I shared my experiment with creating a niche site with you guys the other day. I love to share my results because it keeps accountable and forces me to be humble with my failures. I’ve learned that you can’t let success get to your head just like you can’t let failure get to your heart. Today I wanted to go in a different direction and discuss what you should outsource for your niche site.

What’s the point of outsourcing anything with your niche site? To get quicker results. If you try to do everything on your own it will either take you forever to launch the niche site or you might just get frustrated and give up. I learned this the hard way. I would come up with every excuse in the book and end up doing nothing. Then I finally decided to fork the money over on the things that I was not good at. I found much more success this way.

What should you outsource for your niche site?

• Design work. Coding can be some of the most annoying work. For those of you that are like me, you’re going to want to outsource all design work because it can get annoying. I’ve just recently started to figure out the world of Thesis a little bit, but I’m far away from being able to put together a decent design.
• Graphics. You don’t want to spend valuable time on playing around with graphics. All you need to do is find someone on fiverr.com or any other graphic design service to do the work for you. Someone with an eye for this kind of work can create a graphic in no time. You just tell them what you want and focus on what you do best instead.

What should you learn to do on your own with your niche site?

1. Writing articles. I realize that you can easily outsource this, but I feel that you need to write the first articles so that you know enough on the topic to be able to promote a whole blog. While this is time consuming, it’s the true test of your passion for the subject. If you really want to write about a niche, you’ll easily be able to pump out 15 articles in a month.
2. Promotion. You can do the promotion on your own through your existing channels. You can perform SEO work, social media stuff, or try any other unconventional strategy. I just recommend that you keep the promotion in your control because it’s your brand after all.

I hope that this piece gives you a starting point when it comes to deciding what to outsource and what to do on your own. If you have limited financial resources, then you can do everything on your own. You just need to understand that it’s going to take you much longer to see results.

What will you outsource with your niche site?

Last week I asked if you had tried to start a niche site in the past. The reason for this is that last year I finally started my own niche site.

Back in November I started my first niche site, Picking Up Girls 101.

Now I realize that I still need to work on my niche site. Some of you might not be impressed with the topic, but it’s a popular one. The theme also sucks and I need to fix up the layout.

I wanted to start off by looking at the results for March:

Page views was at 147, and unique visitors at 107. I have 25 posts published.

I’m going to use the rest of this piece to analyze my experiment with this niche site. I wanted to look at what I did right with my niche site:

Chose a topic I could write about.

This is a topic that I could easily write about since I’m a dude in my 20s that has dealt with these issues over the years. While my girlfriend was pretty upset when she found this topic, the truth is that it’s something that I could easily write about. Plus there are so many similar sites around that you could easily find new content to add and new article ideas.

Researched the key word.

I conducted my research with Market Samurai to see what variations of keywords in the niche site would be the best to target. I looked at the popularity of the keywords (very high) and the competition (also high) to see what I should target. When I found the best keywords, I built articles around them.

Now it’s time to see what I need to improve on with my current niche site:

More content.

I need to add more content to the site to have more pages indexed in Google. While 25 articles is a great start, I know that I need more. I plan on adding more content in the upcoming weeks. I also planning on adding quality content. I want my articles to be at least 500 words in length and to solve real problems.

Build links.

The most important aspect of building any site is the back links. Without any links it’s difficult to gain authority. The reason that popular blogs are popular is simply because they have lots of links pointing back at them. I need to focus on building more links.

Get a better design.

The design sucks right now. I know that I need to get a better design and optimize the page more. I just suck at design work and I’ve always outsourced this type of work in the past. I’m looking at tweaking a few things around and I plan on checking out similar blogs to see how they’ve been setup over the years. You can learn the most about your topic from your competition in my opinion.

That’s what I have to say about my niche site experiment so far. What have your results been like with your niche site?

Have you thought about building a niche site?

A common source of passive income that we haven’t looked at yet is building niche sites. We’ve discussed real estate, eBooks, and other capital-heavy ways that you can work on your passive income. Today I wanted to finally jump into niche sites since I built my own last year for the first time.

What’s a niche site all about?

