Passive Income

I have been toying with the idea of buying Micro Niche Finder for a while now.  I have heard nothing but great reviews from the people using it, but I thought it was all hype. After all, most of the tools you need to be successful are freely available on the internet, aren’t they?

I honestly believed this with my whole heart. Why spend $97 when I can use Google’s Adwords Tool for free. Once I dig through and find 10 nice looking keywords, I simply go to Google and do a little competition check. You know the kind….Put your keyword in quotes and see how many results you get back. While this may give you a decent idea of what you are against, it is my experience that this type of guestimation is pretty easy to mess up.

If I were lucky, I would have found 1 decent keyword after about 30 minutes. Pretty good, right? Now all I have to do is create an article, publish it, get some backlinks and watch the money roll in.

I promise you that this is much more difficult than the so-called experts make it seem. More often than not, none of the articles I would write would end up on the first 5 pages of Google, let alone the first page. I always seem to underestimate the competition.

Fortunately for me, last week I had a few sales come through from some older One Week Marketing campaigns. I decided to re-invest these funds into my online empire (which is now an official LLC by the way) and purchased Micro Niche Finder.

All I have to say is WOW! Seriously. That thing is cool.

Today on my lunch break, I was able to create a keyword list of 50 long-tail keywords that I should be able to rank for almost immediately. This best part was I did this in about 10 minutes. Not only that, Micro Niche finder found an affiliate product for me to promote, showed me where to find research articles for my landing pages and even determined that the .com domain name was available for a truly kick-butt long-tail keyword (the CPC is $9.50).

I have only had this program since last night but I have to say I am impressed. If you have been on the fence about buying it, go ahead. I think it will more than pay for itself rather quickly!

If you do not know what I am talking about, or simply want more information about it, Click Here

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Creating passive income is a truly worth while pursuit. It is so rewarding seeing the $0.05 click in your account, or better yet a sale or two from Clickbank. It feels like you are on top of the world and that nothing is out of your reach.

But then reality returns and slaps the crap out of you! All of a sudden Google bans your account or your niche site gets de-indexed! What then? Do you give up or do you power through it and see if you can make a real run at this game?

In order to be successful there are many things that have to go right, and you have to get a little lucky. There are also a few things that you should not do. Here is a list of rules I think people should follow when trying to create successful passive income streams.

5. Do Not Fail to Diversify – Everyone has heard the old saying ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket’. The bible puts it this way:

Give portions to seven, yes to eight, for you do not know what disaster may come upon the land. Ecclesiastes 11:2

There is nothing wrong with adding a little focus to your online efforts; whether it is writing articles for eHow or creating your own educational eBook empire. There are certainly many success stories out there. Problems arise, however, when you put all of your efforts into something that may not last. If, for instance, you were earning decent money on Squidoo promoting weight loss products then lately you have had the rug pulled completely out from under your feet!

4. Do Not Quit Your Day Job – Let face it! Most of us will not make it as full-time internet marketers. While I would like to believe that I am smart enough, dare I say even driven enough, the reality is that more than 90% of us will fail. Of the 10% who do not completely fail, perhaps only 1% will ever make enough money to sit around in their PJs sipping cafe lates and watching Oprah.

And by the way, those stupid sales pages that convince you if you purchase their product you could be working from the beach….who the heck wants to work from the beach? Certainly not I!

3. Do Not Follow the Crowd - Jennifer, over at PotPieGirl (who is absolutely brilliant), teaches us not to follow that shiny new penny. While this is the most difficult thing about learning internet marketing, she is definitely right.

Pick one plan and follow it to the letter. If you have not checked it out yet, I HIGHLY recommend Jennifer’s latest product ONE WEEK MARKETING. Of all of the things I have tried, this has been by far the most successful. In fact, I am currently going back to the basics, by combining OWM with good old fashion keyword research! The good thing about using a product like micro niche finder is that all of the work is basically done for you. Then all you really have to do is concentrate on creating quality content.

