So just what is passive income? Passive income is an income received on a regular basis, with little effort required to maintain it. Sound’s pretty good huh? Who wouldn’t want to make money while putting forth little effort? Well I’m going to teach you how to do just that. The key in that definition is “little effort requited to MAINTAIN it.” This isn’t a get rich quick scheme and it doesn’t mean that there is no work required. In fact, to get started there is quite a little bit of work. Just reading this will take you a little time. (But it will be well worth it!) The key is, once you learn the process, and get some things in place, then you can kick back and enjoy the “passive” part.
So how are we going to generate this passive income? We are going to use a website and Google Adsense. I’m sure you already know what a website is, but perhaps your not familiar with Google Adsense. Basically Google will provide advertisements that are relevant to the content on your site that you can put on pages of your website. When people click on the advertisements, you get paid. If you get a lot of people to click on ads then you can make a lot of money.
Build a website, sign up with Google Adsense, and make money. Sounds easy enough, right? So what’s the catch? Well, there are a few catches. And that’s what I’m going to focus on for the next little while.
Catch One: Some ads pay better than others. For some ads you’ll make only a few cents every time one of them is clicked on, but for others you could make several dollars per click. The key is getting high paying ads to show up on your site.
Creating a website and signing up with Google Adsense is the easy part. The work comes in dealing with the catches. But I’m going to teach you how to do that. So let’s start at the beginning.
Creating a Website and signing up with Google Adsense
It is in this beginning step that we begin working on the catches. Especially catch one and three. Google has software that searches the page that the ad is showing up on and then tries to pick ads that relate to the content. Therefore your website should be about the topic that the ads are advertising. So, how do you pick the topic of your website. If you’re in it for the money, which I’m assuming that you are since you are reading this, then you want to pick a topic which has ads that pay well. And here is a tool that will help you do that. It is the Google Adwords Keyword tool. The idea is to pick a keyword or phrase to build your site around. It is best to not choose something to general, but to pick specific keywords. Find a niche. This is why these types of websites are called niche websites. Because they focus on very specific keywords.
So here is how to use the Google Adwords Keyword tool.
First get to the page. At this point enter in a keyword that you think you might like to create your site around; maybe a topic that interests you.
Once you have put in your keyword and done the captcha, hit the search button.
A list will be generated which will include your keyword as well phrases and related words.
There are a few valuable bits of information that you can see right now. One is how many searches there are for that word. When picking a good keyword to base your niche site around, you want to make sure there are enough people searching that word that you will be able to get a fair amount of traffic. There is one bit of information that isn’t there though and that is information on how much you’ll make when someone clicks on ads related to those keywords. To get that information to show up, go to the tab that says columns and click on it.
A screen will come up with choices for which columns you would like to see. Check the box that says “Estimated Avg. CPC” then click save. (UPDATE: Google Adwords has changed a bit and now requires you to login before you can see the CPC option and it is now called "Approximate CPC". If you do not have an account you will have to set one up. )
Anyway, play around with this tool for a bit. Try different keywords related to different topics.
So which keyword to pick? Well one might think that it is fairly obvious, you just pick the keyword pays the most. Well that might not always be the best choice. You see, other people are doing the same thing you are, so most of the time there is a lot of competition for the high paying key words. We are going to address this when we talk more about catch 2 and 3, but the best way to get traffic is to have people find you using a search engine, and it is best to be ranked high on the first page of that search. If there is a lot of strong competition for that keyword, your website might not even make the first result page of a search…or the second page…or the tenth page…so nobody will find you and visit your site. That means no clicks and no money. So you need to pick a keyword that will give you good returns per click, but whose competition isn’t too tough. So how do we do that? Well you’ve already learned how to use Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool to rank keywords according to which pay more, now let’s focus on checking the competition for keywords and phrases. For this I use a page ranking tool at www.checkpagerank.net. Let me take just a moment and discuss page rank as it is essential to this discussion. Search engines like Google rank pages according to how important they think a page is and part of the ranking comes into play when the return results for searches. It is not the only thing they look at, but it does carry some weight. So, when we are checking out the competition, we want to see what there page rank is to see if we are going to be able to compete with them. That is where the page ranking tool comes into play.
