The Passive Income Project

Catholic Confirmation Gifts aStore Inside of Wordpress

J. Todd Baker — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:26:47 +0000

Last week I rolled out catholicconfirmationgifts.com that targets a specific market. Many important events take place in the Catholic Church this time of the year (Lent/Easter, First Communion, RCIA, and Confirmation). Religious gifts associated to these events are often given as a result.

I utilized a $25 credit I had from GoDaddy for Google Adwords to build some initial traffic to the site once I had published it. Although the site is general enough for year round shopping, its focus is on this particular time of the year. So I thought it necessary to get traffic there now in hopes of taking advantage of this window of opportunity.

The website was built with Wordpress and contains three main pages — the Amazon aStore, an About page, and a themed blog area termed The Spirit of Giving. This area uses Wordpress to post categorized feel-good stories about giving. It has a form that allows readers to submit their own stories to be considered for publication on the site. This feature serves two purposes. The first is that it provides content which is helpful to search engine indexing, and second, it plays on the emotion of the reader in hopes of building site stickiness.

Another unique aspect of the site is that it markets the fact that fifty percent of the site’s earnings are donated to the Catholic Church and Catholic Charities. This hopefully promotes shoppers, whom are primarily Catholic, to use the site for their purchases since it directly results in charitable contributions to the Church. This is a win-win-win strategy — the consumer is provided a satisfactory and mildly gratifying service, a positive charitable contribution is generated, and lastly it provides a passive income revenue stream for me. This win-win-win strategy will surely be instituted in future Project websites.

limewifi.com Used to Test Amazon aStore

J. Todd Baker — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 16:14:30 +0000

Last week I modified limewifi.com to test the features of Amazon’s aStore feature for affiliates. The aStore was easy to build and simple to incorporate into the current structure of limewifi.com (which is powered by Wordpress). I plan on dressing up the website in the near future and make it more search engine friendly. An iframe is used to display the aStore within Wordpress, which is not conducive for the search engine indexing. Therefore, some additional content pages will be built to address this issue. Another update will be posted upon completing these additional modifications.

jtbwebsites.com — Mashup Mania

J. Todd Baker — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:07:07 +0000

Last evening another affiliate mashup script web site (jtbwebsites.com) was published. The keyword focus of the site revolved around affiliate marketing, passive income, and website content management systems. I figured I would take advantage of the RSS feed display portion to pull the RSS feed from this site, in hopes of assisting with search engine optimization of thepassiveincomeproject.com. I have noticed some minor formatting issues with the keyword menu portion of the mashup script and how it displays in IE6 and IE7. I will be tweaking the mashup script further in order to fix this problem. Although I don’t expect great returns from the mashup script sites, I do want to make sure they look tidy in order to maximize their potential.

bakerits.com — An Affiliate Mashup Site

J. Todd Baker — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:12:22 +0000

I put the newly enhanced mashup script (containing the RSS reader display) into production last evening. This domain was formerly used for an I.T. business (Baker Information Technology Solutions, LLC) which I operated for the past 5+ years. It already has a small traffic base from being an established presence. I used software vendor names as the keywords for the mashup script and titled the site ‘Baker I.T. Software’ in order to fit the format of the domain name.

Mashup Script Tweak

J. Todd Baker — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:42:20 +0000

I have added an RSS feeder display in the mashup script that I discussed in my previous post. I downloaded and used the ‘RSS Extractor and Displayer’ code from Scriptol.com. This addition provides even further indexable content for the search engines and generates relative information for display on my Affiliate Mashup sites. An invaluable aspect when attempting to produce an unmanaged site that gives the illusion that it is updated and maintained on a regular basis. You can think of them as the Ronco Rotissrie of Affiliate Marketing web sites — just, “Set It and Forget It”.

I will continue to enhance this script and will likely generate multiple flavors over time. Down the road, I probably will avail the scripts if they prove to produce income. Time will tell.

Added Network Page

J. Todd Baker — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:11:26 +0000

Since I will be rolling out hundred of sites under this project, I have removed the TPIP Network site links from the left sidebar and added a Network page that lists all the current and active TPIP site links. This will keep from having a left sidebar that becomes too long over time.

Two Amazon/Google Mashup Sites Published

J. Todd Baker — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:08:12 +0000

Last night I utilized two domains (bakerboybakery.com and sikgrx.com) that I had not been using to rollout a couple of Amazon/Google affiliate sites. I had downloaded the EAYA mashup script from 45n5.com last week and thought I would experiment with it some. The basis of this script is to have the ability to put dormant domains to use quickly and easily as affiliate marketing sites. Upon messing around with the script, I found a modified version of it from Domain Re-Activator. I stripped out the Youtube and eBay portions of the script and made some minor CSS changes. Once that was done, it literally only took me a handful of minutes to create each site.

Although these sites likely won’t make much money, they do provide a potential source of income and this is favorable for the fact that they are so easy to create. It is a no-brainer for unused domains that cost roughly $10/yr.

Initiated Google Analytics for Tracking TPIP Network Traffic

J. Todd Baker — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 14:11:25 +0000

Last night I set up a Google Analytics account which will be used as the traffic analysis and reporting tool for the TPIP Network. I am currently hosting all the TPIP sites on Godaddy with an ‘Unlimited Plan’ account. The free traffic analysis tools available through Godaddy were lacking in features and it appears that installing a third party traffic analyzer such as Webalizer would be a hassle. Therefore, I decided to use Google Analytics since it has the features I want and is easy to implement for each site.

Published limewifi.com

J. Todd Baker — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 06:26:12 +0000

This past weekend I utilized the domain name limewifi.com (which I had purchased and never used for another business model sometime last year) and published an Amazon.com affiliate marketing website of wireless networking products. In addition to the Amazon product links, Google Adsense for content was also included in the right column.

The basic function of this site was to produce a working prototype affiliate marketing website for me to cut my teeth on. This site was built by utilizing Wordpress and an existing Lime theme from themeboss.com.

I will reapproach this site and add further enhancements to begin building site traffic in the coming weeks. Further progress on this site will be reported as completed. This will include such details like which plugins were used and SEO strategies implemented.

Change in Strategy

J. Todd Baker — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 04:41:14 +0000

Since my last post, which has been many months ago, the strategy for this project has shifted from a single flagship blog site (to generate traffic) to a flagship site with the creation of numerous affiliate marketing sites.

In addition to the strategic changes, two new plugins have been implemented (All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps Generator). The Karailiev Sitemap plugin has been removed, although it worked perfectly. Once the new sitemap plugin was activated and an updated sitemap generated, I then submitted the sitemap.xml file through the Webmaster Tools.

The main focus of this project is to build an abundant number of affiliate marketing websites to generate a serious amount of JACK. This site will serve as the hub of the network and report all facets of the project.