Success online is really a numbers game. This is my new philosophy when it comes to building new pages. For the next 4 weeks, I am going to pump out as much content as I possible can, and then evaluate where I stand.

Why am I doing this?

I spend entirely too much time worrying over every little detail of my sniper sites. Instead of simply creating useful content and moving on, I agonize over everything.

Where should I put my links? Should I include pictures, and if so, where do I put them? How many pages is good enough? Where do I plan on getting traffic?

Blah, blah, blah. The list keeps going on and on and on.

What I really need to do is WRITE. Just write and get some content out there, so I can learn for myself what works and what doesn’t. Sure, I can read how everyone else is doing (GREAT job again PAT), but what about me? What is working for me that I want to replicate?

Most people that I have talked to think that you should be able to determine whether or not something is successful after 500 or so hops. Unfortunately, at my current HOP rate, some of my products may not reach that number until Christmas; which is just plain unacceptable.

I spent my lunch break reading some articles on Ezinearticles. I then spent some time following the author’s resource boxes to see what they looked like. I must admit that there are some truly awe inspiring writers out there. Not only do they have thousands of articles published, they also have thousands of pages linked to those articles presumably making them money.

I would think that after creating 500 articles or more, one would stop unless they were making some serious bank.

So that’s the plan for the rest of July….Build little sites that offer clickbank and amazon products as fast as I can, and see what happens. Who knows, maybe I will get off the $0 earnings streak I am currently experiencing!

Sales: $0.00 - Would not want to break this streak now would we?

What about you? How is your passive income empire coming along?

ShareThis

Do Or Do Not, There is No Try

I truly hope everyone had a nice, long and relaxing holiday weekend. I spent every second that I could with my wife and son. I could not imagine a better way to spend my time. They are, after all, the motivating force behind all of my efforts; both professionally and with my online empire.

Tonight, I spent some time doing a bit of keyword research. It simply amazes me how much one ‘expert’ can disagree with another. Should you select only keyword phrases with less than 20,000 competing pages? Or perhaps that number should be 7,000 pages. Should you analyze your true competition by searching Google with quotes, or without? And what does that tell you anyway?

I do not know about you, but all of these rules make it difficult to get started. I really want to make money online, but I refuse to over-analyze things anymore. I have picked a set of ‘guidelines’ that seem reasonable, and I am going to stick with these. I am not going to buy any more resources which promise to make me thousands of dollars overnight.

Why?

Most experts try and teach you how to use Adwords. While I realize that this is indeed where the big bucks occurs, I refuse to even attempt that until I can make consistent sales using free techniques. Additionally, trying to make some additional passive income is supposed to be fun. If it isn’t, then I am not going to do it. I am not putting ANY pressure upon myself to succeed. If I do..GREAT. If I don’t…as long as it is fun, I will continue.

Once I wrapped up my keyword research, I went out and bought two more domains. Both appear to be solid long-tail keywords that have decent search volume. The competition is moderate, but I think I can get on the first page within a few weeks.

Sniper Site #3 has completely disappeared from Google’s listings. I am not worried, since this is common with newer sites. Before it dropped off, it had managed to climb to page 7 for my main keyword, and page 4 for a different keyword I was not even targeting. Weird how that happens sometimes, isn’t it?

Sales: $0.00 - Pretty consistent so far

How are your sites going? Have you managed to make any sales yet?

ShareThis

Taking a bit of advise from Carrie, I spent a few hours tonight creating backlinks to two of my sniper sites. If you have ever sat down and done some of this, you know how long it can take. Over the course of 3 hours, I managed to get around 50 links created, all to sites with page ranks of 5 or higher. Hopefully over the next few days I will see these sites start to creep up in the SERPs a bit.

After spending a few hours doing this, I found that I kind of enjoyed it. It was relaxing in a weird sort of way and helped get some creative juices flowing. As you know, I plan of buying a ton of domain names over the next few weeks. I wanted to use my eHow money to fund this, however, my earnings have been slowly decreasing ( since I do not have the time needed to constantly create new articles).

As such, I have decided to offer my services to a few of my readers. This should provide a little seed money so that I can go out and grab a few more domain names.

Outsource Your Link Building to Me!

