Many readers of this blog are ‘mepreneurs’ who love to travel. You are self employed, self funded and you have a number of projects on the go that give you the liquidity you need to keep travelling or stay holed up in some foreign land. Others amongst you are lucky enough to have your overseas stay paid by your company.There is an additional way to keep funding your travels and your projects using what many call ’automated’ or ’passive’ income, usually involving internet based revenue streams that, if successful, regularly pay money into your bank account. If you research this on the net you will find many passive income programs called ‘the lazy guide to millions’, ‘autopilot cash explosion’, etc etc. These kind of schemes are little more that pyramid programs that involve you basically reselling the same ‘dream’ to someone else, and in return you get a share of the cash.

The passive income strategies that i know deliver results, involve some work and strategic thinking on your part but in a very short time…e.g. weeks, can actually begin generating cash. Here’s an insight into how to create your own little collection of ‘oil wells’ pumping cash on a regular basis and some free pdfs to get you started:

A Bullshit Free Explanation

So, this is how it works:

The Revenue Streams:

1. Google Adsense: you create websites, you place Google Adsense code onto them, you get visitors, they click the ads, you get some money. Very easy this one.
2. Affiliate Sales: you create a website or build an email list. You find products that are relevant to your website or that your email list have a propensity to buy, you get an affiliate link, you promote it on the website or to your email list. They click the link and buy the product, you make money. Also quite easy to do.
3. Your own digital product: bit trickier this, but very doable. You create a digital product – usually some software or an ebook – you list it on one of the many sites that will promote it to their base of affiliates (see 2 above). They sell it for you, you make money.

Getting Started:

For any business getting going is the hardest, but once you understand the key techniques it is quite simple.

1. Keywords. This is where you begin to find out the markets that will make you the most money. You build websites around a particular theme, for example, weight loss. You find all related terms that people look for within the weight loss category e.g. weight loss pills. You can then expand the weight loss pills search term into other related terms eg. cheap weight loss pills, weight loss pills online etc etc.
2. Content. Once you have the keywords you then need content for a website. The easiest way to get content is to go to a free article directory and get everything from there related to keywords. You will want to rewrite it or pay someone to rewrite it for you.
3. The website. You need to register a domain name that has at least 2 of the main keywords in it. Find a host for the website. You then need to build the website around all the juicy content you got in step 2. You can use software for this or outsource it to someone who will do it for about $50. You will make this money back very quickly.
4. Promotion. Content is king, promotion is everything. Without people knowing about your site you wont make money, simple. Promotion of your website involves 2 techniques that the pros call ’onsite’ and ’offsite’ optimisation. Onsite means you have written your content with good use of keywords and meta tags, meta descriptions, meta titles and page naming. Offsite refers to building links in the appropriate way so that ’search engine spiders’ from Google, AOL, Yahoo, MSN etc can find your site and list it in their search results for your search terms e.g. weight loss pills
5. Monetisation. The revenues streams (adsense, affiliate sales, digital product) all need steps 1 through 4 carried out. Adsense is the simplest and if your site has visitors, you will make money straightaway. A pretty basic website done well will bring you in $10 a day. Affiliate sales make more money but less often. Some products will pay you well over $50 a sale. Again a pretty basic website could make you 1 sale every couple of days. Selling your own digital product on a regular basis is where the big money is in the ’passive internet income’ space. To have your $100 product being promoted by 10,000s affiliates everyday without any further input from you could bring in revenues in excess of $20,000 a month.

Objectives:

Most of the ’guru’s in this industry stress the setting of goals before you begin. As this is simply a ’numbers game’, it isn’t hard to do, it just requires some leg work or a small amount of investment in outsourcing the laborious elements such as website creation and promotion. Set yourself a start-up budget of just $50 per site and you should make approx $2000 a year from it. If you have the financial leverage to outsource to a remote worker and pay them $750 a month to build and promote 15 sites for you each month, at the end of year 1 you will have 180 units of ’virtual real estate’ that could generate for you in year 2 over $360,000 (180 x $2000). That is around $350,000 net profit.

Strategies:

The heavy hitters in this industry tell me that they are making over $1million a year in automated earnings using the monetisation techniques above. Due to the nature of this business, there is a very nice multiplier effect that increases earnings year on year. Here’s what they do:

1. They find multiple niches based on keyword research. They put their content together and surround it with Google Ads. They then build loads of sites like this.

2. They will also build a single page niche or product specific site that uses a ’squeeze page’. This will make visitors ’opt in’ to providing their email address. This then enables the visitor to receive promotional email offers through what the gurus call a ’backend affiliate sales strategy’. If you do this, each email you send out will promote an offer that features your affiliate link…..to make sales like this each product has to be relevant to the website they originally visited

3. If the site is promoting a product or an offer, they will use an ’exit page’ one time offer. This may or may not be related to the original offer, but usually involves a bonus or freebie of some kind.

Further Reading:

Two of my friends have done very well in this business and have given me the right to give you 2 of their ebooks that talk in depth about the passive income techniques i mention above, free of charge.

Brad Callen has written an excellent book called Adwords Made Easy Understanding Keyword Strategies (downloadable pdf by clicking the link). This book is packed with lots of info on how to use keywords to build sites and generate traffic.

Michael Cheney is a heavy hitter at making websites that bring him in $10000s a month in Adsense earnings. Michael Cheneys Adsense Videos Free Ebook (downloadable pdf by clicking the link) will help you understand how generate traffic and revenues.

Download the books, print them out, read them on a plane or in your hotel room. Good luck!