I thought I would go ahead and post the reply to a comment I received in my previous post about “The Low Hanging Fruit” which may help some of you get over the keyword research hurdle.

Sorry I should have clarified.  The keyword research bit is to find keywords that you can easily rank high for in Google, not for PPC purpose (although you can, and it won’t hurt).

Here is what I do for keyword research.  I look around the house, or think of a topic in my mind, then I type that word in Wordtracker tool.

Then I go down the list of keywords that it came up with and click on the rightmost icon which will pop up a competition/Google trend estimate for that keyword.  You can use the < 30,000 competition and > 100 searches/day guideline it gives you as a starting point.

So, if you want to follow along, I’m looking around right now and I see computer speakers in front of me.  I type “computer speakers” in the keyword research tool, and it came back with this list (partial):

1,328 searches (top 100 only)
Searches    Keyword    G
1,328    total searches
418    computer speakers
73    wireless computer speakers
70    best computer speakers
43    bose computer speakers
31    speaker computer
20    computer speaker reviews
18    computer speaker
17    klipsch computer speakers
15    logitech computer speakers

Start going down the list and click on the icon in the “G” colulmn.  You will see that “computer speakers” gets searched over 3,000 times a day, but it also has over 3,000,000 webpages that are targeting that keyword!  So it’s very competitive.

Let’s try another one.  How about “wireless computer speakers”  Nice!  This is a good “low hanging fruit” keyword with over 130 searches per day, and 17,000 webpage results.

The next keyword is also good, “best computer speakers”

I would actually like someone to actually go out and register a domain for those keywords, and either monetize it with Google Adsense, Amazon, or eBay auctions, and see how it goes.

More to come later…

I want to introduce you to a publishing business model that will generate passive income for you for years to come.

I call it the ‘Low Hanging Fruit’ system. It is quite simple, and here is what you do (keep in mind that you will need to make an investment to get a domain and hosting):

1. Use Wordtracker’s free keyword tool to find a long tail keyword. A long tail keyword, in my standard, is a keyword that gets searched in Google at least 10 to 20 times per day (300 - 600 searches a month), and has a less than 5,000 results when using the allintitle: search in Google

The tool is located at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends

2. Register a domain based on that keyword and get it hosted. I use WholesalerDomains.com because it’s a bit cheaper than Godaddy.

3. Once domain and hosting is set up, write a piece of article (around 300 - 500 words in length) for that keyword.

4. Find a way to monetize the traffic. If you are lazy, then Google Adsense will do. If you are ambitious, you can create an information product based on that keyword, or find affiliate programs that fit the traffic.

5. Submit that article to article directory sites, like ezinearticles.com, aritclecity.com, etc.

6. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the passive income.

7. Repeat steps 1 - 6 for different keywords.

When you have mastered the “low hanging fruit” system, you should be able to pick a “low hanging fruit” everyday, and build yourself a sizable passive income.

Later on I will show you how to pick “high hanging fruits” where it does take a little bit of time to get it, but once you got it, well, it’s extra sweet!

Got an email today from HomeClick.com’s affiliate program announcing that they are leaving CJ to another affiliate program management:

Dear Homeclick.com Affiliates –

We would like to inform you that a decision has been made and HDPI has decided to move the Homeclick.com affiliate program from Commission Junction to Performics.
All of your Homeclick.com links will no longer be active, and no commissions will be paid on any clicks after June 6th, 2008.

…

Well, we are all too familiar with the recent announcement of eBay leaving CJ and moving to its own affiliate platform (Good for them!).

When I got that email from eBay, I was devastated! I have so many web properties out there I don’t even know where to begin to look for those links! Let alone the web properties, what about those free PDF reports that I have written that are just floating out there? How the heck would I be able to update those links?

Luckily I thought ahead and used URL forwarding AND luckily I didn’t use TinyURL.com! In fact, I got a TinyURL clone script written so that I have full control of going into the database and chang the destination URL for the shortened URLs I made in the past.

