Innovative Passive Income is pleased to present a guest post by Kevin of 20smoney.com. Without further ado, here is Kevin:
Making a living off the internet is a strong desire for many, including many of the visitors to this site I would assume. While most fail in this journey, I’m here to tell you that there are real opportunities via the web for types of various income streams, but none are automatic. Whether your dream is to be self employed or retire early, looking to the web is a real option for everyone. Furthermore, it’s important to note that there are proven strategies that will help you reach your online income goals and I’d like to discuss these here today.
Build A Strong Blog
Your initial focus in the long-term journey of building a portfolio of income streams is to build a strong, well-established blog. Before we get into what a strong blog looks like, let’s first discuss why you need a strong blog in the beginning. The reason is because it is much easier to ramp up other websites when you have a well-established website (we’ll get into this further later). Additionally, ramping up a first website takes a good amount of time, so you should focus your effort on a single website until its producing.
So, what does a well-established, strong blog look like? Here are a few characteristics:
- The blog is getting consistent traffic with at least 250-400 visits per day (more is better obviously)
- Your traffic is well diversified between search traffic, referrals and direct traffic
- You have some regular readers who visit on a regular basis and maybe add comments
- You have a page rank of at least 3 and 4+ is preferred
- You are well known enough to where other blogs are linking to your content on a fairly regular basis
- If you offer an RSS feed, you have at least 400-500 subscribers
Now, the above characteristics are not set in stone, but they represent my observations on blogging success that I’ve made over the years. Can you succeed without matching all of the above points? Of course, but this should provide some guidelines on where you need to be.
Monetize Your Site
After establishing a solid blog, it’s time to generate some income from all your effort (this part might be partially in tandem with the previous step). You can monetize the blog through various forms of advertising, sponsored posts, etc.
The beautiful thing is that as your site becomes well-established and makes money, it will become increasingly more passive in nature. The revenue per hour of work that you will generate will start to become very attractive. As the maintenance work required of this site drops and the income increases, you can then determine when to start looking at building additional income streams.
Add To Your Portfolio
If you have had success in everything I’ve discussed so far, you can start to expand. This is where things can get very exciting. As you start to ponder additional website opportunities, you can explore all types of websites (not just blogs). Why do I think the first website is best to be a blog? Because a blog has the best chance of success in my opinion for first timers in the world of making money online. Your next website might be a niche adsense site, it might be an affiliate sales site, or it might be another blog on a different topic.
As you move forward, you will notice that you can ramp up a second website much faster than the first. Why? Here is a glimpse:
- You can funnel visitors from your high-traffic site to your new site, thus ramping up the traffic
- You can link to your new site from your old, thus ramping up the status in the eyes of the search engines
- You can get other new sites to pay attention to your new site by having a proven site, thus ramping up the awareness
If you have 2 websites up and successful, your third site is more easily ramped up than your second. If you have 3 up and running, your fourth is more easily ramped up than your third and so forth. The reason is that you have multiple resources on the web to leverage each time. It’s a beautiful process.
As websites mature in their ability to drive revenue, they also become increasingly passive allowing you to take a step back and reap the rewards or continue to plow forward adding to your portfolio.
My Journey
You can check out my journey towards financial freedom by making a living online by viewing some of my previous online income reports. With a few years under my belt, I’ve had successes and failures in this journey. I enjoy helping others get started on this journey or help them get to the next level in their journey. Good luck!
