Establishing a Passive Income Business

In previous articles, we have outlined income producing strategies in broad terms, either by selling goods and services locally (Earning Extra Money – Physical Goods & Services), or by exploring the various money making vehicles on the ‘net (Earning Extra Money – How to Earn Money on the Internet)but now it’s time to zero in further, and begin talking in specifics. This article will focus in on the specific actions and activities you need to be pursuing if your selected goal is to create and establish a viable passive income business.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, please note that “passive income” DOES NOT MEAN “no work required.” As I’ve said before, you get out of this business what you put into it, so if you’re interested in instantaneous, vast riches with no effort, then go chase after one of those “Pied Piper” IM “gurus,” buy every new product they recommend for a year, and after you’ve wasted a few thousand dollars, come back here and we’ll show you how to do it properly, and if you’re not sure this is for you, head back to the home page (Extra Income Online) and review.

Okay, first things first, let’s define what a “passive income business” actually is, so there are no misconceptions:

This sort of stay at home business is predicated on the notion that the greater bulk of the work is done on the front end. That means lots of long days creating content, doing signups and setups, publishing stuff and creating backlinks, and during the initial work phase, you can expect to see very little in the way of revenues. For this reason, most people give up before they ever get this kind of business off the ground, and that’s a pity, because if they’d just stuck with it, the profits would start rolling in, and the neat thing about this type of business model is that once you do the work…once you’ve laid all the necessary groundwork (and make no mistake, there’s a lot to be done!), the websites, and the profits they generate are pretty much on auto-pilot from there on.

I’ll caution you though. It takes a special kind of person to slog through all the prework and setup stuff necessary to succeed, and unless you can go 1-2 solid months with nothing to show for your Herculean efforts (and then, when the results do start appearing, they’re often fairly modest in the beginning), this is not for you. I should also add that you CAN do this and earn money part time, but of course, it will take correspondingly longer to get to whatever your desired income goals might be.

Don’t worry though. If you can survive the early days, this type of business is absolutely fantastic, and the work you do on the front end resonates down the chain and through the entire body of your work. There’s a compounding effect here, and what starts off as a modest income stream can be grown steadily to any income level you can dream, so as a home money making business opportunity goes, it’s pretty close to perfect. All it takes is…you guessed it. Persistent, focused action.

WHAT action though? If you’re new to the game, that’s the very first question that springs to your mind, and the answers to that question are the very thing that lots of gurus charge good money to answer. Unfortunately, most of them do a relatively poor job explaining it, but of course, you don’t find that out until after you’ve spent your money.

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone who had already made all the newbie mistakes just came clean and mapped out a clear, simple strategy for how to learn what needs to be learned?

That’s exactly what I thought too, and one of the major reasons I made this blog.

I will lay out the specific blueprint for you right here. What to do, and how to do it. Bear in mind though, that this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Internet Marketing and SEO are both simpler, and more complex than they first appear. You can learn the basics of SEO and backlinking techniques in five minutes (by reading below), but to truly master them will take months of real world practice, and preferably, some type of mentorship to speed things along and smooth out the bumps in the road you’ll invariably encounter, and that’s what I propose. I’ll lay out the basics for you in the paragraphs below. You can take this information and try to go it alone, and in this way, you will absolutely minimize your out of pocket expenses.

Of course, I’ll also tell you how you can spend just a bit of coin and radically shorten your learning curve. Up to you which you opt to take. Fair enough?

Passive Income Businesses generally revolve around two types of sites/pages. Adsense and/or Affiliate products. In my opinion, sites/pages that focus on both in tandem represent the best of all possible worlds.

The chief advantage to such sites is their passivity (hence the name). Once established, it’s basically a “hands off” business. You don’t have to worry about stocking a product, or customer interactions. All of these are handled by…well, you may not even know, exactly, and that’s quite alright, because it’s not your concern! You are merely the advertising vehicle, and for that, you get a commission per click or sale. That’s the sum total of your role, and that’s actually quite an attractive place to be! A secondary advantage is that it doesn’t require a PhD to do, and in fact, could be a viable business for your kids, if you didn’t see anything to your liking over in the article on Ways for Kids to Earn Money.