So, webmasters, affiliate marketers listen up, DO NOT rely on TinyURL or any other URL shortening/direction service out there. Have your own solution, just like eBay is doing its own in-house affiliate management.

Here is a good ????????TinyURL clone script that’s free-of-charge. Enjoy!

Yeah, you’ve heard the saying, “It’s not about the money.”

Well, that would depend on what context you are using it in.

If you are suddenly broke or if your objective is to make as much money as you can, then yeah, it’s all about money because that’s what you are after.

But after a while people realize that they are simply trading their time for money. They realized that in order to make money, you have to spend time to make money.

That’s why sometimes it is important to remind ourselves what we are truly after. Is it the new car that you’ve always wanted, more time with your spouse or family, the new house that you dream of, the respect and fame that money will bring for you (and all the trouble that follows)?

Make no mistake - money is a common denominator, just like time.

Money is time, and time is money. Both can be traded (people do everyday, trading their time for money), both can be leveraged (investors leverage money and time for more money and time for themselves), both can be earned (sort of) and lost.

So, having that said, how can one make more money or time for himself?

Simple, you need leverage. You need a way to generate passive income, not earned income where you trade time for money.

You need a profitable procedure that can be performed by people other than yourself. And there are only two type of activities that I know of that can produce such desirable outcome - business and investments.

Many people confuse self-employment with being in business. If you find yourself trading time for money in your business, then you are most likely self-employed. You’ve just bought yourself a job.

Alternatively, you can be in the business of investing, where your time and money is highly leveraged. The simplest, least risky investment (and thus lowest return on your money) is putting your money in a CD or a savings account, where you allow the bank to leverage your money to make more money.

It sounds easy, but it isn’t. Because leverage goes in opposite proportion with return. The more you leverage your time and money, less return is expected (just like saying high risk yields high return), so it’s a game of constant improvement of your business process.

So, rather than debating whether it is or isn’t about the money, it truly is all about keeping the money, and making more with it.

—
So think about your online business - do you have a profitable business model, a profitable and sustainable business process, one that can you out of the equation and replace it with someone else? Is the business model expandable? If you place two of you in your business, will the profit double?

Think about those questions for a moment and truly evaluate all the aspects of your online business… or perhaps you are still self-employed?

Instilling a successful mindset in the beginning is the first step to your financial and personal success.

If you are not into investing in domains, you should definitely check it out right now because, like the real estate market, it’s a buyer’s market.

Here is an interesting LLLL.com for sale, QBAY.COM, cousin to EBAY.COM (j/k :))

It’s listed on, you’ve guessed it, ebay!

QBAY.COM auction link

I’m one of the bidders in the auction, and so far the highest bid is $7008.88, which hasn’t met the reserve.

I’m thinking of developing a site on it that compliments eBay.com, perhaps a site with list of the most bizarre auctions, a list high-ticket items, a list of items with most bids (most active auction), etc.

Once you get that site/script developed, you can then flip it to another domain/website investor or end-user.

What would you use the domain for if you were to own QBAY.COM, and how much would you buy that domain for?

I woke up early this morning @ 6:30am (OK, some of you probably think it’s late) to watch a 4-letter domain being auctioned off on eBay. The domain is boso.com and you can see how much it got sold for here.

Yeah, I came in a close 2nd high bid of $4,250. I thought for sure I got it with only a few seconds left, but another domain investor snatched it right out of my hands for $5,100.

So, what’s boso.com all about and what makes that domain so valuable?

If you are into domain investing, you will know that 4-letter .com’s are in high demand, especially premium 4-letter .com’s that are pronounceable or brandable.

I remember just 2 years ago I had a list of over 14,000 4-letter .com’s that are still available to register, but today they are all taken.

Take, for example, parse.com that is being auctioned off right now. I put a bid of $10,000 and that’s not even meeting the seller’s reserve.

So, what makes parse.com so valuable (I think it will go well into 5-figures)? Well, it’s both a dictionary word and brandable like the seller said.

In my opinion and from past experience, eBay isn’t the best place to sell a premium website or domain. It is, however, a great place to pick up deals.