Here is what I am offering for $15:

• backlinks to 10 sites (of my choice), of which all have at least a PR of 5
• for each site, I will create 1 or 2 links to any site you choose (PG-13 or less - I will not do anything shady, unethical, or even slightly questionable)
• A list of where you can find your links as proof they were completed (which you can then use on your other sites yourself or have me create them again for you)

I think this is a pretty decent deal for everyone involved. You get 20 high quality links and I get a few dollars to fund my sniper empire. Each link will be created from an inner, do-follow page, that allows the main domain’s link juice to flow to your site.

If no one elects to give this a try, so be it. No worries either way! Creating these links takes about an hour or two, so to be safe, I am limiting this to 5 people at a time. This ensures that I can get the links done for the purchaser in a reasonable amount of time.

If you are interested, leave me a comment (use the email you want me to respond to when filling out the comment form). I will email you and get all of the information that I will need to create useful backlinks for your sites! To start, I will simply go down the comment list, first come first served, until I have 5 orders (if anyone wants to take me up on this offer). Once I have completed the first 5, I will move on down the list.

Since my main focus is creating passive income, this will be a limited time offer. I may cancel it at any time, so if you are interested, please let me know!

What do you guys think? Am I taking on too much at one time, or not enough?

ShareThis

If you will remember from my last passive income challenge update, I added a new site to my growing empire (Sniper Site #3). For whatever reason, it still has not been indexed by Google. I have not added much to it so far, maybe one or two posts, so today I plan on using a few techniques found in One Week Marketing to get it indexed, and to get the traffic started. As a side note, Jennifer sent out another OWM update about an hour ago. This little 50 page bonus gave me some new ideas to jump start a few of my older campaigns. I will probably attack those this weekend.

Since clickbank allows you to track your hops for only 30 days, I went ahead and downloaded my activity for June. Sniper Site #1 is absolutely killing it with respects to hops but has not produced even one sale. I am thinking that perhaps this product has seen the last of its productive days. I am going to give it another 250 hops to produce a sale, or it will be fired. Products that do not convert have no place in my empire. Sniper Site #2 has only received a few hops thus far, so it is way to early to judge its performance.

As a review, my overall passive income mission statement is as follows:

By January 1, 2010, my goal is to earn an additional $400 each month ($500 total). These earnings should be derived primarily from passive sources (i.e., affiliate marketing, revenue sharing websites, etc) in which additional effort may be required up front but require less than 1 hour of maintenance per month to continue.

Passive Income Results: June 2009

Affiliate Sales: $89.12 - While not my best performance ever, I did make a few sales all coming from different niches. My experience continues to prove to me that this whole online income thing is truly a numbers game. Try and get as many little sites working for you and you are bound to make at least some money.

eHow earnings: $68.59  - There is no telling how long it will take for ehow to update June’s final earnings, so I am going to go ahead and provide an estimate. I will update it with final numbers as they are posted. As I earned $82 last month, $68.59 represents a 16% decrease in earnings. As part of my own little ehow experiment, I created no new articles and did not participate at all on ehow during June. I honestly believe that this negatively impacted my results. I am going to resume my article creation efforts in July to see if this has any impact at all.

Amazon: $6.74 - A couple of smallish sales was all I managed from Amazon in June. While the commission percentage is rather small, people trust Amazon, so I like promoting items found there. It will never make me rich, but even $5 a month will help me reach my overall goal.

PCP: $25.45 - I use Yahoo and Google in equal parts. I do not feel comfortable breaking these out individually, so you will see them presented here together. I have toyed with the idea of trying to create 30 new hubs on hubpages, but it is difficult to find the time. If you get the chance, please visit my profile and become a fan.

Swagbucks: $90 - The little search engine that could :). This actually represents two months worth of earnings, but since I did not post my results last month (and i finally cashed them in), I included it here. Typically, I use them to buy Amazon gift cards. I bought myself a new pair of running shoes (since I am trying to get in shape) and the first season of True Blood (which a few colleagues have been raving about). I really like Swagbucks.

Peer Lending: $1.17 - This represents the interest I have been paid on the FREE money I received when I joined. So far, both notes remain current and continue to earn 9.34% annually. I have considered adding some of my own money, but for now I think I will just use the free money and see how it all pans out.

