Passive Income From Passive Traffic

Today I’m going to share with you a simple online publishing business you can get into for yourself to generate passive income online.

Step 1:  Decide on a market/niche

As a test, I chose the wedding market (a huge market by the way) and registered somewedding.com (if you want to register domains, I recommend http://www.wholesalerdomains.com)

You can go with any marketing/topic you want.

Step 2:  Build the site

I used Wordpress script for pretty much all of my content sites.  Just login to your cPanel (If you need an affordable hosting, try GuruCS’s $5/month web hosting) in your hosting account and use Fantastisco to click-install the wordpress script.  It is really easy and you can literally have a site up under 15 minutes.

You can go with the default template that comes with the Wordpress install or you can install a different theme (for free) by going to http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

Step 3:  Keyword Research

In the case of my wedding site, I intended to focus on “low-hanging fruits” or longtail keywords that have very little competition (competition = how many other webmasters who also have webpages focusing on the same keywords as you are).

Make yourself a list of keywords and proceed to step 4.

Step 4:  Write content to incorporate your longtail keywords

If the keyword allows, use it as your article title.  If not, try to incorporate your keywords inside the article itself.  Remember, since these are longtail keywords, they don’t need to be “optimized” as much - I find that simply having your keyword mentioned in your article will get it ranked well in the search engines.

Step 5:  Place monetization on your site

How are you going to make money from your site?  In case of my wedding site, I simpled used Google Adsense program (I’m selling advertising space on my website).  You may choose to sell an actual product or service (your own or affiliate).  But the point is, you have to sell something.

Step 6:  Promotion! Promotion! And more promotion!

This is vital to the success/failure of your site.  In order to get visibility and high ranking in the search engines, you have to get noticed.  There are several ways to do this and these are my favorite:

• Browse other blogs relevant to your site and start making comments and leave your website URL behind
• Submit the article you wrote to other article directories or blog network

Promotion activities can be very time consuming and that is why I highly recommend you use our link building service BackLinkShop.com (Use the coupon code “netpassiveincome” to get a $5/month off discount).

Step 7:  Reinvest and Rinse and Repeat!

Once you start making money with one site, start another!

There you have it!  I know this is just an overview and I have left out a lot of “how-to” information but given the time/space constraint on my blog this is simply not possible.  Would anybody be interested that I put together a PDF or video course that details how to do each of the steps?  Make a comment and you shall have it when it is available.

Be sure to subscribe to my blog to get the latest annoucements.

How To Rank Top 10 In The Search Engines

A while ago I introduced to you a ‘low hanging fruit‘ system of researching keywords and driving free traffic from the search engines to your website/webpage which will subsequently make you more passive income.

In Step 5, I wrote:

5. Submit that article to article directory sites, like ezinearticles.com, aritclecity.com, etc.

The main purpose of submitting articles to article directories is to gain backlinks to your website or webpage.

If you have tried to reverse engineer and figure out why some websites rank higher than others in the search engine results, you will find that there are 2 dominant factors that the search engines use to rank your website against others: On-Page optimization factor, and Off-Page optimization factor.

On-Page Optimization
On-Page optimization has to do with how the content is relevant to a keyword. For example, let’s say you have built a webpage on “dog training” and there are millions of other webpages that also has mentioning of “dog training” on the page (just go to Google.com and search for “dog training”) - how are the search engines to say that your webpage should be displayed first, above the rest of the other millions of pages?

This is where On-Page optimization kicks in. The more “relevant” your webpage is for a specific keyword, the search engines will give you a higher score on this factor.

Here are some tips on how to improve your On-Page optimization:

1. Put your keyword (in our example, it is “dog training”) in the <TITLE> tag.

2. Give descriptive META DESCRIPTION tag and try to mention your keyword in it. List your keywords along with relevant keywords in your META KEYWORD tag.

3. If possible, try emphasize your keyword in a <H1>, <H2>, or <H3> tag or give it a large font size - a good place for this would be in the content label or section heading.

4. Try to mention your keyword in your page content a few times. Many search engine optimists have different findings as to what percentage of keyword density it should be, but I tend to just make sure that the keyword is mentioned while keeping the content information and engaging to my readers.

Most of the On-Page optimization can be done by the site operator or webmaster - and it’s something that can be easily done.

Off-Page Optimization
This factor is based on everything else that’s not content-related. Namely, how many other websites are linking back to you. Generally speaking, more websites link that back to your website, the search engines will deem your site as more “important” and “authoritative” than others, thus gives you a better search engine placement.

Search engines have also evolved to not only count the number of backlinks (number of other websites linking back to your website) your website has, but have also accounted for the quality of backlinks. Here is what I mean by quality:

1. How long has the site been around - longer the site has been around, more weight it carries when linking back to you.

2. How relevant are the sites linking back to you - if your site is on dog training, then you would want to find other dog training sites to link back to you.

3. What link text other sites are using to link back to you - if your site is on dog training, then it wouldn’t make sense (both to humans and the search engines) to have other sites link back to your site using “bird watching” as the link text.

