Which of these book titles do you think would sell better? “How to Be Happy With Your Dog”, or “How to Stop Your Dog From Biting You”? And why?

26 interesting and intriguing comments later, I decided to write a blog post about it because I think we could all benefit from the conversation.

Before I begin, I’d like to mention that seeing this conversation unfold directly on my Facebook page was really amazing. I honestly don’t think interactions like this, involving this many people and being so useful for everyone (even people not directly involved in the conversation) can happen on a platform such as Twitter. Google wave…maybe. If I only had an invite

If you can get fans talking about whatever your niche is about, and then coming to you as the expert for an answer, you’ve got yourself some good leads. Since I’m not selling anything to you or my fans, all we’re doing is having an old school Socratic Seminar right on the Facebook platform. Sweet.

Going into this, I had an idea of what the “better” answer was. I don’t want to use the term “correct” here, since a superior marketer would be able to sell ice to an Eskimo, if you know what I mean. So, which do you think would better sell online?

My Thoughts

I do not consider myself “The Expert” on internet marketing. Far from it actually. However, after a year of living off the internet, being super hardcore and involved in learning as much as I can from some of the top and most successful IMs out there, as well as being comfortable with calling this kind of stuff “what I do” now, I do consider myself “knowledgeable” in the arena of IM. So, it’s up to you if you want to agree or disagree with me on this. Either way, I’d love to hear what you think. We’re all here to learn from each other

I believe the “How to Stop Your Dog From Biting You” book would definitely outperform the other book, for the following reasons:

1. It’s More Specific

Online, the more specific you can get, the better. It has a lot to do with the way people are searching for things. When we have some kind of problem, we don’t search for the general topics anymore – we’ve become very specific with what we type inside search boxes.

“Being Happy With Your Dog” is a lot more general, and probably covers so many more things such as how to properly feed your dog, how to have playtime with your dog, how to make sure he gets enough exercise, how to reprimand it when it does something it’s not supposed to, how to act with your dog when other dogs are around, etc. It may even include a section about dog biting, but because it does cover so many topics, I don’t think it would do quite as well.

The “Happy” book, even though it’s more useful and it would be really good on a dog owner’s bookshelf, it would be harder to sell.

More importantly…

2. It Addresses a Fear and Solves a Pressing Problem

People are always looking for solutions to problems, especially if it’s something specific that triggers some kind of fear, such as getting bit by a dog. In my opinion, with the “Happy” book, although it might be full of really useful information, unhappiness with a dog is not such a pressing issue. Furthermore, a lot of people don’t understand what it’s like to be unhappy with a dog, or know that there exists a solution for such a problem. Would people admit that they are unhappy with their dogs? When does the point of unhappiness start? What’s the definition of “happy”?

On the other hand, when a dog bites, you know it and you want it to stop immediately. People are willing to pay when it comes to their fears and their pains.

Further Observations

If you’ve been anywhere online in the last year or so, you’ve probably seen those “teeth whitening” ads. They are EVERYWHERE. Why?

Because they are making a killing, and it’s probably for many of the same reasons I had just mentioned:

1. It’s a very specific thing: teeth whitening. It’s not about having healthier teeth, or beauty. It’s just about having whiter teeth.

2. It addresses a pressing problem and fear.

The problem: yellow teeth.

The fear: people seeing your nasty yellow teeth.

And those ads aren’t afraid to show you exactly what those yellow teeth look like either.

And this brings me to my last point, which has to do with advertising. With a more specific problem, such as dog biting (or having yellow teeth) your ads can cater to exactly who they need to cater to, and you’ll spend less money on your campaigns.

With broader subjects and niches, you may get a lot of clicks on your ads from people who may not need exactly what you have to offer. Broader keywords cost more (usually), and you’ll have a much lower conversion rate.

That’s not to say you won’t be successful trying to sell either one. I just feel that the more specific, fear addressing book would be much easier.

What Do You Think?

Do I make a good case? I was thinking about going into an analysis on the keyword data, but I don’t think we even need to go there. I can tell you, however, that there were indeed a lot of searches specifically for dog biting type keywords.

Again, if you’d like to get in on more of these types of conversations, come on over to my Facebook page and say hello!

All the best to you! Cheers!

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Let’s Discuss: Which of These Books Do You Think Would Sell Better?

If you sell something online for $30.00, how many units would you need to sell in order to support a $100k lifestyle?

The answer: 3,333 units

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of the world as of November 9th, 2009 is 6,795,850,072 people. If you don’t think you can sell something to 3,333 of those people, you’re crazy. Seriously.

That’s a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the world’s population. Yes, I understand that the population count is skewed as far as who can vs. who cannot purchase things online (i.e. children, certain countries, internet access, etc.) but take those people out of the equation, and the bottom line is that you still have to sell to only 3,333 people to make $100k. When you really think about it, that’s not very many people.

…and that’s selling units at $30 a pop. What if you were selling something for $60? Then you’d only need to reach half, or 1,667 people. At $100 per unit, 1000 people, and so on and so forth.

The above example is how many people make a living online. The following is how “Ninjas” do it.

Ninja Status

A Ninja will sell something for $30. Just for fun, let’s say its a book entitled: “How to Be a Ninja in 30 Days”. He only sells 1000 copies in one year. (1000 x $30 = $30,000)

Of those 1000 customers, a quarter pay extra to get an upgraded course, entitled: “Super Secret Ninja Techniques”, which was not included in the original book. This costs an additional $60. (250 x $60 = $15,000)

Of those 250 customers, 10 pay for a two-day Ninja training course that is held live at the author’s dojo. This costs each person an additional $1000. (10 x $1000 = $10,000)

Of those 10 customers, 2 pay an extra $10,000 for a 6-week Ninja apprenticeship. (2 x $10,000 = $20,000).

The Ninja has made a total of $75,000. And how many people did he sell to? Only 1000.

Oh, and he only worked 6 weeks + 2 days out of the year, and it’s probably work he loves to do.

Ninja Lessons

Here’s what we can learn from our Ninja dude:

• If people buy from you once, they are more than likely to buy from you again. This is so true, and I’ve experienced it myself. Provide excellent content once to prove yourself, and many people will be all over any additional or new stuff you have to offer.
• Dollars earned per customer is important. There are two basic ways to increase the amount of money you make. First, you can focus on getting more customers. Secondly, you can focus on how much you can earn from each customer, not just from raising the prices of what you have to offer, but offering premium and upgraded stuff as well. Do both, and your income will skyrocket.
• You don’t need a lot of customers to become successful. This was the whole point of this blog post. You don’t need to reach that many people in order to earn enough to make a living online.

Two Approaches

Here are two things that you can take away from this information:

First, you can enter a widely popular market, one that is fairly saturated with many companies, businesses, websites and/or blogs, and still do quite well. If you can take a relatively unique angle with your business that will appeal to a number of people within that market (again, it doesn’t have to be very many), you can do quite well for yourself.