So, knowing that, you should also look into purchasing some 4-letter .com’s from eBay and flip them in a domain forum (dnforum.com is a good one) or webmaster/IM forums such as sitepoint.com/marketplace, or you can just buy and hold and wait for the value of your domain to skyrocket.

I frequent sitepoint’s marketplace (http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace) to look for good “deals” to buy. Recently I came across someone selling a PR4 domain here.

At the time of this writing the bid on that domain is $40, and you have to think that this is really too good to be true. So I went to my favorite PR checker tool here and it came back saying that it may be a fake PR.

Well, it probably is. Whoever owned the domain did a 301 redirect to http://blogoforum.com/ for a while just long enough for Google to give it the same PR as blogoforum.com, and then takes off the 301 redirect and parked it.

I raised this concern in the sales thread and got my comment deleted.

So the moral of the story is, if the deal seems too good to be true, it probably is (not all the time), and you should do your due diligence to make sure you get what you paid for.

I’m sure some of you had noticed that my site was down (account suspended) for 2 days a couple of days ago.

Well, as it turned out, I don’t think Hostgator wants to host my sites anymore. I purchased their Reseller plan and have over 100 sites on that that plan. I do have some active sites, but most of them are just parked domains.

Out of the blue they suspended NetPassiveIncome.com because it’s causing a CPU overload and it’s affecting other sites on the same server.

I wrote back to Hostgator asking what the reason for the overload is and they wrote back telling me that it’s due to high traffic. Now, I know for sure I have other sites that get much more traffic than my blog on the same account, and if it’s an attack then they should know what to do. I checked my web stats and saw no unusual amount of traffic, so I don’t know what the issue is other than that they wanted me off their shared server and on my own dedicated.

Fine, no problem, if that’s how they want to play it. I asked if they can enable cPanel so I can go in and create a backup copy of my site so I can move it to my dedicated. Support email came back and offered to zip it up for me. I had to write back and say “please do so” - another few hours of downtime wasted.

In any case, this is actually not the first time that Hostgator suspended my account. Last time they suspended my account I had actually called their security department and talked with a network security engineer who couldn’t tell me why my account was suspended the first place.

Anyway, rant’s over, now this blog is hosted on a LiquidWeb server - not the cheapest, but one of the best web hosts in the industry. Oh… also, stay away from Hostmonster - they may just terminate your account out of the blue as well.

If you are looking for shared hosting, site5.com is actually pretty impressive.

Back in 2003 I was surfing eBay’s website for sale category looking to buy an established website. I came across an interesting listing where the seller was selling his affiliate account that was generating an average commission of $2,000 per month, all passive income for him. This is not the average affiliate program that most internet marketers are promoting. In fact, it was an online casino affiliate program where the affiliate gets a percentage of the casino’s revenue for the life of the players signed up under the affiliate.

I was very skeptical about this throughout the entire bidding period - especially there were only a few bidders competing against me and the fact that I won with the highest bid of $4,500!

Of course the seller and I had our email exchanges and I asked him the usual questions such as why he’s selling this account and asked if he can provide proof of income from this affiliate account. Everything looked good to me, and for $4,500 to purchase an affiliate account that generates an average of $2,000 per month in passive income was a real steal.

But was it really a bargain or did I get scammed? Well, let’s just say that my investment of $4,500 was paid off after 2 months of purchasing that affiliate account. Up to today it is one of the best passive income generators I have invested in.

Fast forward…

I recently acquired a web property that has a top 10 ranking for numerous high-traffic keywords. This came about as I was searching in Google and I saw this website that is a typical ugly site (if you are a real estate flipper, then you know these are absolute goldmines).

The site owner apparently knows about Google Adsense because he has a banner text ad on top of his “content.” An immediate light bulb moment came into my mind because I KNOW he is not monetizing his website to its fullest potential.

