You want to start your next business, niche site, or side project. You want to make more money. You want to improve your situation. You’re ready to start working. You just don’t know if it’s worth going after your specific idea. You’re not sure if you should invest your sweat equity just yet.

That’s all good. This post is for you.

How can you test your idea right now?

Make sure a market even exists.

You can use the Google keyword tool or any complex tool out there to see what the traffic is like. I personally use Market Samurai. I do a search of the relevant keywords or whatever I would type in if I was looking for this specific market. I then see what the volume is like. I see how many other relevant keywords are popular.

I do this just to see if there’s even a market in the first place. For example, when I started my niche site I realized that there was more than a strong enough market out there. I just needed to get specific and target a segment of that niche.

Before you work on any idea, you simply need to see what the search traffic is. If nobody is searching for it, then nobody will ever find you. You can’t persuade someone that they have a problem. It’s better to find those looking to solve their problems. Why bother putting in the work for something that nobody cares about?

Make sure you actually solve a problem.

No matter what niche you enter, you need to remember to solve a specific problem. We as human beings generally want more sex, time, money, and recognition. If you help someone gain more of any of those then you’re solving a problem. If your throw out general advice, you’re not solving much of anything. You’re just killing time.

Create the best solution.

Why go half way? If you want to enter the niche or bring this new idea to life, I suggest that you create the best possible solution. There’s no point to create something sub-par. If you truly love the topic, you’ll be able to pump out something that’s very high in quality.

Get feedback from real people.

One thing that many of us rarely do is ask real people for feedback. We read blog posts and go on Twitter. The thing is that there’s a huge difference between what people actually want and what they say they want.

You need to think of your potential target audience and see what they think about your idea. For example, if you want to start a nutrition business helping people get in shape, I would suggest reaching out to someone that’s looking to get into shape. Ask a real friend. Ask someone at the gym. Don’t just rely on Twitter for feedback. Everyone on Twitter will tell you that yes, of course they want to eat better and get in shape. How many of them actually want to do this and are willing to pay for it?

One more thing here: please DON’T ask your parents for feedback. They’ll tell you that you’re the best. You don’t want a false sense of hope. It’s cool to keep your family and friends involved. Just please don’t solely rely on your family for feedback. Positive reinforcement can only take you so far when your new idea sucks!

That’s how you can test your next idea out right now. I don’t want you wasting any time or money on something that wasn’t meant to be. Trust me, I know. I learn when I released an eBook that nobody bought. I just assumed that there was a market there. There was clearly no market.

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?

It’s pretty ironic about how I wrote about the important rule for getting into real estate the other day. I just experienced my first issue with my rental property. My tenant emailed me and asked me if he could get out of the unit early. He found a new job in a different part of town. The commute is too far and he spends too much of his time on the streetcar.

We’ve never had any problems. He kindly emailed me to let me know that he really wants to get out a little bit early. Now I have an important decision to make.

What do you do when your tenant wants to leave early? What are your options?

Let them leave.

Do you really want to force someone to stay when they don’t want to? The obvious choice is to let them leave. The benefit of doing this is that you maintain a strong relationship with this person and you get to find someone else that wants to live in the unit. I can let the tenant leave early.

Force them to stick with the contract.

You can force the tenant to stick with the contract. You signed a rental agreement for a reason. If you really don’t want to look for a new tenant, you can force this person to stay and continue paying rent until the lease expires. This will likely cause some tension and not a lot us can deal with this.

Immediately start looking for a new tenant.

Instead of waiting around and making excuses, you can start looking for a new tenant right away. This is what I started to do. For me I see it as a learning experience. I get to work on creating another ad, screening tenants, and choosing the ideal tenant for the second time around. I want practise at this because I plan on purchasing more properties in the future. This is also why I opted to not hire a property management firm. I want to get to know the ins and outs of real estate.

Live in the unit for a bit.

You can always live in the unit for a little bit of time. This is a rare option but it’s definitely viable. As you live in the unit, you can work on upgrading it and fixing it up. You can also get to rediscover the community all over again. When you rediscover the community you can become better at selling the rental unit when the time comes for it. I’ve been strongly debating the idea of living in this unit for a month while I figure out what to do next.

That’s what you can do when your tenant wants to leave. You’re going to have to learn to deal with issues if you want to become a landlord to build your passive income. There’s no guarantee that you’re going to have a long-term tenant. This is why you need to get into the habit of looking for tenants and screening tenants.

Do you want to build passive income with real estate? Are you looking to purchase a rental property?

If you enjoyed my piece last week on why young professionals should get into real estate, I wanted to quickly followup today. I wanted to look over an important rule that you need to keep in mind as you consider investing your hard earned money into real estate.

One of my main sources of passive income is a rental property. I recently purchased a second rental property. I plan on owning a bunch of properties before I hit the 30 milestone (if the world doesn’t end this year).

What’s the one important rule for getting into real estate as passive income in your 20s?

If you want to get into real estate you must be able to deal with problems.

Do you have high anxiety? Do you get stressed out easily? Can you handle problems? Can you handle pressure?