You’ve heard of “market share” right? Same idea.

Secondly (and this is the approach that I took with my LEED exam training business), you can enter a niche or market that is really narrow, one that is super specialized that doesn’t really have much existing competition. You become the authority in that niche, the “go-to” person or website people find whenever they need information about that subject. Leverage your authority, and again you won’t need very many people to purchase from you to succeed.

This is why doing business online is so cool. You have the opportunity to sell something to anyone in the world with internet access. There has been no other time in the history of the world where this was possible for people like us.

This Isn’t Crap

I’ve gotten a lot of buzz from my last blog post, my Annual Passive Income Report. I’ve had a lot of amazing, really awesome comments from many of you, and I thank you for those, from the bottom of my heart. Some people, however, are still doubtful that what I’ve done was even possible.

I feel really bad for those people because they are not giving themselves a chance to see what’s possible for them! I hope this post gives at least one of those skeptics a dose of reality. Times are changing, people are buying information online. Reach a few of those people, and you will see what can really happen.

Oh, and the estimated population of the world by 2040 will be 9 billion. Will you take advantage of that?

Here’s to your success!

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6,795,850,072 Reasons Why You Can Make A Successful Living Online

1. Getting traffic to my blog
2. Interacting and building relationships with my target audience
3. Helping to establishing myself as an authority

These three things are all important aspects of becoming a successful blogger, as you probably already know.

I tried to look for posts from the big time bloggers specifically about Facebook and how one could utilize it for their blog, and if it was even worth it. Well, I couldn’t find any definite answers, so I figured I’d just do it myself, see what happens, and report my findings back here for you. That’s kind of what I usually do on this blog.

Anyways, the following is a compilation of what I’ve learned, which I hope many of you can use as a guide if you’re at all interested in using Facebook for something useful other than poking your old high school friends, or showing off your latest Bejeweled Blitz scores and Farmville achievements.

Why Facebook?

Before I get into the actionable, how-to type stuff, it’s important to understand why Facebook should be paid attention to in the first place. Here are some astonishing statistics:

• There are over 300 million active users (that’s one for each U.S. citizen!)
• It has an Alexa ranking of 2, just behind Google.
• On average, people spend 20 minutes a day on Facebook. (Average time spent on any given website: 10 seconds)

Additionally, check out the trends below. I have to credit TechCrunch for this eye-opening comparison:

Craziness.

So, what’s in it for us bloggers? Can we benefit from this rapid expansion into the Facebook platform? I say absolutely, and I have some initial data to prove it.

After just one single month, Facebook has proven to be a notable traffic source for The Smart Passive Income Blog (click chart below to enlarge):

Probably the most notable part of this data is that the traffic from Facebook included those with the most pageviews (3.25), the most average time spent on the site (05:14), and the lowest bounce rate (49.55%), and by a significant amount too. As time goes on, I expect my traffic to increase, and I’ll make sure to keep a close eye on what happens and report back to you. So far, I’m fairly convinced. If not for the quantity of traffic, at least for the quality.

Now, realize that in a perfect world, I would have 1000 Facebook accounts and methods in place to control variables that could have an impact on my data (not to mention, more time) but of course that can’t happen. You can interpret these numbers however you wish, but honestly you won’t know what Facebook can do for you unless you give it a shot yourself. Getting on Facebook is NOT a “Magic Button” for your blog. I’d be weary of anything that claims to be just that. It does take time and it’s another platform you’ll have to “deal with”, but Facebook might be one that you don’t want to miss out on.

The rest of this post is dedicated to helping you get the best bang for your buck if you do choose to get into Facebook a bit. If you’re not convinced, please don’t waste your time with the following information.

Personal Profiles vs. Groups vs. Pages

There are three basic ways to connect and engage with people on Facebook:

1. Your Personal Profile
2. A Group; or
3. A Page

Your personal profile is basically your primary account, where you can interact with friends and family. You may wish to just use your personal profile to advance your blog (which many people do), but knowing that you’re going to have to talk about whatever niche your blog is about from time to time, understand that this may end up annoying your friends and family who really just want to see pictures of you passed out in Vegas. For this reason, you may want to consider creating a Group or a Page for your blog, to keep things quasi-separate.

Mashable has a fantastic post about the differences between a Facebook Group and a Facebook Page, so I won’t repeat what they outline, but their bottom line is:

“Groups are great for organizing on a personal level and for smaller scale interaction around a cause. Pages are better for brands, businesses, bands, movies, or celebrities who want to interact with their fans or customers without having them connected to a personal account, and have a need to exceed Facebook’s 5,000 friend cap.”

Because of this, I created a Page for the SPI Blog. It works JUST like a personal profile, so it was easy for me to get used to, and the interaction with my fans (friends for Pages are called “fans”), has been quite good.

You can’t convert between Pages and Groups once you’ve made your choice, at least not at the moment, so choose wisely. The rest of this post will be primarily geared towards Pages, not Groups.

How to Create a Facebook Fan Page

Here’s a video about how to create a Facebook Fan Page. I apologize for the music and intro in the beginning, this was one of the first videos I did. In my later videos, I skip that and go straight into the content.

(if you cannot view the video, please click here to view it on youtube)

Here are a few important things to consider when creating your Page.

• Put Some Thought Into the Name Of Your Page: Once it’s created, you can’t change it back. Also, Facebook Pages get picked up by Google, so keep that in mind. My Facebook Page for SPI is ranked #3 in Google for “Smart Passive Income”, for example.
• Are You Going to Upload a Logo, or a Picture of  You?: It’s really up to you, but think about this: if you were a fan of a website or a blog, which would you rather interact with? A logo, or the actual person you’re engaging in conversation with?
• Send Out Status Updates Before You Try and Get Fans: Why? Because you won’t get any fans if you have a blank wall. At least mention how stoked you are to finally have your Page setup, or how excited you are to talk to your fans in the near future.
• Change the URL of Your Page So It’s Easier to Work With: It’s a lot easier to say, “check out facebook.com/smartpassiveincome”, instead of “check out facebook.com/awdoihaiwduh82320983o4h3 or whatever the url ends up being. You can customize it by going to http://www.facebook.com/username. Please note that you can only do this once you have at least 25 fans. Again, put some thought into the customized URL. Most likely, the same address as your blog will be your best option.

The Facebook Landing Page

This is THE most important part of this whole guide. If there’s one thing you take away from this post, this is it.

In order to convert people who head over to your Page into fans, you must use a landing page. Without it, new visitors will be taken straight to your wall, which is ugly and doesn’t really tell people exactly what to do. They’ll see all of these conversations going on, links and pictures everywhere and they’ll probably end up leaving because they have no clue what to do, or what’s in it for them to become a fan.

