How To Make Passive Income Online
My first venture into earning a passive income online started on a rainy night in my dorm room over three years ago. I had heard about how people were making millions online with adsense by targeting high paying niches and just writing about stuff like yeast infections and mesothelioma. So I set up a couple blogger blogs and wrote feverishly for hours every day for a month. My earnings at the end of that month didn’t break $5 and my dreams of jetting around the world while the money rolled in were quickly dashed. My baby network of sites was abandoned, never to be posted on again.
Even though I didn’t actively work on building a passive income after my first attempt, I still frequented various internet marketing forums and collected a nice $100 check from big G every year from my blogs. In January 2009, I finally came to my senses and decided that my plan to major in actuarial math and find a job crunching numbers as an Excel monkey for an insurance company was pure insanity.
Once again, I was bitten by the IM bug and tried my hand at earning money online by creating passive income websites. This time around, I knew more about things like SEO, backlinks, and keywords. I threw together a 10 page wordpress site and put up some affiliate links. This site has consistently made over $100 every month without any work or upkeep. Finally, it seemed like my dream of building a passive income was within my reach.
However, it seemed like no matter what I did, my site would not budge and climb the up the SERPs. So I gave up on that site and moved onto easier niche sites. I spent the next few months jumping from site to site, doing a lot of work but never really getting anything done. Part of the problem was that I never knew what I should concentrate on. Should I add write more content? Target more keywords? Write some articles? Go post some comment spam? The end result of course being that I would end up like this at 2 AM:
My passive income websites were making a nice bit of pocket change, but nothing near enough to live off of. I had the basic ideas and concepts down, but still couldn’t put the pieces together. Then in September I discovered TKA and at the same time stumbled across Grizzly’s site. The pieces came together and a plan started to form in my mind. The Keyword Academy fine tuned my keyword research and Grizzly’s blog laid out the blueprint for how to make money online.
In the past two weeks, I’ve went back and cleaned up my passive income portfolio. Just some simple changes like fixing internal links, putting up adsense, adding related keywords and getting a couple backlinks from article marketing has increased my website earnings by 144%. Also, some of my sites that have been sandboxed for the past month have suddenly returned in the last two days stronger than ever for their main keywords.
I am more certain than ever that earning passive income online is truly feasible and within my reach. All I need to do is streamline the process and of course put in the work. I plan on making at least $1000 from my passive income websites. To do this, I can either increase the volume of pages or websites I have out there or I can maximize the money I’m earning for each page by increasing search traffic to each page.
I have analyzed all my websites and calculated how many dollars I am earning each month for each post. The September figures are lower than they should be since several of my sites were sandboxed and ranking in the 200+ position. Even in this worst case scenario, I’m making an average of $3.25 per month for each post before extensive backlink work. At this rate, I’ll need 308 posts to reach my goal of $1000 in monthly sustainable passive income. This is the worst case scenario. If I work on getting enough backlinks, the earnings per page should rise to somewhere in the $6-$8 range.
My plan for October was inspired by this site on how to make money with Adsense. I’m going to start each niche site with 20 posts targetting long tail forms of my main keyword. Then I’m going to force myself to stop adding content so I don’t throw too much effort into a dud. The next step after mass content creation will be backlinking. I’m going to concentrate on only two sites at a time, writing content for one and link building for another to avoid jumping around and getting distracted.
At this rate, even in the worst case of the rest of my sites not ranking at all and only getting trickle traffic (like they currently are) I should still reach my goal. After doing all this I will let the sites age and settle in it’s new position before deciding if further content/links are needed to increase my internet passive income or if I should just focus on the performers and building them up to authority sites.
My time line for this plan to maximize my passive income streams is going to be one month. That works out to six posts a day not including articles for links and support sites. A walk in the park compared to writing 20+ page research papers on poking sea slugs, watching cabbage plants grow, and theoretical statistics which I already do anyways for no money.