, especially in the current market. Big companies that pay decent dividends have come into favor, and I am happy to have a mix of them in my own portfolio.

My long term goal is to have a large enough portfolio that, while still diverse, will have enough dividend payments to fund my lifestyle completely. This is very similar to what Jacob of Early Retirement Extreme used to advocate (he recently stopped blogging).

Min-max your life – Another exciting idea for me, because I used to suffer from the problem of wanting to be “frugal” and also “cheap” at the same time, and emotionally scolding myself for doing one or the other because I had never really heard of the concept of min-max.

The concept is basically this: spend more money on the important things in your life, and practically no money on the things that you do not care about. One example of this would be to purchase an expensive knife if you really use it a lot for cooking, but get your coasters and such at the dollar store. Knowing when to “cheap out” and when to “buy quality” is the essence of min-maxing your life.

Time value of money - Sean talks about the time value of money on his site, and he references “Your Money or Your Life,” a book that I also read. One of the concepts is to compute the real value of your salary when you subtract all of your work related expenses. Most people earn a lot less than they think.

Another concept is to then compute the hourly requirement of work to purchase something. If you honestly assess how little money you earn after expenses and taxes, it can be a real smack in the face to realize how long you have to labor in order to pay for something like a pricey vacation. One of the things that gets me really excited is computing my hourly wage for online work. I do some freelance here and there for $50 and hour, but that is nothing compared to my estimated hourly wage after the sale of my website: $900/hour. That is after figuring all of the advertising income over four years and also the final sale price of the website.

Now that I am earning money online and have complete freedom from my day job, I think about the time value of money….all the time (ha!). I now fully realize how much I do not want to become a corporate slave again. I think about how wonderful it is to be able to leverage the Internet, provide real value to people, and make good money doing it. I just love it.

Therefore, the solution for me is to use the basic principals of financial independence that Sean writes about. Frugality, as I say, is one half of the ticket to freedom. The other half is in producing a solid online income. As the web becomes more and more efficient over time at weeding out spam (the search engines actually do improve slowly over time), you have to provide greater and greater value with your website in order to remain competitive. Don’t expect to just put up a wall of boring text and be able to earn a living online.

Online income + dividend investing + frugality = totally freaking awesome.

Time to brainstorm new goals and resolutions for 2012.

My focus of course is on building another successful online business, one that generates consistent profit with very little ongoing effort. This can be best accomplished by building website authority on this existing website. Right now there are over 300 articles, plenty of them are high quality, in depth, and genuinely useful. There are several links that are already pointing at the site, but most of them are of questionable quality.

Therefore the main goal for 2012 is to create domain authority in the form of additional link juice. Once I have that link juice in place I am very good at producing mountains of new content with which to rank long tail search phrases.

The tough part is in getting the link juice to begin with. Manufactured (cheap) links are not going to help much in this department, though they can be useful after you have established authority and trust with the search engines. Right now they are not very useful, even though I do have a small amount of trust with Google and a website that is over 3 years old.

Goals and resolutions are not very useful (or actionable) unless they are specific. Therefore, I am going to get really specific here:

My goal for 2012 is to publish 50 guest posts that all link back to this website.

I have already published 2 of them, and I have written the next 3.

Mind you, these are not just fifty junk posts of 400 words each. My thought is that most webmasters are quite leery of people who are looking for quality links, so they want to see quality guest posts. Therefore, I create what I call “ultra premium” articles to serve as guest posts. Not just fluff content, but useful, in depth, and generally lengthy resource articles.

In all truth, I am good at creating this type of content quickly. What I am not so great at is “pitching it” to website owners who might publish it on their websites. The easy part will be writing 50 dynamite guest posts. That will be a breeze, and I will enjoy doing it. No problem with that. The hard part will be shopping it around and getting people to publish them.