Total: $191.07 (excluding the gift cards earned from Swagbucks). Overall this is not a horrible month. It was not my best by far, but it is a start. I elected not to include the $90 from Swagbucks because I cannot use this money to pay the mortgage. While I can buy myself some cool things, it does not really help me reach my goals.

Speaking of Goals:

In July, I want to accomplish the following tasks:

• write 15 articles on ehow and Infobarrel
• create 10 new Hubs on HubPages
• create 50 links to each of my new sniper sites
• create 20+ posts on Chasingthebull and ExperimentalBlogging
• complete 5 new Sniper Sites
• lose 5 pounds (I actually gained weight on vacation - go figure?)
• earn $250 in passive income - which is an increase of slightly more than 30% (pretty realistic)

What about you? How did your month end up? What are you going to do today that will help you reach your goals tomorrow?
earnings from ehow have been updated

ShareThis

Anyways…Lending Club was having a deal at the time. For every person that signed up, the referrer was SUPPOSED to get $25, while the new member’s account would be credited with $50 to begin their peer lending experience.

From Lending Club’s website:

Rather than spending money on advertising, we’d like to give that money to you, our members, for introducing your friends to Lending Club.

The last time I ask John about this, he still had not receive his income, but I did get receive $50. As such, I immediately set out to lend this money to someone who really needed it. My lending strategy, can be boiled down as follows:

• Credit Score Over 700
• Using Loan to Reduce Debt
• Zero Delinquencies in Past 2 Year

Note #1

Amount: $25
Weighted Average Rate: 9.63%
Principle Received: $5.17
Interest Received: $0.59
Outstanding Principle: $19.83
Status: Current

Note #2

Weighted Average Rate: 9.63%
Principle Received: $1.81
Interest Received: $0.59
Outstanding Principle: $23.19
Status: Current

So far, this little experiment is going rather well. In fact, I was thinking about investing a little more. I would love to hear about your experience with peer-to-peer lending.

If you get a few minutes, go check out Lending Club and let me know what you think.

Have you had good experiences with Peer Lending? What words of caution would you give me or someone else thinking about starting a peer lending portfolio?

ShareThis

I have to admit that when I make a sale, it feels pretty good. Kind of like scoring the winning goal when I was in high school good. You know the kind! You look at the screen, see numbers where zeros typically like to hang out and you jump around doing your little celebration dance. I myself, am partial to the Icky Shuffle.

Last night, I got to thinking that if I was happy about one or two sales here and there, then the creators of these products must be absolutely loving life. Even giving up a huge portion of their commission to their affiliates, they are simply raking it in.

For example, currently the highest Clickbank product, in terms of gravity is a Twitter Traffic Machine. According to cbanalytics, it has a CURRENT gravity of 701. What this means is that in the past 30 days, 701 affiliates have made at least one sale of this product. For this particular product, the author keeps 50% of the sale and gives his/her affiliate the remaining 50%.

Doing some quick math - [701 *11.95] = $8,376.95

Impressed yet? Don’t be just quite yet.

Accordingly to cbanalytics, this product has an TOTAL GRAVITY of 50,415. WHAT?

From cb-analytic’s help page:
Total gravity is the measure of how established the product is. Every day [that the] product is present on [in the]marketplace it’s gravity is accumulated. This value is total gravity. It’s very useful for separating well-established and stable products from ones that have their gravity spike to hundreds in a matter of days and then slowly decays without generating much sales for most of the affiliates”.

green was added by me for clarification

Does this mean that this product has been sold 50,000 times since March 20, 2009 (the products release date)? If so, this guy is really killing it and killing it well.

A little more math - [50,415 * 11.95] = $602,459.25

I honestly do not think my brain can handle numbers like that. It is a little difficult for me to believe. While I am sure this product absolutely rocks, $600k? Dang. Maybe, we should reconsider this whole selling someone else’s product. I think Pat figured this out a long time ago

Other Popular Products (Product Creators Income):

Fat Loss 4 Idiots - 193,018 gravity * $10.83 = $2,090,385 - This cannot be real, can it?