You can create a special area on your Page, a landing page, that only new visitors will see first. You can put whatever you want on this page, including exactly what your blog is about, why they should become a fan, and exactly how to become a fan as well. If you have a newsletter or some type of free gift for an opt-in / email list you’re building, you can easily throw that in there too. You basically have a blank html page (about 760 px wide) to work with, so it’s up to your imagination. To show you the difference…

Before, when new visitors would come to my Facebook Page, they would see this:

Now, they see this:

I could probably do more with the copy and the design, but after 3 versions of the landing page, this one seems to convert the best for me. Besides that, which of the two do you think converted more fans?

The second one, by a landslide.

Here’s a video of the exact process to create a landing page on Facebook, and how to set it up as the default page that new visitors will see first:

(if you cannot view the video, please click here to view it on youtube)

As mentioned in the video, you will need to insert a piece of code in the Static FBML application for your Page. My landing page is basically a large jpg file with all that text included, and only a snippet of html text at the bottom, so there wasn’t much code required. I could probably make the landing page look a lot better, and I may even hire someone on elance.com to do that for me for $50 or less. As you can see, I have not yet included an opt-in form for an email list, which is definitely something you should consider placing in there if you have one. I’m working on it

PLEASE don’t let the design of my particular landing page tell you that this is the only way it should be done. I mean, check out these other awesome landing pages below:

• http://www.facebook.com/shoemoney
• http://www.facebook.com/vw
• http://www.facebook.com/cocacola

Lastly, if you want to use the “become a fan” button that Facebook uses in your landing page copy, you can just right click and save the .png file below.

Keys to Getting Facebook Fans

Besides the landing page, there are a number of things you can do that will increase the number of fans you get. Here are my top 5 tips in another video I just filmed the other day (he first tip I mention is to create a landing page, which we’ve already discussed):

(if you cannot view the video, please click here to view it on youtube)

Here’s an outline of the other tips mentioned in the video:

• Place a Link to Your Page on Your Blog: You can place a link to your fan page on your blog either in the area where you also have an RSS button, or at the bottom of your posts, where readers are more likely to engage with you after reading your content.
• Place a Link to Your Page in any Forum Signatures You Have: Make sure to take advantage of your presence on forums related to your niche by placing a link to your Page in your signature, so it’s done automatically for you after each of your posts. Take advantage of html to make a nice looking anchor text (preferably with a call to action), back to your Facebook Page.
• Include a Link in Any Videos or Guest Posts You Do
• Advertising Your Page on Faceboook: It does cost money, but you can get highly-targeted followers to your Page and blog by advertising with Facebook.

Linking Back to Your Blog and Getting Traffic

Your blog is where you eventually want everyone to end up, so you want to make sure you provide enough opportunity for your Facebook fans to click on over.

Static Links

Static links are links to your blog on your Facebook page that are not part of the conversations and interactions going on. There are a few opportunities to place links right on your wall for everyone to see.

1. Inside the “Info” tab there’s a spot for your website address. Links in the “overview” area will not be clickable.

2. On your main page, right underneath your profile picture, there’s a perfect spot for a quick intro and a link back to your blog. Just hover over this spot to edit.

Links Via Conversation

The more exciting way to get traffic to your blog from Facebook is to share a link with your fans via your wall. This way, it will be shown on every one of your fan’s personal news feeds. You can also share videos, pictures and events in the same manner.

Besides a “broadcast” to all of your fans, you can insert links within the conversions that are already going on on your wall.

If you want, you can use your favorite url shortener to make them look nicer if they are too long, and you can track how many clicks you get at the same time. Personally, I like to use bit.ly.

As with anything that involves you wanting to get people to click something, your copy will have a lot to do with how many people actually click on the link. Test out different ways to present information to your Fans, and I’m sure you’ll find a way that works best for you.

Oh, and as always – spamming is bad. Go easy with your links, but don’t feel like you aren’t allowed to post any links at all either.

Other Multi-Media For Your Page

There are many other applications on Facebook that Pages can utilize (Groups cannot utilize applications at the moment). For example, you can setup an RSS feed tab, which immediately pulls the latest blog posts from your blog’s RSS feed and places that into your Page. The same goes with YouTube and Twitter, and I’m sure all of the other social networking and bookmarking websites as well.

Only a limited number of tabs show up on your Page (the rest are hidden, but can still be accessed), so you’ll have to choose your primary tabs carefully, although they can be rearranged later. Personally, I have a Twitter and YouTube Tab on my Page, as you can see below.

Cool Resource

Involver.com is a company that does complete brand marketing for companies on Facebook. They have a number of different applications you can choose from for your Facebook Page, and the first two you use are free. After that, you’ll have to pay. It’s hard to choose because there are so many cool applications you can use for your blog, such as a twitter feed, RSS feed, YouTube channel, Flickr, Slides, PDFs, file sharing, and more. My advice to you: choose wisely.

Facebook On Your Blog

There are a number of things you can do on your blog itself to optimize your Facebook experience.

The Fan Box

You can create what is called a “Fan Box”. A Fan Box is a widget that you can display on your blog that shows either your latest updates, pictures of your fans, or both at the same time. On the right hand side of my blog, you can see my personal fan box.

The Share Button

On your blog posts, you can insert a button that will share your post to the friends on Facebook of whoever clicks on it. It’s sort of like the Tweetmeme / Retweet button, which you can see at the top of this post on the left hand side. I have yet to try this out, but I might incorporate it into my next design. As far as this kind of “push-button sharing” is concerned, more people are using Twitter instead of Facebook, at least for now.

Facebook Connect

Facebook Connect is an advanced feature that I won’t be discussing here. It’s a bit complicated. If you’d like to read more about Facebook Connect, or even implement it on your website, you can click on the links below:

• What is Facebook Connect?
• How to Add Facebook Connect to Your Blog in 8 Minutes

All of these Facebook sharing devices (and more), can be found here on the Facebook Widget Page

Thanks!

Well, that was a super long post, but I think it should give you a good start with getting used to Facebook and how to leverage it specifically for your blog. Until next time!

I wish you nothing less than success! Cheers!

p.s. If you found this post useful, please share it on twitter by clicking the button below, and as always, you can subscribe to the blog by clicking here. Thanks!

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THE Blogger’s Guide to Facebook

Just one year ago, at the age of 25, I was living in my parents’ home, engaged to be married. I got laid off and wasn’t exactly sure what was going to happen next. Now, I’m married with a baby on the way, we have a puppy, we’re living in an apartment (about to move into a house), I own a couple of businesses and I work for myself on the internet. A lot can happen in one year.

I do feel very fortunate to be where I’m at today. That being said, I also know that it wasn’t all luck. There are a few things I’d like to mention about how I think I got here, before I get deep into the numbers.

My Mindset for Success

Survival

Getting laid off sucks. For those of you who are fortunate enough to have never been laid off, it’s kind of like getting punched in the stomach, losing your breath, and when you finally regain your lungs and get back up, you have no idea where you’re at.