Here are some strategies I am going to use in going forward with this:

* High volume of submissions - I am not going to just submit 50 guest posts to 50 blogs and then get mad when only 10 of them accept it. Instead, I am going to submit to 500 blogs and then be ecstatic if I can even get 80 to 90 percent of the posts published. And if necessary, I can keep trying….over and over again. Good content (should) sell itself, so it is all a numbers game.

* Daily effort towards the goal - every single day of 2012 I will work on this goal until I have 50 guest posts published. In all likelihood I will have the 50 guest posts written within 3 or 4 months. The challenge after that is going to be taking daily action, no matter what, and pitching the posts. If this proves to be difficult using a volume approach, I will have to shift to a “quality” approach, explained below:

* Quality approach to premium guest posting/personal approach – instead of just submitting premium content to blogs, the idea here is to build a relationship with the blogger before pitching the post. Taking a genuine interest in their blog, leaving value-added comments, and interacting with them through other channels will help to land you a potential guest post.

At any rate, that is the end goal for 2012:

Fifty new guest posts published.

What are your goals for 2012?

Lots of changes last year for me and it basically amounted to this:

* Experienced rising earnings with my flagship website, started building confidence that I could finally quit my day job and do internet marketing full time.

* Quit the day job.

* Sold the flagship website for a large sum of money.

Now I am in limbo. I have a “make money online” (MMO) website that has a few years of age and a tiny smidge of trust with Google, and I am seriously considering making that into my main online project.

I am also doing freelance work at an attractive rate but the volume is not really enough to sustain my current lifestyle, which costs about $1,300/month. I have my own apt, car, etc. The freelance work seems to be paying around $500 to $800 per month or so.

One issue that worries me is that the MMO niche is ultra competitive, and I could work hard on it for a year or so and never get any traction. I do not mind putting in hard work and growing the site aggressively but I am worried that it might be a big waste of time. But I guess that is why I worked so hard to get into the position I am in, I have a healthy cushion and even if my expenses exceed my freelance income for a few years it is not going to put much of a dent in my (already growing) capital.

My hope is to get the MMO site earning a decent income such that it covers my living expenses. If I work hard for a year or two and that does not happen I would be disappointed, but that is a risk that you take when starting a business.

I may have been lucky in some regards with my flagship website but now I have several factors that lean heavily in favor of my next business being a success:

* I know how to create premium content and link-worthy resources. I no longer create 400 word articles of questionable quality. Everything is super premium.
* I know that it is all about quality content + links. I know that I need some really good authority links. I know not to waste my time being distracted with low-return marketing tactics.
* I am patient. My MMO site is 3 years old, I am willing to wait 2 more years in order to see it produce income.
* I have time freedom and can publish quickly. This can be my full time effort, and on top of that, I write very quickly.
* I have capital to invest. While the foundation of the site is quality content that I already create myself, I have money that I can put into marketing and promotion. I am not afraid to spend money to put eyeballs on my best content.

Even with all of those factors in my favor, I am nervous about it because the niche is so ultra competitive. But it is also quite lucrative so even a small success could translate into a decent income. Right now the site averages 19 search visitors per day. My short term goal is to get that up to 100 search visits per day and I think if that happened then it would put me on the map, so to speak. After achieving that it would simply be a matter of adding quality content + more links, and eventually it would be in full time income land. But the hard part is going to be creating the authority to get 100 visits/day. Because I already have 300+ articles on the site, several “premium posts,” and also a manufactured link campaign, the only missing ingredient is premium links. I have 2 of those already and I am probably going to spend much of my time in 2012 trying to get several more.

I am also experimenting with paid traffic, sending visitors to my best, most premium articles in order to try to build links over time. I am willing to spend a decent chunk of money to promote my content this way and see if it can build authority.

My MMO site already looks impressive at a glance with lots of premium content. Manufactured links are easy to get and I have those coming in. What I need now are “real links.” Hard to get, but necessary in order to build a real income.

Raise income, lower expenses

The other half of my 2012 focus could well be on frugality. One possible plan is to cut my expenses by several hundred dollars per month. If I do this, then it lowers the bar for how successful my MMO site needs to be.