Earth 4 Energy - 135,189 * $10.74 = $1,451,930 - Someone please tell me my math is wrong?

Hemorrhoid Relief - 38,421 * $11.22 = $431,248 - Wow!. You just never know, do ya?

I honestly hope that I am wrong about these numbers. I hope someone speaks up and says, no no my friend, you misunderstood TOTAL GRAVITY. If not, I need to get cracking with my own product!

ShareThis

I found another long-tail keyword in the same niche that I targeted with Sniper Site #2. I simply could not help myself. There are a decent amount of searches each month, moderate levels of competition and even a few articles listed on Page 1 of Google. I like my chances!

I honestly have no idea if I will every make a sale from either of these two sites. The only thing that I am certain of is that if I do not create these sites, I will be in exactly the same place that I am in now.

Dave Ramsey tells us to live like no one else so that we can live like no one else. I firmly believe in this concept. If I am willing to put in the effort, day in and day out, in 6 months I should be better off that I am now (all other things remaining constant).

I am going to put in the effort. I am going to spend some money to actually BUY a few domain names. I am going to create my own little online empire, even if that empire only makes me a few dollars a month.

Am I certain that I am going to make money? No. But I am certainly going to give it the old college effort!

Sales: June 23 - $37.50 WHOOT WHOOT!
One Week Marketing strikes again. Seriously folks! If you have not tried this yet, I am hear to say it really does work. I literally have not touched this campaign in 2 months, yet I continue to make 1 sale a month from it. In fact, once my sniper sites have a chance to age a bit, I will be adding a few concepts that I learned in this resource that should turbo charge my results.

I am excited about the future, and so should you be! While you are here, please take the time and SUBSCRIBE to my feed! I really would like to hear your thoughts and comments.

What did you accomplish today? Have you ever traded time for ‘the chance’ of making it big?

ShareThis

Introduction - Dave Ramsey’s Baby Steps - The Decision to Become Debt Free
Step 1 - Save $1,000 Fast - Build a Small Emergency fund
Step 2 - The Debt Snowball - Pay Off All Debt
Step 3 - Finish the Emergency Fund - Save 3 to 6 Months of Expenses
Step 4 - Maximize Retirement Investing - Invest 15% of household income into Roth IRAs and other pre-tax investment vehicles
Step 5 - College Funding - Provide a ‘Paid For’ Education for Your Children
Step 6 - Pay Off the Home Mortgage
Step 7 - Build Wealth Like Crazy - Then Give It Away

Additional Steps (optional)
Helping Your Snowball Gain Momentum

Baby Step #3 - Finish the Emergency Fund

Once you have completed your debt snowball, it is time to provide your spouse with a little piece of mind. Truth be told, I wish this step was the first one because it really would have made my wife feel more safe and secure.

Your initial emergency fund of $1,000 performed its job adequately but now it is time to really prepare for a major emergency. A fully funded emergency fund should cover three to six months of expenses. As this amount is completely dependent upon how much money you earn, I cannot provide the exact number that you need to save.

Additionally, as our economy falls deeper and deeper into the global recession, six months may not even be sufficient. Once we have successfully completed our debt snowball, my wife and I are going to save 12 months of expenses just in case.

The most difficult part of this step is to avoid spending your emergency money. It is so easy to simply think that you can buy whatever it is that you want and replace that money next paycheck. What happens when that emergency you were saving for occurs right after you spend $500 on a new set of golf clubs? What would you do then?

It is important to note that these steps are not meant to make you miserable. Most likely, you have done a pretty decent job of that all by yourself. No! This process is laid out the way that it is because it works.

According to Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover, 78% of Americans say that they would simply borrow money from a credit card if a real emergency ever occurred. While this was once the attitude that I had myself, I honestly hope that I never go there again. It is way too stressful.

One last thing to note is that your emergency fund should remain liquid. By liquid, I mean put your money somewhere that you can get it anytime you want with absolutely no penalties. Additionally, you should avoid putting it in the stock market, mutual find or even bank CDs.

The purpose of a fully funded emergency fund is to provide cash when needed to satisfy an obligation deriving from a real emergency. If you place your funds in a mutual fund, you may be tempted to charge the cost of your emergency to some credit card if the mutual fund you purchased has gone down in value.