There are several opportunities for improvement that made me interested in wanting to contact the site owner and buy out his site if the price is right:

1. The site is monetized by Google Adsense and nothing more. Although easy to implement, Google ads should be your last resort for monetizing your website (yeah, I know, I will replace mine pretty soon :)). Why? Adsense publishers get the lowest end of the stick. Just think why advertisers and merchants are willing to pay you for displaying ads and buy traffic from your website - because they can make so much more by selling their products or services.

2. The site does not capture and retain the traffic. In other words, there isn’t a way for visitors to subscribe to the site. Most of you reading this are probably brought back by an email announcement. I use Aweber to capture names & emails and automate the email announcement for almost every one of my sites, and you should, too.

3. The site looks crappy and visitor retention rate should improve with a new face lift.

4. The site offers people to list their sites for free when they are willing to pay to get listed.

So knowing that, I went ahead and contacted the site owner through the “contact me” form he has on his site (sidenote: rule of negotiation - always have the other party give you a number first). I basically asked if he would be interested in selling his site and how much he would be willing to sell it for. We had a few email exchanges and I found out that the site is currently making $150 per month from Google Adsense. Not an impressive number, and he wanted $4,000 for the site!

So simple math tells me if I were to buy the site for $4k and it only makes $150/month then it’s going to take me about 27 months or 2 to 3 years to break even from my investment! Granted, the $150/month is passive income, but I am not about to wait 2 to 3 years to get my money back. So I talked the price down as much as I can and finally agreed to paying $3,250 for it - not too bad, considering all the “improvements” I can make to it.

Here is what has happened since the ownership change. I immediately changed the Google Ads to CPA offers and converted the free listing service to a paid listing service. End result? From $150/month that the site was making with the original owner to over $400/month in passive income. Instead of waiting 27 months to pay off my investment, now I’m looking to break even in 8 months.

Want to know the other upside?

Passive web properties usually sell for 12 to 24 x monthly income. Let’s just take the lower end of 12 x multiple. If I were to flip this site today that is now making over $400 per month, then I am looking at selling it for $5,000 or better, for at least a $1,750 profit from this deal. In other words, for every dollar I can improve on the monthly income, I can get $12 back in return. I don’t know about you, but that’s a lot of leverage. Don’t forget I’m also building a subscriber base which the buyer will pay extra for.

So why am I sharing with you all this?

There are many more deals that I’m not at the liberty to tell, but I will tell you that I have been scammed before and have made some horrible deals. I consider that my tuition fee If you look at the richest man in the world (currently Warren Buffet, sorry, Bill), he is very much into the business of investing in businesses.

What most people don’t realize is how “cheap” you can buy web properties for, and how fast it can pay off itself and become a passive income generator for you.

With that said, I will be starting another closed-door website that should help readers who are interested in investing in web properties to get started (and how NOT to get into horrible deals and get scammed). The real key to success in this business IS finding a solid investment and get it at a good deal - and this is what this new site will be about.

Once again, if you are not on my blog announcement list, you should get on it by filling out your name and email in the upper right corner of this site

I just had to pass this along - came across this post where he’s giving away a coupon code that gives you a one-year free membership to premium wordpress theme club (even if you pay for it, it’s just $5/year!)

Get it before it runs out:
http://www.theblog.ca/wordpress-premium-themes

Too good to be true!

I got this email from Stephen Pierce today about his new product launch “Instant Traffic Expert” system where he gives you the blueprint to 21 traffic generation techniques that are “outsource-ready.”

It is not so much about the 21 ways to generate traffic, but the fact that he has them down into a blueprint so that I can easily hire a few virtual assistants and get them to perform these traffic strategies for me.

Back in 1996 when I first started my own web design service, I quickly learned that having a website is simply not enough. After all, what good is it that no one knows about your pretty-looking website, right?

If you are serious about generating traffic to your website, then I highly recommend his “Instant Traffic Expert” system (currently selling at $197 and will go up to $497 on Tues. March 31st, 2008). Top that with a 90-day “free-look” refund guarantee, you simply can’t go wrong.

I am a client of Stephen Pierce and has been for a long time (in fact, I purchased his “The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth About Internet Marketing” back in 2003) and I know Stephen’s products are always top-notch.