From my understanding it’s a more specific and targeted site where you aim for a few specific keywords. For example, you can take a popular sub-topic on your current blog and turn it into a niche site. You then create a certain amount of posts on the topic and you go live with your niche site.

How do niche sites generate income?

Niche site monetization depends on the type of site and the audience. It all comes down to basic advertising at the end of the day. You can use the traditional Adsense model or aim at affiliate sales. It seems that the point of a niche site is to promote products in the niche. This is why it makes sense to do research in advanced to ensure that you enter a niche where there’s money involved in the market.

What do you need to build a niche site?

The good news with building a niche site for passive income is that there’s not much financial investment involved. You’re going to have to invest some of your spare time, some pocket change, and you’re set to go. Unlike with real estate, you don’t have to invest all of your savings into a niche site. You can literally take 20 minutes a day for month (what I did) to work on creating content. You don’t need hundreds of articles on the site. You just need a dozen or so solid pieces up.

What do you need to start building that niche site?

1. You need a current hosting plan or a new one.
2. A solid domain name.
3. A few key plugins to help you run the site (Google XML Sitemaps, All in One SEO Pack, Syon Policy, Google Analyticator).
4. Some free time to write articles (or you could outsource this).

That’s all a niche site requires. Downloading and installing the plugins is something that you can easily do while killing time one boring afternoon. The plugins are essential because you want your site to run properly from the beginning. You also want Google to find your site right off the bat as it can be frustrating waiting to get indexed in Google.

That’s what you need to know about starting a niche site. For further information you can check out everything you need to know on how to build a niche site over at Smart Passive Income.

Do you have any experiences with working on niche sites? Would you recommend them to others?

Everyone these days is a social media evangelist. Everyone’s telling us that we need to be on social media. Everywhere we turn we get advice about how you need a Facebook page or a Twitter account. It makes sense. Going on social media seems like to logical thing to do as a blogger.

Is social media always the best options? I don’t think so. I have proof against it as well. Social media has cost many individuals their income.

How can social media ruin you?

With the rise of Twitter and Facebook also comes an increase in people losing their jobs. The truth is that social media makes it far too easy for us to share inappropriate comments and to post pictures that should be kept private.

The reality is that employers, customers, friends, family, and critics, are all on social media watching our moves. You may think that your posting something innocent or funny for your buddies, but you don’t know who else is watching what you have to say.

Here are a few examples that I found about how others got screwed over on social media.

Helio Castroneves (3-time Indianapolis 500 winner) was fined $30,000 when he called a director a “circus clown” on Twitter.

UFC Fighter, Miguel Torres, got cut because of an inappropriate tweet. I believe that he eventually got his job back after a few months of working hard to improve his image, volunteering, and paying fines. That doesn’t sound like a wise carer choice.

Those are some pretty harsh consequences for writing something on Twitter. The situation is that there’s lots of nonsense happening on social media and there are consequences for it.

Why can social media ruin you?

Allow me to share the main ways that social media can hurt your finances and your business:

• You don’t know who’s on the other end listening.
• You can lose a client over a comment.
• You can hurt your brand when you post something offensive.
• Your stupidity could be exposed to the whole world.

That’s how social media can mess things up for you. I’m sure that there are more examples of how social media has hurt people. We all know someone that did something stupid on Facebook or embarrassed themselves in front of a large audience. They say that if you don’t want something posted on a billboard, then you shouldn’t put it online.

How does social media tie into passive income?

When building your passive income, it’s cool to be on social media. You want to promote your brand, gain more exposure, and help more of your readers. However, you should spend the majority of your time focusing on what truly matters to your income streams. When building passive income you can’t get too caught up with Twitter, Facebook, and all of the other distractions out there. It’s far too easy to get distracted on things that just don’t matter and take time away from your livelihood.

“Are you inventing things to avoid doing the important?” — Tim Ferriss

Will you let social media ruin you? I hope not.

Are you building your passive and active income streams through blogging? Are you a blogger looking to increase your readership and income? If you are then this piece is for you.

I wanted to write about how you should stop worrying about other bloggers. I find that bloggers are far too concerned with their peers and what they have to say. Many bloggers are excited to do roundups, write about what their blogging friends have to say, and base their blog around other bloggers. This is pretty common these days.