It’s easy to panic, because it’s human nature. I panicked for a day or two myself, but soon realized all it did was make me feel worse, and get nowhere fast. Think about this: in life and death situations, who are the ones that usually survive? The ones who panic and freeze, or the ones who focus and assess the current situation, and act accordingly? I did not want to become a victim of natural selection.

Decisions

Getting laid off was not like coming to the end of a road, but rather arriving to a fork, one where I could decide where I would want to go next. We don’t often think about it, but every single decision we make determines the course of the rest of our lives. I hate to get all philosophical, but it’s important to understand, especially when you are ready to make an important decision in your life, like which college to attend, what your major will be, or what to do after a lay off. Thus, I gave some careful thought into my next decision.

One path I knew would lead me down a road that I was quite familiar with: I’d go out and search for another job in the architecture industry. It’s the comfortable path that I had been down before, so it was really attractive to me at first. It was really all I knew.

There were two reasons why I didn’t go down that path again:

1. I thought about how happy I was the last time I was on that path. I liked my job, but I didn’t like the kind of person I was when I got home from my job – tired, stressed, and grumpy. I didn’t want to be that kind of husband or father.
2. I wanted to explore what the other road had to offer, and I knew that if I had reached a dead end, I could very easily come back to the fork, and go down the road I was on before.

So, I made the decision to go full force with an internet business. I had a non-monetized blog that was getting some decent traffic, so I knew there was something I could do with this.

Know You’re Right

When I was in architecture school at Cal, specifically in our semester long studio courses, we were required to make plans and build models for various types of projects. It was awesome because we could usually design the buildings however we wanted. The problem with that was, that left a million and one possibilities, which meant that we would have to determine a reason why we design something a certain way. When presenting our final designs to a jury (a group of panelists, usually local architects and designers. Yeah…that’s how it worked), we must also give the reasons why.

“The building curves here…”

“Why does the building curve there?”

“Well, because it addresses the wind coming from the West.”

“Why is it at that particular angle?”

“Because it allows for views into the courtyard from North side of the building.”

See what I mean? Anyways, what I learned from this is that if you’re going to make any kind of decision, you must be able to:

1. Back it up from all angles; and
2. Know you’re right.

When deciding to go into internet business, I was fortunate enough to have the support of my family and friends. For many people, however, this kind of decision is met with immediate backlash from others, which will often lead that person to some kind of self-doubt.

Self-doubt, especially self-doubt implanted by others, is a killer. If you can back up your decision, and believe in yourself and know you’re absolutely right, you’re going to give yourself a better chance to succeed. Some of you may call that “delusive”, I call it “mandatory”.

In architecture school, even if you’re designs weren’t that good, if you had a legitimate reason for them, you were given more credit than if you had an outstanding design for no apparent reason.

For whatever reason, I knew I was going to succeed with online business one way or another.

Knowing and Doing What it Takes

My next step was to figure it out. I read books, researched like hell, asked a billion questions, and even paid a monthly fee to join the Internet Business Mastery Academy so I could figure out exactly how it was supposed to work.

Everything I had read helped, but nothing would of happened if I just read and did nothing. So, as I was learning things I put them into action. I learned about how to optimize my blog, so that’s exactly what I did. I learned about outsourcing to do various tasks, so I did that as well. I even learned to create some type of information product, so I sat down and wrote an eBook for a couple months, which many of you know became my main source of income ever since.

I’m not a genius, nor do I consider myself an expert in anything. I got a 1240 on my SATs, and I still write “would of” instead of “would have” no matter how many times I try to correct myself. I forget where my sunglasses are, when they are on top of my head. I’m deathly afraid of spiders. I am not special! With the internet, we’re all on level playing fields, so it’s really the people who take action, those who learn and do, who will meet success in the future.

Looking Back

As I reflect on the past year, I can truly say that my lay off was the best thing that’s ever happened to me. For some reason, my 9 to 5 job was masking the fork in the road that has been there the whole time. It just took an eye-opening experience like a layoff to really see what was available for me and my future.

Income

Most of you are familiar with my monthly income reports. Well, here’s my first ever annual report, a sum of all of my income from all of the different sources for the entire year. This goes from October 2008 through September 2009 (it doesn’t include my latest report from October 2009).

• GreenExamAcademy.com Product Sales:
  • Ebook Only (2 versions): $70,353.78
  • Audio Only (2 versions):  $8,536.45
    
  • Ebook + Audio Package (2 versions):  $79,163.06
  • Total: $158,053.29

• Google Adsense:
  • Total: $16,456.25

• Private Advertising:
  • Total: $7,108.32

• eHow Earnings:
  • Total: $1,448.56

• Affiliate Earnings:
  • Total: $10,806.62

• iPhone Apps:
  • Total: $9,346.00

Gross Total: $203,219.04

Basic Expenses

Here, I’ll give you a rough idea of what kind of expenses I’ve had. In total, I’ve spent over $20,000. That may seem like a lot, but just to be clear, most of these expenses are expenses that were made after my business was already created and generating an income. The total startup cost, including the domain, hosting, paypal (payments pro) and shopping cart fees, and even the creation of my eBook, was less than $200 bucks.

• Bookkeeper: $50/month
• Tax preparation: $500/year
• Formation of LLC: $420 bucks
• Voice talent (for audio book): $3,500.00
• Website design stuff: $3,200.00 (redesigns and updates)
• Paypal fees: 4% (about $6,000)
• Legal Fees: $1000.00
• Business education: $3,000.00 (classes, books, courses, etc.)
• Outsourcing SEO: $900.00
• iPhone App Development: $6000.00+

Time

At the beginning, creating the business did eat up a lot of time, but I knew it was all an investment.

The green exam blog actually was built while I was working my 9 to 5 job, since it’s primary purpose was to hold my notes for the exam before I took it. So during this time, I’d spend an extra 2 to 3 hours a day writing my notes on my blog. It was kind of like killing two birds with one stone, because I was studying at the same time as I was writing these blog posts, which I didn’t know would get picked up by Google, but they did.

After I was laid off, I had all the time in the world to work on my business. When I finally decided to write an eBook, I’d spend 6-7 hours a day for over a month writing, organizing, and re-writing until I was satisfied with it.

After the business was setup, and the shopping carts and payment processors were all in place, and my eBook was launched, I’d spend about an hour a day answering emails and tweaking the website for better results. I soon created an FAQ, and was down to just working 15 minutes a day while earning a full-time income.

When I learned about product expansion, and decided to create an audio version of my eBook, I hired a voice talent to record the entire thing for me. It took about 2-3 hours to go over instructions with the person I hired, and after 2 weeks, it was complete. It took about a day to incorporate my new product into the existing website, update the shopping carts, make new buttons, etc. but after that was finished, I was back to only working 15 minutes a day, mostly answering customer emails.

Giving Back

Right now, I’m not quite earning enough to feel comfortable donating a large chunk of my income to charities and back to organizations that have helped me get to where I’m at, but that’s a very important goal for me. With the baby coming soon, I want to make sure we’re all good and set on his financial future first. Remember, a large chunk of my income goes back to Uncle Sam too.