Here’s what you need to do in order to create a viable passive income business:

Step 1: Niche Research – See…a lot of people go astray right from the start. They figure what they’ll do is write some content about something they’re interested in, and then find a way to market it. This is, in fact, the most intuitive way to approach the business, and is exactly the wrong thing to do!!! I don’t have any numbers on it, but I’d imagine that this is the #1 reason most people fail at internet marketing. They’re doing it backwards. What niche research accomplishes is that it finds you a little corner of the ‘net that has profit potential. If there’s no profit potential in it, then there’s no point in writing about it, right? I mean, if your goal is to make money at it. Certainly, if you’re passionate about a hobby you have and you want to make a website, then by all means, don’t worry if it’s profitable or not! But that’s not why you’re here. That’s not why you’re reading this page, or for that matter, why you came looking for this information. You’re interested in making money on the internet, and in order to do that, the first thing you have to do is rid yourself of your “backwards thinking.” Don’t just write about what you’re interested in. Do the research. IF it is profitable, THEN start working on content, based around keywords that real humans are actually searching for! Now, in order for a niche to have profit potential, it needs two things: A decent CPC rate, and a decent number of monthly searches. Again, if you are new to this, then my statement raises more questions than it answers. WHAT is a CPC rate? HOW do you know if it’s good? HOW MANY searches is good? Where do you find this information out? And how, exactly, do you find a good niche?

All of these are completely fair and valid questions, and all of them will be answered below:

* Where to Find This Info:
The first, best (free) place to look for the information about niches is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

What you want to do is type in a broad idea for a keyword into the tool and let Google recommend others for you. Specifically, you are interested in search trends, global search volume (this is a monthly estimate), and CPC. You’re really only interested in “exact match” search terms, so whatever you type in, put the term in [this kind of bracket]. If you just type the word in, you’ll get a broad match, and if you use “quotation marks around the phrase” you’ll get phrase matching results, and this is too broad for our purposes. What we’re really after is an estimate on how many times each month are real human beings typing a given phrase into Google. That’s what’s important, and that’s what the tool above gives us a good estimate on.

* CPC:
CPC = “cost per click.” In simple terms, this is the rate that Google (or other ad networks) charge advertisers to post an ad so that it’s visible for a certain, specific keyword. Now obviously, if you build a website that targets a given keyword, you don’t “get” whatever amount the CPC is. A good rough estimate would be 20-25% of that number would go to you. So, if a given KW (keyword) has a CPC of $1.00, then your share of that would be in the range of $0.20 – $0.25. In other words, if you design a web page around the keyword “baby monitors,” and that KW has a CPC of $1.00 (I don’t know that this is accurate, I’m just making it up for this example), you can expect twenty to twenty-five cents per click. Obviously, the higher the CPC, the better for you, but bear in mind that a higher CPC also generally tends to mean greater competition, which in turn means greater difficulty in getting a page 1 ranking on Google, so there’s a bit of a tradeoff, and this should factor into your thinking. This kind of puzzle can be solved one of two ways. Either go it alone and experiment, or find yourself a mentor you trust and ask him/her. If you have six months to a year to experiment, you can certainly gain the experience on your own, and become quite adept at “reading” a niche, but you can cut the learning curve down dramatically by studying with someone, or even better, a group of people. I heartily recommend the group over at WordPress Goldmine, who took me under their collective wing. I learned more there in two weeks than I learned in all my time spent learning on my own, combined. I refer to them (the WPGM forums) as my own personal money making forums, and that’s not an exaggeration! They virtually created my current business by teaching me most of what I know today!

* Number of Searches Per Month:
Ask ten different IM people what range you should shoot for, and you’ll get ten different answers. Ideally, you want a phrase that’s getting at least 20-30 searches a day, bare minimum (so, figure an absolute floor of 500 searches per month), and of course, anything higher than this is gravy. Again, having a group to bounce ideas off of is extremely helpful, and for this reason, I offer another nod in the direction of my study group, WordPress Goldmine (note: I do not own WPGM. I am merely a grateful student who found a place with legitimate information and great people!)

* A decent site should start with no less than 5 keywords. If you find more that are related to your topic, great! Save them in a spreadsheet and you’ll have fodder to add to your site for later!

* If you think you’re done with the research at this stage, boy are you wrong! Now that you have some keywords, you need to assess them (and again, having study partners helps here!). How many other websites are already out there, competing on the very words you choose? How strong are they? There are all sorts of opinions and advice on the matter, and notably, there are a number of tools you can use to automate checking on this which greatly speed the process along. You can do it by hand, of course, and while free, this takes valuable time, so you must decide. Do you have more spare time, or money? If you’ve got lots of time, by all means, the learning experience will be good for you, so do it by hand! You may want to use the “by hand” approach for your first couple of sites to prove to yourself that I’m not yanking your chain anyway, but once you see that it works, you will most likely want to make the process more efficient by investing in tools to make your life easier, so I’ll describe both ways:

* The Free Method of Checking a KW:
For each keyword you’re thinking about using (not just the five or so you want to start with initially, but all the KW’s you have on your list), type into Google: allintitle:YOUR KEYWORD and allinurl:YOUR KEYWORD. Note how many websites each result returns, and study the sites on them. These guys are your likely competitors. They have done at least the basic on-page SEO work for the keyword you’re after. Study the sites on page one of Google for each keyword you have on your list, cos these are the people you’ll have to beat if you want a page one ranking. Lastly, of course, you’ll want to simply type in the keyword straight into Google (no quotes, brackets, or anything), as this will be what your potential viewers will be doing. You’re now looking at the playing field. The very expanse of search engine real estate you’re going to stake a partial claim to. You’ll no doubt see lots of “familiar faces” on this page (the guys from your “intitle” and “inurl” search, but possibly a few ringers as well—note that the outliers in this group will be the ones that will be relatively easier to dislodge). Next stop, to find out each player’s relative strengths.

To find out how “strong” they are, you’ll need a plugin that will show you the site’s page rank. Now, it is entirely possible that a PR0 (brand new site with no backlinks) can beat a PR5 site, but the odds are against it. Doesn’t mean it is impossible, but all else being equal, the site with the higher PR is going to get displayed first, if they are at all optimized for the keyword in question, so you’ll need to find out what PR your competitor sites are. Best way to find this out is to get a free membership at SEO Book and download their Firefox SEO plugins. When activated, they’ll display the page rank of each site that shows up on a google search. Again, you’ll need to do a search for each keyword you want to work with.

Now, if all that sounds tedious and dull, that’s because it is! And, there’s a better way to go about finding the information you’re after. You can simply purchase Micro Niche Finder and automate the entire process. MNF is set to default to exact match searches, and displays, and at the touch of a button will analyze the competition and give you a color coded and numeric response with a drill-down feature so you can dig more deeply into what factors most contribute to the strength of the competition’s rankings. Red = Strong, Yellow = Moderate, and Green = Minimal. Obviously, if you’re just starting out, you’ll want to gravitate to those keywords with minimal competition. Get some victories under your belt, and then you can consider tackling some of the more difficult keywords. Unlike many tools of this type, Micro Niche Finder is a straight up, one-time fee, rather than a monthly subscription, and that’s one of the many reasons I recommend it!

* Finally, sign up for ClickBank or Commission Junction and look to see what products are available to promote that relate to your niche. I ALWAYS recommend trying these out and reviewing them on your site. You don’t have to do this straight off (you can start with just Adsense), but you need to at least be thinking in terms of what you might eventually promote.

If you can’t find any particular product, then consider Amazon or Ebay affiliate partner networks as a good way to boost site revenues. Again, these need not be placed on-site immediately, but there’s little reason not to.

As for finding good niches: Browse through DMOZ, EZA (Ezine Articles), look thru magazines, watch TV, go outside, look at the products around your house, join Oprah’s mailing list…any or all of these are completely valid.

Step 2: The Mechanical Stuff – Buy a domain. Install and configure WordPress. This is probably the easiest part of the whole smash, and should take you less than an hour, total. If you don’t already have hosting someplace, I recommend Go Daddy. I use them, and their unlimited hosting plans are pretty cheap. Also important, I’ve never had even the slightest trouble with any of my sites, and their customer service department rocks! (When I was just starting out, I didn’t have a clue what to do or how to configure stuff…Brandon in customer service patiently walked me through everything I needed to know…WELL above and beyond the call of duty!). Anyway, I consider them the total package. Good stuff. When you choose a domain, use one of your better (if not the outright best) keywords from your list, and make sure that keyword is in the URL Whenever possible, buy a .com domain (even if you have to add a word or two to the URL to get a .com).

Installing WordPress. If you use Go Daddy for hosting, they’ve got an auto install right there on the site. Just use that. Should be set up and ready to go in less than 20 minutes, tho I have had it take an hour or so. I guess it depends on the demands currently being placed on their servers. Anyway, tell it to install, go get some pizza and something to drink, and wait.

Configure WordPress to your liking. There are all sorts of directions you can go here, and this is another one of those areas where you’re better off to study with a private mentor or a group to get a good plan of action. Again, feel free to experiment with what works best on your own, but you may find that you’d just rather have a group to bounce ideas off of or learn what that group’s best practices are.