There are going to be problems in real estate. There’s no way around this. There’s always going to be something that pops up. Some real estate issues will be minor. Other problems with your rental property will seem catastrophic at first.

What are some common issues that can occur with a rental property?

The minor issues include:

• Tenant doesn’t know how to use something.
• The lights don’t work.
• Tenant is unfamiliar with something.
• You need to find the tenant a parking spot.

The major issues with a rental property are:

• Tenant stops paying rent.
• You need to evict the tenant.
• Tenant runs away from the property.
• Something breaks down, the furnace or some other major item.
• A huge house fire.
• A break in.

Think about all of those potential issues. If you’re impatient (me at times), then you could really lose your mind at one point. I remember my friend got a call from a tenant one time because this person didn’t know how to turn on a light switch. He drove their in the middle of the night to show them how to use a switch. Imagine that for a second.

If you can’t deal with problems, you really shouldn’t get involved in real estate. You’ll simply lose your mind or get far too stressed out. You might end up hiring a property management firm because you can’t handle the hassle of being a landlord. I’m not trying to scare you. I just want to prepare you for what can potentially happen if you decide to use a rental property as a source of passive income in the future.

I’m lucky so far. My problems have been minor. However, I’m bracing myself for huge problems in the future because that’s just how life works usually. I follow this simple strategy: plan for the worst case scenario and hope for the best.

Can you deal with problems? Are you ready to become a landlord?

We’ve discussed various sources of passive income around here. One of the topics that has been discussed plenty already is the idea of using real estate for your passive income. As you may know by now, my first real source of passive income was my rental property that I purchased (a new condo). It has been an interesting experience and I enjoy sharing it with friends and readers. Today I wanted to suggested why you should consider real estate as an investment.

If you’re finally making money for the first time in your life, saving a good chunk of change, and seeing real progress for once, you’re likely thinking about what to do next. You don’t have to move out and get your own place just yet, you can purchase a rental property that you’ll rent out while you save up for your own place.

Long story short, young professionals can really benefit from getting into real estate.

Why should young professionals get into real estate?

Low interest rates.

The interest rates are pretty low right now. I’m not sure how much lower they can get. The benefit here is that you’ll spend less money on interest than previous generations have. It might be tougher to get a mortgage, but if/when you get one, you can reap the benefits of lower interest rates.

A property is a tangible asset.

When you buy a rental property, you have four walls. You can always rent out the whole place or a piece of it. You now own something that is all your own. Depending on the area that you live in, your property can also greatly increase in value over the years. You can also lose value. The good news is that you can rent your place out at any time and earn yourself passive income through your rent checks.

Motivation for more.

Are you lacking motivation? Perhaps you need something to push you in the right direction. When I purchased my condo it wasn’t even built yet. I knew that I had two years to save up X amount of money. I also knew that I didn’t have this money yet. That meant that I had to go into full hustle mode. From 2008 until 2010 I worked my butt off, while I still studied full-time. It wasn’t easy, but my condo was the motivation that I needed to save more money and get myself into the zone when it came to working.

I’ve also seen this happen with my friends. They buy a place and they become motivated for more. They want a better car, for disposable income, and more money to enjoy life. Will a rental property give you the motivation that you so badly need? It’s not guaranteed, but it’s worth a shot.

That’s why I believe that a 20-something should consider buying a place in their 20s. You don’t have to use this as your primary residence. You can rent the place out, save up money, learn about real estate, and prepare yourself for the future. What will you do?

Do you ever tell yourself that you’re going to start a new workout regimen? Do you also convince yourself that you’re going to train every single day and eat clean all of the time? Do you notice what happens? You go all out for a few days and then you give up.

This also happens with personal finance. You plan on getting totally serious about saving money. You have bold plans to save thousands of dollars. You plan on never spending money again. You want to just make money and save it all. You’re totally amped up about this. Then nothing really happens.

This also applies to passive income. You look for passive income sources so that you can make thousands of dollars from passive income. When you realize that it requires a ton of effort, you sort of give up eventually. You realize the fact that passive income won’t come over night and you’re suddenly no longer interested.

Why don’t you start off by saving $100? Why don’t you start off by making $100 in passive income?

What’s the point of this? Why should you start off by making $100?

All I’m suggesting is that you get started by saving up a little bit of money at first. You’re not going to build up any passive income if you don’t get into the habit of saving money. By saving $100 you can then turn around and invest this money in your passive income sources.

How does $100 impact your passive income? Why should you strive to make $100 in passive income?

It’a start.

You need to start somewhere. The end goal is to make thousands of dollars from passive income. The first goal should be to stop reading so much and to take some action. You should start off by shooting to make $100 in passive income just to see that it’s even possible to make money online. The first online income that I had was $20 coming in for a monthly text link. I took this $20 with a smile on my face despite knowing that $20 would get me like three drinks at a bar.

You begin to build momentum.

To get the ball rolling on anything you need to build up that first bit of momentum. As I just mentioned, the momentum started rolling in for me with my first $20. That’s all. $100 in passive income usually means that you’ve read about passive income theory, put some work in, and tried something out. Just the fact that ou made $100 should be enough motivation to try again.

