Let’s get down to business. You want passive income in your life, you want to build a business that pays you over and over again, you want freedom from day job tyranny.
Working for an hourly wage can be very oppressive. It is sort of like treading water just to keep yourself from drowning. When you trade your hours for dollars at a regular job, you put a hard limit on the amount of money that you can earn in your life.
What’s worse, working a 40 hour per week job saps your life energy and prevents you from starting a lean and profitable business that could possibly lead you to freedom. If you are “average” then you probably a whole list of monthly expenses that keeps you firmly stuck on the work-for-more-money treadmill: Cell phone bill, rent or mortgage payment, groceries, gasoline, maybe a car note, etc. The longer your list of monthly expenses is, the more of a slave you are to your day job. You can’t quit or your entire life would fall apart. So, you keep working, and this prevents you from creating your freedom.
I believe that if you can carve out an hour per day or so of free time, you can change this fate to one where you build your freedom slowly over time by creating an online business. This is definitely not “get rich quick.” It will take time. But, ask yourself:
“What else are you going to do?”
The time is going to pass anyway. You may as well be building something that pays you income, right?
You can effectively “hire yourself” by putting an hour or so each day into your new business. Instead of watching mindless television each night, create something amazing online. One day it will pay you over and over again.
Here is how to build a business and escape day job tyranny:
* Choose a profitable topic and use the one website approach.
* Go register a branded domain and buy cheap hosting.
* Install WordPress and start creating amazing content.
* Seek out a real guest posting opportunity.
* Manufacture some links.
* Create more amazing content. Expand your content model.
* Foster a community around your ideas.
* At some point, shift entirely to “producing amazing content.”
Choose a profitable topic and use the one website approach
Here is my first piece of advice: just make one website.
Just one.
There are going to be so many voices that advise otherwise. They will say “one website? Are you crazy? What if you get deindexed? What if the search engines just decide, on a whim, that they no longer like your site? What then? You’ll be sunk!”
They are half right. If you make all of your money from one website, then you risk losing all of it if tragedy suddenly strikes.
But here is what they are not telling you: diversification in the online world is a problem of scale. Let me ask you something:
How many articles per day do you plan to publish with your new business?
And also, while we are at it:
How many link building articles are you going to write each day?
Because if you have multiple websites, they all are going to need lots and lots of links built to them. It is painstaking to build links to just ONE website, can you imagine trying to do it for 5 or more websites?
If you start a website and put up 100 articles over the next few months and build a few links here and there, to be honest, not much is going to happen. It takes more effort and more age and more link juice than that in order to start making any sort of real income.
So imagine that you are trying to “diversify” and start several websites at the same time. You are sunk before you even get started. I don’t care if you write 5 articles each and every day, you are not going to gain any traction in the first year with that approach. You are spread too thin.
I have a solid argument against diversification: I started a single website, built it up over the course of about 4 years, and it slowly grew to over $2,000/month in income. Then, guess what happened? Someone bought the site for $200,000 dollars. No, I did not accidentally add an extra zero or two to that number.
That is the power of serious concentration. If I would have diversified like all the internet marketers were telling me to do, I never would have hit those fantastic numbers.
Make one website. Just one. You will be tempted to make more. Don’t. Just stick to the one website and keep pouring all of your effort into it.
Think about this, too: if you make 5 or 10 websites, the content will be spread very thin among them, and their link profiles will all be fairly weak. If you put all of that energy into a single website, the content on the single site would be strong, robust, detailed, and the backlink profile will be much stronger.
Which type of website do you think Google rakes over the coals when they flip their algorithm update switch? The tiny niche sites are the ones that get taken for a ride, and the larger sties that have some stability and authority tend to fare much better. Obviously my website that sold for $200,000 was not ripe to be penalized by Google. If it was, the buyer would have looked elsewhere for a more stable and reliable site. But the fact was that my site was built rock solid from the ground up using the principles you will read about in this very article. Some of those ideas include:
* A branded domain.
* High volume of quality content (1,500 articles).
* Wide variety of article length (several articles over 1,000 words, 3,000 words, 6,000 words, and a few 10,000 plus).
* Variety of content types (pictures, infographics, videos, eBooks, text, etc.)
* Diversified backlink profile (though not necessarily very strong).
* Community of users in a very active discussion forum.
* Long term outlook (age 4+ years).
Keep these ideas in mind as you build out your authority website.
Now as for a profitable topic, I would suggest that you use the “Google adwords test” in order to determine if your topic is profitable enough to pursue.