The Smart Passive Income Blog is kind of my way of giving back at this moment in time, by providing helpful information and quality content related to how I got to this point. If I had a resource like this blog when I was starting out, I probably could of done even better, and reduced the amount of mistakes I’ve made in the past. Hopefully, it has helped you out in one way or another so far. If not, I apologize for wasting your time.

Thank You

It’s been a great year, a year I would have never imagined would ever happen. I just wanted to personally thank you for joining me on my online entrepreneurial adventures, and I hope I can continue on this path and take things to the next level again in the near future, and share my experiences with you.

I wish you nothing less than success. Cheers!

P.S. If you’re new to this blog, please feel free to stay updated with your RSS reader by subscribing here!

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One Year After Getting Laid Off – My Annual Passive Income Report

It seems like a lot of time has passed since my last report, but I think that’s because I’ve been focusing a lot on creating quality posts on a consistent schedule for you to read. I feel, and I think most of you would agree, that the content here on the blog this past month has been some of the best so far. It shows in the number of comments and in the amount of traffic I’ve been seeing lately. For all of you readers out there, new and old school – I just want to say thanks.

Important Going-Ons in October

On a personal note, April (my wife), just entered her third trimester! She’s doing well, and the baby is healthy and moving around…a lot. Just the other day, I put my hand on her belly and felt the baby slowly move across where my hand was. It kind of felt like one of those back massagers you put on a chair, with the balls that move in a circular motion that you’re supposed to lean your back against, but in super slow motion. It was crazy!!!

Online, a lot of crazy good things have been happening too.

GreenExamAcademy

Although sales are expected to slow down a bit for the holidays, I’m super stoked to report that with Google’s recent PageRank update (it’s slowly coming along, it may or may not have hit your website already), GreenExamAcademy is now PR 5! That’s after intheleed.com had to be shut down, which made my new domain a PR 0 – so this is definitely an amazing feat. I also rank in the top 10 for all of the major keywords. I’ve got to give props to my VA who I hired from elance.com. He did a wonderful job, even after changing the primary domain in his campaign halfway through his 3 month hire period!

Smart Passive Income

If you remember from my last report, one of my plans was to expand the SPI brand to other channels like YouTube and Facebook. So far, branding has been going very well. Starting from scratch, in just a little over 2 weeks, I have gained over 200 fans on facebook, and 35 subscribers on my YouTube Channel. To top it off, I’m approaching 30k twitter followers. I’m reaching out to people on various platforms who would of never found me before, and I am seeing more and more traffic coming from these specific channels every day, which is awesome. I haven’t researched the exact numbers yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I now have more traffic coming in from social media websites than any other sources, including search engines and links from other websites combined.

I’ve actually had so much fun creating new videos, that I’m kind of getting addicted to it. In the last 2 weeks I’ve put out 8 videos, and I don’t plan on stopping. It’s a great way for me to put my voice and face out there, as well as provide some helpful content to you that would normally be difficult to do with just text on a blog post.

Alright – it’s time. Here’s the breakdown:

Income Breakdown

• GreenExamAcademy.com Product Sales:
  • Ebook Only: $1856.90
  • Audio Only: $204.65
    
  • Ebook + Audio Package: $1,772.50
  • Total: $3,834.05
    • Last Month: $5,773.95
    • Difference: -$1,939.90
      

• Google Adsense:
  • Total: $57.16
    • Last Month: $87.65
    • Difference: -$30.49
      

• eHow Earnings:
  • Total: $198.18
    • Last Month: $188.92
    • Difference: +$9.26
      

• Affiliate Earnings:
  • Total: $3,450.98
    • Last Month: $3,123.67
    • Difference: $327.31
• iPhone Applications:
  • Paid Applications: $759.50
    
  • Free Applications (via Ads): $361.91
    
  • Total: $1,121.41 (did not report in previous months)
    

• Gross Total in October: $8,661.78
  • Last Month: $9,174.19
  • Difference: -$512.41

Overall, things have been pretty consistent the past several months. I expect things to die down with the holidays coming up, since more people will be focusing on vacations and spending time with their families, rather than studying for an exam. Hopefully, things will pick back up in the new year. There is one thing pending that may have a significant impact on my future sales: the company that administers the exam is planning on coming out with their own study material soon. We’ll see what happens.

Things I Learned in October

I’d just like to briefly talk about one very important thing that I learned.

For a long time, I’ve always thought, “why not me.” When someone wins the lottery…why not me. When I hear about someone else’s half a million dollar product launch…why not me. I realized that when I would think this way, I would be basically putting myself down.

No matter what I’m doing online, I shouldn’t dwell on how much better someone else is doing. I think its okay to be inspired by someone else’s achievements, and use that energy for my own productivity and success, but it’s not healthy to wonder “why not me”.

From now on, every time I begin to think “why not me”, I’m going to immediately change that to, “what’s my next step”. This way, I’ll get right back into a productive state of mind. I will no longer worry about what could have been, but instead I’ll focus on what will be. What do you think?

Plans for the Future

This blog’s redesign should be completed very soon. You should see a far more organized website, with more room to breath. If you’re interested in exactly what the changes will be, I’ve created a video entitled: Is Your Blog Optimized? Here Are 5 Questions You Can Ask Yourself to Find Out.

Also, I’m almost ready to debut the Smart Passive Income Podcast. More on that later.

Lastly, since October 2008 was when I wrote my first income report, I thought it might be cool to do an annual income report, so look out for that next!

Thanks everyone, and I wish you nothing less than success!

Cheers!

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My Monthly Report – October 2009

Last week, I initiated my keyword position experiment, implementing various strategies to rank as high as possible for the specific keyword phrase, passive income streams, which I was unranked for when this experiment began. Below is a detailed report of exactly what I did and when, and what my Google keyword position was at that time.