You can see what works.

When you make $100 in passive income, you’ll suddenly know what works. Once you make your first hundred dollars you can start to tweak your approach. You can make changes so that in the future you can make more money. You can see what the market demands. Until you make that first $100 you won’t know what works or what doesn’t work. You’ll just have consumed a plethora of passive income theory. Making that first bit of income is proof that you’re onto something.

Are you going to go after that first $100 in passive income?

“Marketing is what gets you noticed, and that side of it something – this side of it, if you like, doing interviews – is the side of it that I least enjoy, and yet is 50% of the project.” — Rowan Atkinson

Creating passive income will require you to have decent marketing skills at times. You’re eventually going to have to promote something.

You need to know how to promote your eBook if you want any sales.

If you want a tenant for your rental property, you have to know how to get the word out.

You have to possess some basic marketing skills if you want to improve your situation.

I like to go on beach vacations fairly often. Whenever I go away I usually chat with everyone there from the tourists to the locals and especially the resort workers. One of the bar staff actually added me to Facebook because we spent lots of time chatting. The funny thing is that over the years I’ve managed to learn a lot from the resort workers at these various destinations when it comes to marketing and selling your products.

I wanted to share what I learned about marketing from resort workers on my past trips:

You need to build connections.

Marketing and promoting your stuff is all about connections.

Every time that a resort worker has tried to sell me a time share, excursion, something illegal, or just general crap, they started off by trying to become my friend. They would ask me where I’m from and get into a discussion about your usual stuff. They would do their best to build a connection. Then they would promote their offer.

This is also generally what you learn in school about marketing. It’s just fun to see it in practise and then apply it to your own life.

It pays to make people feel comfortable.

You need to build trust with your audience and the person on the other end if you want them to hand over any money to you. We all work hard for our money. It’s not easy to get it. If someone is uncomfortable or uneasy with you, then they won’t be buying anything from you.

How can you influence others to trust you more?

• Be honest.
• Be transparent.
• Show both sides of the equation.
• Offer a money back guarantee.

Trust is everything in life and in sales.

Persistence is key.

It’s not going to be easy to promote your eBook or you rental property. This is why you need to be persistent. You can’t just give up after the first try. This is almost what happened to me. Nobody bought my eBook so I wanted to just give up and call it quits. I then realized that persistence is key and there’s no point in feeling sorry for myself.

Resort workers often live off commission. If they don’t sell, they simple don’t eat.

Imagine framing things like that? You’ll be much more persistent when you realize that failure is not an option nor is it a final destination.

That’s what I picked up from resort workers and applied to my own marketing efforts. You never know when and how you can learn something new. This is why I do my best to open up a conversation with everyone that I meet. You could help someone out or vice versa. That’s the good part of getting out there. Building passive income is all about getting out there and testing out new ideas. You don’t if something works or not until you test it out.

I often toot the idea of a rental property around here. I personally invested into a rental property and it now generates passive income for me. However, those are just my experiences. You can totally go wrong with investing your money into a rental property.

Recently a reader, Sean, left an interesting comment on rental properties compared to stocks:

Having a rental property comes with the fun of maintenance, emergency calls, and potential vacancies. Not to mention praying to God you find a responsible and clean renter. The leg work of finding a reliable blue chip stock may take some time, but I don’t see that being much different than researching a potential rental property or screening renters. Once you find a good stock you believe in, it can become a form of passive income. I also prefer how liquid stocks are compared to real estate. The real estate market may not be in a very good state when you need your money.

Does a rental property always make sense? Nope. You can crash and lose your money with a rental property. I wanted to look at what can go wrong with a rental property.

You find a horrible tenant.

Screening tenants is the same as screening applicants for a new job. Sure, everyone is great during the interview process. You just never know what can happen once the tenant is living in the property. My friend has a tenant that calls him for every single small thing.

Then there’s the other side of the horrible tenant– what if they stop paying? What if they just leave on you? These are all issues that you have to deal with as a landlord. Everything is in your hands.

Maintenance issues.

A lot can go wrong with a property. If your hand, it will be an inconvenience. If you have no hand-man skills, then you’re going to have to pay the big bucks to get these issues resolved and dealt with.

A few other common maintenance issues that could arise:

• Furnace breaks down.
• The plumbing doesn’t work.
• Electricity goes out.

Expensive upgrades.

I purchased a brand new condo so that I wouldn’t have to worry about upgrades. Many new investors will want to purchase an older place to fix up or a property that they want to renovate. The only problem is that these costs of upgrades can add up real quick. The next thing you know is that you’re spending far more than you expected to upgrade your rental property. You could make your money back in the future through rental income and appreciation, but it can be a setback at first.

As always, I’m open minding to both sides. As you can tell from earlier writing, I’m personally a fan of rental properties as a source of passive income. With that being said, I can definitely see the negatives of investing your hard earned money into a property. Anything could happen. You just need to know what you’re getting yourself into when you purchase your first rental property.