4. The rate of other sites are linking back to you - you don’t want to have a spurt of links going back to your site in a month, and no links going back the next month. The search engines are very keen (at least Google is) at detecting backlink manipulation, and this is what buying a 10,000 directory submission package will do to your site - red flagging your site and possible send your search engine ranking to the bottom of the ocean.

Off-Page optimization takes time. It is not easy to ask for other websites to link back to you. However, there are certain type of websites out there (often times directory type sites) that will let you submit a piece of content in exchange for a link back to your site (ie. article directories).

It’s truly a win-win situation, because the article directories get fresh content from you, and you get a link back to your website, which helps to improve your search engine placement (and ultimately your traffic).

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I hope this will shine some light as to what you can do to your website to get a top 10 ranking in the search engines. Start with the On-Page optimization, because that can be done by modifying your content/site layout. Then focus on steady link building. The Off-Page optimization will require constant promotion, thus making it a deciding factor for the search engines to rank you first as opposed to ranking your competitor’s webpage first.

Long Tail Keyword Research with Wordtracker

I thought I would go ahead and post the reply to a comment I received in my previous post about “The Low Hanging Fruit” which may help some of you get over the keyword research hurdle.

Sorry I should have clarified.  The keyword research bit is to find keywords that you can easily rank high for in Google, not for PPC purpose (although you can, and it won’t hurt).

Here is what I do for keyword research.  I look around the house, or think of a topic in my mind, then I type that word in Wordtracker tool.

Then I go down the list of keywords that it came up with and click on the rightmost icon which will pop up a competition/Google trend estimate for that keyword.  You can use the < 30,000 competition and > 100 searches/day guideline it gives you as a starting point.

So, if you want to follow along, I’m looking around right now and I see computer speakers in front of me.  I type “computer speakers” in the keyword research tool, and it came back with this list (partial):

1,328 searches (top 100 only)
Searches    Keyword    G
1,328    total searches
418    computer speakers
73    wireless computer speakers
70    best computer speakers
43    bose computer speakers
31    speaker computer
20    computer speaker reviews
18    computer speaker
17    klipsch computer speakers
15    logitech computer speakers

Start going down the list and click on the icon in the “G” colulmn.  You will see that “computer speakers” gets searched over 3,000 times a day, but it also has over 3,000,000 webpages that are targeting that keyword!  So it’s very competitive.

Let’s try another one.  How about “wireless computer speakers”  Nice!  This is a good “low hanging fruit” keyword with over 130 searches per day, and 17,000 webpage results.

The next keyword is also good, “best computer speakers”

I would actually like someone to actually go out and register a domain for those keywords, and either monetize it with Google Adsense, Amazon, or eBay auctions, and see how it goes.

More to come later…

Do you NOFOLLOW?

Wouldn’t it great to be able to see if a link on any web page has a “nofollow” attribute to it? Well, fortunately a plugin is available that will give you exactly that information.

Whenever it comes across a link with “nofollow” tag in it, it simply strikes a line through the link denoting that it’s a nofollow link:

The plugin (available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers) can be downloaded for free here: http://www.seoquake.com/

Once you have the plugin installed to your browser, you should see the plugin’s icon located at the bottom right corner of your browser window:

By default the nofollow link indicator is not turned on, so what you will need to do is RIGHT-CLICK your mouse button on the icon, and check the ‘Line-through “nofollow” and “noindex”‘ menu item. Refresh the page that you are viewing and it should put a line through any hyperlinks with nofollow attribute.

One Way Backlink Automation Tool

If you are into SEO or Search Engine Optimization (optimizing your website to rank high in the search engine’s result page) then you know the importance of obtaining links from other web properties (especially true for Google).

Beside all the web 2.0 properties (social bookmarks, social networks, etc.) there are many webmasters who run WPMU, or Wordpress MU websites. WPMU sites allow users to create their own blog with their own unique web address. This presents an excellent opportunity for Search Engine Optimists to go out and seek for these WPMU sites, create a free blog, and start posting content with a link back to their websites.

Currently, my brother (who is an excellent programmer, by the way) is putting in the finishing touch for an automated submission tool that will help you submit content to your WPMU blog accounts. He had 280 WPMU accounts created, and is now using his own submission tool to post articles (with link back to his site) to his blog accounts. It is a HUGE time saver to have the software post articles to 280 blog accounts, and he is seeing amazing rankings.

Would you be interested in such software tool if he should decide to make it publicly available? If so, please put in your name, email, and a suggested price for this software and I’ll let you know when it becomes available (ETA end of March 2008).

Rank Once, Get Paid Over And Over

Do a search in Google for “passive income” and tell me if you see this blog in the search results - see how many results turned up. Do another search for “internet passive income” and see where this blog is ranked - also see how many results came up, and where this blog stands.

Most people over-complicate search engine optimization.

If you want to rank high in Google, you only need to be concerned of 3 things. A good domain name (with your keyword in it), an optimized content page, and good supporting links to your page.

Most people can master the first 2, but have a lot of trouble getting good supporting links to their sites.

Have a look at this service that I provide:
http://www.netpassiveincome.com/blogWSO

This will give you an “unfair advantage” to ranking high in the search engines. This is also the only way for you to get 1-on-1 help from me, personally to you, for you to succeed in your online business.