Pick one of the keyword or keyword phrases that you think you might be interested in, then click on it.
A Google search will come up based on that keyword or phrase. Those top 5 or 6 spots are your competition. At some point you’d like to bump them down and take one of their spots, so that eventually you’ll be getting all their traffic. We’re going to use the page rank checker to see just how much competition they are going to be. First copy the domain. All you need is to the .com or .net, etc. part.
Next put that domain into the page rank checker and see what the page rank is.
Page ranks of 5 or higher are going to be very tough competition. A page rank of 4 wouldn’t completely scare me off, but would still be tough. If your seeing 2 and 3 or less…Woohoo! You’ve probably found a great keyword to get started with.
One thing you may find is that the highest page ranks aren’t necessarily always ranked highest on the search page. Again, page rank isn’t the only thing that the search engine looks at, but it does carry some weight, so we definitely want to take it into consideration when checking out the competition for our keyword. Right from the beginning this is where a lot of Adsense users go wrong. They pick a high paying keyword that has super tough competition and they end up being on page 47 of the Google search and nobody ends up visiting their site. Nobody clicks on their ads, and they give up. You have to pick a good keyword or phrase. Pick a keyword that has a relatively high payout, with not to strong competition. Then build your site around that topic .
Phew! I told you this was going to be a lot of work up front. Don’t worry though, the passive part is coming!
Ok. Now that you’ve played around with the Keyword Tool and Page Rank Checker and have picked a keyword for your niche site let’s create it. There are lots of ways to do this. There are thousands of places that will host a site for you and help you register a domain name. I’m not going to talk about all of them…or even some of them. I’m going to tell you about the easiest one that I’ve used. I simply just use Blogger. Creating a blog is super easy and free. Maybe you’ve already done it before. If not it is a pretty straight forward process. Go to www.blogger.com, click on “get started” and away you go. You can just use your blogger blog if you want, but here is what I would do. Register a domain name with Blogger. It’s $10 a year, and if you choose the domain name right it can give you quite a punch in the search engine results. You want to choose a domain name that has your keyword(s) in it. For example, if my keywords were “how to juggle swords” I would try to register the domain name www.howtojuggleswords.com. If .com was taken I would try .net or .info. If they were taken I might try something like www.how-to-juggle-swords-.com. Anyway, I think you get the idea. So how do you register a domain with blogger? Well go ahead and set up a blog. Once you have your blog set up. Click on the setting tab and then on the publishing tab.
Ok. So now you have your website set up it’s time to get your Google Adsense Account set up. Go to www.google.com/adsense and click on sign up now.
I’ll see you back here when you get done.
Alright, so you’ve got your niche site set up with a great keyword. Your domain has been registered and you’ve got your Adsense account set up.
Just one more note. How do you get the ads on your niche site. Well, that is one of the reasons we chose to set our niche site up using Blogger. It’s super easy. All you do is click on the design tab on your blog and then “add a gadget”.
One of the gadgets is Adsense.
It will let you pick the style, size, and color, and then you can also move it to where you would like it to appear on the page. Since you don’t have any content on your niche site right now, I would wait to do this for a bit until you get some stuff on your site.
Catch one: Some ads pay better than others. We’ve actually already begun to address this. We have picked a great keyword or phrase that should pay well. Now we just need to make sure those are the ads that show up on our site. In order to do this, the content we need to put on our site needs to be related to the topic and keyword heavy. Meaning, you need to use your keyword on your site and in the articles that you post. Don’t overdo it, but just make sure they are in there and that the software that Google uses will be able to recognize what your site is about. Particularly make sure that you use your keyword or phrase in things like titles and headings both on the site itself and the articles you post.
Catch Two: Getting people to visit your website.