If you are considering purchasing Micro Niche Finder, please do so through THIS LINK!

2. Do Not Spread Yourself Too Thin – Most of these marketing techniques will work to some degree. If fact, I would argue that if you would give each technique a real chance (say 4 weeks worth of effort), you would experience much more success than you do now.

I am so guilty of not following this rule! Instead of sticking to OWM campaigns, I got into sniper sites and keyword snipes and backlinking campaigns and article marketing campaigns etc etc etc! Now it takes me half an hour to figure out what site I want to work on each night, instead of simply concentrating on completing more content!

1. Do Not Give Up – If this is your passion, you will make it work. Give up now and you will never know if you could have been part of that elite 1%.

A wise man once told me that if you do what you love, you will never have to work a day in your life.

This is so true. Start working on things that make you happy. Make sure you are giving other areas of your life sufficient face time and remember that kingdoms built on earth will not last, but the grace of the Lord will last forver.

Thanks for stopping by and have a great evening!

Dusty

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I cannot believe that it has been 60 days already. It seems like it was just yesterday that I started my passive income challenge. In the past 60 days, I have had my ups and downs. Some things that I have tried have worked okay; others things have really bombed. The important thing to remember is that I am going to keep trying no matter what.

Online Income Empire (aka Things I have tried)

eHow – Writing articles for eHow remains a stable method of making money. It takes some effort to find subjects that are not completely saturated already, but it can still be done. Some of my friends are doing much better than I am. My earnings were down in July, and are down in August.

Along with my buddy over at passive family income, I am participating in the 100 article eHow challenge. I started a few days late and have fallen way behind. In fact, I am not even on pace to complete 30 articles in August. I really need to kick it into gear if I want to complete this challenge. I am going to take the advice of The Corporate Barbarian and just finish what I can and not worry about it so much. Even one article published is one more than I had the day before.

Approximate Monthly Earnings Update – $70

Sniper Sites – In order to develop some of my own real estate properties I created 10 sniper style sites. I have monetized these with Clickbank products, Amazon products and CPC ads. While these have not yet produced a sale, they have resulted in a few ad clicks and even a few Amazon sales.

I experienced tremendous ranking right from the beginning (making the first page for each keyword phrase I was targeting). Within a few weeks, Google had dropped me completed. Over the past week, these sites have finally started to climb the rankings again. Some are on page 4, while others are on page 10.  I think a nice backlinking campaign should bump these back up to the top again.

Clickbank Sales from Sniper Sites: $0.00

Amazon Commissions from Sniper Sites: $39.95

One Week Marketing Campaigns – Of all of the strategies I have tried so far, this one has worked best. Each month I continue to produce sales from the three or four small campaigns I put up months ago. In fact since one lens is producing 2 to 5 sales a month, I created a word press blog targeting those same keywords. Google has not ranked this site yet, but I am expecting big things from this.

Clickbank Sales: $99.48

Ezinearticles – One of the primary reasons I am so far behind is that I have been cranking out articles for EZA. I have finally achieved platinum status, which just means I can submit an unlimited number of articles for approval. I have been using these articles to test a few new markets that I may want to enter.

Here is my basic EZA strategy:

• Keyword research (2 or 3 keyword phrases)
• Buy keyword rich .info domain from GoDaddy
• Redirect this domain to a masked affiliate link
• Write 5 – 10 articles for these keywords, dropping my new domain name in resource box
• Rinse and Repeat

Currently, my click through rate is about 25%, which is pretty decent. I am planning to complete EZA’a HAHD challenge – write 100 articles in 100 days. This should really help my traffic levels.

Direct EZA Sales: $0.00

Overall Results

Taking all this into consideration, I am at about $200 per month. With a bit of additional effort, I should be able to reach my goal of $500 per month by the end of December 2009. All I know is that even though some things have failed, and I am way behind in a few areas, I will not stop. I am going to power through and see what I see.

What about you? How are your results so far? I would love to hear about them!

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