Simply go to Google.com and do a search for your topic idea, then look carefully at the ads that are displayed with the search results. What I would do then is to try to use some common sense here and think about what the advertisers are attempting to sell. You may even investigate their websites and landing pages to see what they are offering.
If you do a search for “free doily patterns” you will notice that there are ads displayed. However, these advertisers cannot be making much money. Even if you ranked well for this topic, you would not be making hardly any money at all. Why? Because free doily patterns do not cost much money.
On the other hand, say that you ranked very well for “investing adviser.” Do you think there is more money to made in that niche as compared with the doily niche?
You bet there is. Financial advisers typically get a customer to give them all of their life savings and then they end up making a slice of that pie, over and over again. This is a much more powerful business model than selling doilies and therefore the competitiveness of the keywords will reflect that. It is much easier to rank for doily keywords than it ts to rank for investment keywords. But ultimately what I am telling you is not to pick a website topic that pays out peanuts, such as the doily topic.
On the other hand, you do not want to choose a niche like “insurance” or “credit cards” because it is just too competitive, and you will never gain any traction.
Also, be leery of choosing too broad of a topic. You are not going to build an authority site about “cars.” But, you might make a very profitable website about “classic muscle cars” or some such thing. Pick a niche that has profit potential, but then drill down to some level of detail in which you have expert knowledge or experience. You can always broaden the site topic slightly as you gain traction and continue to build it out. But, if you go too broad in the beginning you will be sunk before you get started.
Go for “Hawaiian vacations” rather than “travel.” The former is just specific enough, the latter is too broad.
Go register a branded domain and buy cheap hosting
So if you are gonna build a single website then you need to go buy yourself a dot com and get set up with some hosting for it.
Let’s talk domain names.
Avoid the spammy keyword laden nightmare such as:
www.this-is-my-keyword-website.com
If your topic is “investing,” don’t go with a generic sounding domain that focuses on keywords such as:
www.bestInvestingAdvice.com
Instead, go with something that is more “brand-worthy,” such as:
www.investingNinja.com
Notice that you still get one keyword in there, while still being a brandable domain. So in the long run a domain like “investingNinja.com” will help you to rank well for “investing” type keywords. On the other hand, don’t go for a keyword-laden domain just to try to boost your seo value of it. It is much better to seek out a worthy brand name.
I would recommend that you go to a hosting company such as HostGator.com or BlueHost.com and just buy your ten dollar domain and the cheapest shared hosting plan that they have. In a few years as your site gets bigger, you may upgrade to more expensive hosting that can handle more traffic, but this is absolutely not necessary when you are just starting out. I stayed on shared hosting for the first 3 years of my journey and I probably could have stayed there until I sold the site off.
There are other web hosts out there but I have used both of those that I recommended above and they are both outstanding in quality. Their customer support is fantastic as well with 24/7 phone support. You will pay less than $100 per year for all of your expenses, including both the domain name and the hosting costs, and you are not going to get much cheaper than that.
Install WordPress and start creating amazing content
After you decide on a domain name and purchase it along with shared hosting, you need to install WordPress and start blogging. If you cannot figure out how to do this, simply call up your web host and have them talk you through it. They will gladly do this because their support is very good and they want your repeat business so badly.
Once you have wordpress installed on your website, you can start blogging by creating a new post. This is going to be your primary activity that you use to build your business with.
What I would do in order to get started is to brainstorm a list of keywords based around your topic. So if your topic is investing, you might come up with a list that starts like this:
* investing budget
* financial planning
* savings
* debt reduction
I would advise that you create a swipe file of some sort, just a notepad or excel file will work just fine, and then start to add more and more keywords as you think of them. One technique that would be especially helpful is if you force yourself to come up with 5 new keywords for your website every single day. After you come up with 5 new ones, write an article for your site.
What you do in order to write an article is to take the next keyword on your list and then convert it into a great headline.
For example, I would turn the keyword list above into these article titles:
* “How to Create an Investing Budget when You Have Limited Income
* “5 Steps to Sound Financial Planning”
* “Increase Your Savings with these 5 Unique Strategies”
* “Become a Debt Reduction Ninja with this Bulletproof Plan”
Notice how each post title also contains the exact keyword that it is based on.
I also recommend that you use the keyword from your list just ONCE in the post itself.
After that, I simply recommend that you write an incredibly useful and informative article between 600 and 2,000 words in length. To be honest most of my articles that I have published in my life have been closer to 600 than to 2,000 words long. But, these days most of my articles run longer than 2,000 words, simply because they are so detailed and thorough.
Seek out a real guest posting opportunity
After you have some great articles posted on your website, it is time to go build your first link. I suggest that you wait until you have at least 10 articles on your website before you attempt this. I would also recommend that they are of excellent quality and probably longer than the usual 600 words or so.