Step 3: Content Creation – This is either dreadful or great fun, depending on how much you enjoy researching and writing. You want to start with one post per keyword (one of the things you’ll learn as part of a study group, and eventually on your own, is how to start feathering multiple keywords into the mix, but when you’re just starting out, keep it simple!), and each post should be on the order of a thousand words. If you’re feeling wordy (like I am with most of these posts), then knock yourself out.

From your content pages, you’re going to re-write bits of these pages to form the basis of articles. If your content post covers five salient points, then you can probably get at least five articles from that, with each article covering one of the five points.

Content and some articles at the ready, and you’re ready for the next step…the dreaded “M” Word!

Step 4: Marketing – This is not a “one and done” kind of step, but rather, a bit of an ongoing process. The very first thing you want to do is take your existing stable of articles and post them to EZA (Ezine Articles). This will get you lots of exposure and initial traffic while you’re waiting to be indexed (and EZA gets new content all the time, which means Google crawls it all the time, which means that publishing an article here will get you indexed fairly quickly…see?! No need to pay that “guru” fifty bucks to “submit your site to hundreds of search engines!”

As soon as you’re indexed, activate Adsense and place one ad block (336×280) in the upper left hand corner of your site. Word wrap or not, at your discretion. This is statistically the best place to put ads…another one of those “trust me, just do it” things. Once you start making money, play around with this, but if you want to make at least a little jingle quickly, just listen to me, ‘k?

While you’re waiting for your articles to be approved, you can take them and begin “spinning them.” That is to say, tweaking them to create unique variants of them for submission to other places.

The idea here is that you don’t want to spit out thousands of carbon copies of your articles and have these all over the web. No, at present, Google doesn’t levy a penalty on you for doing this, but IMO, it is only a matter of time before they do, and you’ll protect yourself from an eventual slap if you plan for it now, so spin out some variants.

There are all sorts of ways of doing this. Andy Black has a free tool here, that will get you started, but for the money, you’re going to be hard pressed to beat the software combination of Magic Article Rewriter and Submitter. Not only will this allow you to create variants on your articles, but it’ll also give you access to more than seven hundred article directories AND allow you to schedule the publication of your articles so they don’t all hit at once (which could make Google angry with you and your new site). As of this writing, the software duo was only eighty bucks, and a steal at that price.

Yes, you can find some free article submission software out there, and yes, it works, but it doesn’t have NEARLY the firepower that this one has (the best free software I’ve found is Article Submission Helper, which submits to ~175 directories vs. more than 700 with MAS). There are programs that can generate more backlinks for you, but these all cost a monthly fee, and until you’re already making good money, I would not recommend them.

You CAN add Free Traffic System to your backlink building mix, however, as they have a free option. It’s more limited than their pay option, but still generates those much needed backlinks (and Magic Article Rewriter will auto format your stuff in FTS format!).

And that, in a nutshell, is how you play the game. One of the best home computer jobs you could ask for!

Summary – “Big Secrets Revealed”

• Print this page and use it as your site building blueprint

Software Referenced on this Page (Free Stuff Listed First!)
All items listed here should pretty much be considered must-haves at some point, in your Money-Making Internet Business Tool Kit

Adwords Keyword Tool

SEO Book Plugin Collection (for Firefox)

Andy Black’s Easy Article Rewriter

Article Submission Helper

Free Traffic System (has both a free and pay option…start with the free!)

Software Options that Cost Money and What They Do

WordPress GoldMine (not software, but a study guide and dedicated forum, run by Mark Thompson…come study with us!)

Micro Niche Finder (helps identify niches, keywords, and the strength of competition within any given niche).

Go Daddy (Web Hosting)

Magic Article Rewriter/Magic Article Submitter Combo Pack (spins then submits articles to more than 700 directories – comes with a scheduler!)

Full Disclosure: I use regularly, and am an affiliate for Go Daddy, WordPress GoldMine, Micro Niche Finder, and Magic Article Submitter/Magic Article Rewriter

Earning Extra Money – How to Earn Money on the Internet

Lots of people talk about it, but lots of people also fail when attempting to discover how to earn money on the internet, and there are a number of reasons for this high rate of failure.

Often, people lack a sense of scale and proportion. As with anything else that has the potential of earning you extra cash, you get out what you put into it, but most folks don’t want to hear that. They come into the game with stars in their eyes, completely enraptured by the people shouting that they can “make $50,000 by next weekend with no work! A system so simple, your cat could do it for you!”

Uh huh.

Look, if that’s the kind of program you’re looking for, then you’re in the wrong place. I told you on the home page of this site (article entitled “Extra Income Ideas“), that’s not how we do things around here. You get the unvarnished truth, even when maybe it’s not what you were hoping to hear.