Right now I live alone in an apartment and I also have a car. My expenses of around $1,300/month could easily approach half of that if I were to get a roommate and either eliminate the car or share expenses on it with someone.

I do not like the idea of being completely without a vehicle. On the other hand, paying approximately $400/month over the life of a car (current estimate for my car even though it has been paid off for several years) when several people benefit from it is just crazy. In other words, I know a few people right now in my life who do not have a car, but definitely need one. Shared ownership makes the ridiculously high expenses of a car easier to take.

The sale of my website has me generating investment income. But that extra income is somewhat “wasted” if I do not tighten up my monthly expenses. The goal is to let my investment money grow (rather than to live off of it) and that means I need to have income coming in and low enough living expenses to be able to make ends meet without going back to the grind of day job labor.

Because I sold my flagship website I now have an opportunity. The worst path forward would be:

* Don’t create a new business that generates income.
* Don’t work or create any new income for several years.
* Increase spending and monthly expenses due to extra money.

These actions would be a disaster, and completely destroy the opportunity I have before me.

Instead I want to:

* Create a successful business in the next year or two that generates a healthy income with very low overhead (another profitable website).
* Live off the income from this new website and eventually put more of that income into investments (or sell it off again for a lump sum).
* Lower monthly expenses and reduce spending in order to give my investments a chance to actually work FOR me, rather than just wasting the dividends away.

Living frugal and reducing monthly expenses is another form of “cushion.” Even if the new business venture fails, it will not negatively impact my investments because I will not be spending much money to live.

On the other hand, if I can work hard and get the new business producing income fairly quickly, then it reduces the need for extreme frugality. Right now I live very comfortably with much freedom but all of that has a definite cost (about $1,300/month). If my new business can produce even half of that within a year or so then freelance work can pick up much of the slack. With that kind of momentum, after another six months to a year the new website would likely shoot above $1,300/month and then I will be in a very comfortable situation indeed.

Basically, I do not want to rest on my laurels and expect my investment income to carry me. That would be a huge mistake. Instead, I have an opportunity in front of me to create another lean business. I have done so once successfully and chances are good that I can do it again based on my knowledge and experience.

I am not expecting a miracle here. I do not need $1,000/month in income to appear overnight. What I want to see is a small trickle of income based on growing amounts of search engine traffic. That is something I can work with and I have the patience and resources to grow that sort of seed into a success.

My task for 2012 is to build website authority through links and networking. Once that is accomplished, I can go back to focusing on what I really excel at, which is premium content generation. But first I need an audience. That has to be created by promotion and links. So the clock is now ticking and I am pressed to get this website producing income.

What is your goal for 2012?

These are all secrets that I learned on my journey to building up a successful website and eventually selling it off for $200,000 dollars. I am not sure if all of these qualify as real “secrets,” but many of the concepts here are not obvious, and some of them even go completely against traditional internet marketing wisdom.

Secret #1: Volume/quality

The whole “quality content” argument will likely rage on for as long as the Internet exists.

Everyone knows that you need “quality” content on your website.

I would argue that this is absolutely true, at least as far as “authority websites” are concerned. You are not going to build a long term, full time income out of junk content, unless you keep putting more and more of it up (this is a job, no?).

But the “secret” that goes along with the quality content argument is this:

You need a lot of it.

The problem is that the search engines have to use certain trust factors in order to rank your website. One of the biggest signals of trust has to do with the size of your website.

Yes, you actually CAN rank a very small website, but it is MUCH more difficult to do so.

The niche site model is dying, and has been over the last few years. Bigger websites get pushed to the top of the serps because search engines can trust them more not to be spam.

So yes, you need quality content. That is no secret. But I would advise the newcomer that they need quality + volume. That is a bit tougher act to provide, but you can do it if you are determined to stay at this business for a long time.

Secret #2: Cheap links

Everyone knows that you need “quality links.” You know, links from other websites in your niche that are actually “real” websites. I would advise that you need at least one or two of those and possibly more in the long run.