There’s just one problem with this logic. Blogging is all about your readers. Blogging is not about other bloggers.

You don’t have to be an outcast. You don’t have to rude to other bloggers. You just shouldn’t let them dictate what you do. You shouldn’t worry about other bloggers when you’re trying to help your readers.

You won’t make any money from blogging if you worry too much about other bloggers. I love to help out my peers, exchange links, and chat. However, your actual blog should be about helping your readers and solving their problems. Not writing about how you met some other blogger over the weekend.

Why do you need to stop worrying about other bloggers?

I wanted to highlight the main reasons why you should stop being so concerned with your blogging peers when you’re building passive income:

• Your readers have problems that need to be solved.
• Other bloggers will never buy from you.
• You want actual proof to see what you’re doing is working.
• You want to grow your blog.
• There’s more income in helping your readers.

You can now move on to helping your readers.

How can you focus more on your readers?

Hopefully by this point I’ve convinced you to focus more on your readers and less on other bloggers. Let’s look at how you can focus more on your readers when your building up your passive income and your blogging source of income:

1. Solve reader problems.
2. Ask questions at the end of your articles.
3. Turn common questions into posts.
4. Reach out to new readers.
5. Be available by email.
6. Listen to what readers have to say.
7. Stop preaching all of the time.

That’s how you can focus more on the readers and less on the bloggers. When you want to build your income, you need to be more focused on your customers and readers because those are the folks that can bring your blogging to the next level.

That’s why I feel that you need to stop being so concerned about your blogging peers and be more focused on your readers.

Are you going to give your readers the attention that they deserve? Will you focus more on your readers moving forward?

In 2011 I finally dabbled in launching eBooks. I had been planning to get into the eBook game for the longest time. I would plan out my eBook, write a ton, and then get nervous. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what the next step was. Instead of doing research I would just make excuses and not get anything done.

Then I finally took the time to conduct the research to see what it takes to launch an eBook. I invested in one of those “how-to launch an eBook” course and I read every single page. I made notes. I read every tip like 5 times. I spent a whole month on writing the eBook. I paid $400 for a professional eBook design. I wrote 7 guest posts to ensure that my eBook got a decent amount of publicity. I did everything that I could possibly think of.

Then I launched my eBook.

How many copies did I sell in the first week? Was it 10? Was it 100? Nope! It was zero. I didn’t sell any copies. I was furious at the time. I couldn’t believe that this had happened. Now 4 months later I’m able to reflect and understand why I sold no copies of my eBook.

Why did your eBook launch fail? Let’s look at the ingredients involved in a eBook that failed to sell…

You have the wrong market.

Your market perhaps just isn’t cut out for an eBook launch. This is what I learned the hard way. Not every audience is right for eBooks. My audience is students and recent graduates. These are not people willing to shell out money on an online product for at least a few of these reasons:

• They don’t want to pay for online content.
• They don’t want to read more.
• They think everything online is a scam.

I was oblivious to these facts while launching the eBook. I thought my product was so good that it would sell for sure. It turns out that my suspicions were correct. My audience is not willing to shell over the bucks to buy an online product. You live, you learn.

Not every market is right for premium content. There are bloggers with less readers that make more money. Then there bloggers with thousands of readers that just can’t sell anything because their readers aren’t interested.

What can you do about this? Be realistic when analyzing your audience. Just because your readers are eager to leave comments it doesn’t mean that they’ll be as excited about buying products from you.

Your sales page sucked.

You can have the best product in the world but nobody will buy it if the sales page sucks. This is true for any sort of sales promotion in life. If you don’t know how to market the product or position it properly, you’ll never get any sales. I thought my sales page was amazing. It turns out that it just didn’t make the cut.

What can you do here? Look at successful sales pages and try to mimic them as best as possible. Then get a ton of feedback. Get your peers to look it over to see what you can improve.

That’s why nobody bought your eBook. Have you failed with an eBook launch in the past? Are you considering launching your own product?