So there it is. If you want to make money working at home (either on the internet or on something else), it’s going to take work, and anybody who tells you any different is 100% certain to be either lying or trying to sell you something.

Do you know how much I made during my first month online?

Wait for it….

Twenty-four cents.

And let me tell you, NOTHING tasted sweeter than that twenty-four freakin’ cents. I called my wife in to the computer just so she could see the little numbers sitting there on my Adsense earnings page.

Wow, I thought. I did it.

And it was a pretty huge accomplishment when you consider that the greater bulk of people who attempt to make money online never make a dime.

Heck, I made two dimes and change, and that was only my first attempt!

That figure seems laughably small, and let’s face it, it is, but it was a major milestone for me, and since that time, I haven’t looked back.

That twenty-four cents was my talisman. Proof that the concepts I was pursuing were valid and viable. All I needed to do from there was scale it up.

In the real world, “scaling it up” usually means multiply the number of hours you apply to a given project, but thankfully, on the internet, things work a bit differently, and once you’ve identified a profitable niche and set everything up, you can leave it in what I call “maintenance mode” and it just sits there, idling, generating regular income for you for months on end without you having to touch it. Of course, periodically, you’ll still want to check in and give it a bit of a tune up, but that’s nothing that takes any amount of time really, and in future articles, I’ll be showing you ways to minimize the time it takes.

Seriously, once you get a system in place that works for you, it’s just a matter of repetition. Some might even say it’s a little on the dull side. Certainly some of the mechanics of making money on being online are, well…less than glamorous, but others are downright fascinating, so you take the good with the bad. To be honest, even if it was flat out mind numbingly boring (which it isn’t), there’s still nothing I’d rather be doing.

I enjoy the freedom that the knowledge of how to earn money at home provides, and it is my pleasure to share it with you.

You might still be skeptical of that, and I don’t blame you.

If you’ve spent any time at all searching for “the next big internet money making idea,” then you know how many hucksters and charlatans are out there, and you don’t know me from Adam. I might have some dark and nefarious plot in mind to take your money while you’re not looking, and to convince you otherwise will take time.

I understand that.

You should know that one of the hallmarks of people who want to sell you something is that sooner or later, they’re going to ask you for your email address.

You will note that nowhere on this site, is there an opt in box asking for such information from you.

And there never will be, because that’s not what this site is about. (NOTE: you can have this site’s RSS feed directed to your e-mail, but at no time will that be used for anything other than a matter of convenience for you).

Anyway, enough on that topic. Let’s get to the meat of this lesson.

Ways to Earn Extra Income at Home

If you want to make money working at home, then more likely than not, the internet is going to figure into your plans. Even if you focus on business ideas that are better suited to a local approach (see the article entitled, “Earning Extra Money – Physical Goods & Services”), sooner or later you’ll find yourself making use of the ‘net to boost your earnings.

The first thing we’ll do is broadly define the various approaches you can take to earning money online, and then drill down further into each of them to discuss their viability, pros and cons. And here we go:

The following are the most common methodologies for earning extra money via the internet (note that some of these might also be considered options for your kids, if you didn’t find anything to suit your fancy over in the article on Ways For Kids to Earn Money):

• PTC Advertising Sites

• PTS Sites

• Survey Sites

• Hybrid Sites

• Freelance Sites

• Augmentation Strategies

• Internet Marketing/Advertising

I have listed these in what I consider to be their order of effectiveness, and the rest of this article will be spent discussing each of these items in greater detail.

PTC Advertising Sites – In my opinion, you’d have to be pretty desperate to attempt to make money using this methodology, but there have been some who’ve tried it and found it to be worth doing. I tried it and found it awful, but your mileage may vary, so I’m including it here for discussion.

PTC stand for “pay to click,” and the gimmick here is that you sign up with a company. That company displays advertisements to you, which you have to view for a minimum allotment of time (i.e., “ you must look at each ad for at least thirty seconds). Then, if you click the ad for more information, you make a few cents.

And there’s the rub. Yes, you can earn money quick using this system, but you’ll be earning pennies for a full day’s “work.” Add to that the fact that it’s just soul crushingly boring to sit there for hours at a time clicking on ads and…well, you get the idea.

There’s a secondary gimmick with this type of site, also. They almost universally come with an affiliate program attached. This means that if you convince someone else to do this, you’ll get a small boost to your account for ads they view too. Theoretically, with a sufficient number of people signed up under you looking at advertising all day long, you could make some decent money at it.