So the secret here is that you need cheap links too. Or rather, you would be foolish not to use cheaper links if you know what you are doing.

Basically my advice is to slowly drip in cheap links only after two other factors are leaning in your favor:

* Site is aging a bit (over a year old, say).
* Site has at least one or two “real links” pointed at it.

After those two things are met, dripping in a few cheap links with specific anchor text can really help boost your rankings.

I used to fear that suddenly Google would completely eradicate the juice that cheap links pass. I was worrying about this over 4 years ago and it has still not really come to pass.

Cheap links still work if you know how to use them.

Secret #3: Ignore the head, go for the tail

When I first started in internet marketing I thought that the big payoff would be for ranking for really juicy keywords. So I set out to rank for a few keywords with my website, words that I thought would bring in a healthy income all their own.

Now the thing to understand here is that I worked really, really hard at this. I built links for months and months. Tons and tons of effort. And ultimately, after all of this hard work, my best keyword was only earning me $50 dollars per month.

This was on a website that was earning over $2,000 per month in advertising. The best keyword only drove in about 48 bucks.

Where was the money coming from? The long tail.

This particular website had about 1,500 articles, and over 1 million words published on it. It did not rank for extremely lucrative keywords, it just ranked for a lot of them.

Don’t get me wrong….it IS possible to rank for a single keyword and make a lot of money doing it. But, that is not how I experienced success myself, and that is not really the “authority website” model.

At least one drawback jumps to mind immediately for chasing the really juicy keywords: you can suddenly lose your ranking and then all of your income is gone.

This is because you will be relying mostly on backlinks in order to rank your content.

With the authority website model, you are not so much counting on backlinks to rank, but your high volume of quality content instead. Sure, you still need some links in order to rank, but they are not going to be critical drivers of your income. Your vast span of content is what will be the main driver of your income, as you clean up on long tail keywords.

Long articles are not necessary, but a high volume of articles will multiply your earnings. That said, I would not create a website in which every articles is 400 words. I would try to make a variety of article length, with most being between 1,000 and 2,000 words long.  Learn how to build a website properly by using a variety of content types and lengths.

Secret #4: Legitimacy through community

Building a community around your website and your ideas would provide “intangible benefits” that cannot be fully explained. Part of the benefits of building a community and/or a readership include:

* Repeat traffic that the search engines may use to help legitimize your website with.
* Building fans that can then help spread your content and build real links to it.
* Having a platform for your community to add content (like a forum) that can then grow your site’s footprint and thus help to build authority in the eyes of the search engines.

Those are just a few of the ideas that lead to real benefit to your site if you can build a community.

My advice for actually building a fan base intentionally would be for you to:

* Have original and useful ideas within your niche.
* Engage each and every reader who leaves a real comment on your site.
* Start a discussion forum when you are getting a few comments each day on a regular basis.

If you do this then the community that forms within your discussion forum will bring many benefits to your website, some tangible and some that are much harder to quantify.

Secret #5: Persistence/patience

OK so this one is fairly obvious, not really a secret, but so many people fail in their online career simply due to a lack of persistence, so I had to include it here.

If you keep doing internet marketing for the long haul then at some point your income is going to be down (or non-existent). There will be ups and downs. This is much the same as any other business.

The key is that you keep your head down and keep pushing forward even when things are not looking so good. Usually it is during those down times when an upswing is just up ahead and if you want to take advantage of that then you need to keep publishing every day and promoting your website.

It takes a good deal of time to build real authority on the web. Actually, compared to other businesses in the “real” world, the timeline is rather short. You can achieve a full time income and real authority in only a year or two if you work hard at it. This is actually a phenomenal opportunity considering how lean the business is and how low your overhead will be (under $100/year for domain and hosting).

So while it might feel like it is taking forever to build up authority, keep in mind that most businesses lose money in the first year or two, and internet marketing should not necessarily be any different from that. You have to put in the effort, time, and consistency if you want to build a stable business.