There is really only one good way to do this. Search Engine Traffic. We’ve picked a great keyword or phrase to build our website around, now we need to get our website ranked high in the search results (ideally one of the top 5) when people type in that keyword. If you registered a domain with your keyword or phrase in it, you’re off to a good start, but that’s only the beginning. There is still a lot of work to go, but I’m going to share with you a great strategy that works.
There are a few tools that you can use to make the process a whole lot less time consuming, and for me have been a truly awesome investment, but you can still use the process I describe without them. It will just be a ton more work. Please note that the links to the software and tools that I describe here are affiliate links which I do receive financial gain from if purchases are made from them.
Backlinks are the key to getting your website ranked high when it comes to search engines. Getting your website ranked high in the search engines is the key to getting traffic to your site. And getting traffic to your site is the key to making money!
So what are backlinks? Backlinks are links on other sites that link back to your site. The best backlinks are those links that take people to your website when they click on certain words, called the anchor text. Ideally that anchor text is your keyword or phrase for you niche site.
If your site has lots of backlinks to it, then the search engines like GOOGLE will rank it high in their searches because they judge your site to be important; especially if the anchor text linking to your site are the words that have been searched with the search engine. The importance that a search engine gives to a website is called page rank.
Lots of links are good. Links from sites with high page rank are even better! A link from a high page rank site can be worth 100’s of links from low page rank sites.
Let’s get started by looking at an overview of the process and then we’ll get into the details. The strategy actually uses two layers of links. A primary layer which links directly to your niche site, and a secondary layer which are links that link to your primary layer.
Two layers, that’s the key!
Your primary layer will consist of a few blogs and websites that you set up linking to your niche site, as well as a few articles submitted to some of the top article directories.
Your secondary layer will consist of mass article submissions that will link to your primary layer, not directly to your niche site.
The reason that you don’t want to link directly to your niche site is because you are going to be creating hundreds of backlinks at a time. If you link all of them to your niche site, it will look very unnatural to the search engines and definitely raise a red flag. When it comes to our niche site we don’t want any red flags. We’ll use our primary layer as a buffer. Our primary layer sites are on high ranking, totally populated websites, like Blogger and Wordpress, and they’ll be able to handle the influx of links. Your primary layer acts as a shield while at the same time allowing you to get the benefit from all those links. Your niche site will benefit from all the secondary layer links because they will boost the page rank of your primary layer. Remember a few links from a higher ranked site are worth many links from a lower ranked site!
O.K. Let’s get down to business!
Step One: Write an Original Article Related to the Topic of Your Niche Site
Everything in this process begins with writing an original article. Maybe you’ve already got one written and it is posted on your niche site. If you want to use that one, that’s fine, but make sure that it is original and contains unique content. It should typically be around 350-600 words in length. Although the length isn’t extremely important, it’s smart to stay within this range because it will make your life easier in the later steps of this process. If you have written a new article, go ahead and post it on your niche site.
Step Two: Spin Your Article
If you’re not familiar with the concept of article spinning let me give you just a quick overview. Spinning an article gives you the ability to quickly create multiple variations of an original article so that you can submit them to various places without worrying about duplicate content penalties and so that you can save tons of time by not having to create brand new content from scratch over and over again to get the same message across. Spinning your article is the first place where you may consider spending a little money to get software that will help you with this. Otherwise, you will be doing all the spinning yourself, meaning, you will have to take your article and re-write it several times saying the same thing using different words. The software that I have been using lately is called The Best Spinner. It is by far the best spinning software available and will make the spinning process so much faster.
Once you have spun your article and created several different versions, you’ll be on to step three.
Step 3: Begin Your Primary Layer by Submitting to Article Directories
In this step you will be submitting spun versions of your original article to some of the top article directories to create some of the first links in your primary layer. The directories that I like to use are
Ezine Articles
GoArticles
Amazines
Article Dashboard
Article Blast
Article Alley
Remember to create a link to your niche site. Some like Amazines, will let you put links directly in the article. Others will only allow you to put links in the author bio/resource section. Make sure you have at least one link that has an anchor text that matches your target keyword or keyphrase.