Sadly, theory doesn’t align very well with reality in this case. Your “bleed rate” (the rate at which you lose those under you) is very high, again, because this is frankly mind numbingly dull work, and most people who’ve tried it won’t stay with it for long. So you’ll have to continually ratchet up your marketing campaign to entice ever more people to do it for you in order to do much more than tread water. Again, if you have no other options and need a specific amount of money, maybe give this a go. Otherwise, there are more appealing and effective ways to earn extra income at home. Also note, most of these have minimum payout thresholds (i.e., “you don’t get paid till you have at least thirty dollars in your account), so while you can EARN money quickly, you might not get paid that money for a while.

PTS Sites – There used to be tons of these (Pay to Surf Sites) floating around the ‘net, and there’s a reason there aren’t any more. The business model sucks and doesn’t work very well. The only survivor that’s worth noting here is a company called Cash Fiesta, and more on them in a minute.

The gimmick here is that when you sign up with one of these companies, they install a toolbar on your computer. While you’re surfing, the toolbar is busily flashing various ads at you. You don’t have to click the ads or do anything in particular, and you get paid for the amount of time you’re surfing. Again, there’s an affiliate program involved, and if you can get people to sign up under you, you get a little bonus money for the time they spend surfing.

Once more though, we’re talking pennies per hour here. The only exception is the company I mentioned earlier, Cash Fiesta, and they’ve got a few interesting gimmicks that have ensured their survival when many of their contemporaries went belly up.

First, their toolbar is unique in that it ensures you’re paying attention to it. There’s a little icon running along in the toolbar. Periodically, he stops running, and when he does, you stop earning money until you click him (which starts him running again). Because of this, they can charge better rates for ads, since companies know you’re actively looking at the bar.

They’ve also got a program where you can complete a variety of free (or mostly free) offers made by advertisers associated with the company. The more offers you complete in a month, they more per hour they pay you to surf (up to a dollar or so an hour, if you complete at least 6 offers a month).

If you choose to do this, you will NEED to stay organized. You’ll need a spreadsheet with the offers you’ve completed so you can keep track of when to cancel them—because invariably the free trial comes with a stipulation of automatic billing after the trial period, unless you cancel), and probably an e-mail box dedicated to the task, so your main e-mail doesn’t get flooded with spam.

If you’re going to be online a good bit of the day anyway, you might as well get paid for it, but make no mistake, this will NEVER make you rich. Again, if you want to earn money quick, and your needs are relatively small, you can be set up with something like this in under five minutes. Still, keep your expectations in check. This will never make your car payment, and probably never pay your cable bill (tho if you market heavily for affiliates, you could realistically make in the neighborhood of a hundred bucks a month at it…more trouble than it’s worth, IMO, and while I signed up to be an affiliate for them, I’m not going to even bother to post my affiliate link). I turn it on now and then when I remember, which is honestly, not very often, though when I was hungry for ANY money I could make on the ‘net, I did use them for a few months. It’s legit, just not terribly effective. Again, there are usually minimum payout thresholds involved here, so the money might not be as quick in coming to you as you’d like.

Survey Sites – There are programs out there where people charge $27 – $47 for their “secrets” of survey site success.

I suspect that if those people find this site, they will not be very pleased with me, because I’m about to divulge everything you need to know about making money with survey sites.

First, it’s possible. There’s a market for it, and you can make money filling out surveys online. If they’re not free to join, don’t bother with them. Second, you will need an e-mail account dedicated to the task, because it will get FLOODED with spam. Get used to it. It’s one of the costs associated with doing this type of work. Third, you will need RoboForm. Taking surveys is neither glamorous or fun. In fact, it’s only a few steps better than looking at PTC ads all day, but the money’s better. RoboForm is free, and makes your life easier. Get it. Install it. Use it. You’ll thank me later.

There are tons of survey sites out there, and most of them are interconnected (they link to each other), so once you find a few, you’ll easily find a ton more. Start with SurveySpot, Vindale Research, and Opinion Outpost. Those are all good outfits, though Vindale is the best of the bunch and the most professional, in my opinion.

Survey sites come in three “flavors.” Paid surveys (you get money), Points surveys (you get points, which can be traded in for various things), or Sweepstakes Surveys. Obviously, cash is best. Take survey. Make money. Another instance of a quick paying internet work from home gig, but be aware that most survey companies have monetary thresholds (i.e., “you don’t get paid till you’ve got at least $30 in your account), so be aware of this. Points can be as good as cash, depending on what they offer. A $50 Target gift card is as good as a fifty dollar bill, provided you need what Target carries, so don’t automatically shy away from these. DO stay away from sweepstakes surveys though. Waste of time. Follow the money.