Be persistent in building up your website and be patient with the results. It takes longer than you think, but the rewards are also greater than you are assuming as well.

Secret #6: Reinvest profits

One of my internet marketing teachers once told me a story about a student he had that started a website and was earning about $100 dollars per month. The student was happy with this amount and was quite pleased with the additional income. But, when the teacher instructed him to start reinvesting a percentage of his profits in order to grow the website, the student would not hear of it.

“He had a kung-fu grip on that 100 bucks,” the teacher told me. “And it was such a shame because if he just would have started outsourcing maybe half of his income, he could have easily grew his revenue to over $1,000/month within a year or two.”

You see, the first $100/month is the toughest. It takes a lot of effort to build your website up to the point where it is earning that much income. But once you cross that threshold, adding an additional $100/month in income is fairly easy to do.

Why?

Because once you have enough link juice to earn $100/month, you probably have enough link juice to scale that up by creating more content.

There are two ways to expand your income more quickly once you start experiencing some initial success:

1) Add more content on site.
2) Add more links off-site.

If you are dedicating 40 hours or more to building your website, then there probably is not a huge need to outsource your efforts. However, if you are not able to dedicate that much time, it will probably make sense for you to reinvest a portion of your revenue in order to grow your income further.

Some people do this by paying for new content to publish on-site. I never went that route personally, and instead reinvested a portion of my profits into link building and promotion instead. I feel this is an important strategy because the quality of your content is going to be questionable at best if you are paying anything less than 15 dollars per article for on-site content. Most people cannot afford that expense and are better off writing their own on-site content. My opinion is that your outsourcing budget should be spent creating “cheap links.” I would recommend doing this only after you are generating regular revenue.

Decide on a percentage of your revenue or a set amount to reinvest and stick to it until you reach your monthly income goal. What I did was this: When I was earning $600/month with my website, I started outsourcing $200/month in promotion. I continued to do this all the way up to when the site was earning over $2,000 per month. I never varied the amount or bothered to increase it (which I certainly could have). The important thing was that I was consistently reinvesting part of my profits to help grow the site further.

Secret #7: Test everything and ignore traditional wisdom

As I was experiencing more and more success with my flagship website, I was getting all sorts of advice, such as:

….”You should write an eBook for your website and sell it to make another revenue stream. That way you are more diversified.”
….”You should use social media to diversify away from search engine traffic.”
….”You should create a product or service in your niche and diversify away from relying on AdSense for income.”
….”You should explore other forms of monetization: develop an eCourse, create a membership website, sell eBooks, pitch affiliate products, etc.

I took much, if not all, of this advice.

I attempted to sell an eBook. I sought out direct advertisers and made direct deals to try to beat AdSense income. I experimented with social media using various platforms. I tried to monetize with affiliate products.

Now keep in mind that all sorts of people were telling me that I could increase my revenue and diversify.

But ultimately what I learned was that, for my niche, AdSense was extremely efficient. I tested many different forms of monetizattion, but none of them could compare to AdSense for my particular niche. Now this was quite unusual because in most niches, AdSense is not going to be the most optimal solution. Nonetheless, this only goes to show that you should test everything and simply go with what works best.

Every niche is a little different. What works for other internet marketers may not work perfectly for you.

I don’t have all the answers. And the people who taught me internet marketing? They didn’t have all the answers either. I had to find many of them on my own.

The way to do that is through experimentation and testing.

So, take advice from others and try new things. But always measure what you are doing and simply go with the setup that earns you the most profit.

Secret #8: Solve problems for search engine visitors

My flagship website sold for such a large some of money because my content was actually useful. The articles that I produced for the site had value to the search engine visitor because the information that I presented in the articles helped to solve a real problem that people were having.

If you look at marketing from the perspective of “problem solving,” you will see that most people who decide to part with their money and spend it on something are doing so in order to solve a problem that they have.

Your content–even though it is essentially “free”–should solve a problem for people.

Why?

Because if it doesn’t, then nobody will care about it. And if nobody cares about your content, no one will link to it or share it with others, and your message will never spread.