So you’ve started a blog, and now you think you’re ready to earn some money. My first tip of caution is that you should never start a blog with the intention of making money. That’s where the first mistake is made. Blogging should be a passion, a hobby, or at least a past time. People can see right through to you if you’re intentionally trying to profit off of them, and they won’t allow it to happen. However, if you enjoy your blog outside of making money, you can stand to make a nice amount of dough, and it can truly be passive income. So how do you increase your advertising revenue and start earning some decent cash?

1. Blog consistently for at least 6 months: New blogs simply aren’t going to have the credibility or audience for advertisers to notice. You have to be around and heard by a few people first before companies are going to want to be seen on your blog. If you have an active blog for at least 6 months, trust me, advertisers are going to notice. 6 months is still relatively new, but it’s long enough for people to start talking about your site, coming to it, and wanting to be featured on it.
2. Join a blog network: While many veteran bloggers don’t think a blog network is worth it, it’s great for newbies. Blog networks are a way for you to connect to other bloggers, as well as advertisers. Big companies who are looking for web campaigns connect with these networks, ask them to find a few bloggers who write about specific topics, and they will offer you compensation for a post, a link, or a review. I’m part of 2 blog networks: Yakezie and Clever Girls. Both have been awesome in finding me a few advertising opportunities.
3. Become an authority: Advertisers aren’t just paying you because they want to. They want the relationship to be mutually beneficial. In exchange for compensating you, they want to get their branding in front of your audience, in hopes that your readers will become their customers. So you need to be an authority in a niche or category. Is your blog about food or fashion? Do you talk about parenting and marriage? Brands in these markets will look for blogs and websites in the same market so they have a better chance of finding customers. Decide what market your blog is focusing on, and work on being one of the best blogs in that field. A great resource for this is Technorati, as it has multiple verticals and thousands of blogs that are ranked in those verticals. See what the top 10 sites have that yours doesn’t, and work on becoming one of those top blogs.
4. Get your numbers together: Advertising is a numbers game. How many people does your blog reach? If you don’t already have it installed, you should install an analytics program like Google Analytics, to keep track of your readers. How many people visit your site per day, week, month, quarter? Where are they from? What browser do they use? How many pages do they read? How long do they stay? Advertisers are going to want to know this, and your numbers are going to have to be impressive. You won’t find advertising revenue if the only person who reads your blog is your mom. You need new people reading everyday.
5. Have a price in mind: Once advertisers do start reaching out to you, you’ll want to have prices in mind. I have an Advertising Manager who handles my requests for me. Crystal came up with a list of prices for different types of advertising based on my site’s statistics, and she sends it to the people requesting advertising opportunities. I usually don’t budge on my prices, as I know what my site is worth. Obviously, you’ll get some lowball offers, but they’re trying to be thrifty just like you. Don’t overprice yourself, especially if you’re new. Try a few different prices and see the response you get, or hire Crystal and she’ll help you out.

These are the first steps to getting more money from advertising on your blog. Be patient, and the advertisers will come to you.

Bloggers need to make money. Everyone needs to make money. Its just the reality of life. We all need a certain amount of money to survive.

I find it funny how readers of a blog will enjoy free content for years. This content will help them greatly in life. The blog will provide them with a frequent source of information. Then when the blogger tries to make some money everyone is quick to judge. Why?

There are different monetization strategies out there for your typical blog. A few of the common ones include:

Google Adsense.
Affiliates (any product that you promote).
Text links.
Sponsored posts.
Premium products.

I find that readers have become adjusted to Adsense just because it has been around for so long. The text links also go unnoticed most of the time.

Affiliates can go either way depending on what you try to promote. Bloggers walk a fine line when it comes to promoting a product/trying to push it on their readers. Some readers will appreciate you bringing a new product to their attention. Others will (myself included) will become frustrated if all you ever do is promote stuff to us.

Premium (paid) products and sponsored posts usually receive many complaints. The sponsored posts detract from the usual style of the blog. I understand why readers would not appreciate these. However, they allow the blogger to earn some extra revenue.

When it comes to premium products I just don’t understand the hate. These products usually take a lot of time to put together and can stretch you to the limit. If you don’t want to buy the item then simply don’t buy it. Don’t resent the blogger for trying to produce a quality product.