The key to success with surveys is mass. Don’t sign up with one or two companies, but twenty or thirty (start with the ones above and they will lead you to the rest in short order). The more you take, the more you make. Some have affiliate programs associated with them, and there’s something to be said for a bit of marketing here…give away information on surveys and provide (affiliate) links for others to click on. Then you get a little cut for your trouble. I’m not going to do that here, because that’s not the purpose of this site, but it strikes me as workable.

Anyway, the bottom line is that survey sites are a viable way of making regular income, and if you leave here and sign up for a few, you can start making money within the hour, though again, most have a minimum payout threshold, so don’t plan on spending that cash today. It’s repetitive and a bit dull, but you can easily keep the lights on and the internet running with the income you make. As an extra income opportunity, it’s certainly viable, but I am deeply sorry if you’ve spent any money at all to find out more about it. The things people will make you pay for! Sheesh.

Hybrid Sites– Sites like these combine the best features of several types of “internet, work from home” programs, and are generally stronger and more effective because of it. Sites like SendEarnings and Inbox Dollars (two that I have used in the past, when I was just starting out) combine offer completion, surveys, games, and paid e-mails (you get paid for receiving and reading advertising e-mails) into a means of making a small but serviceable income for yourself.

As with most programs of this type, there’s usually an affiliate gimmick involved, and you make a little something by convincing others to sign up (while I am still technically an affiliate at a few of these, I’m not going to place my links here…again, that’s against the purpose and main thrust of this site), and they come with a minimum payout threshold, so no immediately spendable cash, though you can start earning in a matter of just a few minutes. Combined with surveys and the aforementioned Cash Fiesta, I found that I could earn money part time at the computer, and it was the rough equivalent of a 20 hour per week job, in both time spent and monthly gain. Not a bad haul, but again, also not something that you could plan your retirement around.

Still, they’re easy to use, and they make it easy to track your earnings. Just remember: Dedicated e-mail account and stay organized!

Freelance Sites – Now we’re getting into the good stuff. The various sites, packages, and programs mentioned above are all essentially designed to make someone else rich. Sure, you get a humble slice of the pie, but at the end of the day, the guy who owns the company is the one making the big bucks, and deep down, you knew that.

Freelance stuff is different though. Now you’re more in control. If you have a skill you can market (editing, writing, coding, web design, etc), you can sign up and create a profile at elance.com, odesk.com, or other such sites, and sell your services.

You can start today, and begin making money as soon as your first assignment rolls in.

You can also join sites like eHow and do articles for them. There’s no way to predict how much you can earn from doing freelance stuff, but the upper limit is bound only by your time and what skills you’re offering (obviously, someone with twenty years coding experience and mastery of several programming languages will make more than a guy cranking out 300-400 word articles), but you get the idea.

Market yourself. Market your skills. Make money. With these kinds of sites, it really is that simple. And people said there was no such thing as a way to make money easy online? (I know, I know, this is probably not what the marketer was hawking when he used the phrase, but still!)

Augmentation Strategies – If you’ve an existing local business and want to expand, you can certainly use the web to do so. A perfect example of this: My wife makes jewelry. She sells some locally and does craft shows and the like, but recently, she expanded her operation by opening a shop on etsy.com (Creativisms, click to see!). Now, instead of selling to the city of Conway and surrounding towns, her creations are visible to a global audience, and THAT is quite a boost in exposure!

Internet Marketing/Advertising – And this, in my opinion, is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Yes, it is true that you can make money working at home via any of the options mentioned above, but if you want to earn a second income and then hold out the possibility of quitting your day job and working your online business full time, then this is where you want to be.

We’ll devote the entire next article to this subject in particular (Establishing a Passive Income Business), but let me briefly go over the way this works.

Internet Marketing/Advertising is essentially about three things:

• Selling your site’s traffic to advertisers

• Marketing products with affiliate programs

• Selling physical goods via drop shippers, Ebay, and the like

In the first case, what you’re doing is building content sites for ad networks like Adsense. The idea is that you identify a low-competition niche (and more on how to do that in the next article, where we’ll cover this in much greater depth), make a site that caters to that niche, get traffic to your site, and start displaying ads.

Some portion of your traffic will click your ads, and you make a spot of money.

A good Adsense site can make you $5-10 a day in clicks, and even an average site can pull in a buck a day. Now, I know what you’re thinking…that’s not really all that impressive, but consider this:

Once you learn to do it, you can easily generate 5-10 such sites a month.