The experiment officially began with my blog post entitled Passive Income Streams 101, which included an embedded YouTube video, with the same title. FYI, the keyphrase passive income streams is searched for approximately 1600 times every month. Here’s the log:

Keyword Position Log for	Passive Income Streams
Tuesday, 10.20.09
3:08pm	Blog post published	n/a
3:10pm	Tweeted about the new blogpost using keyword "Passive Income Streams"	n/a
3:12pm	Posted about blog on Facebook Fan Page	n/a
6:10pm	Bookmarked on Digg	n/a
6:12pm	Bookmarked on StumbleUpon	n/a
6:14pm	Bookmarked on Delicious.com	n/a
6:20pm	Bookmarked on 25 sites via Socialmarker.com	n/a
8:15pm	Checked status: Tipd.com bookmark was #61 Blog post was #74.	74
9:45pm	Checked status	30
Wednesday, 10.21.09
12:00am	Checked status	27
1:00am	Uploaded to 5 video sites via TubeMogul.com	27
9:00am	Checked status	27
Thursday, 10.22.09
9:00am	Checked status	25
12:00pm	Wrote eHow.com Article	25
8:00pm	Checked status	25
9:00pm	Bookmarked eHow.com Article via Socialmarker	25
Friday, 10.23.09
9:00am	Checked Status	25
12:00pm	Checked Status	25
6:00pm	Checked Status	25
9:00pm	Checked Status	25
Saturday, 10.24.09
9:00am	Checked Status	15
3:00pm	Created a Squidoo Lens	15
5:00pm	Article submitted to EzineArticles.com	15
6:00pm	Article submitted to GoArticles.com	15
9:00pm	Checked Status	15
Sunday, 10.25.09
9:00am	Checked Status	9
12:00pm	Checked Status	9
7:30pm	Article submitted to ArticleAlley.com	9
11:00pm	Hub created on HubPages.com	9
Monday, 10.26.09
All day	Checked Status	9
Tuesday, 10.27.09
All day	Checked Status	9

note: my keyword position may have changed since writing this article

I reached the first page in the first week, which is great, but is somewhat expected because I ranked so high already for the keyword passive income. That being said, it was not easy. A lot of things had to happen to get there, as you can see.

Many times, I’d find myself in a plateau, but after implementing something new, I’d move up again the next couple of days. This just shows that these kinds of things do work. Here is some more detailed explanation about some of the things I did:

The Blog Post

• I included the keyword phrase, passive income streams in the title. This is a no-brainer.
• I made sure the URL also contained the keyphrase.
• I included the keyphrase in the description in the All in One SEO plugin for this post.
• I also included the keyphrase in the first sentence of the blogpost, which is also a must.
• I bolded the keywords every once and a while in the body of the blog post as well, which has been said to help in the past.
• I embedded a YouTube video, with the same title, into the blogpost. I also linked to it using the keyphrase as the anchor text.
• I also included a relative picture, which is named “passive-income-streams.jpg”

Social Networking

• I immediately Tweeted and Facebooked a link back to the blog post as soon as it was published. I made sure to put the keyphrase into my tweets and Facebook posts. If you lookup “passive income streams facebook”, and “passive income streams twitter”, my name or website shows up near the top, which means it’s doing something for it.
• Blasting it out on social media websites at least increases the visibility of your post, which gives it potential to be linked to by other people on other websites.

Social Bookmarking

• When bookmarking the blog post, I made sure to write a title, summary and tags that all contain the keyphrase.
• Bookmarking on Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious should be done manually, and very carefully. If abused, your account will be banned rather quickly. Luckily, I have a history with these websites with normal activity, so bookmarking this new blog post was not an issue.
• On other sites, I used the tool SocialMarker to make bookmarking a little easier for me. It’s not entirely automatic (like Bookmarking Demon is), but it’s a lot faster than dealing with each site individually.
• Again, this creates backlinks, as well as increases the visibility of your blog post.
• Note that you can also bookmark your YouTube video or any related articles, which will all help your campaign in one way or another.

Video Syndication

• I submitted the video to 5 video websites similar to YouTube.
• I used TubeMogul to make this process a little easier for me. It allows you to upload your videos to several video websites all at the same time. Depending on what kind of content you are uploading, you may or may not be restricted to upload to certain video sites.
• Again, I made sure to title the video passive income streams, as well as put that into the description, using html to create an anchor text with the keyphrase in it pointing back to the blog post.

Article Writing

• Article writing is different than social bookmarking because you’re actually writing new content and publishing it on another website.
• For this particular keyword, I’ve written new articles on eHow, eZineArticles, GoArticles, and ArticleAlley. I do plan to do more.
• For eHow, it has to be in the form of a “how-to” article, which is why I wrote How to Create Multiple Passive Income Streams. I also included pictures with the keyword as the file name, and I social bookmarked this article like I did with my original blog post. Of course, I added links back to the blog post in the Resources section at the bottom, using the keywords as the anchor text. I even included a link to the YouTube video as well. Be careful though – if your article isn’t in a how-to format, or just seems spammy, they will not hesitate to delete it.
• For other article sites, you can write whatever you want, although you still have to provide something unique and non-spammy. I wrote a new article entitled, Passive Income Streams and The New Rich, which I’ve submitted to a number of these sites. In the “about the author” area at the bottom, I include a backlink to the original blogpost using the keyphrase as the anchor text.

Squidoo and Hubpages

• Squidoo and Hubpages are unique websites that sort of allow you to easily create a webpage from scratch. Instead of dealing with HTML and blogging platforms, you can basically drag and drop different “modules” together and customize your own page. You can also share revenue on the ads that are placed on the site as well, or donate them to charity, which is pretty cool.
• On Squidoo, I created a “lens” (their name for a page) called passive income streams, which pulls an RSS feed from this blog, includes a few of my YouTube videos, as well as other links and resources about passive income. Of course, I’ve also included backlinks to my original blog article using the keyphrase as the anchor text.
• On Hubpages, I’ve basically done the same thing, with a page I created entitled passive income streams business.

Summary

All of these techniques are great for ranking higher in the search engines because they do help in one way or another. However, they do take time. Much of this can be done by someone else, such as virtual assistant, if you have one to work with.

The nice thing is that the strategies that you implement now will forever keep working for you and your blog. It’s the perfect kind of thing for getting free traffic for any type of passive income stream you may have working for you.

After all of that, I’d love to leave you with one last piece of advice. The best thing that you can do if you want to rank higher in the search engines for a particular keyphrase (especially one that is fairly competitive) is to write a killer blogpost that provides excellent, unique content that others would be crazy NOT to link to and tweet about. If done correctly, you may not need to implement all of the strategies that I’ve outlined above. This is how I was able to make a living online and not spend a dime on advertising.

I’ll keep working at it and shooting for that #1 position, and I’ll report back with more results soon. I really hope you’ve enjoyed this post and found it useful.

Thanks, and I wish you nothing less than success. Cheers!

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Keyword Search Engine Position Experiment – One Week Report

This is a guest post by Glen Allsopp

Why are you really here?

The obvious answer would be to read Pat’s excellent content, but I want you to dig a little deeper. Why is it that you spend so much time reading blogs each day looking for new nuggets of knowledge that you can hopefully apply to your online ventures?

The reason I ask is because introspection is the one of the most important things you can do to build a profitable business. Online or offline. I know that many of you will run successful projects online already and are here to take things to the next level, but I know others use resources like this as a way to procrastinate and try to have everything perfect before you actually start taking action.

I know, as I used to do the same thing.

My Own Mission

It took me three years to make a living online. Three whole years before I could quit my day job and work for myself. Yet, in the 10 months since leaving my job, I’ve built new properties that could have replaced my job income alone. Doing the same thing in 10 months that I could only achieve in three years is quite a difference.