One thing that I want to mention is that I really hope you guys understand that bloggers need to make money. The more money a blogger earns from their blog, the more time and effort they can put back into the blog. This is just the reality of it. It’s tough to spend all of your time on something that doesn’t make you any money when you have bills to pay.

Writing “quality content” has become a must for anyone that wants to grow their new blog. This leads to the super-important question, how do you consistently write quality content? I feel that you need to switch up the content that you write. Instead of writing in the same fashion, you could try writing a different type of a post. One of the types of articles that you could write is a case study.

Why a case study?

Because it’s not a theoretical or “what if” post. A case study is a concrete example of how one person achieved success. People also love to hear from people that have “been there and done that.” A case study is a chance to show case an interesting tale.

A case study is also an excellent opportunity to learn from someone else. You have the chance to sit down and pick the brain of someone that has reached a specific goal before you. You’re essentially killing two birds with one stone. You get to learn from a successful individual and you get a quality blog post out of it.

A case study on who?

On someone in your field. Someone that has accomplished something you would like to one day. An individual that has made a huge impact on a specific industry– or you could do a case study on someone on their way up. Either way a case study should outline the trials and tribulations that someone you admire has gone through.

My favorite case study was when I wrote about a friend that works as a tutor and makes decent money at it. Instead of writing about something that I don’t know anything about, I reached out to my social circle for help. My friend was more than willing to help me out and share tips with me on how one could be a profitable tutor. We actually went so deep into details that my friend shared with me on how he earned $2,100 from tutoring.

Will I apply my own advice? Yes I plan on conducting a few case studies here in the near future. Stay tuned guys.

Blogging for money is clearly a core aspect of earning an active/passive income online. I’m not in any position to be running a blog on how-to blog, but I feel that I’ve read enough and spoken with some of the most successful bloggers, that I could at least pass along some of the knowledge that they shared with me with you guys.

You write great stuff. You update your blog daily. Still at the end of the day nobody seems to come to your site. Of course your family and friends pop in for a visit.  Why is your overall traffic so low? The underlying issue is most likely the search engine optimization within the articles on your blog. Is search engine optimization really that important on a blog? I would have to argue yes. Please allow me to try to prove my point.

Organic search engine optimization is time consuming

By the time you start to see results from organic SEO you will have snapped at the lack of traffic. I tried starting a blog before straight from the bottom without placing any emphasis on SEO. After about a year my traffic was stagnant. I was at the point where I maxed out at 300 views a day. Not exactly a great amount of traffic if you plan to live off your blog income. SEO will allow you to write great articles that will bring in traffic from Google and other search engine users that are researching specific topics.

Organic keywords and organic search optimization do come with time but they take much longer to expand your daily traffic. Sure there are the blog success stories of a small blog that grew from 60 subscribers to 60,000 in less than a year or so (Zen Habits), but with the advent of so many new excellent blogs this is becoming increasingly difficult. Every day a new blog emerges (this blog for example) and it starts to cut into your traffic. The sad reality is that generally the more SEO articles will make it to the top of Google’s search engine.

Traffic generated from links is often not suffice

Your personal finance blog may get a link from Get Rich Slowly, The Simple Dollar, or The Consumerist, and the link will generated lots of traffic. You will likely get at least a couple of hundred click throughs and a few new subscribers. Great! The problem is- how many of these high quality links will you get? You can’t solely rely on links from A list bloggers as your bread and butter for blog traffic. Your articles need to be optimized for search engines so that you have a steady influx of traffic. Quick traffic bursts are a pleasant surprise but steady growth is the key to long term traffic success (in my opinion).

Regular readers will not visit your blog.

What a stupid statement- regular readers will not visit my blog. How does that make sense? The people that truly love your blog will subscribe via email or RSS feed and chances are they will stop actually visiting your blog.

My most loyal readers never actually go on the site because they have articles delivered straight to their email inbox. So you can technically have 1000 subscribers and 200 daily blog views because your loyal readers are simply not accessing your site. So if regular readers are not viewing your blog then that means you need to find new readers. The best way to do this would be to perform some SEO on your articles so that more eye balls are on them.

Those are just my thoughts on the importance of search engine optimization on a blog.