Even if your sites are all average (assuming you’ve done your niche homework correctly), and they only net you a dollar a day, look at what happens:

Month 1: 5 Sites @ 30/month = $150/mo
Month 2: 10 Sites @ 30/month = $300/mo
Month 3: 15 Sites @ 30/month = $450/mo
…
Month 6: 30 Sites @30/month = $900/mo
…
Month 12: 60 Sites @30/month = $1800/mo

And so forth. Once built, these sites continue to earn money month after month with very little input from you, creating a passive income business that will grow as big as you care to make it.

Now, mind you, it takes a fair bit of work, and it will probably be a few months before you’re good enough and efficient enough to crank out five of these sites a month, and the truth is that you may find a really good niche that’s worth devoting all your time and attention to for several months to really build and market it (in which case, that one site can earn you a substantial sum, all by itself).

Even so, the business market of a pure Adsense marketer is a little wonky, when you think about it.

I mean, at the end of the day, you’re designing a site with the HOPE that people will leave it (i.e., click an ad…you get paid, but they go away from your site).

So…you’re building all this content, hoping that they choose an ad over your content? Meh. Something just seems off kilter about that.

I’ll admit it. When I first started studying Internet Marketing, that was my goal. To make 100% of my income from Adsense, but here’s the thing.

Let’s say that the average Adsense click pays $0.50 (it varies wildly, by niche and loads of other factors, so don’t use this as gospel!)…but for the sake of example, let’s just say you get fifty cents a click. It takes the same amount of work to build the site for Adsense as it does to market an affiliate product though, and if you get a 50% commission on whatever product you’re selling (quite common to get that, or more), then each affiliate sale is going to be worth a LOT more than fifty cents.

What I’m saying is…Adsense is good, and I have it on all my sites, but why not also incorporate affiliate products? Same amount of work, potentially huge gain, and you still don’t have to worry about customer service, returns, and the like. Affiliate sales are every bit as “hands off” as Adsense is, so why not make use of it? They really work beautifully together and form a cohesive strategy. That is to say, you win either way.

On the one hand, if someone comes to your site looking for information and you have it, they’re likely to buy the affiliate product. If you don’t have exactly what they’re looking for, they’re likely to click an ad and keep looking. Either way, your cash register rings, and that’s a good thing.

The final thing to make note of here is the selling of physical products online, and this can take any number of forms, from drop shipping a staggering assortment of products (do a google search on “drop shipper directories” and you’ll see what I mean!), to selling stuff on Ebay (tangential story, on a dare, I bought something from the local dollar store, to prove I could sell almost anything on Ebay at a profit…it sold for $4.95 plus shipping!…Cake!), to more homespun online stores like Etsy.com, and a gazillion others. In every case, you’re taking either something you already own, or have made, or can buy at a discount (wholesale), putting it up for sale, and pocketing a commission on each. That’s where your money is, and this type of selling can be hugely profitable. In my opinion, it comes with some drawbacks not found with Adsense/Affiliate selling, but by no means can I call this a “weak” or inferior option. It all comes down to what you prefer and what you’re comfortable with.

In any case, both of these types of sites will be covered in much greater detail in coming articles, as there’s far more to be said on the subject, but I’ve kept you long enough for this session.

Whew! Okay, I know we’ve covered LOADS of material in this section, and I’m sorry it took so long, but the fact is, there are TONS of internet moneymaking ideas, and I wanted to give you a thorough and complete overview before we continued (and even this doesn’t cover the whole spectrum: There are money making forums where you get paid to post, and a host of other things besides…the internet is a dynamic beast, and people are constantly finding new ways to monetize it, so don’t consider this list to be all inclusive, by any means!)

Summary – “Big Secrets Revealed”

• There really ARE tons of ways to make money working at home

• There are a few ways to use the internet to earn money quick, but most of these come with strings and don’t pay all that much

• You get out of it what you put in. Anyone who tells you there’s no work involved is either lying or trying to sell you something. Keep your wallet closed! If someone tells you that by next Tuesday, using his newfangled $97 system, he can have your income on par with the GDP of Bolivia, put him/her on ignore and move along. If you pay him, he’ll get richer, you’ll get disappointed, and I’ll get to say I told you so. Save us both time and don’t go there.

• As always, the best money making opportunities online are the ones where you remain firmly in control. Freelance stuff is very viable. Augmentation strategies can pay off big time, and Adsense/Affiliate marketing in combination is wonderfully effective.

Freebies reference in this Section

None