Of course, I’ve learned what works and what doesn’t along the way and I can now really streamline the process to building successful websites. But there’s more to it than that. You see, in the first three years that I was building websites, only around 25% of my time was actually taking action.

The rest of my time would be spent doing things like:

• Reading blogs looking for more nuggets of knowledge
• Buying ebooks that promised to teach me the secrets
• Signing up for services like Aweber even though I had no use for them at the time
• Watching videos of those who had made it and seeing how they did things
• Following different trends and constantly starting new websites

Instead of just focusing on what I knew and continue to take consistent, quality action, I kept searching and searching and searching. It was until I had this realization and went from 25% action to 85% action that I started making money.

Can you relate to that? I hope so.

Log Down Every Single Thing You Do Tomorrow

Or whenever your next “typical” day is. You don’t have to write down what you had for breakfast – this is not a food journal. Instead, I want you to record your activities. So that might be chatting on Facebook, spending 9-5 at work, leaving comments on blogs and being active on Twitter.

Whatever actions you take tomorrow, I want you to record them. If you’re anything like me, when you look back over this sheet, you’ll be disappointed. You’ll see that you somehow managed to keep busy throughout the entire day, but you didn’t actually get anything done.

Nothing that is going to take your business further forward, anyways. If you don’t like the results, the worst thing to do is worry about it. The best thing to do is be happy because unlike hundreds of thousands of people out there, you’ve probably realized where you can improve and you’ll now want to take action.

That’s powerful.

Working With The Results

If you spend most of your day taking solid action that will provide results for you, then congratulations. You’re one of the few. On the other hand, if you’re like I was and see that actual work only takes up a small portion of your day, you can improve upon that.

One key thing I realized is that I was working on things that didn’t interest me. A good example is when I started a celebrity blog just because it was easy to drive traffic to them. I had no interest in celebrities, but I was writing 3-4 articles about them every single day just to try and make money. It wasn’t long before I slipped down to 1 article per day then nothing at all.

It’s so easy to follow the trends online and work on things that you can see are making money for other people, but that’s hard. Your work online does not have to be difficult, it should just be in a direction that you enjoy. I love writing articles about marketing and what seems like minutes can actually end up with hours passing by. That’s a real passion.

If you’re not working on things you love, change that, right now. If you don’t, then don’t be surprised if you’re in exactly the same position next year as you are in right now.

You should also find in your log areas that are completely pointless to your day. If you’re building up a Twitter profile but don’t even have a website, you’re probably wasting time. If you’re wondering why your blog isn’t making money and you haven’t tried selling ads or creating your own product, you’re wasting time.

Look at your log and give yourself an honest assessment. Only then can you start to make headway.

I’m Not Saying Learning Is Bad

I’m consistently making a five-figure income online every month but you’ll still see me leaving blog comments and reading websites like this one. Reading blogs or buying eBooks is never a bad thing, but you must put into practice what you learn instead of becoming an information junkie.

I recently picked up a copy of Tribes by Seth Godin and sat down to read it with a pen and paper by my side. Within a third of the book I had already taken 3 pages of notes. I could not get enough of the great information in there.

I continued to read the book at night, with no form of note taking available, and didn’t get anything from the next third. Not one note to take away. It’s not that I don’t think they were there, it’s just that the way I was prepared to take in the content and was reading for the sake of reading.

If you’re going to buy eBook after eBook or read blog after blog, actually apply what you learn from them and make sure you test things for yourself rather than blindly following ‘leaders’. You’ll probably get to the point where you realize most eBooks are rehashed junk and blogs with quality information like this one are rare to find.

In fact, I went from having 136 blogs in my feed reader, to just 15.

So why are you here?

Glen is the author of a blog called ViperChill which covers the topic of Viral Marketing. He helps people build remarkable websites that people naturally want to talk about.

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Why Are You Really Here?

…Yourself.

This is fine if you start each piece with “Dear Diary”, but in the world of internet marketing and blogging, writing to yourself can be the biggest mistake that you can make – especially if you’re spending lots of time creating information products that you eventually want to sell.

Before each blog post that I write,  I think about who will be my reader. Not readers….reader. Singular. I often choose a previous commenter, and pretend to write specifically for them.

When I created my study guide eBook, I imagined one person the entire time that I wanted to help pass the test. I even gave this person a profile, with a name, age, location, likes and dislikes. It may sound kind of weird, but it works. I receive at least 2 or 3 emails from my customers each week saying that my guide was super easy to read and understand, and they often say it’s like I was right there with them as they were studying.

Why This Works?

Writing for Joesph, a 34-year old engineer from San Francisco, who only has a couple of hours of free time each day to study, is a lot easier than writing to Mr. blank computer screen. After reading that profile, didn’t you just imagine what Joseph might look like in your head?

By imagining a specific person as “your reader”, your writing becomes clearer, the progression of what you write makes total sense, and you have a lot more feeling behind your words, which can absolutely translates to your audience.

So, Who is YOUR Reader?

If you have a blog or an online business, do yourself a favor and make up a person with a profile who is your ideal reader. This will not only help you understand who your ideal audience is, which will improve your writing, but it will also remind you of exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing.

If you’re up for sharing, leave a comment with a made up:

Name:
Age:
Occupation:
Location:
Pains:
Why He/She is Interested In What You Have To Say:

I’ll start by using my LEED exam website and study guide as an example:

Name:Joseph
Age: 34
Occupation: Engineer
Location: San Francisco, CA.
Pains: Works hard at his job, but wants to climb the corporate ladder. He wants to pass the LEED exam as a way to improve his resume, but he doesn’t have much free time. He’s also struggling while looking for good, organized information about the exam.
Why He/She is Interested In What I Have to Say: I have an easy-to-use, organized resource that he can use to find all of the information he needs to pass the exam. I passed myself, so he knows I personally have experience with it.

You try =)

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A Quick Exercise That Will Help You Write Better – You Try!

Before we get into it, I just wanted to mention that this isn’t the only business model out there. Obviously, there are a million things you can do online and offline to generate a decent income, but this is the business model that I choose to use because:

• It’s relatively cheap and easy to setup…
• It’s low risk (what have you got to lose?)…
• After it’s setup properly, it runs on auto-pilot, which means you don’t have to be present in order to complete a transaction…
• You can implement this business model “on the side” for an extra income in addition to your 9 to 5…
• You can make money at any time of the day, from anywhere in the world…
• It’s easy to implement tests and business strategies to try and improve results…
• Once it gets going, you can try and duplicate your results in other markets and create multiple passive income streams…
• If all goes well, you’ll have the freedom and time to do what ever it is you want.

Hmm…cheap, easy, low-risk and high-reward? Sounds like a winning business plan to me.

In the video below, I outline exactly how my passive income business model works. Also, for you beginners out there who may not have information products to sell just yet, I’ve included a Bonus Adsense Tip, which I used to quadruple my Adsense earnings, back before I was really focusing on information product creation.