Step 4: Finish Your Primary Layer by Creating New Blogs and Websites
At this point you can use spun versions of your original article to create new blogs and websites that all have backlinks pointing to your site. They will be a part of the primary layer that we talked about in the overview, which means they will contain links that point directly back to your niche site.
New Blogs
These new blogs are blogs that you create for free, and the real benefit here is that they are a part of a larger, more powerful and higher ranking domain. So for example, when you create a free blog at WordPress.com, even though the blog you create will start out as a Page Rank 0 (PR0) website, it’s still a part of the PR9 wordpress.com domain. This same ideology goes for all of the articles you’ve written for article directories too.
Each of the new blogs will only require one post, which you can grab from a spun version of your original article. Adding a picture or a video or both would be good too so that it looks like your blog is updated a little.
Here are the blog sites that I use.
Blogger
Wordpress
Tumblr
Live Journal
Remember, you only really need one post on these with a link to your niche site. Make sure that the link is the key word(s) that you want to be ranked high for in the search engines. I don’t do any cross linking between these sites.
Websites
These are other sites that can be set up that do not have their own domain, but are part of a larger, more powerful high ranking domain. These types of websites include:
Squidoo
HubPages
They are free to setup and treated in the exact same manner as the New Blogs, they are just setup a little differently. To create content for these sites you can just use a spun version of your original article and can also add some pictures and videos. Again, just make sure that on each site there is at least one backlink with your keyword(s) as the anchor text pointing back to your niche site.
Step 5: Creating Links on Your Secondary Level Pointing to Your Primary Layer
In this step, you’ll be creating a ton of backlinks that link back to your primary layer that you’ve created. You'll do this by submitting articles to as many article directories and blogs as you can including a link(s) to one of your primary layer sites.
This is the second place that I would consider spending some money. You can do all the work yourself, but by using the following tool, it will save you tons of work and time. In this step you want to create as many links as you can. If you are doing the work yourself and you want to create a hundred backlinks, that means that you have to submit your article by yourself to a hundred article directories or blogs. That is very time consuming. An awesome tool that I have been using for a while that will do all the submitting for me and help me generate 1000’s of links is unique article wizard. When using unique article wizard there is a little work upfront to get your article ready, but you can get up to 800-1000 backlinks from a single article, with links to prove it, which is awesome. This is why we use these articles to link to our primary layer, because 1000s of backlinks to your niche site would definitely be a little much.
Here’s a video explaining how unique article wizard works:
If you are interested in UNIQUE ARTICLE WIZARD click on the picture below.
Step 6: Repeat
That’s it. Write an article. Post it to your niche site. Spin it. Create a primary layer of links pointing to your niche site. Create a secondary layer of links (1000’s of them if possible) pointing to the sites on your primary layer. Do it again and again. Get your site ranked number one. Make lots of money!
The software and tools I’ve been talking about come with a cost, but I don’t want you to think that you need to purchase any of these things in order to succeed. The tools work, but they aren’t necessary. They will just save you loads of time and work. For me they have been totally worth it!
So that is how we are going to deal with catch 2. We are going to get traffic to our site by ranking high in search engine searches like Google.
Catch Three: Getting people to click on the ads.
Technically we’ve already addressed this problem as we’ve been going along. The key to getting people to click on your ads is to get the right kind of traffic. By getting search engine traffic that came from typing in the keyword that is the focus of our niche site, we are getting people that are interested in the products that our ads are promoting.
There are lots of places and programs out there that promise you traffic. Don’t fall for it. While it is true that many of them will indeed get you traffic. They are merely numbers. It is the wrong kind of traffic. It is people who are not interested in the content or topic of your site, but are only visiting your site in order to get something from the program they are involved with, not because they are interested in your site. They are not going to click on your ads. Search engine traffic is the key. They are the people that are interested in your niche site’s topic. They are the people that are interested in the products that your ads are promoting. They are the people that are going to click on them. If you’ve followed the process up to this point, then you’ll be getting the right kind of traffic.