What I would suggest that you do next is to write an insanely useful and outstanding article about your topic. Your goal is going to be to contact other website owners in your niche and ask them if they would like to publish a guest post.
This might sound like a lot of work, because it is. But there is no way around it. You need links, and you need at least one really good link, and so this is it. You need to create an outstanding post and then shop it around until you find a website in your niche that agrees to publish it. Hopefully they will link back to your website, but I would not push the idea that you need a link out of the deal.
So how to do this? I would recommend that you build up to it slowly by leaving extremely high quality comments on their blog first before you ever approach them about guest posting. Build the relationship a bit first before you try to ask them for anything.
Manufacture some links
After your site gets a bit of age and you have published a real guest post or two, I would recommend that you slowly start building some lower quality backlinks. These would be things such as article directory links, links from sites such as hubpages, eZine articles, etc.
I personally outsource all of this by using services such as those offered at TheContentAuthority.com
They allow you to specify what anchor text you want and what URLs you want linked to and they do the rest. The prices are not bad either but I would never spend more than about $100 or so per month on this. Also, be sure that you ramp up your linking slowly. So, don’t order $100 dollars worth of links your first month. Instead, do $20 dollars and then slowly build up from there.
I would also recommend that you not spend ANY money on outsourcing unless you are earning the equivalent in income already. In other words, make the business pay for itself and don’t invest serious money into building the site unless the website is already making good money.
I also think this is an important approach because then you really learn how the business works from the inside out, because you have to create the initial success yourself without paying others to write your content and build your links for you. In fact, I would not outsource any of your on-site content at all, and only use outsourcing for link building purposes.
Go easy on the “manufactured” links. The search engines do not really like the idea of them, but they still put weight on them. So it is sort of a fine line when you building cheap links this way. I would urge you to focus on getting one more solid guest post rather than spending several hundred per month on cheaper links.
Ultimately, in the long run, do both. But if you do not have a solid link yet from a guest post, I would focus on that first before you get the cheaper links rolling in.
Create more amazing content. Expand your content model
If you use the one website approach as I suggest, it is not so unthinkable that some day you might shoot a video of yourself talking about your topic, and then post it on your website. You might also draw up a graph or something visual that illustrates a concept about your topic, and then take a picture of that and post it on your website along with an explanation.
Expand your content offerings. I would say that anyone who is serious about building out their business should eventually create an eBook about their topic as well. I would tend to offer the eBook for free on your website in order to encourage more links and sharing of your content.
So eventually your website will be much more than just text. I would try to offer a mix of videos, pictures, and text based articles. Of course 90 percent of your content will be text based, but I think it is important to have a mix as well.
Foster a community around your ideas
If you keep adding amazing content and building quality links, you are going to get search engine traffic pouring in at some point. Because you will have a WordPress blog, your site visitors will be able to leave comments on your site.
When they do, answer them. Have real conversations with them.
If you keep doing this over the long haul, you will create fans and build real relationships. These people will become your community.
As your site moves up in the search engine results, you will get more traffic and even more comments. At some point, it will be a natural move for you to create a discussion forum for your site visitors. This will bring many indirect benefits to your website, including the ability to more effectively build organic links from publishing high quality content.
At some point, shift entirely to “producing amazing content”
If your site is successful enough that it can sustain an active forum that is producing new content on its own every single day, then you should probably shift away from “thinner” 600 word articles and start creating truly amazing, high quality, and in-depth articles that have the power to generate viral traffic.
If you have gone through the painstaking process of building up significant daily search engine traffic, then it is time to start “wowing” your audience with amazingly useful content. Set a new standard for yourself that you will only publish new posts that are of super premium quality. You have an audience; now make use of it and let them do your marketing for you. They will not share boring “me-too” content that over-promises and under-delivers. Instead, create something fantastic, each and every time that you post. This is how to take your brand to the next level and build a website that has sustainable income for years to come.
So that is the road map that I suggest you follow in order to build an online business. The tough part is that you have to “hire yourself” in order to do the work, and you probably won’t get paid much in the first year. But after you build your site out a bit and get some age to the site, the income will start to trickle in slowly but surely.
From there, it is simply a matter of scale. More content, more links, and more relationship building.
It may all sound a bit overwhelming at first, but it is not so bad considering you are only going to be creating ONE website. Put all of your effort into making just one site a success, and one day you will be rewarded with a growing and sustainable income that is mostly passive.
It takes time, energy, and creative energy to get there. But, what else are you going to do? You might as well build something that pays you income!
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