If you cannot view the video, please watch Passive Income Streams 101 on YouTube here.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the presentation. Please leave a comment for me below. I’d really appreciate it! Thanks!

P.S. If you liked this video, you can subscribe to The Smart Passive Income Blog on YouTube for more videos just like it! Check out my “4-minute blog”, a blog that I created in less than 4 minutes from scratch, including it’s first blog post with an embedded picture. Now you don’t have any excuse to not get started earning money online!

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Passive Income Streams 101

In my experience, there are three primary ways that search engines (namely, Google), will determine the rank of your website relevant to certain keywords:

1. The number of backlinks to your website. We all know that one of the biggest things search engines look at is not the quality and quantity of websites that we link to, but the quality and quantity of websites that link back to us. It’s no wonder then why there are tools dedicated just for finding backlinks and showing you exactly which websites are linking back to you.

2. How active your website is. Have you ever heard anyone say that “Google loves blogs?” Well, it’s true – Google and other search engines love blogs and will often rank them higher than static websites on the same topics. This is because they know that blogs are more active and there is an actual discussion about the topic on the website itself. I’ve also noticed that some of my posts will get a little “bump” in keyword position soon after a new comment on that post was made.

The cool thing is, the more active your website is, the higher you will rank. The higher you rank, the more active your website will be. It’s a nice little perpetual cycle once it gets going.

3. Relevancy. This is the biggie that ties everything together. How high you rank for certain keywords is determined by how relevant the information on your website or post is to those keywords. Relevancy can be determined by:

• The Domain / url. Duh.
• The Title or Headlines on the Page. These are usually wrapped by the <h1> tags, and they tell the search engines exactly what the page is about. If you create a title or headline that doesn’t encompass the keyword or key phrase, you’re not giving yourself the best chance to rank as high as you could.
• Vocabulary. If your website or post is just sprinkled with the keyword that you’re trying to rank for and nothing else related – it’s plainly obvious to the search engines that all you’re doing is trying to rank higher for that keyword, and you’ll be penalized. For example, a title or headline shouldn’t look like this: Fly Fishing Tips for Fly Fishing in California that Fly Fishing People Use to Go Fly Fishing. Use vocabulary throughout the page that is related to the keyword or keyphrase you’re trying to hit, and you’ll be far better off.
• Backlinks. How relevant the websites are that are linking back to yours is very important too. If your site is about Fly Fishing, and you have a link coming in from a Model Train website, that really won’t do anything for you. Why should it? However, if you have a link coming back from a Fly Fishing Magazine website, then that will definitely help.
• Backlink Text. You can think of backlink text as the clickable, blue, underlined text that contains a link to another website. That particular text matters. If it contains the keywords or any related vocabulary, it will help show relevancy of your website for those keywords. This is why it’s smart to have keywords in your business name or domain. When people link to you, chances are they will include the keywords for you automatically. For example, when people link back to this blog, they might say something like,”Pat at Smart Passive Income writes…”. My top keyword, is Passive Income.
• Media. If a website has media, such as pictures and video, those will be taken into account for relevancy as well. Of course, the search engines won’t actually look at the pictures or watch your entire video (unless a manual review of your website is done), so the relevancy happens through the name and description of the media. Are you optimizing your media for keyword research?

There are many other factors involved with keyword rankings and search engine results, but these are the major ones that will have the most impact for you. Taking these into account, I’ve created an experimental plan. I’ll go over what I’m going to do, why it should help, and how long it should take.

The Plan

In my previous post, I had asked you to help me determine a keyword to focus on for this experiment. Here are the results below:

Thanks again for your input. The keyword selected was actually the one I ranked the lowest for (I wasn’t even on the radar), which makes this even more interesting.

Here’s the Plan:

1. Create a New Post That Contains the Keywords in the Title. Besides actually having a home domain name that exactly matches the keywords, the second best thing you could do is have the keywords in the title. This will show relevancy to the search engines via the <h1> tags, and also from the keywords in the domain name from the blog post title. Also it will help when people link to it from their websites with relevant backlink text. (1 hour)

2. Create a YouTube Video That Contains the Keywords in the Title, Description, and Tags. Putting a video on You Tube will definitely help show relevancy for the key phrases and will make the process happen even faster. Hmm…who owns YouTube? Oh that’s right…Google does. (30 minutes, including upload time)

3. A Call of Action to Comment. In the video, I’ll throw out a question at the end so that people will be more inclined to comment and will keep the post a little more active. It’s tempting to offer a “prize” or something like that to generate even more comments (especially from readers who rarely comment), but I don’t want you to think you have to do some kind of contest in order to rank higher in the search engines. So, I’ll stay away from that for now.

4. Utilize Social Bookmarking. After the blog post is published, I’ll bookmark the post on various social bookmarking websites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and a variety of others. I’ll use Social Marker to bookmark the post to the lesser known social bookmarking websites even faster. Of course, I’ll be including the keyword phrases in the descriptions and tags for all of these. This will create backlinks to my post from higher ranking websites with relevant backlink text included. (1 hour)

Please note that you should never use these websites just for bookmarking all of your posts for the sake of search engine optimization. For many of the sites, if you create account today and bookmark a bunch of your own material, you’ll get kicked out. You should have an account with many of these sites already and have a history of healthy, bookmarking etiquette, in which case you won’t have any problems if you bookmark your own site, especially if it’s something useful.

5. Utilize Social Media. I’ll also use my social networking connections (Facebook and Twitter) to bring people over to the post and hopefully keep it active. Although the links you post on many social networking websites won’t actually translate back to you as backlinks that will help (because they use a “nofollow” rule, which helps control spam), putting my post out there will give more people the opportunity to come by, as well as the opportunity to see a good post that they may eventually link to on their own websites. (15 minutes)

6. Write Related Articles. After a day or two, I’ll probably write an eHow article, an article on eZineArticles.com, and Squidoo.com to create some high-quality backlinks going back to the post, as well as just expand the “network” that’s connected to my blog and the particular post. It might be smart to link some of these articles to each other in addition to back to my post as well.

These articles won’t be entirely new articles. To save time, I may transcribe the video from my blog post and just use that instead. (2 hours)

Total Time: 4 hours and 45 minutes (over two days)

The Results

After the post is published, I’ll check the search engines every 2 hours to determine when something happens, if anything does. I’ll be keeping a log of my results. After a week (I’ll be doing other posts in between), I’ll do a fancy report. Fun times =)

As pointed out before, this may be fairly easy for me to accomplish since I already rank high for passive income. I am, however, off the radar for the key phrase I’m trying to hit, so I think this will still be useful as far as how fast it can happen and how powerful these techniques may be. I’d be up for doing the same thing with a keyword that I don’t currently “own” in the future as well, if this work out.

Thanks everyone! I’ll be starting the experiment on a Tuesday to give people on Monday a chance to read this first.

Cheers!

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A Step By Step Plan To Rank Higher in the Search Engines