Having a fully funded emergency fund can sometimes seem like some unrealistic concept. Imagine the piece of mind provided by knowing that if something major were to occur, you could survive for many months.

Do you have a fully funded emergency fund? How would you survive a real emergency?

ShareThis

As part of my increased efforts to diversify my passive income streams, I have begun creating small, 5 to 10 page, sniper sites.While these sites will never been considered authority sites, it is my hope that they become a useful part on my online empire.

After the completion of Sniper Site #1, I quickly began thinking about completing another site. The competition in this niche is a bit tougher so my expectations are not as high as they should be. Never-the-less, I began working on it yesterday afternoon around 3pm and completed it around 9pm.

It was never my intention to spend six hours creating a site that may or may not make any money for me, but I guess that is part of the learning curve. Hopefully my next site will only take half as long to complete.

Tonight marks the end of the first week of this passive income challenge. Since I have only created 2 small sniper sites, 1 HubPage and a couple articles of Infobarrel there is not much to report. My adsense earnings from all sources is just plain pathetic. Hopefully, this will pick up over the next few months. I am still loving Infobarrel, although I am getting crushed in this month’s contest (too little time, too many projects to complete).

My eHow earnings are well below normal. Perhaps this can be contributed to my little eHow experiment. I have not made this experiment public until now because I did not want to influence my results in any way. Basically, for the month of June, I have decided to NOT participate on ehow at all. No commenting, no rating and absolutely no article creation.

I am trying to determine whether or not this will impact my earnings. My goal is to create passive income, not income that requires active participation. My buddy Norm, over at The Cheap Bastid, is doing the exact opposite. In his Great eHow Experiment, Norm is commenting on articles, rating various articles and participating in the ehow forums. Like me, he is not adding any additional articles in June. From the preliminary results, it looks like Norm is getting the better end of the experiment. I will let you guys know how it goes once the month is over.

I have actually made a few sales on Amazon. You may remember that a few months back I had some really decent sales, but this has really dried up lately. It appears to me that if you create articles targeting specific products you are more likely to pull in a few referral sales. Again, Norm is the king at this (I just wish he would start posting again - the dude is brilliant).

Tomorrow begins the creation of Sniper Site #3. As I have already purchased the domain name, added a new Wordpress theme and related PlugIns, creation should not take quite as long. One interesting thing is that this site is already ranked on the first page of Google and I have not added a thing. Basically, when you click on the link it has the default Wordpress settings and everything.This could truly be a powerful method of generating some additional income online.

Sales - June 17 - 20: $0.00
Yahoo Ads - $0.05

How is your online empire going? What did you do today to help you reach your goals?

ShareThis

I finally completely my first sniper site tonight. I am somewhat happy with it as it is my first true attempt at a niche website. One of the first things I did, after installing a slick new Wordpress theme and related PlugIns, was to install a stat tracking code at the footer of the site’s template.

For my Sniper Empire, I have elected to use StatCounter since it is so easy to use. While many people choose to use Google Analytics, I have decided to take a different path.

After only four days, it is very apparent that this first niche site will receive pretty decent traffic once it gets established a bit more. Using the techniques I learned from One Week Marketing, I was able to get this new site indexed in Google within 12 hours. Additionally, it ranks on the first page (#9) for my main keyword phrase already.

Since I wanted to work my way into this whole keyword sniper idea very slowly, the keyword phrase I selected only has 40,000 competing pages. Each month it receives approximately 5,000 searches, so my odds of being ranked number one are pretty good. Additionally, there are a few related keywords that get between 750 and 3,000 searches a month that I have worked into my published posts as well.

My goal for this Sniper Site #1 is $10 per month. Doing some quick math, this would mean that, after taking out the cost of renewing the domain name each year, it should earn me $110 per year, or $9.15 per month. Now I just need to create 55 more of these little sites

Sniper Site #2 is in a more competitive environment. Getting ranked on the first page will take some effort. I think I am going to tackle that project tomorrow night!

What you do guys think? How would you increase your monthly earnings to a decent amount?

Learn the Power of Writing for eHow!

ShareThis