This will be a problem in the long run because if you have rely on manufactured links in order to promote all of your content all by yourself, then you are probably never going to make it.

Most people who use a search engine are trying to solve a problem that they have of some sort. Give them the answer to their problem. Not only that, but give them the best possible answer for their specific problem.

Some people have used the approach where they sort of talk about the problem on their website without really solving it directly, in the hopes that the user will click on an ad. Don’t do this. Although it can increase conversion rates and make you more money in the short term, it is a poor long term strategy for your business. More important is to gain authority and long term organic link juice by actually being the best authority on the Internet for a certain topic.

Give the best answer that you can and really try to help people solve their problems.

Secret #9: Give people something amazing to link to

Why would anybody share your website with someone else?

Your content has to be good enough, useful enough, or insightful enough to “sell itself.” If it is not, then what you have actually created is just a big website full of spam, not a true resource for people.

The solution is to create amazingly helpful content that actually solves a problem for people. That way, your content will market itself with much less effort required on your part.

Think about your content years from now. Will it still be accruing links naturally, without any effort on your part? Some of it should be. Your best articles should be good enough to pull in organic links indefinitely. If this is not the case yet then you need to start planning and developing some truly amazing, remarkable “flagship” content.

Not every article on your website has to be a “home run.” But many of the articles should be, eventually. Start creating “premium content,” one article at a time.

I would advise that you shoot for at least 20 such articles or so on your website, and then promote them all heavily with links. Also, be sure to list them in the sidebar of your website so that everyone who visits your website has instant access to them and can find them easily.

Other tips for creating link-worthy content:

* Create good headlines that have serious “grab-ability.” See the front of Cosmo magazine for examples. Google your topic and look at the headlines on the ads for headline ideas. You want stuff that is highly clickable and has serious grab.
* Over deliver on your promise. Make a big promise in your headline, and then over deliver on it. Look at the existing resources for your topic on the web, and then beat them all with a superior piece of content. Go for long and detailed.
* Mix it up and offer a wide variety of content formats. Supplement text with videos, pictures, and free eBooks. Give everything away for free; charge nothing for your premium content and do not use pay walls of any kind.
* Look at what your competitors charge money for in terms of content. Then, create superior content, and give it away for free. This will encourage incoming links and word of mouth sharing.

Secret #10: Daily publishing

Perhaps the biggest secret of all is this:

Publish multiple articles daily.

That’s it. The day is your multiplier. You get 365 of them each year. If you publish 3 articles each and every day, then after a full year you will have a huge website with over 1,000 articles on it.

Most people who are making money online do not even have that much content. Those who do are generally making a really nice, mostly passive income.

Now this “secret” of publishing multiple articles each and every day is hardly a secret, but it is critical that we point out:

1) Just how powerful the technique is, and
2) Just how few people do it.

My own flagship website used to have about 300 articles on it, and was making around $500 dollars per month. I wanted to expand my business and earn more from it so that I could quit my day job and thus buy my freedom.

So what did I do? I took a month off of work, and proceeded to publish close to 20 articles every single day for a while month.

It was this big push in my publishing that took my website above $1,000/month and eventually above $2,000/month.

You are probably not going to get very far just publishing one article each day, unless you are really, really patient. Most people do not want to wait several years for their business to start generating a return on their time investment.

Therefore, if you are in this thing to make money then you need to set a daily publishing goal and stick to it.

I recommend that you publish 3 quality articles every single day. I would make sure that they are in the 600 to 1,000 word range at the minimum.

Some people consider this to be a lot of writing. If you stick to the schedule for a full year then at some point cranking out your 3 articles will seem pretty easy. You will get faster and more efficient at composing articles if you have the discipline to stick to a publishing schedule.

None of the secrets listed in this article are even half as powerful as this one. If you publish multiple articles every single day, you will reach your monthly income goal eventually.

It takes work, and dedication. No days off. Publish daily, and you can achieve your dreams.

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/